What is it about?
'On the crown' is the most famous speech of Classical Greece. In it, Demosthenes provides a broad perspective on the war between the state of Athens and Philip of Macedon. At select points in the speech, Demosthenes uses the present tense to describe a past event ('then Philip writes a letter'). What is the rhetorical function of this 'historical' use of the present tense, and why does Demosthenes only use it eight times in a speech of a hundred pages?
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Why is it important?
The 'historical' use of the present tense is something that still fascinates, puzzles, or even irritates readers today. Someone on an internet forum asks why Shakespeare uses the present tense to narrate a past action. Newspapers receive letters arguing that sentences such as 'In 2012, president Obama is re-elected' are linguistically faulty. There was even a dispute between John Humphrys and Melvyn Bragg, two giants of British broadcasting, concerning this use of the present tense, the former arguing that it 'gives a bogus, an entirely bogus, sense of immediacy; it is irritating, it is pretentious'. In this article I try to show that the 'historical' present is not necessarily a grammatical oddity but has a specific rhetorical function. Demosthenes does not use it to 'give a sense of immediacy' in the sense of suggesting an eyewitness account. Rather, the 'historical' present serves as a marker to the audience that they are to pay particular attention to the significance of the narrated event in the context of the overarching narrative of the speech.
Perspectives
At some point while studying the legendary speech 'On the crown' I was struck by how Demosthenes' use of the 'historical' present seemed so effectively geared towards a specific rhetorical goal. Remarkably, I found that commentators had not noted this, even though this was the most studied speech of Classical Greece. Also, certain aspects of Demosthenes' use of the 'historical' present seemed to contradict existing theories of this phenomenon. Usually, people argue that the 'historical' present serves to invest the narrative with a certain 'immediacy', which means to give it the quality of an eyewitness report. Demosthenes, however, uses it to describe events that are highly abstract and hard to visualize. Also, in this speech we find the 'historical' present in places in the narrative structure where it is not expected (in particular, in a so-called 'evaluation' section). This article was the first step in a long process of developing a comprehensive theory of the use of the present to describe past events in Classical Greek. I have now laid this out in a monograph, 'Tense-switching in Classical Greek: A cognitive approach' (2022, Cambridge University Press).
Arjan Nijk
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Pragmatic Account of the Use of the Historic Present in De corona, Mnemosyne, January 2013, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/156852511x584946.
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Resources
Tense-switching in Classical Greek
Link to the monograph 'Tense-switching in Classical Greek'
The 'historic' present tense: What is it for?
A blog discussing the relevance of the issue of tense-switching
Shakespeare [sic] use of present tense narrating a past action
A forum post enquiring into Shakespeare's use of the 'historical' present
Melvyn Bragg and John Humphrys in tense standoff on Radio 4
A piece in the Guardian covering the dispute between two British broadcasters concerning the 'historical' present
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