SOURCE: “Clarity and Obscurity in the Speeches of Aeschines,” in American Journal of Philology, Vol. 109, Spring, 1988, pp. 40-43.

In the following essay, Wooten analyzes Aeschines's varied uses of distinct, enumerated arguments to achieve advantage over his opponents.

One of the most striking features of the oratory of Aeschines is what Hermogenes calls eukrineia or distinctness.¹ In the system of Hermogenes this is one of the two sub-types of style that create saphēneia or clarity. Distinctness involves an approach whose function, according to Hermogenes, is “to determine what aspects of the case the judges should consider first and what they should consider second and to make that clear to them.”² Of the techniques that Hermogenes recommends for producing distinctness Aeschines is most fond of the one that states clearly in advance what arguments he is going to use and in what order he is going to present them...