FORENSIC FABULAE: STORY STRUCTURES IN ATTIC ORATIONS

Abstract

Growing literary interest in the Attic Orators has led to an increasing number of literary analyses of their stories. These literary analyses have assumed that certain groupings of the speeches (e.g., by author, procedure, or position) can be meaningfully used for comparative analysis. In this dissertation, I set out to examine the corpus of Attic forensic oratory through a structural lens to see whether, when you apply different structural readings to the corpus, these or any other distinct categories or genres of narrative emerged. To pursue that goal, in each chapter I applied a different theoretical framework that has been previously productive in generating narrative groupings to the corpus as a whole to see whether any novel or useful categories emerged. I looked at narrative introductions, the chronotope, focalization, and character types. Although there are some commonalities, such as the narratives from inheritance disputes appearing to be meaningfully distinct from the rest of the corpus regardless of the analytic approach taken, each of these theoretical approaches generates different narrative groups. The implications of my findings are, thus, twofold. First, the groupings that my chapters identified should in and of themselves be productive avenues for further comparative studies of narrative in the orators. Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, the variety of potential narrative categories that emerge when applying a theoretical lens to the corpus in a category-agnostic way, demands that future comparative studies of narrative technique in Athenian forensic orations starts by questioning the validity and applicability of the axes along which the corpus is being divided for comparison.