Handbooks were not the only source of skill for one who wished to learn speaking and argumentation in classical Greece. The older tradition of imitating a successful orator, without necessarily any conceptualization of the techniques involved, continued to be followed and became the characteristic form of rhetorical study in what may be called the “schools” of sophists.
The word sophist is derived from the adjective sophos, meaning “wise,” and might be translated “expert.” In the fifth century the term was used for anyone who gave lessons in grammar, rhetoric, politics, ethics, or other subjects for pay (see Plato Protagoras 313c). Among the most famous were Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, and Hippias. Sophists were professors of how to succeed in the civic life of the Greek states. Most were not Athenians, but the young men of Athens constituted their chief clientele. A vivid, though rather negative picture of sophists can be found in several dialogues of Plato, including Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias Major and Minor, and The Sophist. Sophists taught primarily by public or private epideixis, oral demonstrations that presented in a striking style their ideas and techniques of proof. Their presentations were sometimes dramatic, as when Hippias appeared at Olympia in a costume of his own making (Plato Hippias Minor 368b).
Some of the sophists, Protagoras in particular, may rightly be thought of as philosophers who developed ideas and published treatises on what we might call epistemology, anthropology, linguistics, and almost anything involving human life and belief. Before the time of Aristotle, however, what we think of as separate disciplines of the arts and sciences had not been defined or differentiated except in the case of medicine.1 The sophists of the fifth century were generalists with wide and overlapping interests, they projected great self-confidence, and they sometimes claimed knowledge of all subjects.2 A crucial issue in their epideixis was often the antithesis between what the Greeks called physis, or nature (i.e., that which is objectively true), and nomos, which means “law,” but that included institutions, conventions, and beliefs, often viewed in relativistic terms. Since nomos is a human creation, transmitted by education, the physis/nomos contrast is sometimes referred to as “nature vs. nurture.” Vigorous presentation of paradoxes and controversial moral views by sophists illustrated the potential of rhetoric for social change and provided an opening for self-aggrandizement. Good examples of the latter are the arguments of Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias or of Thrasymachus in the first book of the Republic that justice is the right of the stronger over the weaker. Sophistry seems to be a characteristic development in “sophisticated” literate societies at times of change and conflicting philosophical teachings, and it appeared in India and in China as well as in Greece.3
Sophists are said to have “schools” in the sense that they attracted followers who paid fees for instruction. Exactly what went on in these schools is not well-known, but a central activity was certainly listening to the sophist speak or reading versions of his speeches, followed by memorization or imitation of these works as models of argument and style, which the sophist may have criticized. Some sophists engaged in question-and-answer dialogue resembling dialectic as developed by Plato. Their model speeches furnished examples of topics, forms of argument, and style that could be useful in public address.
The best illustration of how judicial oratory could be learned from sophistic examples are the Tetralogies attributed to Antiphon. Antiphon is known to history as a sophist and oligarchic politician who was executed as a result of the failure of the revolution of 411 B.C. in Athens. He was also a logographer, that is, a person who, for pay, wrote speeches for others to deliver in court; three of these survive, all dealing with homicide cases.4 Whether he was also the author of the Tetralogies has been much debated; recent research suggests they may have been written a generation after his death and have been attributed to him because they concern homicide cases and resemble his techniques.5 Both in the Tetralogies and in the genuine speeches the speaker relies on argument from probability, and the few fragments of Antiphon’s speech in his own defense when he was tried for treason argue that it was improbable that he would have plotted to overthrow the government for his own advantage.6 Whoever was the author, the Tetralogies were clearly intended to serve as models of techniques in judicial oratory and consist of three sets of four speeches, two for the prosecution and two for the defense in imaginary murder trials. No names are given to any of the persons involved in the cases.
The situation imagined in the first Tetralogy is as follows. A man has been killed in a deserted spot. The slave accompanying him was also attacked and has died, but not before stating that the defendant was the aggressor. The trial in a case like this would have been held before the Areopagus, an ancient council with jurisdiction over cases of premeditated murder and made up of former holders of high office in the city. It is difficult to estimate the number who would have served on such a jury but it might well be a hundred or more. Since there was no public prosecutor, criminal actions were brought by anyone who felt injured. In this case, the prosecutor claims to be concerned about the religious pollution that will infect the city if a murderer is allowed to go free. The prosecutor opens his speech with the following proemium. It could easily be adapted by other speakers to open any case dependent on circumstantial evidence and argument from probability.
Whatever actions result from plots by ordinary citizens are not difficult to prove, but if people of considerable ability are the perpetrators, experienced in the business, and at a time of life when they are at the peak of their mental powers, they are difficult to discover and convict. Through the greatness of the risk, they pay much attention to the safety of their schemes, and they take no action until they have provided against every suspicion. Knowing this, it is necessary for you [the jury] to put great trust in any probability you perceive. . . . It is improbable that muggers killed the man, for no one who ran the risk of his life would have abandoned the object of his robbery when he had it in his hands. Yet the victims were found with all their property intact. Nor did someone kill them in a drunken frenzy, for we would have information from fellow drinkers. Nor did the murder result from an argument, for they wouldn’t have been arguing in the middle of the night in a deserted spot. Nor did the murderer kill the victim in mistake for somebody else, for he would not have killed both him and his slave. Since these possibilities are dismissed, the fact of the death points to the man having died as a result of premeditation. And who is more likely to have set upon him than one who had suffered great wrongs at his hands and was expecting to suffer still more? That man is the defendant. (1.1.4–5)
The speaker continues his development of probabilities, then adds the deathbed evidence of the slave as corroboration of them, and finally summarizes what he has said and stresses the importance of removing the pollution from the city. A speech in a real case would have included a narration, describing the persons involved and the circumstances; here we have only proemium, proof from probabilities, evidence, and epilogue. In the second speech in the same Tetralogy we see how the defendant might deal with the argument just quoted. Under Athenian law, he is required to defend himself, and he responds: “It is not improbable, as they say, but probable that a person wandering around in the middle of the night should be killed for his property. That he was not robbed is a sign of nothing. But if the assailants had not yet stripped him, but left in fear of somebody who was coming, they were sensible and not at all mad to prefer safety to profit” (1.2.5).
