ANDOKIDES differs in one important respect from all the other Attic orators of the canon. He is not an artist. Each of the rest represents some theory, more or less definite, of eloquence as an art; and is distinguished, not merely by a faculty, but by certain technical merits, the result of labour directed to certain points in accordance with that theory. Among these experts Andokides is an amateur. In the course of an eventful life he spoke with ability and success on some occasions of great moment and great difficulty. But he brought to these efforts the minimum of rhetorical training. He relied almost wholly on his native wit and on a rough, but shrewd, knowledge of men.

This accounts for the comparatively slight attention paid to Andokides by the ancient rhetoricians and critics. Dionysios mentions him only twice; once, where he remarks that Thucydides used a peculiar dialect, which is not employed by ‘Andokides, Antiphon, or Lysias ¹ ;’ again, where he says that Lysias is the standard for contemporary Attic, ‘as may be judged from the speeches of Andokides, Kritias and many others ² .’ Both these notices recognise Andokides as an authority for the idiom of his own day; and it is evident that he had a philological interest for the critic. On the other hand it is clear that Dionysios discovered in him no striking power; for Andokides does not occur in his long list of men foremost in the various departments of oratory ³ . Quintilian names him only in one slighting allusion. Who, he asks, is to be our model of Attic eloquence? ‘Let it be Lysias; for his is the style in which the lovers of ‘Atticism’ delight. At this rate we shall not be sent back all the way to Andokides and Kokkos ⁴

It is a result of the precision with which the art of rhetoric was systematized in the Greek and Roman schools that much of the ancient criticism upon oratory is tainted by a radical vice. The ancient critics too often confound literary merit with oratorical merit. They judge too much from the standpoint of the reader, and too little from the standpoint of the hearer. They analyse special features of language and of method; they determine with nicety the rank of each man as a composer; but they too often forget that, for the just estimation of his rank as a speaker, the first thing necessary is an effort of imaginative sympathy. We must not merely analyse his style; we must try to realise the effect which some one of his speeches, as a whole, would have made on a given audience in given circumstances. As nearly all the great orators of antiquity had been trained in the rudiments of the technical rhetoric, the judgment upon their relative merits is not, as a rule, much disturbed by this tendency in their critics. It may often, indeed, be felt that the judgment, however fair in itself, is based too much upon literary grounds. But, in most cases, so far as we can judge, no great injustice is done. Criticism of this kind may, however, happen to be unjust; and it has certainly been unjust in the case of Andokides. Others far excel him in finish of style, in clearness of arrangement, in force and in fire; but no one can read the speech On the Mysteries (for instance) without feeling that Andokides was a real orator. The striking thing in that speech is a certain undefinable tone which assures even the modern reader that Andokides was saying the right things to the judges, and knew himself to be saying the right things. He is, in places, obscure or diffuse; he sometimes wanders from the issue, once or twice into trivial gossip; but throughout there is this glow of a conscious sympathy with his hearers. He may not absolutely satisfy the critics; but he was persuading, and he felt with triumph that he was persuading, the judges.

It is somewhat difficult to analyse the style of a speaker whose real strength lay in a natural vigour directed by a rough tact; and who, in comparison with other Greek orators, cared little for literary form. An attempt at such an analysis may, however, start from the four epithets given to Andokides in the Plutarchic Life ¹⁷ . He is there said to be ‘simple’ ( ἁπλοῦς); ‘inartificial in arrangement’ ( ἀκατάσκευος); ‘plain’ ( ἀφελής); and ‘sparing of figures’ ( ἀσχημάτιστος). The first two epithets apparently refer to the order in which his thoughts are marshalled; the last two, to the manner in which they are expressed. We will first speak of the latter, and then come back to the former. ¹⁸

