Hybris in Demosthenes’ Against Conon
Abstract
The speech Against Conon from the corpus Demosthenicum addresses the dispute between Ariston and Conon due to physical aggression by Conon’s son against Ariston, which has the contours of hybris, a term that appears in more than half of the sections. Despite the recurrence, the legal action is not a graphe hybreos, but a dike aikeias. This paper aims to analyse the role of hybris in the speech to characterize exacerbated violence, such that father and son are considered unfit for political life. The violence is physical, since Ariston is bedridden after the attack and symbolic, through the imitation of the rooster crowing over his beaten and naked body. Hybris is also associated with youth and wealth, topics presented by Aristotle in Rhetoric as a means of stirring up pathos and depicting ethos.
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