The Tetralogies are examples of a form of rhetorical teaching that flourished in Athens. They are not accompanied by any generalized rules and were presumably to be studied in written form and imitated. In the opening pages of Plato’s Phaedrus we find young Phaedrus studying a speech by Lysias; impressed with it on first hearing, he claims to have made Lysias repeat it, borrowed the manuscript, and is now learning it by heart (Phaedrus 228a–b). It is obvious in this case, which perhaps is imaginary, that there was no discussion of the technique until Phaedrus encountered Socrates. Other evidence that indicates a lack of conceptualization of technique and the formation of rules includes Aristotle’s complaint in his treatise On Sophistical Refutations (183b–84a) that the pragmatic method of Gorgias consisted only of furnishing speeches to be memorized by students, much as if one tried to teach shoemaking by giving the student a collection of shoes.
Students of sophists did not necessarily memorize and reproduce only whole speeches. Just as the composition of oral poetry and the oratory in it was built up with blocks of memorized material adapted to a variety of situations, so sophistic oratory was to a considerable extent a pastiche, or piecing together of commonplaces, long or short. Some of these commonplaces even appear in actual judicial speeches given in Athens, especially in the introductions and in treatment of stock issues such as the reliability of witnesses. We have a collection of proemia by Demosthenes, which he and others drew on as needed, and the references to style, amplification, and emotional appeal in the account of the handbooks in the Phaedrus seem to suggest that these included collections of material made by a sophist whose students could then incorporate parts in their speeches at will. In the fragmentary speech Against the Sophists (12–13) Isocrates compares the teaching of rhetoric by some sophists to teaching the alphabet. Students memorized passages as they would letters and made up a speech out of these elements as they would words out of letters. Except, says Isocrates, that the sophists neither knew nor could teach their students how to combine the passages in a useful or appropriate way, for composition is a creative process and not something with definite rules, like spelling. The use of commonplaces remained characteristic of sophistic oratory and of some other genres of rhetoric as well. In the Middle Ages handbooks of letter writing often contained formulas, such as salutations and exordia, that a writer could insert in a letter, and in the Renaissance a whole series of formulary rhetorics existed. A modern successor is a collection of anecdotes and after-dinner stories for the use of speakers.
The sophists introduced a revolution in education, one resisted by conservative thinkers in the fifth century, as we can see from the satire of sophists in Aristophanes’ Clouds. In Greek schools before this time, after acquisition of simple reading and writing skills, the principal activity seems to have been the memorization and recitation of epic and lyric poetry. There was no provision for practice in original composition and no encouragement of original thinking. Students of the sophists, for the first time, were encouraged to engage in original composition and in argument and to question traditional values. Much of what the students produced was probably imitative, shallow, or even silly, but it represented their own attempt to enter actively into the culture of their time, a period that has been called “the Greek Enlightenment.”7
The most famous of the older Greek sophists is Gorgias, whose long life stretched from sometime around 480 to around 375 B.C. Gorgias was a native of Leontini in Sicily, near Syracuse. He is supposed to have been a student of the philosopher Empedocles and may have known Tisias. In 427 he was sent by his native city as an ambassador to Athens, and he visited the city frequently for much of the rest of his life. His remarkable oratorical style and dramatic presentations attracted much attention. Although the devices he used were largely drawn from Greek poetry and can individually be found in some earlier Greek prose, he exploited them to an unprecedented degree. On Gorgias’s lips oratory became a tintinnabulation of rhyming words and echoing rhythms. Antithetical structure, which is native to Greek syntax, became an obsession. Clauses were constructed with persistent parallelism and attention to corresponding length, even the number of syllables in each clause was equalized. The sound effects are difficult to convey in English, but the following translation of Gorgias’s description of Helen of Troy might suggest something of the style:
Born from such parents, she possessed godlike beauty, which getting and not forgetting she preserved. On many did she work the greatest passions of love, and by her one body she brought together many bodies of men greatly minded for great deeds. Some had the greatness of wealth, some the glory of ancient noblesse, some the vigor of personal prowess, some the power of acquired knowledge. And all came because of a passion that loved conquest and a love of honor that was unconquered. (§ 4)8
This is called the Gorgianic style. The particular devices on which it is based were among the first to be given descriptive names, perhaps by Gorgias’s students, and later were called schêmata in Greek, or figurae in Latin, or “schemes” or “figures” in English. Reference to Gorgianic figures such as homoeoteleuton (rhyme at the ends of successive phrases) or parison (equal length of phrases) is already found in fourth-century rhetorical treatises, and the figures continued to be treated as a group by later writers, though often regarded as somewhat gauche.9 In Gorgias’s own time they were imitated widely, by Thucydides the historian, Lysias the orator, and Isocrates, for example, but with greater restraint than their orginator showed.
