On Dinarchus’s λέξις in Contra Filocles

Abstract

Ever since Antiquity, Dinarchus’s style has been considered either similar or inferior to Demosthenes’s. As a consequence, critics have never paid much attention to the speeches of this logographer from Corinth. This article seeks to characterize Dinarchus’s λέξις in Contra Filocles (Din. 3), through a linguistic and rhetorical analysis of his speech and taking into consideration contributions from sociolinguistics and phemology.