The sense in which the diction of Andokides is ‘plain’ will be best understood by a comparison with Antiphon and Lysias. Antiphon consciously strives to rise above the language of daily life; he seeks to impress by a display of art. Lysias carefully confines himself to the language of daily life; he seeks to persuade by the use of hidden art. Andokides usually employs the language of daily life; he is free, or almost free, from the archaisms of Antiphon, and writes in the new-Attic dialect, the dialect of Lysias and his successors ¹⁹ . On the other hand, he does not confine himself to a rigid simplicity. In his warmer or more vigorous passages, especially of invective or of intreaty, he often employs phrases or expressions borrowed from the idiom of Tragedy ²⁰ . These, being of too decidedly poetical a colour, have a tawdry effect; yet it is evident that they have come straight from the memory to the lips; they are quite unlike prepared fine things; and they remind us, in fact, how really natural a speaker was Andokides,—neither aiming, as a rule, at ornament, nor avoiding it on principle when it came to him. The ‘plainness’ of Lysias is an even, subtle, concise plainness, so scrupulous to imitate nature that nature is never suffered to break out; the ‘plainness’ of Andokides is that of a man who, with little rhetorical or literary culture, followed chiefly his own instinct in speaking. Lysias had at his command all the resources of technical rhetoric, but so used them towards producing a sober, uniform effect that his art is scarcely felt at any particular point; it is felt only in the impression made by the whole. Andokides had few of such resources. As his ²¹ biographer says, he is ‘sparing of figures.’ Here the distinction already noticed between ‘figures of language’ and ‘figures of thought’ must be kept in mind. Andokides uses scarcely at all the ‘figures of language’: that is, he seldom employs antitheses —aims at parallelism between the forms of two sentences—or studies the niceties of assonance ²² . His neglect of such refinements—which, in his day, constituted the essence of oratorical art, and which must have been more or less cultivated by nearly all public speakers—has one noticeable effect on his composition. There is no necessary connection between an antithetical and a periodic style. But, in the time of Andokides, almost the only period in use was that which is formed by the antithesis or parallelism of clauses. Hence, since he rarely uses antitheses or parallelisms, Andokides composes far less in a periodic style than Thucydides or Antiphon or even Lysias. His sentences, in the absence of that framework, are constantly sprawling to a clumsy length; they are confused by parentheses, or deformed by supplementary clauses, till the main thread of the sense is often almost lost ²³ . But while he thus dispenses with the ornamental ‘figures of language,’ Andokides uses largely those so-called ‘figures of thought’ which give life to a speech;—irony—indignant question, and the like ²⁴ . This animation is indeed one of the points which most distinguish his style from the ordinary style of Antiphon, and which best mark his relative modernism. ²⁵

As Andokides is ‘plain’ in diction and avoids ornamental figures, so he is also ‘simple’ in treatment of subject-matter, and avoids an artificial arrangement ²⁶ . His two speeches before the ekklesia— that On his Return and that On the Peace—shew, indeed, no distinct or systematic partition. In his speech On the Mysteries he follows, with one difference, the arrangement usually observed by Antiphon and more strictly by Lysias. There is a proem, followed by a short prothesis or general statement of the case; then narrative and argument; lastly epilogue ²⁷ . But the narrative as a whole is not kept distinct from the argument as a whole. Each section of the narrative is followed by the corresponding section of the argument. Dionysios notices such interfusion as a special mark of art in Isaeos ²⁸ . In Andokides it is rather a mark of artlessness. He had a long story to tell, and was unable, or did not try, to tell it concisely. The very length of his narrative compelled him to break it up into pieces and to comment upon each piece separately. He has not effected this without some loss of clearness, and one division of the speech is thoroughly confused ²⁹ . But it should be remembered that a defective ordering of topics, though a grave fault, was less serious for Andokides than it would have been for a speaker in a different style. The main object of Andokides was to be in sympathy with his audience—amusing them with stories, however irrelevant—putting all his arguments in the most vivid shape—and using abundant illustration. Lucid arrangement, though always important, was not of firstrate importance for him. His speeches were meant to carry hearers along with them, rather than to be read and analysed at leisure.