What was the point of the Gorgianic figures? This is the period of the first experiments in artistic prose and the beginning of the acceptance of prose as having literary merit. It is thus not surprising that poetry furnished the stylistic model. Gorgias can be regarded as having sought to create an elevated oratorical style for formal speech, distinct from conversational language, though at the risk of drawing attention away from what he was saying to how he was saying it. In addition, as Jacqueline de Romilly has argued,10 Gorgias saw magic in speech, the same kind of magic that appeared in religious poetry or in the healing incantations of medicine men. In his Encomium of Helen (§ 8) he speaks of the power of speech: “Speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and most invisible body accomplishes most godlike works. It can banish fear and remove grief and instill pleasure and enhance pity.” The Gorgianic figures probably should be regarded as the devices by which Gorgias sought to work his magic. They are the techniques that stir the passions or obsess the mind and perhaps draw the listener to unconscious agreement with the speaker. The view of Gorgias as a magician seems supported by the general reaction to him in antiquity. He was more often thought of as a clever rhetorician than as a philosopher. When he appears in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, he seems quite incapable of conceptualizing or analyzing what he does.
Gorgias’s speeches were not only studied as examples of style; they also illustrated arrangement and logical argument. His Encomium of Helen, for example, is divided into proemium, narration, proof, and epilogue, as taught in the handbooks of his time. He argues that Helen deserted Menelaus and went off with Paris to Troy for one of four possible reasons: it was the will of the gods; she was taken by force; she was seduced by words; or she was overcome by love. He then tries to show that whichever of these was the reason, she should be held blameless.
Some scholars have argued that Gorgias was a serious philosopher who speculated about the nature of being and the limitations of knowledge and was influenced by the Pythagoreans and Empedocles.11 Gorgias shares with these philosophers an interest in oppositions, antitheses, and paradox. His treatise On the Nonexistent, or On Nature, which survives in outline form, can be read as a serious effort at logical argument.12 Here Gorgias proposes that nothing exists, that even if anything does exist it is inapprehensible by human beings, and even it were apprehensible it would be impossible for one person to communicate knowledge to another. The argument is supported through the identification and elimination of alternative possibilities. In consequence, it can be argued, since the truth cannot be known rationally, the function of an orator is not logical demonstration so much as emotional presentation that will stir the audience’s will to believe. Thus, the power of persuasion involves deceiving “the emotional and mental state of listeners by artificially stimulating sensory reactions through words.”13
The philosophical approach to Gorgias, valuable as it is in relating his work to other intellectual developments of the fifth century, probably exaggerates his sophistication and credits him with an uncharacteristic power of conceptualization. Gorgias imitated what he found in the philosophers as he did what he found in the poets, not so much as contributions to a theory of knowledge as to a technique of speech. Although, like most other sophists of his time, he was probably a relativist about the truth and moral values, it is not clear that he cared very much about philosophical implications. What was important to him, and what remains characteristic of the sophistic strand in rhetoric, is a sense of the power of the orator to accomplish whatever he wishes, to make great things small, small things great, and even the worse seem the better cause. It is the claim to do this that opens the discussion of rhetoric in Plato’s Gorgias, and this is the technique Gorgias illustrated and taught to others by furnishing, orally and in writing, models for imitation. To many followers of the sophist, rhetoric was an exhilarating game, with no necessary relation to reality or truth.
At the end of his Encomium of Helen Gorgias refers to that speech as a paignion, “childish sport, a game.” Anecdotes about him suggest a good sense of humor. Other sophists were more serious or even self-important, but a recurrent feature of sophistic rhetoric is a love of paradox and of playing with words and ideas. Isocrates (Helen 12) mentions encomia of salt or bumble bees, and from later times we have Dio Chrysostom’s Encomium of Hair, Synesius’s Encomium of Baldness, from the Renaissance Erasmus’s Encomium of Folly, and other discourses that are either openly playful or disguise their serious intent. The two sophistic speeches in Plato’s Phaedrus, arguing that a nonlover should be preferred to a lover, are playful exercises, not serious attempts at persuasion, though Socrates becomes alarmed at their inherent immorality.
Some of the playful element in sophistry derives from an effort to teach rhetorical methods by using subjects that will interest students to whom more serious subjects might seem tiresome. An effort to engage young minds in rhetorical exercises by unrealistic but exciting themes is also a feature of declamation as it developed in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Playfulness in sophistry also sometimes reflects a disillusion with a seemingly self-righteous and complacent religious or political establishment that refuses to question traditional values and practices. Sophistry uses satire to bring about change. An outrageous example of sophistic rhetoric in this mode in English is Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal, arguing that Irish babies should be killed and eaten in time of famine. Satire or playfulness on the part of the early sophists can also be associated with their relativism, implicit in Gorgias’s works and most famously stated in the words of his older contemporary, Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things, of things that are in so far as they are and of things that are not in so far as they are not” and “Concerning the gods, I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist; for there is much to prevent one’s knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of man’s life” (Diogenes Laertius 9.51). Skeptical schools of philosophy existed throughout antiquity. Some individuals concluded that life is a game and should not be taken too seriously. The view was consistent with the great interest of the Greeks in athletics, something unique in ancient societies. An analogy between the Greek games and public life is drawn in the opening of Isocrates’ Panegyricus and found often in later writing.
