There is little expressed distrust of rhetoric in traditional societies, and this seems to have been the case in Greece before conceptualization, but the creation of rhetorical handbooks and the claims of sophists to teach the art of speech made rhetoric vulnerable to criticism. Bold claims about the role of the orator and the power of speech replaced tacit assumptions, and rhetorical techniques could now be learned by anyone motivated to speak in public. Intimately involved with democracy and new ideas, rhetoric awakened the hostility of oligarchs and conservatives. Because of its newness, it tended to overdo experiments in argument and style. Not only did it easily seem vulgar or tasteless, it could seem to treat the truth with indifference and to make the worse seem the better cause. Aristophanes found sophistic rhetoric a fertile source of comic satire in Clouds and other plays. More serious reaction also occurred, and that reaction produced what may conveniently be termed “philosophical” rhetoric, the view of rhetoric expounded by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
Socrates (469–399 B.C.) resembled the sophists superficially. He had little interest in physics or astronomy as studied by earlier philosophers and was deeply concerned with human life and human judgment, as were Protagoras and the more thoughtful sophists. Like them, he contributed to the conceptualization of abstractions; like them he taught orally, was interested in words, and showed a fondness for paradox. He is distinguished from many sophists by a preference for the question-and-answer discussion to expound his views rather than lectures or speeches; by a rejection of the claims of nomos, or convention, as the basis of thought and action; by the fact that he did not accept fees from his followers; and perhaps most of all by his rejection of the rhetorical and assertive role of a sophist. In addition, he believed that little good had been accomplished by the debates of the Athenian democracy and doubted that justice was being achieved by the rhetoric of the lawcourts. Whereas the rhetoric of the handbooks was democratic in origin, and sophistic rhetoric was politically ambiguous, philosophical rhetoric was in origin antidemocratic. In speaking of Socrates’ views on any subject, however, caution is needed, for in common with several other great teachers of antiquity, he left no writings expounding his views. We know him only from the reports of his followers or the reactions of his critics.
By far the most important of these followers was Plato (ca. 429–347 B.C.), who took up many of Socrates’ views and developed them over a period of fifty years in a series of dialogues, most of which are represented as Socrates’ conversations. What is often called the “Socratic question” is the problem of the extent to which these dialogues represent actual views of Socrates and the extent to which they are vehicles for Plato’s own philosophical speculations. The commonest view today is that the historical Socrates stressed the need to examine assumptions and make definitions, and that although the seeds of many Platonic doctrines such as the “forms,” recollection, and imitation were perhaps implicit in Socrates’ interests, Plato felt free to develop his own beliefs, retaining Socrates as a dramatic figure in the exposition.1 If this is the case, the earlier Platonic writings are likely to be more Socratic than later ones.
Plato is the greatest Greek prose writer, a master of structure, characterization, and style, as well as one of the most original thinkers of all time; he is perhaps also one of the most dangerous as an influential “enemy of the open society.”2 He was a consummate rhetorician and a literary artist of so many dimensions that any analysis of his work is likely to fall far short of appreciating its full meaning or art. No dialogue of Plato is untouched by rhetoric—Republic, Symposium, and Menexenus, in particular, contain interesting applications of the art—but the Apology provides the best example of the Socratic orator, and Gorgias and Phaedrus most specifically discuss the nature of rhetoric, so discussion here can be limited to these three works.
The Apology is Plato’s after-the-fact version of a speech for Socrates at the trial in 399 B.C. that led to his conviction on charges of atheism and corrupting the young and to his eventual execution.3 A majority of critics have preferred to think that it was composed in the first year or two after the trial, which Plato attended (Apology 38b6),4 but it is possible that the work was written sometime around 390 B.C. in reply to the publication of an Accusation against Socrates (now lost) by the sophist Polycrates. In any event, the Apology is one of the earliest works of Plato and is thus one of the closest in time and thought to the actual Socrates. If Socrates did not say what is here attributed to him, the discourse is at least something that, within ten years of his death, he was regarded as capable of having said.
The opening lines of the Apology make clear not only the premise on which philosophical rhetoric was developed but also the ambivalence of the philosophical orator in regard to conventional rhetoric. Socrates is represented as trying to counteract a warning by the prosecutors that the jury should beware of him as a clever speaker. He says that he will soon reveal how lacking in cleverness he is, “unless they label clever one who speaks the truth” (17b4–5). He goes on to say that he will tell the whole truth, that there will be no flowery language, that he is confident in the justice of his cause, that he will speak in his usual way, without affectation, and that since he has never been in court before, the jury should excuse his inexperience and consider only whether he says what is just or not, “for this is the excellence of a juryman, and of an orator it is to speak the truth” (18a5–6). This is a vignette of the philosophical orator consistent with what is pictured elsewhere. As it happens, however, it is also largely consistent with the conventional claims of a litigant in a Greek court of law as seen in the introductions of judicial speeches—for example, in Antiphon’s speech On the Murder of Herodes (1–3). Similarly, at the end of his defense (34c–d) Socrates rejects the kind of emotional appeal by relatives and friends that was commonly introduced into the epilogue of a Greek judicial speech, but even in so doing he manages to include pathetic reference to his three sons, two of them still children. The reason given by Socrates for including the reference here is to prevent resentment by a juryman who might think Socrates arrogant; but in a perfectly philosophical speech all this would be irrelevant.
What intervenes between proemium and epilogue in Socrates’ speech falls into three main parts: a statement of the case, which is Socrates’ denial of the charges (19a–20d); an explanation of the prejudice that has arisen against him over a period of many years (20d–24b); and finally, refutation of the specific charges made against him now. The second of these parts constitutes a narration, since the technique followed is a vivid narrative of Socrates’ way of life in Athens and his encounters with others. The technique in the refutation, by contrast, is basically dialectical. Meletus, one of the prosecutors, is interrogated in a way characteristic of Socrates in Plato’s other writings, and his claims that Socrates has misled the youths and is an atheist are reduced to absurdities. Although the terminology of argument from probability is not paraded, Socrates in fact claims that it is improbable that he would intentionally have an evil influence in the city in which he lives (25d–26a) and that it is improbable that anyone would believe in supernatural activities, as Meletus admits Socrates does, and not also believe in supernatural beings (27b–e). Socrates then returns to the topics of the hostility to himself and his situation before the court and introduces an excursus in which he reveals his philosophy of life and explains why he cannot abandon it now, even to save himself from death (28a–34b). From the point of view of the legal charges this excursus is a digression (parekbasis), but a digression in support of a deeper understanding of the ethical situation. Such “relevant” digressions are characteristic of classical oratory. Anti-phon’s speech On the Murder of Herodes has one (64–73), and the “ethical digression,” in particular, is a feature of the greatest speeches of Lysias, Aeschines, Demosthenes, Lycurgus, and, in Latin, Cicero.5
Plato’s Apology includes three speeches. The first, which we have been considering, is Socrates’ defense. The jurors then cast their ballots and found him guilty, probably by a vote of 280 to 221 (36a–b). Since the law provided no specific penalty, each side next made a proposal about what punishment Socrates should be given. The prosecution proposed death. Socrates would probably have escaped death if he had proposed exile instead, but he regarded that as a betrayal of his philosophy of life; initially he proposes that he be given a feast in the town hall, but that was obviously not going to be accepted, and he finally proposes a fine. This speech contains a passage relevant to Plato’s later picture of philosophical rhetoric. Socrates refers to his rejection of ordinary political life in the city, with its assemblies and other meetings, and to his choice instead to address citizens on an individual basis, “trying to persuade each of you not to have a greater concern for anything you have than for yourselves, that each of you may be the best and wisest person possible, nor to consider the affairs of the city in preference to the well-being of the city itself” (36c5–9). Socrates has thus been engaged in rhetoric, but on a one-to-one basis and not in oratory to the masses.
