Transferable Disgust in Demosthenes 54: Against Conon

Thomas M. Cirillo (University of Southern California)

Demosthenes 54: Against Conon concerns a savage assault on Ariston, a young Athenian, by Conon and his sons. To begin with, Demosthenes tells how two years prior to the attack in question Conon’s sons urinated on Ariston’s slave retinue while the litigants were on guard duty in Panactum (54.3-4); the orator then moves to the recent past and details the assault, which involved the trampling of Ariston into a thick puddle of mud (54.8-9) and a beating which left the young man with bloody cuts and pulsating bruises on his face (54.8-9). As a result of the attack, Ariston suffered a terrible illness, the symptoms of which were fevers, a loss of appetite, and a cathartic expulsion of bloody vomit from his body (54.11-12).

By focusing on the sordid and visceral aspects of the case, Demosthenes is appealing to the jury’s emotion of disgust. In the world of the courtroom the emotion of disgust is part of the jurors’ “moral equipment” with which they will judge the magnitude of a crime (Nussbaum 2004, 84-86). Through a close examination of Demosthenes’ speech it is possible to specify what it was, for an Athenian audience at any rate, that made a particular crime disgusting: it is principally that the perpetrators of the crime turn their victim into a disgusting object. I will show, however, that portraying the crimes of the defendants as disgusting is not the only way of triggering the jurors’ emotion of disgust as a piece of “moral equipment” in the courtroom. In the course of the oration the disgusting elements of the assault against Ariston are turned against the defendants in such a way that they end up being the ones embodying the disgusting characteristics which they had formerly conferred upon their victim.

To understand Demosthenes’ rhetorical strategy of transferring disgusting characteristics from the victim to the perpetrators, we need to consider the emotion of disgust in more detail. Disgust, at its most technical and scientific, is defined as a revulsion to the oral incorporation of an object deemed offensive by the subject because of its animal origin (Rozin and Fallon 1987, 27-28), a more philosophical definition of disgust has been offered by a modern theorist of the emotions: “…ultimately the basis for all disgust is us – that we live and die and that the process is a messy one emitting substances and odors that cause us to doubt ourselves and fear our neighbors” (Miller 1997, xiv). Nussbaum (2004, 92) toes the line between the scientific and the philosophical by proposing that disgust is concerned with the crossing of any number of boundaries from the outside world into the self. Disgusting substances, then, are typically categorized as decaying and rotting materials, and bodily products that have left the confines of the body.

Demosthenes’ description of the assault on Ariston and its aftermath is connected with the ideas about disgust noted above. Urine, mud, and blood, all integral substances in Demosthenes’ telling of Ariston’s ordeal, are objects with disgusting properties. Urine is poured onto Ariston’s slaves, mud infiltrates his body through the cuts on his face suffered in the attack, and blood is expelled from his body when he vomits as a result of his illness – in short, these disgusting substances are removed from their appropriate boundaries by the actions of the perpetrators and are conferred upon the victims so that they appear as disgusting objects themselves. A disgusting crime is one in which the victim is turned into a disgusting object by the offenders. Demosthenes, however, elicits the disgust reaction from the jurors not only as a means of their judgment of the crime, but also targets the jury’s sense of disgust in order to condemn the defendants. The disgusting elements of the substances which were focal points in Demosthenes’ description of the assault against Ariston are projected onto the defendants by citing Conon’s animalistic victory dance after the beating (54.9), his and his sons’ membership in gangs whose names have phallic connotations (54.11-12), and Conon’s disturbing eating practices when he was a young man (54.39). Therefore, Demosthenes uses the emotion of disgust not only as a means of eliciting a harsh judgment of the crime on the part of the jury, but also as a retributive action, which condemns the defendants to suffer the same disgusting indignities which they bestowed upon their victim.