But it is not merely in special features of diction or of arrangement that Andokides is seen to be no technical rhetorician. A disciple of the sophistical rhetoric learned to deal copiously and skilfully with those commonplaces of argument which would be available in almost any case. His education taught him to prefer general argument to argument from particular circumstances, unless these were especially easy to manipulate. We see this in Antiphon's First Tetralogy: it is a model exercise in making the utmost of abstract probabilities as inferred from facts which are very slightly sketched. In the speech On the Murder of Herodes the statement of the facts is hurried over, and there is no attempt at a close and searching analysis of them. But for a speaker unskilled in rhetorical commonplace the particulars of any given subject would be everything. Picturesque narration, shrewd inference from small circumstances, lively illustration of character would naturally be his chief resources. And so it is with Andokides. His strength is in narrative, as the strength of Antiphon is in argument. Andokides relies on his case, Antiphon on his science; it is only Lysias who hits the masterly mean, who makes his science the close interpreter of his case, who can both recount and analyse. But, although the narrative element in Andokides exceeds the just proportion always observed by Lysias, it is, from a ³⁰ literary point of view, a great charm. The speech On the Mysteries is full of good bits of description, lively without set effort to be graphic. For instance, the scene in the prison, when Andokides was persuaded to denounce the real mutilators of the Hermae:—

‘When we had all been imprisoned in the same place; when night had come, and the gaol had been closed; there came, to one his mother, his sister to another, to another his wife and children; and there arose a piteous sound of weeping and lamentation for the troubles of the hour. Then Charmides (he was my cousin, of my own age, and had been brought up with me in our house from childhood) said to me:—‘Andokides, you see how serious our present dangers are; and though hitherto I have always shrunk from saying anything to annoy you, I am forced by our present misfortune to speak now. All your intimates and companions except us your relations have either been put to death on the charges which threaten us with destruction, or have taken to flight and pronounced themselves guilty. If you have heard anything about this affair which has occurred, speak it out, and save our lives—save yourself in the first place, then your father, whom you ought to love very dearly, then your brother-inlaw, the husband of your only sister,—your other kinsmen, too, and near friends, so many of them; and me also, who have never given you any annoyance in all my life, but am most zealous for you and for your interests, whenever anything is to be done.’ When Charmides said this, judges, and when the others besought and entreated me severally, I thought to myself,—‘most miserable and unfortunate of men, am I to see my own kinsfolk perish undeservedly—to see their lives sacrificed and their property confiscated, and in addition to this their names written up on tablets as sinners against the gods,—men who are wholly innocent of the matter,— am I to see moreover three hundred Athenians doomed to undeserved destruction and the State involved in the most serious calamities, and men nourishing suspicion against each other,—or shall I tell the Athenians just what I heard from Euphiletos himself, the real culprit ³¹ ?’

Another passage in the same speech illustrates the skill of Andokides in dramatising his narrative. He delighted to bring in persons speaking. Epichares, one of his accusers in this case, had been an agent of the Thirty Tyrants. He turns upon him.

‘Speak, slanderer, accursed knave—is this law valid or not valid? Invalid, I imagine, only for this reason,—that the operation of the laws must be dated from the archonship of Eukleides. So you live, and walk about this city, as you little deserve to do; you who, under the democracy, lived by pettifogging, and under the oligarchy—lest you should be forced to give back all the profits of that trade—became the instrument of the Thirty.

‘The truth is, judges, that as I sat here, while he accused me, and as I looked at him, I fancied myself nothing else than a prisoner at the bar of the Thirty. Had this trial been in their time, who would have been accusing me? Was not this man ready to accuse, if I had not given him money? He has done it now. And who but Charikles would have been cross-examining me? ‘Tell me, Andokides, did you go to Dekeleia, and enforce the hostile garrison on your country's soil?’—‘Not I.’—‘How then? You ravaged the territory, and plundered your fellow-citizens by land or sea?’—‘Certainly not.’ —‘And you did not serve in the enemy's fleet, or help to level the Long Walls, or to abolish the democracy?’—‘None of these things have I done.’— ‘None? Do you think, then, that you will enjoy impunity, or escape the death suffered by many others?’