The jury then voted on the two proposals and chose death by 360 to 141, some of the jurymen who had earlier voted for acquittal having been antagonized by Socrates’ intransigent attitude. Before being taken off to prison—the actual building has been identified in the excavations near the Athenian agora—Socrates is presented as delivering his thoughts on death, which make up a third speech in the Apology. Among other things he says:
Perhaps, gentlemen of the jury, you think that I have been convicted because of a lack of the kind of words by which I would have persuaded you if I had thought it right to do and say everything so as to escape the charge. Far from it. I have been convicted by a lack of daring and shamelessness and of wanting to say to you the kinds of things that you most like to hear: you would have liked me to wail and carry on and do and say lots of things unworthy of me in my own judgment. This is what others have accustomed you to hear. But during the trial I didn’t think I should do anything slavish and I have no regrets now at the nature of my defense; indeed, I much prefer to die after a defense like this rather than to live after another kind of defense. Neither in court nor in battle should I, nor anyone else, fight in order to avoid death at any cost. . . . Avoiding death, gentlemen, is probably not very difficult; it is much more difficult to avoid doing wrong. . . . Now having been condemned to death I leave you, but my opponents leave having been convicted by the truth of wickedness and injustice. I stick with my punishment and they can have theirs. (38d–39b)
It should be noted that Socrates blames orators and not jurors or others for the vitiated form of rhetoric that so widely prevailed. Jurors are easily satisfied by hearing what they want to hear, and this form of flattery works on the weaker aspects of human nature, but the orator who uses such flattery is demeaning himself and destroying justice in the state of which he is a part.
Gorgias is one of the earlier dialogues, thus perhaps relatively close to the thought of Socrates; it was probably written soon after Plato’s visit to Sicily in 387 B.C.6 It is a dramatic presentation of a discussion between Socrates, Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles, imagined to have taken place in Athens in the late fifth century. Although the interlocutors in most of Plato’s dialogues were dead by the time he portrayed them, Gorgias was still alive in the 380s and is reported by Athenaeus (9.505d) to have remarked, “How well Plato knows how to satirize!”
The dialogue has three main parts. The first is a conversation between Socrates and Gorgias that is concerned with the definition of rhetoric; in the second part, the conversation between Socrates and Gorgias’s follower Polus, the focus shifts to the question of whether it is better to do or to suffer wrong, and thus how rhetoric should be used; in the third part, the conversation with Callicles, the still broader topic of how one should live is the context in which rhetoric is given treatment. Dramatically, the dialogue as a whole is a confrontation between the dialectician Socrates and three rhetoricians, each in turn more sophistic and further removed from sympathy with Socrates. Polarization thus increases as the dialogue progresses. Socrates seeks to carry on the discussion as dialectic; that is, he asks questions to which the respondent can be expected to give an answer. From argument based on the answer he then can lead his opponent, and the audience in general, along a path to greater understanding. As in other dialogues, for example Meno, false knowledge must be destroyed or refuted before a better hypothesis can be advanced and tested. This process can then lead to what Plato calls “true opinion” and at its best to philosophical knowledge.
Dialectic is a faculty of discovering available arguments to answer proposed questions, and in Plato it is the only acceptable form of philosophical reasoning. It follows a method of division of the question and definition of the factors involved, testing hypotheses as they are advanced. In theory, the leader of the discussion does not know, at least not with any certainty, what the conclusion will be (see, for example, the words of Socrates in Republic 3.394d8–9), but the Platonic Socrates certainly has predilections, and his hypotheses often work out with a feeling of inevitability. Plato would say that this is not because new truth is discovered, but rather old truth is recollected: we all existed before birth and we know much more than we can immediately remember.
In contrast to dialectic, rhetoric involves a preselected arbitrary conclusion: that a defendant is guilty or that the assembly should follow a particular policy or that a certain proposal is feasible. The orator chooses those arguments that prove or seem to prove the conclusion, whether or not it is true. Plato had little confidence in the democratic process, partly as a result of having witnessed the worst excesses of the late fifth century B.C., and he was unwilling to consider debate in the assembly or the speeches of litigants before a court as potentially a larger-scale form of dialectic in which conflicting hypotheses are tried before an audience and justice or wise policy determined by clarification and compromise. (Demosthenes and other Greek orators, in contrast, saw clearly the strength of debate and the dynamics contained within it.) On the other hand, Plato does seem to recognize that there are situations in which dialectic will not work and where recourse to rhetoric may be the only alternative. This happens in Gorgias (505b–509c) when Callicles becomes so angry that for a while he will not continue the conversation and Socrates is forced to expound some of his argument in a continuous speech.
In the following discussion many philosophically important features of the dialogue are ignored; the objective here is to state as clearly as possible what the dialogue has to say about rhetoric.
Socrates asks Gorgias what art he knows and what he should be called (449a3). Gorgias replies that he knows rhêtorikê and should be called a rhêtôr. Rhêtôr was in common use in the fifth century to mean a public speaker or politician; rhêtorikê, however, is not found in any earlier text.7 Socrates then, following his method of definition and division, asks what class of objects is included in the knowledge that constitutes rhetoric (449d8–9). Gorgias replies that it is knowledge about words. Socrates next wants to know what kind of words: for example, does it include knowledge of words that explain to the ill how they can get well? Gorgias says that it does not. If this were the report of an actual discussion between Socrates and Gorgias, we should label Gorgias’s answer a mistake. As he appears in the dialogue he has not clearly conceptualized what rhetoric is, but his general view is that rhetoric is an art or faculty that can take any subject matter and present it persuasively. Somewhat later (456b) he describes how he himself has accompanied his brother, a physician, on his rounds and used rhetoric for the very purposes about which Socrates here asks. Gorgias’s dialectical position would be stronger throughout if Plato had allowed him to compare rhetoric to logic or dialectic and other arts that cut across disciplines, but it is likely that this was not clearly recognized before being stated by Aristotle. The Platonic Socrates has no interest in helping Gorgias to such a definition because it runs counter to his philosophical views. Since knowledge in Socrates’ view is something grounded in nature and not in convention, only those arts built on knowledge have validity. The verbal faculty that fulfills that requirement most generally is dialectic, though the dialogue eventually isolates a small valid function for rhetoric in the scheme of things.
Under Socrates’ questioning Gorgias explains that he understands rhetoric to be an art productive of persuasion by means of words and that its sphere is the lawcourts, the council, the assembly, and other public meetings (452e). He subsequently concedes that it deals with justice and injustice (454b7) and that it is the kind of persuasion that produces belief, not knowledge (454e8). Both points, again, would have been a mistake in a real debate: rhetoric may deal with other subjects than justice, as Aristotle will show, and the orator deals with both knowledge and belief, depending on the evidence available or the nature of the subject. It subsequently emerges that Gorgias has a low estimate of knowledge (459c), which is consistent with the views of the real Gorgias as expounded in the treatise On the Nonexistent or On Nature. He rather casually asserts (460a) that if one of his students lacks knowledge of a subject he will teach it to him. Conversely, Socrates’ very high opinion of knowledge leads him to what may be called the fallacy of the expert, in which the generally educated citizen is seen to be incapable of making any determination of good public policy. Socrates unrealistically distinguishes the expert and the orator. He says, for example, that if the city is considering building a wall, the rhetor will keep silent and the master builder will give advice (455b). Gorgias fails to take up this issue and to point out the existence in the same human being of a rhetorical function and the knowledge of a builder, a point that Aristotle will later clarify. Plato portrays Gorgias as very enthusiastic about rhetoric and more interested in making claims for its greatness than in understanding its nature, which may well be true historically, but he does allow him one good speech (456a7–457c3) in which Gorgias distinguishes clearly between rhetoric as an amoral force and the morality of the orator. It is not fair, in Gorgias’s view, to blame the teacher of rhetoric if a pupil makes an unjust use of the art he has learned. The speaker must bear moral responsibility for what he says.