The playfulness, relativism, and skepticism of the early sophists has appealed to some modern thinkers, and has similarities to some post-modern intellectual movements, especially to “deconstruction.”14 In rejecting logocentrism, the belief in absolute truth, postmodern thinkers open up a new realm for rhetoric that resembles some of the experiments of the early sophists.15 In addition, the sophists’ ways of challenging students and encouraging self-expression have some application to the teaching of composition to modern students, although other features of their teaching, such as their great use of commonplaces, may be less applicable. As we shall see, however, the questioning of values associated with the early sophists has not consistently characterized the sophistic strand in rhetoric. Sophistry has often been a tool of conservatism and defense of cultural values of the past. The earliest example is the teaching of Isocrates.
Various trends and influences of philosophy and sophistic rhetoric were brought together and further developed in the work of Isocrates (436–338 B.C.). He helped make rhetoric a central subject in the educational system of the Greek and Roman world and thus of many later centuries as well, and he established oratory as a literary form. His speeches are often characterized as epideictic, but this needs some qualification. A few, including his Evagoras, Helen, Busiris, and Archedemus, are rhetorical exercises or speeches of praise and are purely epideictic. Six early speeches were written for clients to deliver in the lawcourts and are judicial. His long major works, Panegyricus, Antidosis, Philippus, and Panathenaicus, include epideictic passages but are attempts to influence public policy and are thus deliberative in intent. He never delivered any of his speeches in public, though he did read them to his students and invite their criticism.
Isocrates was a native Athenian who knew Socrates and Plato, but his thought did not move in the dialectical and metaphysical direction of Plato’s. Having lost his family wealth in the Peloponnesian War, he subsisted for a time as a logographer, a writer of judicial speeches for others to deliver, but about 393 or 392, several years before Plato founded the Academy, he opened a school for advanced students, the first of its kind in Europe, to deepen their liberal education and prepare them for careers of leadership in various cities of the Greek world. Among the most famous individuals to study with him were Nicocles, son of the king of Cyprus, and Timotheus, the most important Athenian general of the second quarter of the fourth century. Isocrates’ school was a development of the schools of sophists, but unlike the older sophists he did not travel: he required students to come to him and to stay for an extended period of time. This gave his school a stability that the demonstrations of the sophists lacked. To judge from what he says in Antidosis (§§ 287–90), he also took a personal interest in the students and their development of self-discipline, which as far as we know the sophists had not done. Finally, his school had clearly stated goals and a consistent curriculum that he maintained for over fifty years.
An understanding of Isocrates’ goals and methods can be gained from reading three of his speeches, Against the Sophists, Panegyricus, and Antidosis, though a full understanding of his career, his significance to his contemporaries, and his political ideas requires extensive reading in his other works.16 Against the Sophists is a program-speech composed and published by Isocrates soon after he opened his school. He here seeks to differentiate his teaching from that of others, both those who taught tricks of argumentation and those who taught public speaking through models and commonplaces. He agreed with others that one must start with native ability, which training can sharpen but not create. There are in fact three elements in successful oratory—and these remain permanent features of classical rhetorical theory—nature, training, and practice. It is the function of the teacher to explain the principles of public address and also to set an example of rhetorical composition on which students can pattern themselves. Isocrates does not use the noun “rhetoric,” perhaps because of Socratic criticisms (though he does use the adjective rhêtorikos to describe public speakers), preferring to speak instead of logos, “speech,” and he calls the training he gives “philosophy,” or love of wisdom. By that he means a practical rather than theoretical form of knowledge. A very important factor, in his judgment, was moral character; it cannot be taught, he says, but the study of speech and politics can help to encourage and develop moral consciousness. Unfortunately, the extant text of the speech ends at this point.
To continue consideration of Isocrates’ ideas on education it is necessary to turn to Antidosis, a long speech that he published about 353 B.C. to justify his life’s work and to answer mounting criticism of him. It takes the form of a judicial defense in an antidosis trial, a legal procedure in which a defendant was challenged to undertake an expensive public service or else exchange property with another citizen who had been assigned the obligation to pay for the service in question. Athenian citizens did not pay personal taxes, but the state required wealthy individuals to pay for dramatic productions, the construction of warships, and other public needs. An individual called upon to contribute could challenge somebody else and attempt to prove that that person was better able to bear the expense. Here the claim is imagined that Isocrates has made great sums from his school, but the charge is extended into one of corrupting the young by teaching them to speak and thus to gain an advantage in contests contrary to justice. Isocrates means his readers to think of the charges made against Socrates over forty years before and presents himself throughout the speech as a Socrates-like figure.
