Religious Discourse in Attic Oratory and Politics

The book offers a critical investigation of a wide range of features of religious discourse in the transmitted forensic, symbouleutic and epideictic orations of the Ten Attic Orators, a body of 151 speeches which represents the mature flourishing of the ancient art of public speaking and persuasion.

"Serafim has produced a scholarly volume of significant erudition. In exploring the use of religious discourse across the entire canon of the Attic orators, Serafim has emphasised the importance of understanding religion in oratory, adding considerably to the knowledge of this topic. This book is very timely, with many connections that can easily be drawn to modern political life. What makes this particularly relevant is the use of modern frameworks to understand sociological phenomena, such as religion, identity and the importance of contexts in society... [T]his is a fine volume on a topic that, given the current political climate and the importance of religion in politics, is timely and even cautionary to all citizens in democratic countries to be mindful of the way religion is used in political discourse." - Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Autorentext

Andreas Serafim is a Research Fellow at the Research Centre for Greek and Latin Literature of the Academy of Athens. He is the author of a previous monograph, Attic Oratory and Performance (Routledge 2017).

Inhalt

Introduction

Chapter 1. Religious discourse in Attic oratory: A full survey

Chapter 2. Contextualizing religious discourse

Chapter 3. Reacting to the "airy nothing"

Chapter 4. Civic/political identity in religious discourse

Conclusion