Socrates is not very satisfied with the direction the conversation has begun to take and asks Gorgias whether he can make anyone into a rhetor. Gorgias says “yes,” but rather gratuitously points out that the orator’s ability will be evident “in a crowd” (459aa3). Socrates then asks if that does not in fact mean “among the ignorant,” and Gorgias says “yes.” The functional role of rhetoric is once again obscured because of Socrates’ (or Plato’s) insistence on the necessity of knowledge. Rhetoric, Socrates claims, has no need of facts and is a tool of persuasion that makes the unknowing seem to know more than the knowing (459b8–c2). This point is then applied specifically to knowledge of justice and injustice. Socrates asserts that since it has been agreed that rhetoric deals with justice, it is inconsistent to say that the orator might use rhetoric for unjust purposes (460e5–461b2). This is an application of the general Socratic paradox that if a person knows what is good he or she will do it. Thus, an orator who knows what is just will not seek to persuade what is unjust.
At this point Polus breaks in with some irritation, claiming that Gorgias has been too polite to Socrates and has been embarrassed to insist that he has a knowledge of justice and other subjects and could teach this to his students as they need it (though in fact Gorgias earlier indicated this). Polus tries to take the lead in the dialectical process and sets out to grill Socrates on his personal views of rhetoric. The attempt leads to the celebrated comparison of rhetoric and the art of cooking (462b–466a). The passage is probably intended to startle and amuse; it is somewhat tongue-in-cheek in tone and is provoked by the brash personality of Polus, whose name means “colt.” Socrates might not have expounded the image to Gorgias, whom he seems to treat with some respect. On the other hand, the comparison, like other images in Plato, is seriously intended as a way of getting at the truth and vividly presents Socrates’ deep distrust of rhetoric.
Rhetoric, Socrates says, is not technê in any true sense; that is, it is not based on knowledge and rule, but is empeiria, a matter of experience, a facility gained from trial and error, or tribê, a knack, an empirically acquired cleverness at something. Three other empeiriai in this sense are sophistic argument (which is the acquired skill of seeming to prove an argument by verbal trickery), cosmetics (which is the skill to make the flesh look young and healthy by application of paints and powders), and cookery (which is the skill of producing temporary pleasure through spicing up food). These four empeiriai are forms of flattery (kolakeia) and images or reflections (eidôla) of four true arts. The true arts are divided into two groups: those that work upon the soul (psychê), or politics, and those working on the body, which have no collective name in Greek but might be labeled physical culture in English. (Psychê literally means “breath” and refers to the life force in an individual; in Plato’s writings it is often best translated “soul” and is regarded as immortal; in other writers it often means “mind.”) Politics, in turn, is subdivided into two parts, the art of making laws, or legislation, and the art of administering justice (i.e., the politics of the assembly and that of the lawcourts respectively). Similarly, physical culture is divided into two parts, gymnastics, or the art of training the body, and medicine, or the art of curing bodily illness. These constitute a proportion: as legislation is to the administration of justice, gymnastics is to medicine. The first member of each pair is normative and looks toward the future; the second is corrective, setting right what has gone wrong in the past. Plato describes each (464b8) as the antistrophos, or counterpart, of the other, a term we have seen in Isocrates.
| The True Arts | |||
| Of the Soul: Politics | Of the Body: Physical Culture | ||
| Legislation | Justice | Gymnastics | Medicine |
| (Normative) | (Corrective) | (Normative) | (Corrective) |
| Forms of Flattery | |||
| Of the Soul | Of the Body | ||
| Sophistic | Rhetoric | Cosmetics | Cookery |
| (Normative) | (Corrective) | (Normative) | (Corrective) |
In Socrates’ view, set against the four true arts are the “arts” of flattery, also involving soul and body. The two knacks of flattery of the soul are sophistic, which he arbitrarily defines as a sham form of inducing belief in some fake principles or norms for conduct or action, and rhetoric, which is a sham form of persuading an audience by flattery that something is just. The former, being normative, can be compared with legislation; the latter, a corrective technique, with the administration of justice. The two arts of flattery of the body are cosmetics, corresponding to gymnastics, which makes the body seem to be healthy and strong when it is not, and cookery, which corresponds to medicine and tries to correct weakness or illness by pleasurable feelings of well-being. The true arts are always based on knowledge and aim at the good; the sham arts or flatteries are based on experience and aim at producing pleasure. The diagram above outlines these relationships and may help to make clear how the arts are counterparts to each other, a concept also important for Aristotle’s description of rhetoric as an antistrophos to dialectic.
The long discussion that follows (466b–479e) takes its start from the sophistic theme of the power of the orator in the community and leads to Socrates’ conclusions that it is more wretched to do injustice than to suffer injustice and that a person who is not punished for crimes is more wretched than one who is. Under those circumstances, Socrates asks (480a2), what great use is there for rhetoric? A person who has really done wrong will only become more miserable by using rhetoric in self-defense. It would be better for the guilty person to use techniques of rhetoric to make the crime clear and thus to be rid of injustice (480d)! (A literary example of this form of self-deprecatory rhetoric is Saint Augustine’s Confessions.) Socrates also suggests using rhetoric to prevent an enemy from being punished, thus forcing the opponent to languish in the wretchedness of injustice (480e–481b).
The third and longest part of Gorgias is the conversation with Callicles, who is the most violent of the three interlocutors. He expounds his view that justice is a matter of convention rather than nature (482d5–6), makes fun of philosophy as childish inanity, cites the authority of Homer for the importance of speech, and regards speech as a tool of self-advancement and self-defense (486a–c). In general, Callicles admires drive, energy, acquisitiveness, hardheadedness, lack of concern for others, self-confidence, the attainment of luxuries, and, above all, success. He is an ambitious Athenian of the fifth century who would also have been at home in Renaissance Italy and in the executive offices of some modern corporations. Rhetoric is important to him in meeting his goals. Socrates, in contrast, admires justice, philosophy, restraint, self-examination, and simplicity. Rhetoric is not an acceptable way to attain his goals, at least not in its common forms. Of course, Socrates does have a “rhetoric” of his own; he attains his purposes not only by logical argument, but also by using irony, by subtly appealing to better instincts in his listeners, and elsewhere sometimes by using a mystical pathos, and he is not always fair to his opponents.
