Note 707 — Chapter XLVI · CONSTITUTIONAL AND JUDICIAL CHANGES AT ATHENS UNDER PERIKLES.

Aristotle, in the first and second chapters of his Treatise de Rhetoricâ, complains that the teachers and writers on rhetoric who preceded him, treated almost entirely of the different means of working on the feelings of the dikasts, and of matters “extraneous to the real question which the dikasts ought to try.” (περὶ τῶν ἔξω τοῦ πράγματος τὰ πλεῖστα πραγματεύονται· διαβολὴ γὰρ καὶ ἔλεος καὶ ὀργὴ, οὐ περὶ τοῦ πράγματός ἐστιν, ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὸν δικαστὴν, etc., i, 1, 1: compare, i, 2, 3, and iii, 1, 2.)

This is sufficient to show how prominent such appeals to the feelings of the dikasts were, in actual fact and practice, even if we did not know it from the perusal of the orations themselves.

Respecting the habit of accused persons to bring their wives and children before the dikasts as suppliants for them, to obtain mercy or acquittal, see Aristophan. Vesp. 567-976; Andokidês de Mysteriis (ad finem), and Lysias, Orat. iv, de Vulnere (ad finem).