ἐπίλογος

Epilogue comes from Greek ἐπίλογος (epilogos), a compound of ἐπί (epi, 'upon, after, in addition to') and λόγος (logos, 'word, speech, reason'). The word means literally 'an after-word' or 'a word spoken upon the conclusion.' In classical Greek rhetoric, the epilogos was the final section of a formal speech — the peroration, the closing argument — and it had a specific function distinct from the rest of the speech. Where the main body of a speech (the diegesis) presented the facts and arguments, and the pistis (proof) offered the evidence, the epilogos was designed to work on the audience's emotions. Greek rhetorical theory identified four tasks for the epilogue: to recapitulate the argument, to amplify the importance of the matter, to arouse the appropriate emotional response in the audience, and to discredit the opposing argument. The epilogue was not a summary but a weapon.

Aristotle's Rhetoric devotes careful attention to the epilogue, noting that it should make the audience 'well-disposed toward oneself and ill-disposed toward the opponent; to amplify and depreciate; to excite the emotions in the audience.' This is sophisticated persuasion theory: the closing section of a speech is not where you present your strongest evidence but where you convert the audience from listeners to advocates. Athenian courts, which made their decisions by vote of a large jury of ordinary citizens, were susceptible to emotional appeals in a way that modern courts, with their strict rules of evidence, try to prevent. The Greek epilogue was designed for a democratic audience, and its techniques — empathy, identification, emotional resonance — are the techniques of all effective persuasion.

The word entered literary usage as the term for a brief speech or poem delivered by an actor at the end of a play, addressed directly to the audience. This theatrical epilogue is well documented in ancient Greek and Roman drama, and in English it is most richly developed in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Shakespeare's epilogues — Puck's in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Prospero's in The Tempest, Rosalind's in As You Like It — are among the most beautiful things in English drama, moments when the fiction explicitly dissolves and the actor addresses the audience directly, asking for their applause, their charity, their favorable interpretation. 'Our revels now are ended' begins Prospero's speech, and the epilogue's function — to release the spell of the play while asking for the audience's continued goodwill — is exactly the rhetorical epilogos transposed to the theater.

The prose epilogue — a brief section added after the main narrative of a novel or non-fiction work — developed from these rhetorical and theatrical ancestors. The prose epilogue typically tells the reader what happened to the characters or subjects after the story's main events concluded: where they ended up, how they fared, what their lives became. This 'what happened next' function has a different character from the rhetorical epilogue: it is informational rather than persuasive, closing a narrative loop rather than working on the audience's emotions. But the best prose epilogues borrow from their rhetorical ancestors — they make you feel something about the story you have just read, they give you the emotional resolution that the plot itself withheld, they send you away from the book in a particular mood. The after-word still wants to move you.