Verbal Irony in the Discourtesy Strategies of Aeschines and Demosthenes: A Lexical Approach

This article is a small part of an extensive research work that aims to provide an overview of verbal irony in Greek oratory. Our aim is to offer an approach to verbal irony in the strategies of impoliteness in the speeches Against Ctesiphon and On the Embassy (Aeschines) and On the Crown and On the Embassy (Demosthenes). To identify ironic utterances, we have examined a series of lexical-semantic markers which – together with other factors, such as context or other irony markers – allow us to grasp the speaker’s ironic intention.