The Antidosis is exceedingly wordy and becomes rather tiresome, though it is interesting to see how Isocrates introduces passages from three of his earlier speeches as “witnesses” on his behalf, as well as naming his leading students and discussing in considerable detail the activities of one of them, Timotheus. He denies (§§ 32–34) that he has been active in the courts or that he has taught techniques of judicial oratory, and he claims (§ 67) that all his writings have tended toward virtue and justice. In the later part of the speech he turns to the question of the arts and his method of instruction and takes up some of the matters touched on in his speech Against the Sophists. He divides art into that of the mind and that of the body (§§ 180–85): the former is philosophy, which teaches forms of discourse; the latter is gymnastic, which teaches postures of the body. Each is an antistrophos, or counterpart, of the other (§ 182). This concept will be of interest in contrast to remarks by Plato and Aristotle on the relationship of the arts. Isocrates glorifies the art of discourse (§§ 253–57) in a passage he borrows from his Nicocles (§§ 5–9); he warns against the moral and intellectual dangers of dialectic and abstruse philosophy, and he elaborates his conception of how the study and practice of speech can improve human beings. The argument is that the truly ambitious orator, the kind trained in Isocrates’ school, will first of all choose as subjects only great themes for the good of all rather than for personal ambition. Second, the orator will select examples of noble actions of the past as proof or illustration of what he is discussing. In so doing, the fledgling orator will become accustomed to contemplating virtue and will feel its influence, not only in the planning of a particular speech, but throughout life, “so that eloquence and wisdom will become the possession of those who are philosophically and honorably disposed toward speech” (§ 277).17
By the time Isocrates wrote these words Plato had published the dialogues Gorgias, in which rhetoric is denigrated, and Phaedrus, in which a philosophical rhetoric is outlined (to be discussed in Chapter 4). Isocrates never mentions Plato by name, but it is clear that in many of his works he is responding to Plato’s distrust of rhetoric. Isocrates and Plato held very different views of politics and education, and there was apparently a sharp rivalry between them. Isocrates’ response to Plato’s moral objections is to focus on the speaker rather than on the nature of the art. The technique of a speech is neither morally good nor bad; only individuals are good and bad, and Isocrates would start with a young man who is good, developing that potential by the contemplation of great models. This view becomes a permanent feature of classical rhetoric, taken up in ensuing centuries by Cicero and by Quintilian, who claims that only a good man can be a good orator. In response to Plato’s claims that rhetoric lacks knowledge and a distinct subject matter, Isocrates seeks to provide knowledge of ethics, politics, and history, and he repeatedly says that speech should concern the “highest” subjects, by which he means international affairs and policies.
Isocrates says (Antidosis 295–96) that Athens is the school of orators because Athens holds out the greatest prizes to their ability, offers the largest number and greatest variety of opportunities, provides the most practical opportunities to speak, and has the best of the Greek dialects as its native speech; thus it is not unjust that all great speakers should be pupils of Athens. This view is tenable in terms of the role that Athenian democracy and intellectual history played in the development of rhetoric and eloquence, though it glosses over the oppressive and sometimes cruel actions of Athenian imperialism and the self-serving actions of some famous Athenian leaders; it is not a view that was acceptable to Plato.
It would be interesting to know details about the actual curriculum of Isocrates’ school and his conceptualization of rhetoric. A passage in Against the Sophists (16–18) seems to indicate that he taught composition in terms of what later came to be called invention, arrangement, and style, and he may have been the first to distinguish these fundamental parts of rhetoric. He also says that the teacher “should go over these matters so carefully as to leave out nothing that can be taught and otherwise should himself provide such an example that those who are being formed and are able to imitate him will, from the start, shine in their speaking in a more flowery and graceful way than others.” This statement suggests that he may have given lectures about rhetoric and laid down rules for rhetorical composition. Certainly he offered many examples of how to write and speak. Some later Greek and Latin writers mention a rhetorical handbook, either composed by Isocrates for the use of students or by students from his oral teaching. Quintilian, for example, says (3.4.11) that the followers of Isocrates required the narration in a speech to be clear, brief, and probable (an idea with which many later rhetoricians agreed) and that Aristotle is referring to Isocrates when he objects to the rule of brevity (Rhetoric 3.16.4). Isocrates’ contributions to rhetorical technique were probably largely in the area of style. Seeking a medium for the expression of noble if somewhat bland ideas, he developed an extraordinarily smooth prose, in contrast to the jerky style of Gorgias. His diction is pure, unusual or poetic words being generally avoided. Taking advantage of the fact that he was writing and not speaking, Isocrates weaves these words together into very long periodic sentences. Antithesis, causal and result clauses, and an inclination not only to make a positive statement but to deny its contrary keep the thoughts remarkably clear. His works are among the easiest to read in Greek, despite the long sentences, because he never leaves anything unsaid and never makes abrupt jumps of thought. Characteristic of his concern for smoothness is his obsession with avoiding hiatus, or the gap that results from juxtaposing words ending and beginning with vowels. These stylistic features were permanently influential on Greek prose.
Also permanently influential was the creation of a rhetorical school.18 Successors flourished not only in Athens but in all Greek-speaking cities in the coming centuries, and the institution was eventually exported to Rome, survived in Byzantium, and reappeared in Renaissance Italy. After Isocrates’ time a regular pattern evolved consisting of roughly seven years of instruction for boys and girls in a primary or grammar school, followed, for boys only, by several years studying rhetoric. Beyond that might come advanced study in rhetoric or philosophy. In late antiquity and the Middle Ages this system developed into the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Although Greek and Roman students learned some arithmetic at the elementary level, and picked up a fair amount of mythology, religion, geography, history, and politics incidentally in their reading, and though Greek students, but not Romans, regularly studied geometry, music, and gymnastics, ancient, medieval, and Renaissance education was largely verbal and rhetorical. Isocrates’ view that speech was the basis of leadership in society made it the study par excellence of the free citizen, and thus the primary liberal art. Only in the eighteenth century was the curriculum broadened to include higher mathematics and science; and the social sciences, including history, were not systematically taught in schools or colleges until the nineteenth century.
