The aim of this article is to account for the eight Historic Present (HP) forms in Demosthenes’De corona. The starting point is the theory of Sicking & Stork (1997, 165): “The primary function of HP is to lift out from their context those narrative assertions that are essential for what the speaker has stated to be his immediate concern”. It is argued that this approach yields a convincing interpretation of (a) the five HP forms in the narrative of the Amphissian war (141-59), and (b) the three HP forms in 17-52, divided over several small narratives. Finally, it is argued that considerations of presentation and pragmatics help to explain why HP is used only in those parts of the speech where Demosthenes does not so much discuss his own policies as show that Aeschines is to blame for the current situation in Greece.

In paragraph 21 of Against the Sophists, Isocrates makes the paradoxical claim that the study of the type of philosophy he advocates, that is, writing Xoyoi TtoXmxoi, will sooner improve people's character than their rhetorical skills. Not that any art can really teach virtue to people who are bad by nature, he argues, but this type of study certainly helps. He seems to go on to substantiate this claim:22. ha §£ pv) Soxco xocq pa* tcov a>Xwv inxoaxzazic; SiotXiteiv, a ik ig di ps(£co X£ystv tcov ivovtcov, £1 -&vKzp avxdq i-rceiadYjv ouxco Taux' S/siv, pqtSIcoq olpai xai to Tc; dlXoiq (pavspiv xaxacrr^creiv.But in order that I may not appear to be breaking down the pretensions of others while myself making impossible claims, I believe that the very arguments by which I myself was convinced will easily make it clear to others also that these things are true.

This article discusses the use of proximal deictic expressions to designate distal entities, focusing on the use of the present tense to designate past events. Cognitive approaches to this issue assume that such usages presuppose a special conceptual construal, in which the spatio-temporal distance between the ground and the designated event space is bridged in some way. In this paper, I argue that there are two distinct ways in which this may be accomplished. One is through mentally displacing the ground to the distal space, so that the designated events become proximal in relation to this alternative ground. The other involves bringing the distal space into the ground in the form of a representation. I describe the distinctive characteristics of the two scenarios, showing both where they converge and at what point the difference becomes relevant for linguistic analysis.

Tense is at its most interesting when it behaves badly. In this book Arjan Nijk investigates the variation between the past and present tenses to refer to past events in Classical Greek and beyond. Adopting a cognitive approach to the issue, he argues that the use of the present for preterite depends on the activation of implicit conceptual scenarios in which the gap between the past and the present is bridged. The book is distinguished from previous accounts by its precision in describing these conceptual scenarios, the combination of linguistic theorising with philological and statistical methods, the size of the corpus under investigation and the explicitly cross-linguistic scope. It provides a complete overview of the phenomenon of tense switching in Classical Greek, as well as new theoretical perspectives on deixis and viewpoint, and is important for classicists, narratologists and linguists of every stamp.