Persuasion by Immersion: The Narratio of Lysias 1, On the Killing of Eratosthenes

In his paper on Lysias, Dionysius of Halicarnassus characterizes the effect of Lysias’ enargeia as the power through which the listener “seems to see the things shown and to be almost in the company of the characters whom the orator introduces”. The capacity to give the audience a sense of being present at the narrated scene, vividly imagining the people, places, and actions, is one the most powerful instruments in Lysias’ persuasive toolbox. The ‘sense of presence’ created by Lysias’ narrative style will be approached as a form of what in cognitive literary studies has become known as immersion, a concept that is defined by in terms that are remarkably similar to Dionysius’ characterization of Lysias’ style, as “the experience through which a fictional world acquires the presence of an autonomous, language-independent reality populated by live human beings” (Ryan 2015, 9). Analyzing Lysias’ narrative techniques through the lens of their immersive power is interesting for several reasons. Psychological research has found evidence that highly immersed readers are more likely to be persuaded by the point of view implicit in a narrative than readers who are less immersed. Approaching Lysias’ style in terms of its immersive qualities also allows us analyze the text in terms of a wide and diverse range of linguistic and narratological devices: not only the strategic use of graphic (“vivid”) details, but also the use of verbal tense and aspect, vocatives, direct speech, the narrator’s visibility, and the narrative’s spatial and temporal organization, handling of perspective (focalization), and its capacity to raise suspense and to engage the audience’s attention and emotions.