Isocrates’ greatest speech is Panegyricus, published about 380 B.C., relatively early in his long career as a teacher. A number of later speeches, including Areopagiticus and Panathenaicus, resemble it, but are less successful. Panegyricus is the finest and most carefully crafted example of Isocrates’ prose style as just described; it has greater unity of theme, structure, and imagery than any of his other long works, and it well illustrates his goal of dealing with only the greatest issues and adorning them with accounts of the noblest actions. His proposal is “pan-Hellenism,” the proposition that all Greeks should unite against the barbarians, as they had against Persian invaders in the early fifth century, and that the leadership in such a union belongs morally and historically to Athens. Gorgias and Lysias had spoken on pan-Hellenism at Olympia earlier, and Isocrates here imagines himself doing the same. The unity of Greek culture and Greek traditions remained for centuries a rallying cry that was effectively used by orators and kept Hellenism alive through the time of the Roman Empire. Among the proofs of Athens’s greatness Isocrates cites the role of “philosophy” there as he understood it, and more particularly of speech, in a splendid period (47–50), a translation of which appears in the diagram on p. 44. The translation attempts to show how some of the Gorgianic figures were utilized. There is a pervasive antithesis or balancing of concepts, two or more clauses or phrases are often given approximately the same shape and length, and in the original Greek there is a considerable amount of similarity of sound at the beginning or end of sense units. In the translation some of these sound effects are identified by italics. The rhythm of the concluding words in Greek is that of the end of a line of heroic verse: dactyl plus spondee.
Love of wisdom, then,
which has helped us to discover
and helped to establish all that makes Athens great,
which has educated us for practical affairs
and made gentle our relations with each other,
which has distinguished misfortunes of ignorance from those of necessity
and taught us to guard against the former and bear up against the latter,
[this love of wisdom] OUR CITY made manifest,
and honored Speech,
which all desire
and envy those who know,
recognizing, on the one hand,
that this is the natural feature distinguishing us from all animals,
and that through the advantage it gives us we excel them in all other things,
and seeing, on the other hand,
that in other areas fortune is troublesome
so that in those areas the wise fail
and the ignorant succeed,
and that there is no share of noble and artistic speech to the wicked,
but it is the produce of a well-knowing soul,
and that the wise and those seemingly unlearned
most differ from each other in this,
and that those educated liberally, from the start, are not recognized
by courage and wealth and such benefits,
but most by what has been said,
and that those who use speech well are
not only powerful in their own cities,
but also honored among other men;
and to such an extent has OUR CITY outstripped the rest of mankind in wisdom and speech
that her students have become the teachers of others,
and she has made the name of the Hellenes seem no longer that of a people,
but that of an intelligence,
and that those rather are called Greeks who share our education
than those who share our blood.
A final contribution of Isocrates to the rhetorical tradition that should not be overlook is that he was the first major “orator” who did not deliver his speeches orally. They were carefully edited, polished, and published in written (but, of course, not printed) form. He is thus a major figure in the literate revolution mentioned in Chapter 1, and by his action speech was converted into literature, an influence toward the letteraturizzazione of rhetoric.
Modern scholars often distinguish an Isocratean tradition in classical rhetoric, contrasted with an Aristotelian tradition. The distinction specifically derives from a passage in Cicero’s On Invention (2.8), that speaks of two “families” of teachers in the period after Aristotle and Isocrates, one primarily interested in philosophy but giving some attention to rhetoric, the other entirely devoted to the study of speech. The Isocratean tradition is thought of as emphasizing written rather than spoken discourse, epideictic rather than deliberative or judicial speech, style rather than argument, amplification rather than forcefulness. To this it should be added that the Isocratean tradition in its purest form is a continuation of sophistry and that its main instructional method, like that of the older sophists, was listening to or reading speeches and imitating their invention, arrangement, and style. In contrast to the Aristotelian tradition, followers of Isocrates put less emphasis on theory and the learning of abstract rules and precepts.
The term “sophist” is regularly used throughout antiquity to mean a teacher of rhetoric. Although some teachers gave lectures on rhetoric or wrote rhetorical handbooks for the use of their students, their primary method of teaching was to give speeches on imaginary subjects, often pointing out features of their treatment of the theme, and to require their students to write, memorize, and deliver speeches on similar subjects. In Greek, such a speech was called a meletê, in Latin a declamatio, from which is derived the English word “declamation.” Declamation is a hybrid of handbook and sophistic rhetoric. It is related to handbook rhetoric in that the students had been taught precepts of invention, arrangement, and style to apply in their speeches, and in that the assigned speeches were often imagined as delivered before a court of law and regarded as preparation for judicial oratory. Declamation is, however, part of the sophistic tradition in that the students learned method by imitating famous speeches of the past or the speeches of the teacher, and in that their speeches were exercises, not real attempts at persuasion, in which they were often judged more for the cleverness or novelty of what they said or the ornamentation of their style than for the cogency of their argument. Public demonstrations of declamation attracted large audiences on some occasions and became an important form of entertainment in Greece and Rome.
