Gatt, Jurgen R.;
(2020)
From Murder to Geography: A Forensic Paradigm of Testimony in Antiphon and Herodotus.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
One ‘principle’ of Greek epistemology asserts the superiority of personal experience over hearsay. This principle is attested as far back as Homer and right through the revolution of the Sophistic age. It is also attested, if not unproblematically, in the forensic requirement of witnesses to be eyewitness and not to rely on hearsay themselves. And yet, the very prominence of witnesses in forensic proceedings, and in Antiphon’s speeches, betrays the existence of another, contrary, attitude to testimony. Under certain conditions, it seems, the words of witnesses may be used to help settle important questions of fact. This very assumption is intrinsic to Aristotle’s definition of a forensic witness. The following thesis attempts to reconstruct this positivistic epistemology of testimony from the court speeches of Antiphon. I argue, in sum, that Antiphon uses, and presents, the testimony of witnesses as a heuristic and a demonstrative device. In both cases, this use is underpinned by the oft-defended credibility of the witnesses, in turn defined in terms of two ‘criteria’, knowledge and truthfulness. In other words, the testimony of a witness demonstrates some fact, and makes it known to others, only if the witness is knowledgeable of the fact of which he testifies and is subjected to some test for truthfulness. Following this, I apply this model of credibility to Herodotus’ ‘meta-historie’ of ἀκοή to show that this model may be profitably used to analyse a number of episodes in the text. I argue that the geographical descriptions of the Nile and of Scythia presupposes an analogous ‘epistemology’ of testimony and, indeed, put it to good use. We find, then, that the definition of credibility in terms of the witnesses’ knowledge serves to make sense of the basic Herodotean distinction between the inhabited world and the deserts which lie beyond.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | From Murder to Geography: A Forensic Paradigm of Testimony in Antiphon and Herodotus |
| Event: | UCL |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2020. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Science and Technology Studies |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10099529 |
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