What is "logographer"

Logographer \Lo*gog"ra*pher\, n.

1. A chronicler; one who writes history in a condensed manner with short simple sentences.

2. One skilled in logography.

n. 1 a chronicler; one who writes history in a condensed manner with short simple sentences 2 one skilled in logography

In ancient Greece, the title logographer was applied to two groups of people:

• Logographer (history), chronicler and historian before Herodotus
• Logographer (legal), professional legal speechwriter

The title of logographer (from the Ancient Greek , logographos, a compound of , logos, 'word', and , grapho, 'write') was applied to professional authors of judicial discourse in Ancient Greece. The modern term speechwriter is roughly equivalent.

In the Athens of antiquity, the law required a litigant to make his case in front of the court with two successive speeches. Lawyers were unknown, and the law permitted only one friend or relative to aid each party. If a litigant did not feel confident to make his own speech, he would seek the service of a logographer (also called a , logopoios, from , poieo, 'to make'), to whom he would describe his case. The logographer would then write a speech which the litigant would learn by heart and recite in front of the court. Antiphon (480 BC–410 BC) was among the first to practice this profession; the orator Demosthenes (384–322) was also a logographer. Practice in defending the targets of politicized prosecutions built the foundations of a later career in politics for many logographers.

The logographers (from the Ancient Greek λογογράφος, logographos, a compound of λόγος, logos, here meaning "story" or "prose", and γράφω, grapho, "write") were the Greek historiographers and chroniclers before Herodotus, "the father of history". Herodotus himself called his predecessors λογοποιοί (logopoioi, from ποιέω, poieo, "to make").

Their representatives with one exception came from Ionia and its islands, which from their position were most favourably situated for the acquisition of knowledge concerning the distant countries of East and West. They wrote in the Ionic dialect in what was called the unperiodic style (see below) and preserved the poetic character, if not the style, of their epic model. Their criticism amounts to nothing more than a crude attempt to rationalize the current legends and traditions connected with the founding of cities, the genealogies of ruling families, and the manners and customs of individual peoples. Of scientific criticism there is no trace whatever, and so they are often called chroniclers rather than historians.

The first logographer of note was Cadmus (dated to the 6th century BC), a perhaps mythical resident of Miletus, who wrote on the history of his city. Other logographers flourished from the middle of the 6th century BC until the Greco-Persian Wars; Pherecydes of Leros, who died about 400 BC, is generally considered the last. Hecataeus of Miletus (6th–5th century BC), in his Genealogiai, was the first of them to attempt (not entirely successfully) to separate the mythic past from the true historic past, which marked a crucial step in the development of genuine historiography. He is the only source that Herodotus cites by name. After Herodotus, the genre declined, but regained some popularity in the Hellenistic era.

The logographers, though they worked within the same mythic tradition, were distinct from the epic poets of the Trojan War cycle because they wrote in prose, in a non-periodic style which Aristotle (Rhetoric, 1049a 29) calls λέξις εἰρομένη (lexis eiromenê, from εἴρω, eiro, "attach, join up"), that is, a "continuous" or "running" style.