According to Quintilian (2.4.41), the use of fictitious cases in imitation of the lawcourts began in the time of Demetrius of Phaleron, who ruled Athens from 317 to 307 B.C. Declamation was introduced into Roman schools by the early first century B.C. and was divided into suasoriae, deliberative speeches in which the student was to imagine giving advice to a mythological or historical character—e.g., persuading Agamemnon not to sacrifice Iphigenia, or advising Alexander the Great whether to continue his conquests in India—or the commoner form of the controversiae, in which the instructor posited a law, real or imaginary, and then constructed a special case to tax the student’s ingenuity. For example, a law requires that a woman who has been raped choose whether her assailant is to be put to death or required to marry her; the special case: a man rapes two women in one night; the first woman demands his death; the second demands marriage. Declamation was not practiced as debate; several speakers might contend on the same theme, in which case they might all argue on the same side of the case and not be matched against each other. Our best information about Roman declamation comes from a work by Seneca the Elder, written in the second quarter of the first century after Christ, in which he recalls the activities of the schools in his youth.19 There are also collections of declamations attributed to Quintilian and to Calpurnius Flaccus, dating from later centuries.20 Declamation often exploited themes of sex, violence, tyrants, pirates, and problems between parents and children, presumably as a way of interesting teenage boys, but the result was the creation of an imaginary world remote from the concerns of the actual courts of law.21 Declamation had a marked influence on Latin literature, where speeches in epic, elegiac, and dramatic poetry draw on skills learned in the schools. Good examples can be found in the works of Ovid and the tragedies of Seneca the Younger.
Our best information about declamation in Greek is found in the rhetorical handbook of Apsines,22 in speeches of Libanius, and in the work of Sopatros in late antiquity. Greek teachers seem to have preferred historical themes to a greater extent than their Roman counterparts. The practice of declamation continued in the East intermittently through the Byzantine period. In the West it declined in the early Middle Ages, or was absorbed into dialectic, but reappeared later in medieval and Renaissance schools, and a version of it was practiced in early American colleges. Most American colleges of the early nineteenth century still provided for declamation in the formal curriculum and at commencement, as well as through the programs of debating societies.
In the first century after Christ a movement began, primarily in Greek but with some imitation in Latin, that was later given the name “Second Sophistic” by the sophist Philostratus, who wrote a history of it up to around A.D. 230.23 Philostratus distinguished two kinds of sophists: the pure sophist and the philosophical sophist. Pure sophists were teachers of rhetoric who taught their students some theory, but from Philostratus’s account and other sources their emphasis seems clearly to have been on declamation. The sophist’s own declamation before his class was the chief form of instruction. In a typical case he imagined himself in some situation in classical Greek history and composed an appropriate speech for the occasion. He might, for example, reply to a famous speech by Demosthenes or he might even try to outdo a speech by Demosthenes by composing one on the same subject and in Demosthenes’ style.24
The other kind of sophist according to Philostratus was the philosophical sophist, who used oratory to expound views on political, moral, or aesthetic subjects. Dio Chrysostom (ca. A.D. 40–115) is an early example of the type. These sophists might also teach declamation, but they became famous orators and often served as ambassadors of their native cities or spoke on civic occasions, and like the earlier sophists they traveled widely, giving dramatic demonstrations of their art. In the second century of the Christian era this art form became extraordinarily popular as a form of public entertainment, and some sophists became very rich; but sophists also performed an important cultural function. Their commonest themes were the cultural values of Greek civilization and their manifestation in the Roman Empire; unlike the early Greek sophists, they were traditionalists and conservatives. They can be thought of as fashionable preachers who encouraged belief in inherited values of religion and morality in the most polished and elegant form, and they contributed significantly to the stability of a society whose major goal was preservation of the status quo in the face of barbarian attack and new religious movements, of which Christianity became the most threatening. The greatest of the second-century Greek sophists was Aelius Aristides, in whose work reemerges the magical element celebrated by Gorgias.25 Sophists existed throughout the third century, but wars and economic crisis made life difficult for them as for others. In the fourth century, with more stable conditions, there was another flowering of sophists, described in Eunapius’s Lives of the Philosophers.26 Major orators of that time include Libanius in Antioch, Themistius in Constantinople, Himerius in Athens, and Synesius in North Africa. Although most of these sophists actually delivered speeches, like Isocrates they also wrote, edited, and published their greatest efforts as works of literature, and many of these survive.
During the Hellenistic period, when Greek became the international language of the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor, the spoken language underwent changes in pronunciation and vocabulary and a simplification of grammar and syntax, leading to what is called Koine Greek, best known as the language of the Greek New Testament. At the same time, teachers of rhetoric indulged in various forms of a highly artificial style called “Asianism,” somewhat reminiscent of the technique of Gorgias. Toward the end of the first century B.C. a reaction took place, canonizing the prose style of the Attic orators of the fourth century as the approved model for imitation in public address and academic discourse. This is known as the Atticism movement, and its effects can be seen in the language of the Second Sophistic. Atticism, in varying degrees of purity, characterizes serious composition throughout the time of the Roman Empire, and a version of it persisted as a formal language throughout the Byzantine period, even though the language of everyday Greek continued to depart more and more from classical Greek, eventually becoming Modern Greek. Attic Greek as a formal language can be compared to the continued use of Latin in the West during late antiquity and the Middle Ages when early forms of the romance languages were replacing it in ordinary speech.