‘Can you suppose, judges, that my fate, as your champion, would have been other than this, if I had ³² been caught by the Tyrants? I should have been destroyed by them, as they destroyed many others, for having done no wrong to Athens ³³ .’

The love of Andokides for narrative, wherever it can be introduced, is strikingly seen in his mode of handling his legal argument in the speech On the Mysteries. Instead of simply citing and interpreting the enactments upon which he relies, he reviews in order the events which led to the enactments being made ³⁴ . The same tendency appears in his habit of drawing illustrations from the early history of Attica. These references are in many points loose and confused ³⁵ . Andokides, however, is hardly a worse offender in this respect than (for instance) Aeschines ³⁶ ; and has more excuse. In the time of Andokides written history was a comparatively new invention, and most men knew the events even of their grandfathers' days only from hearsay. Nor does the apparent inaccuracy of Andokides in regard to earlier history affect his authority as a witness for events with which he was contemporary. The value of his testimony for the years 415—390 is unquestioned.

Andokides sometimes shows his taste for narrative in a special form which deserves notice. He is a master of shrewd and telling gossip. He diverges from the main thread of his argument into anecdotes which will amuse his hearers, and either directly damage the adversary, or at least strike some chord favourable to himself. A part of the speech On the Mysteries is, in fact, made up of such stories (§§ 110—136.) Speaking, for instance, of the son of his accuser Kallias, he reminds the judges that there was once a certain Hipponikos at Athens whose house was haunted by an avenging spirit—so said the children and the women: and the saying came true, for the man's son proved a very demon to him. Well, the house of Kallias is haunted by a fiend of the same kind (§§ 130—131). In this trait Andokides resembles one, and one only, of the other Greek orators: it is precisely the impudent, unscrupulous cleverness of Aeschines. There is the same shrewd perception of what will raise a laugh or a sneer; the same adroitness, unchecked by self-respect, in making a point of this kind whenever the opportunity offers; the same command of coarse but telling abuse; the same ability and resolution to follow the workings, and profit by the prejudices, of low minds. Akin to this taste for ³⁷ gossip is a certain proneness to sink into low comedy. There is a fragment of Andokides, describing the influx of country-people into Athens in 431 B. C., which will illustrate this. It has exactly the tone of the Acharnians:—

‘Never again may we see the colliers coming in from the hills to the town—the sheep and oxen and the waggons—the poor women and old men— the labourers arming themselves! Never more may we eat wild greens and chervil ³⁸ !’

In passing judgment upon Andokides, it must be allowed that he possesses neither literary merit nor properly oratorical merit which can entitle him to rank with the greatest masters of Greek rhetorical prose. His language has neither splendour nor a refined simplicity; he is not remarkably acute in argument; and, compared with his contemporaries, he is singularly without precision in the arrangement of his ideas. His extant works present no passage conceived in the highest strain of eloquence; he never rises to an impassioned earnestness. On the other hand, his naturalness, though not charming, is genuine; he has no mannerisms or affectations; and his speeches have a certain impetus, a certain confident vigour, which assure readers that they must have been still more effective for hearers. The chief value of Andokides is historical. But he has also real literary value of a certain kind: he excels in graphic description. A few of those pictures into which he has put all the force of a quick mind— the picture of Athens panicstricken by the sacrilege ³⁹ —the scene of miserable perplexity in the prison ⁴⁰ —the patriotic citizen arraigned before the Thirty Tyrants ⁴¹ —have a vividness which no artist could easily surpass, combined with a freshness which a better artist might possibly have lost ⁴² .