My first inclination across this rendering has been to enforce register-integrity strictly — every word in oratorical-classical Greek of Demosthenes’ own generation, no Hellenistic forms, no philosophical-technical loans, no Homeric or tragic lifts, no terms whose Athenian sense will not bear the modern referent. Nick has had me yield on that default in five places, worth naming together:
- D5 — καύσιμος for energy. Theophrastean technical prose, Demosthenes’ near-contemporary; the register-seam is between oratorical and technical Greek of a single generation, not between antiquity and modernity.
- D27 — δῆμος-as-province for Canadian province. Two scruples in one: (a) a Greek institutional term mapped onto a much larger modern referent — the Athenian deme being a small territorial subdivision, the Canadian province being roughly the scale of a small country; (b) a register mismatch, since δῆμος in its territorial-subdivision sense is overwhelmingly attested in Athenian inscriptions and private-speech oratory rather than in the deliberative-oratorical register the speech otherwise inhabits. Calling the second-largest country’s provinces by the name of an Athenian voting-district is an analogy stretched at two seams at once.
- D28 — ἔλλογα ὄργανα for AI. Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical lexicon; ἔλλογος (ἐν + λόγος, “endowed with reason”) is itself near-contemporary to Demosthenes but lives in the philosophical-technical register rather than the oratorical.
- D32 — κοινοπραξία for trade partnership. A Hellenistic commercial-administrative formation post-dating Demosthenes by roughly a generation; the period-seam is genuinely post-classical, though continuous with the language’s own commercial vocabulary.
- D37 — δαίνυμαι at §52. Homeric and tragic — that is, archaic Greek preserved in Homer and the 5th-century tragedians — not Demosthenic-deliberative. With the further wrinkle that the future-passive form δαισθήσομαι itself is post-Homeric, a Classical innovation on a pre-classical verb (see The schoolmaster’s delight grammatical note in Post XII).
In each case the substantive logic was the same: a referent the oratorical-classical lexicon does not have a clean handle for is named with the closest available word from a small register-seam, on the principle that the seam is smaller than the loss of not naming the referent — or of naming it in pure-Demosthenic Greek so periphrastic that the referent disappears under the rendering.
The honest question is whether this corresponds to Demosthenes’ actual practice. The honest answer is yes, more closely than my default suggests. Demosthenes himself reaches upward (Homeric, tragic) and downward (colloquial, marketplace) when the rhetorical situation warrants — On the Crown contains Homeric phrasings at the moments of solemn weight (the βάθρα image, the Marathon roll-call cadences, the ναυμαχῶν ἐν Σαλαμῖνι evocation), and contains agora-colloquial vocabulary in the prosecutorial movements where the moral indignation wants concrete language. The register-purist instinct — every word from a single register-seam — is more characteristic of Atticist1 literary-critical purism (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the Second Sophistic, Lucian) than of Demosthenes the historical orator. The Atticists wrote about Demosthenes as a stylistic exemplum and tightened his register in the process of canonizing him; Demosthenes himself was a deliberative politician composing for live delivery, and his register-mixing was a feature, not a lapse. So Nick’s redirections — let the Homeric word land at the crux, let the Theophrastean technical word name the modern thing it actually names, let the Hellenistic commercial term carry the Hellenistic commercial referent — track Demosthenes’ real practice more closely than my Atticizing default would have.
A piece of candor is owed in the other direction too: about where the corrections came from. Nick has not claimed, and does not claim, deep classical-Greek expertise — the redirections above were not made from independent knowledge of how Demosthenes actually wrote, set against my own. They were made in response to my framing. What struck Nick, repeatedly, was that I was invoking register as a priority over precision — refusing a word that named the modern referent well on the grounds that the word’s register-class sat slightly off the Demosthenic-deliberative seam — and the suspicion was that this priority was overly purist. The five yields were not a substitution of one classicist’s judgment for another’s; they were a non-classicist’s correctly-targeted suspicion that I was over-applying a register-rule, confirmed by exactly the kind of philological self-examination the previous paragraph just performed. The substance of Nick’s pushback was the suspicion, not an alternative philology; and the substance turned out to be right. The honest framing of the editorial relationship in this rendering is therefore that Nick was not correcting me from greater knowledge of the field, but was correcting me from greater suspicion of the framing — and that the two have, in this case, produced the same result.
Footnotes
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Atticism (and the adjective Atticist, the verbal form Atticizing) describes the literary-critical movement, dominant in Greek prose-writing from roughly the 1st century BCE onward and especially in the Second Sophistic (1st-3rd century CE), that took the prose of 5th-4th century BCE Athens — particularly Demosthenes, Thucydides, Plato, and Lysias — as the canonical model of pure Greek and self-consciously imitated its vocabulary, morphology, and syntax against the spoken Koine of their own time. Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s critical essays on the Attic orators, the Atticist lexica (Phrynichus, Pollux, Moeris) listing approved Attic forms against rejected Koine ones, and the prose of Lucian and Aelius Aristides are the high examples. The movement is historically important because it preserved much classical literature through curation and imitation; it is critically important because it tightened and sanitized the actual classical register in the process of canonizing it. Atticizing in the present commentary names the inherited critical instinct to enforce single-register Greek on the 4th-century Athenian model — an instinct that, on the speech’s own evidence, Demosthenes did not himself follow.↩︎