Sophistry filled an intellectual, emotional, and ceremonial role in later antiquity. In particular, the orations of the Second Sophistic fall into a number of formal genres, each with a technical name and certain conventions of structure and content. These include panegyric, which is, technically, a speech at a festival; gamelion, a speech at a marriage; genethliac, a speech on a birthday; prosphonetic, an address to a ruler; epitaphios, a funeral oration; and many other forms. These forms are discussed and exemplified in two handbooks by a rhetorician named Menander, who lived in the late third century after Christ.27 They have in common the topic of praise or blame and thus are subdivisions of what Aristotle had called epideictic.
The Second Sophistic was primarily a Greek movement, but it was imitated in Latin, and Latin encomia of Roman emperors have survived, beginning with the Panegyric of Trajan by Pliny the Younger. Sophistry was also pagan in origin and spirit, and was often criticized by Christians because of its celebration of the beauties of pagan mythology or because of the emphasis it gave to style, ornament, and the cleverness of the orator. But the Second Sophistic also influenced some Christian writing and preaching as early as the second century, as will be discussed in Chapter 7. In the fourth century, when Christianity was granted toleration and then became the official religion of the state, both the emperors and the orators who celebrated them were usually Christians, and a Christian sophistry was created by Fathers of the Church. This tradition of Christian sophistry remained strong throughout the Byzantine period in the East. It can be found in the western Middle Ages as well, and it was embraced with enthusiasm by the humanists of the Renaissance both as a way of ingratiating an orator or writer with the rich or powerful and for the sheer joy of unrestrained artistic expression. French ecclesiastical oratory of the seventeenth century, especially its funeral oratory, is part of the sophistic tradition, and so is the American Memorial Day or Fourth of July oration and commencement oratory.
Sophistry has had a bad name with many critics. Plato’s objections to the relativism of early sophists began this attitude, and the distaste of austere Christians for meretricious adornment perpetuated it. There is often an empty verbosity and self-indulgence evident in the vast orations of Isocrates and Aelius Aristides, for all their impeccable standards of language and expression. But sophistry, like rhetoric itself, is not necessarily depraved, decadent, or in poor taste. It is a natural development of sophisticated, literate societies, found in India and China as well as in Greece. In its western history it has emphasized the role of the speaker and the process of learning to speak or to write primarily by imitation of models. Imitation is a subject to which we shall return in discussion of literary rhetoric. Sophistry is also one place within the rhetorical system where allowance is made for genius and inspiration, something that technical handbooks cannot create. In this sense, the great critical work of the sophistic movement is the treatise On Sublimity, attributed to Longinus and written in the time of the Second Sophistic. The rediscovery of “Longinus” in the Renaissance was to have important implications for neoclassical rhetoric.
If sophists have sometimes liked to shock or indulge conceits, it should be remembered that most sophists have believed that the orator should be morally good, and their most consistent theme has not been how to make the worse seem the better cause, but celebration of enlightened government, the love of the gods, the beauty of classical cities, the values of friendship, the meaning of patriotism, the triumph of reason, and the artistry of speech.
Greek sophists of the classical period sometimes attempted to influence international or domestic policy. Protagoras drew up the law code for the Athenian colony at Thurii; Gorgias urged the unity of the Greek states at a speech at the Olympic games; and Isocrates published a series of speeches designed to influence events of his time. His Panegyricus of 380 B.C. probably contributed to the formation of the Second Athenian Confederacy in 377. Otherwise it is difficult to trace direct influence of the classical sophists on public policy, but their indirect influence, through the training they gave their students in history, political theory, and rhetoric, was significant.
In the time of the Roman Empire, sophists who had gained fame in Greek cities were sent on embassies to plead local causes with the emperor or governors and sometimes succeeded in obtaining favors for their constituents. Dio Chrysostom, Aelius Aristides, and other second-century sophists delivered major addresses to emperors that were flattering in tone but were also public expressions of the qualities expected in Greek rulers; they exercised a subtle influence on how the ruler should govern.28 Although the emperors had great power, through control of the army, finances, and administration, they needed support, especially from the upper classes throughout the empire. Sophists helped them get and keep this support, while sponsorship of games, distribution of food or money, and the building of baths, theaters, or other public buildings helped attract the support of the masses. The more successful emperors all made use of art and architecture as propaganda tools; this was particularly true of Hadrian, who was also the emperor with the closest connections to the Second Sophistic.
The later Roman Empire was an undisguised military autocracy, but it continued to need the adherence, or at least not open opposition, from the populace, especially the upper socio-economic class of society throughout the empire. Sophists continued to fulfill this need through public speeches, primarily in the Greek-speaking East, and this function continued into the Byzantine period. Although the later Roman Empire suppressed freedom of speech generally, sophists and philosophers had a traditional independence, perhaps sometimes reflecting the rulers’ respect for their learning and eloquence, sometimes their amused contempt for sophists’ impracticality. Libanius, Themistius, and Synesius were able to speak rather frankly about the duties of the ruler without incurring punishment, and with the victory of Christianity in the fourth century Christian bishops, who took up some of the function of sophists and philosophers, acquired great authority to influence Christian rulers, holding over them the threat of excommunication and damnation. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, repeatedly intervened in actions of the emperors of the second half of the fourth century and in 390 excommunicated Theodosius for ordering a massacre at Thessalonica. An excellent discussion of the influence of sophists, philosophers, and bishops on public affairs in late antiquity can be found in Peter Brown’s book Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire.