An Appeal to Philip Sober
A woman convicted of a crime she did not commit took her case to a higher power.
359 BC-336 BC
Macedonian Empire 359 - 323 BC
A woman convicted of a crime she did not commit took her case to a higher power.
359 BC-336 BC
Macedonian Empire 359 - 323 BC
Like his famous son Alexander the Great, Philip II, King of Macedon (r. 359-336 BC) was a Philhellene who aspired to the manners and language of the cultivated Greeks; but there remained a barbarian side to Philip which showed in his seven wives and his bouts of drinking.
from the Latin
A WOMAN of foreign blood shouldered her way into the exalted company; though innocent, she had been judged guilty of some offence by King Philip when in his cups. She screamed her demand for an appeal, and when someone asked her to whom it was to be made, “To Philip” she replied, before adding “only sober”.*
She was engulfed in wine fumes from another of Philip’s capacious yawns, but wafting them aside she forced the drunk to look back carefully over her case, and bring in a fairer verdict. Thus she wrung from him the justice she had been unable to obtain before, getting a better return from lese-majesty than from innocence.
from the Latin
‘To appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober’ thus means to ask someone to reconsider something, with a wiser mind. When Eliza Frances Andrews looked back over her diary of the American Civil War fifty years after first writing it, she mused: “to edit oneself after the lapse of nearly half a century is like taking an appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober” (‘The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865’).
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
Why was the woman upset with Philip?
For passing an unjust sentence on her.
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
Philip was drunk. He found a woman guilty of a crime. She was innocent.