In the course of the discussion Socrates asks Callicles if there are not forms of flattery that aim at pleasure without consideration of what is better or worse (501b5). Callicles is already incredulous about the entire discussion, but he admits there are such forms and also that it is possible to play upon the souls of not just one or two, but many people at the same time. This leads to consideration of poetry, which Socrates describes as a form of rhetorical public address. “Or,” he asks, “don’t poets seem to you to use rhetoric in their plays?” (502d2–3). If public address is a form of flattery, it is not very admirable, but Callicles observes that some orators speak with a concern for the citizens (503a3), and Socrates almost unexpectedly agrees. There is, he says, the rhetoric of flattery and shameless address to the public, but there is another kind of rhetoric too, “and this other is beautiful, making provision that the souls of citizens will be the best possible, striving to say what is best, whether this is more pleasant or more unpleasant to the audience. But you have never seen this rhetoric. Or if you are able to name any such orator, why have you not told me who he is?” (503a7–b3). This orator will be morally good, will speak nothing at random, and will always keep to a single purpose (503d–e).
Will not that orator, artist and good man that he is, look to justice and temperance? And will he not apply his words to the souls of those to whom he speaks, and his actions too, and whether he gives something to someone or takes something away from someone, will he not do it with his mind always on this purpose: how justice may come into being in the souls of his citizens and how injustice may be removed, and how temperance may be engendered and intemperance be removed, and every other virtue be brought in and vice depart? (504d5–e3)
This is the primary statement of philosophical rhetoric found in Gorgias. It represents an advance over the description of rhetoric as flattery in the conversation with Polus and over the acceptance of a kind of rhetoric by which repentant sinners may lay open their sins.
In answer to Socrates’ inquiry as to whether there have been any good orators, Callicles suggests Themistocles, Cimon, Miltiades, and Pericles (503c1–2), all statesmen of the fifth-century Athenian democracy. Socrates does not reply at the time, but he later (515c–517a) returns to the subject and concludes that there has not been a single good politician in the state of Athens. The test he imposes is whether the statesman made the citizens better than they were when he entered office, and all are rejected—somewhat illogically—because of the way the people turned against them. But the statesman must not fear death and judgment, and the final pages of the dialogue present the myth of Minos, Rhadaman-thus, and Aeacus, judges in the underworld.
The conclusion of Gorgias is that one must study to be good. The bad must be punished; flattery of all sorts should be avoided; and rhetoric, like other things, must only be used for the sake of justice (527c3–4). The main strength of the dialogue is the insistence on knowledge as the basis of valid communication. Its main logical flaw is Socrates’ unwillingness to separate those arts like politics that have a specific subject matter from those like rhetoric that are reasoning faculties applicable to many subjects. The need for an orator to be morally good was recognized by Isocrates and the more responsible sophists, but they often regarded the truth as relative to the situation and their standards were more flexible than Plato’s in this dialogue, which projects a somewhat impractical ideal. Socrates was executed on a charge of which he was innocent, whereas rhetoric perhaps could have secured his escape at the cost of some flattery of the jury. Philosophical rhetoric was beyond the possibilities of the Greek city. Plato’s recognition of this fact is shown in the Republic, which takes up many of the moral concepts of Gorgias, but it proves necessary in the later dialogue to construct an ideal state in order to discover justice. The Republic also has much to say about the proper forms and functions of poetry, which turns out to be very similar to philosophical rhetoric.
Plato’s Gorgias is the earliest example of the identification of rhetoric with flattery and deceit, a view that has recurred throughout western history.8 Plato was a widely revered thinker throughout antiquity, and his attack on rhetoric was a problem for many readers. Plato’s successors in the Academic School took a skeptical turn against his apparent dogmatism and interpreted the dialogues, including Gorgias, as dramatic explorations of issues that did not necessarily imply belief on the part of either Socrates or Plato in their apparent, often extreme, propositions. The commonest interpretation of Gorgias by teachers of rhetoric was that Plato was attacking rhetoric as practiced in the time of the radical democracy of the late fifth century and the oligarchic revolution it provoked and that he was holding out the possibility of improvement. This was the view of Quintilian, who says (2.15.30) that it was against the class of men who used their facility of speech for evil purposes that Plato directed his denunciations. In the second century after Christ, the great sophist Aelius Aristides composed three long works seeking to answer Plato’s indictment of rhetoric in detail, including a defense of the four fifth-century statesmen criticized by Socrates, from the point of view of the Second Sophistic.
Phaedrus is one of the middle group of Platonic dialogues, probably composed ten or fifteen years after Gorgias.9 It is possible to see a relationship between the development of views on rhetoric in Plato’s Academy and the works of Isocrates and their students, in which case a probable sequence can be drawn beginning with Isocrates’ Against the Sophists, followed by Plato’s Gorgias, then Isocrates’ Helen, followed by Plato’s Phaedrus, then Isocrates’ Antidosis, and followed by early works of Aristotle in the Academy. Aristotle is said to have begun his teaching of rhetoric with the remark that it was shameful to keep silent and allow Isocrates to teach (Cicero On the Orator 3.141). This sequence would put the composition of Phaedrus in the late 370s or early 360s B.C. Phaedrus is among the most complex of Plato’s dialogues in a literary sense. Although the view of rhetoric that emerges from it is relatively clear, that subject is subtly connected with the theme of love and complicated by the question of the relative value of the spoken and the written word.10 Here Plato goes significantly beyond the suggestions of Gorgias about the positive role of rhetoric; he lays the foundation for basic features of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and he integrates rhetoric into his other philosophical ideas in a way not attempted elsewhere.
From the outset, the tone of the dialogue is vastly different from Gorgias. Instead of a conversation with three sophists with whom Socrates is personally at odds, we find here a conversation with a young man to whom Socrates is strongly attracted and who responds to him warmly. The first half of the dialogue has a pervasive erotic tone. Not only is homosexual love discussed, but the dialogue is set in an almost voluptuous vale of rustic beauty, unique in Plato. Were anyone other than Socrates involved it would not be difficult to imagine the scene developing into a physical intimacy. Homosexual relationships between men and adolescent boys were a common feature of upper-class society in classical Greece, resulting not so much from sexual orientation as from segregation of the sexes and the cult of the male body in Greek athletics. Phaedrus entices Socrates, partially seduces him to the pleasures of sophistic rhetoric, and even threatens rape (236c8–d1). Socrates flirts with him in turn, but in the course of the dialogue converts the relationship into a higher level of philosophical, or what has come to be called “Platonic,” love.
The dialogue falls into two parts. The first part is made up of an introduction and three speeches about love. Phaedrus is said to have attended a demonstration by Lysias in which that orator, known to us chiefly as the writer of speeches for clients in the lawcourts, argued that an imaginary young man should accept the attentions of another who does not love him but is physically attracted to him. The result would be a pleasant relationship in which neither would be emotionally hurt. Phaedrus is much impressed with the cleverness of the paradox and the eloquence of the speech, and he has secured a copy of it to memorize. He is prevailed upon to read it to Socrates. We do not know whether this speech is an actual work by Lysias or whether it is a creation of Plato in the style of erotic sophistry. The latter is probable on analogy to the homoerotic speeches in Plato’s Symposium. Plato clearly delighted in imitating the style of sophists, including Protagoras and Gorgias, and may have tried his hand with the simple style of Lysias, whom he had known personally. Lysias was dead before the dialogue was composed.
The speech is exciting to both Phaedrus and Socrates, but it represents the antithesis of Socrates’ view of what rhetoric should be. It is deceitful and untrue; if successful, it will adversely affect the soul of both speaker and addressee, and it is philosophically unacceptable. Socrates does not begin with that objection, however; what he finds wanting in the speech is its method, for it is repetitive and lacks structure. He is thus led to compose a better speech on the same theme, but he veils his head to avoid the embarrassment of catching Phaedrus’s eye, and he makes one small change in the situation: he imagines the speaker as secretly in love with the boy he is addressing; pretending not to love him is a ploy to secure his attention (237b4). Socrates’ speech is characterized by a definition of love and by a logical division of the subject, both lacking in Lysias’s version, but many of the arguments are necessarily similar to those in the first speech.
After speaking, Socrates prepares to leave before he is led into doing anything more immoral (242a1–2). As he is about to cross the stream on the way home, and thus to escape from the incident, the divine voice, mentioned also in the Apology, tells him not to leave. He turns back and confesses to Phaedrus that his speech has been dreadful, for it represents love as an evil, whereas love is in fact divine. A recantation is necessary, for the boy should accept the love of a true lover. “Where is that boy to whom I was speaking?” he asks. “Here he is, very close beside you, whenever you want him,” replies Phaedrus (243e).
Socrates then begins a second, longer speech. Love may be a form of madness (mania), he grants, but madness is not necessarily an evil. Beneficent madness has at least four forms: the inspiration of prophets like the Delphic oracle; rites of purification such as those of Dionysus; poetic inspiration from the Muses; and the madness of love. To understand the last we must understand the soul, which Socrates describes mythically in terms of a charioteer and two winged horses. One horse is spiritual and noble, one physical and evil. It is natural for the soul to rise, and in the intervals between its lives on earth the soul rises up through the heavens to a glimpse of the reality of beauty and truth. When the soul is born in a human being it loses much of its vision, but it continues to be drawn to beauty, and when it sees beauty in a boy it is moved to love. The great danger is that the vicious horse of physical passion will pull the lovers down to sordid hedonism, but if the better element can prevail, the two can mount to a philosophical and orderly life together that is the greatest human experience. Socrates’ speech is vibrant with a mystical intensity and a beauty of image that inspires Phaedrus and has enchanted readers for twenty-five hundred years. The tone of the dialogue is thus changed from the sensual cleverness of the sophists to the vision of a religious philosopher.
Socrates’ second speech is not specifically foreshadowed by the description of good rhetoric in Gorgias, in the sense that the latter was chiefly limited to public address, but it is consistent with the objectives foreseen in Gorgias, reflecting the need to address the soul of the hearer, to seek to make the soul better, and to move it toward temperance and virtue. This is largely accomplished not by dialectic, for all Socrates’ definitions and divisions of love, but by the ethical force of the speaker and by the emotional impact of the myth. Such a use of myth is an important part of Plato’s own rhetoric in many dialogues, the most famous example being the somewhat similar myth of Er at the end of the Republic.
The first half of Phaedrus is a drama of the rhetorical encounter between good and evil on the field of love. The speech of Lysias scores a point for evil; the first speech of Socrates is a more significant victory for evil in that it is not merely sophistic cleverness that prevails but a use of the dialectic of definition and division for evil purposes. The situation is then dramatically turned around by intervention of the divine voice that leads to the delivery of the second speech of Socrates and the victory of the true and philosophical rhetoric. This sudden inspiration is interesting historically, since outside of Platonism the other great field for philosophical rhetoric is that of religion and there too the impulse to valid rhetoric is often represented as dependent on an act of God in warming the heart so that truth can be revealed, as we shall see in Chapter 7. In Greek and Latin civic oratory this feature is lacking. Its counterpart is a living sense of tradition, seen in Isocrates’ philosophy of Hellenism, shared also by orators of the Second Sophistic, and in the patriotism of Demosthenes or of Cicero. These traditions furnish the orator with an outside test of the consistency and value of ideas in the way that philosophy did to Plato and religion did to Christian orators.
The first half of Phaedrus illustrates forms of rhetoric and utilizes examples of sophistic oratory and the tradition of composition by imitation. The second half conceptualizes rhetorical composition and appropriately considers the contents of the rhetorical handbooks of the time. The first subject mentioned is that of writing speeches (257c–258e). Lysias is a speechwriter. Is that disgraceful? Not necessarily, Socrates says; disgrace comes from speaking or writing badly. A more important question is how we are able to distinguish these qualities. A brief digression (258e–259d) then reminds us of the physical setting of the dialogue and of the Muses who combine attention to heavenly things with an interest in human discourse, thus symbolizing philosophical rhetoric. The question of the standards of good speech is then discussed at length (259d–274b). This discussion first raises briefly the matter of the orator’s knowledge (259d–261a). Can a speaker be content with what seems to be true? Is there need to know the good and the beautiful or only what seems good and beautiful? It is quickly agreed that knowledge is required, and the subject is put aside for the moment in favor of a second question: granted that the orator needs knowledge, is that adequate or is an art of rhetoric needed, and if so what does it include?
Socrates gives a preliminary definition of the rhetorical art as “a kind of leading the soul (psychagôgia) by means of words, not only in law-courts and public assemblies but in individual encounters” (261a7–9). Socrates’ two speeches in the first half of the dialogue and his view of the relationship of the speaker to the hearer certainly indicate that a one-to-one relationship can be as rhetorical as public address. Even though private applications can be found in all periods and all literary forms (for instance, the epistle eventually emerges as a specific manifestation of private rhetoric), classical rhetorical theory consistently limited the scope of formal rhetoric to public speaking. It is perhaps regrettable that Plato’s suggestions of a wider application were not taken up by Aristotle, since the result might have been greater attention to the nature of the rhetorical act and less to the conventions of public address. Socrates here points out that debate can occur in a public assembly, but also between two individuals, and he describes the art involved as one by which a person can make everything similar to everything or refute another speaker who seeks to do so. Similarities or dissimilarities are often matters of very small differences, and the conclusion is, therefore, that the orator needs knowledge adequate to make such distinctions. Particularly, the speaker must be able to make definitions (as Socrates did in both his speeches) and to divide the subject into logical categories (263b6–9). Lysias’s speech illustrates the failure to do this and also the failure to order the material and create unity of related parts: “It is necessary for every speech to cohere like a living thing having its own body so that nothing is lacking in head or foot, but to have a middle and extremities suitable to each other, sketched as part of a whole” (264c6–9).
This is probably the single most influential principle of literary criticism in Plato, reflected in Aristotle’s requirement that tragedy have a beginning, middle, and end, and important for the critical method of the Neoplatonists of late antiquity, who insisted on approaching the Platonic dialogues and other major works of literature as absolutely consistent wholes. The idea was partially anticipated in Gorgias (505d1–2), where Socrates does not want to break off the argument “without a head,” that is, without a proper conclusion. These abilities to structure the argument and achieve a unity are restated by Socrates as two contrasting faculties: that of bringing widely scattered material together into a single “idea,” and that of dividing material into species on the basis of its natural articulation (265d–e). Those who can do this, he says (266c1), he has been accustomed to call “dialecticians,” but he does not insist on that word. That is, a true “rhetorician” would do the same, and both dialectic and rhetoric have the same logical structure.
The subject then turns to consideration of existing handbooks to see what features of the subject they omit. As we saw in Chapter 2, the handbooks turn out to be devoted to the parts of a judicial oration, to types of diction, and to lists of commonplaces. Phaedrus is quickly led to see that they fail to provide understanding of when it is appropriate to use these materials. Their authors deal only with preliminaries; they lack the dialectic necessary to understand rhetoric; and they leave it up to their students to achieve organization and unity in speech (269b–c). Rhetorical ability, like everything else, is a combined result of nature, knowledge, and practice (269d), a view shared by Isocrates and other rhetoricians. For great oratory one additional requirement looms large, a loftiness of mind striving always for perfection (270a). This comes from philosophy and in particular involves a knowledge of the soul.
It is clear then, Socrates concludes, that Thrasymachus and anyone else who seriously publishes an art of rhetoric will first, with all possible accuracy, describe and make us see the soul, whether it is one thing and uniform or multiple like the nature of the body. And second, he will describe what the soul does to what other thing or has done to it by something else, in accordance with its nature. And third, arranging in order the kinds of speeches and the kinds of souls and their various states, he will describe all the causes of change in the soul, fitting each kind of speech to each state and teaching what soul is necessarily persuaded by what speech through what cause and what is unpersuaded (271a4–b5). This is the outline of what Plato conceives to be a true art of rhetoric. Although Socrates restates the description in slightly fuller terms (271c10–272b4), Plato never worked out the theory in detail. Discussion of emotions and characters takes up a considerable part of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and foreshadows the interest in psychology of the British rhetoricians of the eighteenth century. One importance of the concept is that it puts the audience on a full equality with the speaker and the speech in the rhetorical act. As is often the case in evaluating Plato’s theories, the major problem it raises is the practical one. How can a speaker know the souls of an audience in any full sense? How can a speaker fit a speech to the variety of souls likely to be found in an audience, even granting that a Greek audience was more homogeneous than a modern American audience? There is danger of enflaming some at the same time others are calmed. Plato shows a preference for rhetoric in a one-to-one situation: Socrates can perhaps know the soul of Phaedrus, but he regularly speaks of souls in terms of genera and species, which suggests they are to be viewed as types rather than individuals. Such stereotyping was a common feature of Greek thought, well exemplified in Theophrastus’s Characters. Aristotle’s solution was to deal with psychology in terms of the stages of life and the dominant passions and thus to carry through the study in terms of group psychology.
The discussion in Phaedrus of what would constitute a true art of rhetoric was preceded by remarks about the orator’s need for knowledge. It is followed, and thus framed, by a return to that subject. In the lawcourts, we are told, it is commonly believed that the speaker must prove what is plausible and probable, not what is true (272d7–32), and Socrates goes on to describe argument from probability as expounded by Tisias. But just as small differences in similarity cannot be detected except by a person with full knowledge, so the probable is a semblance of the true and can only be known by knowing truth (273d–e).
Finally, the entire discussion of knowledge and art is framed by a return to the first issue raised in the second half of Phaedrus, that of the relative value of speaking and writing.11 Here the view of writing is more negative than in the earlier passage. An Egyptian tale about Theuth and Thamus is told, with the conclusion that writing encourages forgetfulness. We know from Socrates’ second speech what a bad thing forgetfulness is, since it separates us from the good and beautiful. Socrates makes the additional point here that a written work is like a painting and cannot speak. It can fall into the hands of those who do not understand it, and if so has no way of explaining itself, or if it is ill-treated it has no way to answer back. Writing is in fact an illegitimate brother of true, or oral discourse (275d–276a). If a person who knows truth and beauty uses writing, it will be as a kind of plaything for personal amusement (276d). The major thrust of the passage is to assert the superiority of dialectic again, this time not in the sense of definition and division, but of the question-and-answer process of exploring an hypothesis. Rhetoric, in contrast, is like writing, being frozen into the form of a continuous speech with a thesis stated and proved and with no opportunity for questioning. In a literary sense, the passage helps to unify the dialogue, for it takes the reader back, not only to the beginning of the second part, but to the beginning of the whole dialogue, where Phaedrus appeared with a written text of Lysias’s speech, a text that proved singularly unable to defend itself.12 Finally, the passage helps to restore the ironically playful tone with which the dialogue opened. Socrates, after all, did not commit his discourses to writing; Plato did, and suggests that he viewed them only as a kind of game for his own amusement. We see again the paradoxical side of Plato: the rhetorician who distrusted rhetoric, the poet who abolished traditional poetry from the ideal state, and the admirer of oral dialectic who published dialogues worked out with extraordinary care.
Two other passages in the concluding pages of Phaedrus deserve mention. One is the ostensibly complimentary reference to Isocrates as a promising young orator at the time the dialogue is imagined to take place (278e8). It is difficult not to take this statement as somewhat ironic in the context, for no Greek orator more developed the written forms of oratory and was less at home in dialectic. The other passage is Socrates’ final picture of philosophical rhetoric as it emerges from all that has been said before. The passage contains nothing new, but it is a convenient summary of Plato’s view. Although most translators chop it up into a series of short sentences, what Plato wrote was a long periodic sentence in which a true art of rhetoric is made dependent on the fulfillment of a series of previous steps:
Until someone knows the truth of each thing about which he speaks or writes and is able to define everything in its own genus, and having defined it knows how to break the genus down into species and subspecies to the point of indivisibility, discerning the nature of the soul in accordance with the same method, while discovering the logical category which fits with each nature, and until in a similar way he composes and adorns speech, furnishing variegated and complex speech to a variegated soul and simple speech to a simple soul—not until then will it be possible for speech to exist in an artistic form in so far as the nature of speech is capable of such treatment, neither for instruction nor for persuasion, as has been shown by our entire past discussion. (277b5–c6)
Among the implications of this passage is that there are various styles of discourse, appropriate in various settings and with different audiences. This idea, briefly touched on by Aristotle, was taken up by Theophrastus and developed by later writers into the “characters” of style, largely under the influence of the versatile successes of orators like Demosthenes and Cicero.
Aristotle was born in Stagira, a northern Greek city bordering on Macedonia, in 384 B.C. His father, Nicomachus, was the doctor to the rulers of Macedon, and throughout his life Aristotle had friendly connections with the court. He went to Athens to study with Plato in 367 and remained as member of the Academy for twenty years. In many areas of study Aristotle may have begun with questions as Plato viewed them, but he lacked Plato’s mystical side and was far more pragmatic than his master. He found it impossible to accept the Platonic theory of “ideas” as separate reality, and he was not attracted by the interest in mathematics that characterized Plato’s later years. Doubtless realizing that he could not expect to succeed Plato as head of the school, and perhaps nervous at the growing hostility between Athens and Macedon, Aristotle left Athens shortly before Plato’s death in 347 and moved to Assos, near Troy in Asia Minor, and then in 345 to the island of Lesbos. In 343 he was invited to become the tutor of the thirteen-year-old Alexander, heir to the throne of Macedon. He continued in this capacity until 340, when he probably returned to Stagira. The Macedonians defeated the Greek city-states at the battle of Chaeronea in 338, and in 336 Alexander became king. In 335 Aristotle returned to Athens and opened a school in a covered walk or peripatos (hence the term “Peripatetic School”) of the public gymnasium known as the Lyceum. Here he taught until 323, when he retired to Chalcis in Euboea to avoid the hostility to Macedon that followed the death of Alexander, and he died there in 322. Theophrastus succeeded him as head of the school in Athens.
Early in his career Aristotle wrote dialogues in the style of Plato, none of which has survived. The earliest of these was Gryllus, which dealt with rhetoric and was named for Xenophon’s son who was killed in 362 B.C. and was the subject of several encomia.13 Little is known for certain about the content of the dialogue. Quintilian (2.17.14) says it presented arguments against viewing rhetoric as an art, which suggests a resemblance to Plato’s Gorgias. Aristotle may have discussed encomia of Gryllus in a preface and then constructed a dialogue, set in the recent past, in which Gryllus and his friends discussed the extent to which rhetoric should be regarded as an art.
The surviving works of Aristotle, including his Rhetoric, are systematic accounts of the natural sciences, metaphysics, ethical and political philosophy, and other subjects, apparently composed as notes for lectures to his students or for their study within his school and not for publication. They are lacking in literary adornment, and most seem to have been revised on several occasions as he developed or changed his views. They lack final revisions, and there remain gaps and inconsistencies. Although the texts thus present problems of interpretation, they are all the more interesting as living documents in which the reader can see the philosopher’s mind at work. The spirit of the Peripatetic School was one of on-going cooperative research; with Aristotle’s encouragement, Theophrastus and other students further developed or revised some of his theories, including his views of rhetoric.
Aristotle’s earliest draft of lectures on rhetoric was probably written about 350 B.C. While still a member of Plato’s Academy, and probably with Plato’s encouragement, he began to offer a public course on rhetoric in the afternoons in reaction to the teaching of Isocrates (Cicero, On the Orator 3.141; Quintilian 3.1.14). Synagôgê Technôn, his summary of earlier rhetorical handbooks mentioned in Chapter 2, was perhaps put together during his preparation of these lectures. Rhetoric was probably one of the subjects Aristotle taught young Alexander, and he may have revised his notes then. The text as we have it seems to have had its last revision about 336 B.C. when he was preparing to return to Athens. We do not know for certain that the text was ever used as the basis of lectures after he opened his new school, but it seems likely, and in any event it was available for study in the library of the school.14
Aristotle’s works, despite many inconsistencies resulting from composition at different times, are part of an evolving system or network of thought,15 and it is desirable for a reader of the Rhetoric to have some understanding of this system and the place of rhetoric in it. Before Aristotle’s time, what we think of as the academic disciplines had not been clearly defined and organized. One of his great contributions was the creation of a “map of learning” in which each discipline was given a name (“politics,” “ethics,” “rhetoric,” “poetics,” “physics,” “metaphysics,” etc.), a subject, and a method. A second important contribution of Aristotle was the earliest detailed description of logic, and connected with this the recognition that there are “tool” disciplines (organa) that have no specific subject matter of their own but are methods for dealing with many subjects. This contribution was especially valuable in the case of rhetoric, where, as we saw in discussing Plato’s Gorgias, there was much confusion about the function of the art. Aristotle discusses “tools” in his works known collectively as the Organon; they include formal logic, scientific demonstration (apodeixis), and dialectic (discussed in the Topics).
In Metaphysics (6.1) Aristotle says that all intellectual activity is divided into three categories: theoretical, practical, and productive. Theoretical intellectual activity is directed toward subjects like mathematics, where the objective is to know; practical intellectual activity is directed toward subjects like ethics and politics, where the objective is doing something in a certain way; productive intellectual activity is directed toward making something, like creating a poem or a work of art. The sciences differ from the arts in that the former deal with things that cannot be other than they are: in studying mathematics or physics, for example, we seek to learn what is necessarily true, not what is probable. Art, on the other hand, is a capacity to realize a potential by reasoning and operates in the realm of the probable. It is not concerned with things that exist by nature or by necessity, but rather with “the coming into being of something which is capable of being or not being” (Nicomachean Ethics 6.4.4). “Coming into being” results from the operation of causes, of which there are four kinds, according to Aristotle. A simple statement of the concept of the four causes, or ways things are said to be caused, can be found in the Physics (2.3). First is the material cause, such as metal as a cause of metal objects. Second is the formal cause, the pattern or genus that causes the form a product takes. Third is the efficient cause, the maker as cause of the product. Fourth is the final cause, that for the sake of which something is done or made, as the cause of exercise is health.
Aristotle does not specifically discuss how the four causes are to be applied to rhetoric, but he does seem to apply the theory in his discussion. The material cause of a speech is, at one level, the words of which it is composed, and he discusses the use of different kinds of words, but more generally he regards the material of rhetoric as the arguments and topics that the words construct, and these are discussed in detail. The formal cause in the most general sense is the species to which a speech belongs, and Aristotle comes to the conclusion that there are three species of rhetoric: judicial, deliberative, and epideictic. The efficient cause is the speaker, whose projection of moral character turns out to be an important factor in rhetoric. The final cause of rhetoric as a whole is persuasion to right judgment, action, or belief, but each species of rhetoric has its own final cause: justice in the case of judicial rhetoric; what is advantageous in deliberative rhetoric; what is honorable in epideictic rhetoric.
What kind of an art is rhetoric: theoretical, practical, or productive? Aristotle begins his treatise with the statement that rhetoric is a counterpart of dialectic, and he stresses that connection in other passages. From that point of view, rhetoric is one of the tool disciplines, capable of dealing with many subjects. Tool disciplines, however, have theoretical, practical, and productive levels of activity. When Aristotle gives a definition of rhetoric at the beginning of the second chapter, he proposes that rhetoric be regarded as “an ability, in each case, to see the available means of persuasion.” The word translated as “to see” is theorêsai, and here and in other passages Aristotle is considering rhetoric as a theory of persuasion. Later in the same chapter, however, (1.2.7) he describes rhetoric as an “offshoot” of dialectic and the ethical part of politics, and in Nicomachean Ethics (1.2.4–6) he refers to rhetoric as a part of the larger discipline of politics, thus a practical art. Quintilian (2.18.2) reviewed the problem with reference to Aristotle’s discussion and concluded that rhetoric is best regarded as a practical art. Aristotle, however, also sometimes regards rhetoric as a productive art, especially in Book 3, where he compares it to poetics.
The question of what kind of art rhetoric is relates to the audience Aristotle is addressing. His school attracted not only young men who might become philosophers but also others who hoped for political careers in Athens or elsewhere and individuals who might be called upon to evaluate the speeches of others. In different passages in the treatise he seems to have different audiences in mind. The beginning of Book 1 seems to be addressed to students who have been studying dialectic and are given a transition to the related subject of rhetoric. Other passages, especially those containing practical precepts on composing a speech, may reflect the audience of his early public lectures, students anxious to improve their rhetorical skills. Those planning public careers would benefit from instruction in composing a speech, but it might have been even more important that they have an understanding of rhetoric as it was being used by others and be able to make sound judgments about speeches they heard. Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric also provides an excellent basis for criticism and evaluation of spoken and written persuasive discourse.16
Aristotle’s Rhetoric as we have it consists of three books.17 It is convenient here to discuss the contents in terms of chapters, but the reader should understand that chapter numbers were first introduced into the text by George Trebizond in the fifteenth century; originally the text of each book (each papyrus scroll) was continuous. The first three chapters of the first book present in outline Aristotle’s view of a philosophical rhetoric. Although there is no reference to Plato, they provide an answer to the objections found in Gorgias regarding rhetoric as an art and develop suggestions found in Phaedrus about what constitutes a valid rhetoric. The rest of Book 1 and all of Book 2 work out a system of rhetorical invention in detail. In Book 3, perhaps originally a separate work, Aristotle adds discussion of delivery, style, and arrangement. Recognizing that the work, like most of Aristotle’s treatises, was written at different times, we should not impose an artificial consistency on it. Aristotle never finally revised the whole, so words, even technical terms, are not always used with the same meaning, and he has not always reconciled material developed in detail in one part of the treatise with references in other parts. In addition to the problem of classification of the art just mentioned, three major inconsistencies are as follows: (1) the inconsistency between Aristotle’s complaints in the first chapter of Book 1 about earlier writings on rhetoric and the material he himself discusses in Book 2 on the emotions and in Book 3 on style and arrangement; (2) his use or omission of the term topos, and especially his failure to make clear the difference between the “topics” described in Book 2, chapter 23, and other “topics”; and (3) varying degrees of emphasis on the enthymeme, or the enthymeme and the example, as the basis of proof and its relationship to ethical and pathetical modes of persuasion. Inconsistencies in the text certainly result from composition at different times and perhaps for different audiences. Some scholars believe a development can be traced from an early, Platonic view limiting rhetoric to logical argument and best seen in the opening chapters, to a later view incorporating ethical and emotional persuasion and matters of style.18
Aristotle begins Book 1 with the relationship of rhetoric to dialectic. “Rhetoric,” he says in the first sentence, “is an antistrophos to dialectic.” Antistrophos means “counterpart.” We have seen that Plato and Isocrates also regarded rhetoric as a counterpart or correlative to some other art. The functions of rhetoric and dialectic, Aristotle means, are comparable methods. Both deal with matters that are common subjects of knowledge; neither falls within any distinct discipline. All people have occasion to question or support an argument, to defend themselves or accuse others, and the issues relate to a variety of subjects. The relationship of rhetoric to dialectic will continue to be a subject of debate throughout the history of western rhetoric.
What does Aristotle mean by “dialectic”? Dialectic to him is a somewhat more limited form of intellectual activity than it was to Plato. Superior to it is apodeixis, or demonstration, which is reasoning from scientifically true premises. Dialectic, in contrast, is the form of reasoning built on premises that are generally accepted, whether by everybody, by most people, or by those with some authority on a matter (see Topics 1.1). Aristotle says that dialectic is useful in three ways: as an intellectual training in argumentation; in unstructured discussions with others for the sake of determining the truth of some issue; and in connection with study of the various intellectual disciplines (Topics 1.2). The first use took the form of exercises practiced in Aristotle’s school in which one student stated a proposition, such as “pleasure is the only good,” and another student sought to refute it by asking questions that could be answered yes or no. The second use resembles argumentation in a Socratic dialogue. The third involves the ability of a reasoner to raise difficulties on two sides of an issue, thus clarifying a problem, and it also facilitates the development of premises on which disciplines can be constructed. Aristotle’s Politics, for example, begins with the premises that every state is a community, that a community is established for some good, and that citizens act in order to obtain what they regard as good. These premises are based on general agreement; they are not developed within the science of politics, and they can be demonstrated only by a process of showing that they are probably true. It is characteristic of Aristotle’s system that dialectic, like rhetoric, is more an art of communication than of the discovery of new truth; in the Topics, for instance, the student, like an orator, is usually assumed to have a hypothesis to prove rather than to be engaged in an open-ended discussion. This feature of Aristotelian dialectic contributed to its rejection from the scientific method in the seventeenth century.19
Aristotle is at pains to explain how rhetoric is similar to dialectic but says virtually nothing about how the two differ. He takes up rhetoric as commonly understood by the sophists and Isocrates and initially largely reduces it to dialectic, but certain differences remain. One is formal: rhetoric is found in continuous discourse, whereas dialectic takes the form of question-and-answer debate. Rhetoric usually addresses a large audience, and the orator needs to pay attention to the reactions of hearers; dialectic usually involves one-to-one argument and explicit agreement or refutation. There is also some difference in subject matter. Dialectic usually deals with philosophical or at least general questions, rhetoric with concrete or practical ones. Dialectic is rigorous and constructs chains of argument; rhetoric is popular and expansive. Zeno the Stoic compared dialectic to a closed fist, rhetoric to an open hand (Cicero, Orator 113), an analogy cited by many later writers. As treated in the Rhetoric, rhetoric is limited to civic life and to three kinds of speeches: judicial, deliberative, and epideictic. Because Gorgias and Isocrates had treated rhetoric as an art of political discourse, Aristotle is at pains to show that it is a tool and not a substantive art of politics, but he does view it as a tool whose application is political. In Poetics (chapter 19) rhetoric is found in the speeches of tragedy and epic as well as in oratory, but these are analogous to political discourse. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in oratory and poetry rhetoric arouses emotion, rightly or wrongly, which dialectic does not do, and the good character of the speaker has a vital role in rhetoric, whereas in dialectic only the argument matters.
If rhetoric is a form of dialectic, the handbooks were sadly lacking in Aristotle’s judgment. Existing handbooks were inadequate because of their preoccupation with judicial oratory to the exclusion of the nobler form of political oratory, their emphasis on the parts of the oration and the emotions, and most of all their neglect of the essence of rhetoric: pisteis, which can be translated as “forms of proof” or “modes of persuasion.” Rhetoric, rightly understood, is useful, for the audience cannot be expected to come to the right conclusion if the truth is not presented so people can understand it, and there are those whom it is difficult to instruct. Ability to argue on two sides of an issue makes it easier for a speaker to understand the strength and weakness of a case. Also, one ought to be able to defend oneself with speech, which is something characteristic of human society. Speech can do great harm, but so can most good things.
After the introductory remarks of chapter 1, Aristotle begins chapter 2 with his definition of rhetoric as “a dynamis, in each case, to see the available means of persuasion.” Dynamis is Aristotle’s philosophical term for a “potentiality,” but it also means “power” or “ability” and has often been translated as “faculty.” The phrase “in each case” distinguishes rhetoric, which deals with particular people, occasions, and facts, from dialectic, which deals with universals. Means or modes of persuasion, Aristotle says, are of two sorts, atechnoi and entechnoi (1.2.2). Atechnoi—atechnic, nonartistic, or external modes—are outside the art of the orator to create and are used rather than invented by the orator. They include the evidence given by free witnesses, the evidence extracted from slaves under torture, written contracts, and other direct evidence discussed in detail in chapter 15 of Book 1. Under the influence of the technical handbooks, with their judicial focus, Aristotle fails to consider external proofs available to deliberative or epideictic speakers, such as the matter of the occasion on which they speak. Entechnoi—entechnic, artistic, or internal modes of persuasion—are of three sorts, which we may call ethos, pathos, and logos. They derive from the three constituents of the speech-act: speaker, audience, and speech respectively.
Ethos is the personal character of the speaker as projected in the speech: the orator should seem trustworthy. In Aristotle’s view, ethos should be established by what is said and should not be a matter of authority or the previous reputation of the orator (1.2.4). The reason for this is that only ethos projected in this way is artistic. The authority of the speaker would be analogous to the role of a witness and would thus be atechnos, something not created but used, though Aristotle fails to point this out. It may have seemed unnecessary because of the common situation in Greek lawcourts, where the litigants were often persons of no particular reputation, some of whom had purchased speeches from logographers, the professional speechwriters. A logographer’s duties came to include the artistic creation of a credible ethos for the client.
Pathos occurs as a mode of artistic proof when the minds of the audience are moved to emotion: they will come to a different conclusion, for example, when they are angry than when pleased. Aristotle acknowledges that this is the same subject that he criticized writers of handbooks for treating to the exclusion of anything else and promises to discuss it in detail later in the work, which he does in Book 2.
He then takes up, for the rest of chapter 2, what we have called logos, or that mode of proof found in the argument and most characteristic of rhetoric as he understands it. In chapter 1 this was said to be a matter of enthymemes, but here a twofold classification is made, parallel to that in dialectic. We are referred to the Topics for additional information. Argumentation, Aristotle says, can be inductive, based on the use of paradeigmata, or “examples,” or deductive, in the form of an enthymeme. An instance of argument from example would be to cite occasions in Greek history in which a popular leader demanded a bodyguard in order to make himself tyrant, which the orator than can compare to the demand of a contemporary leader for a bodyguard. The generalized conclusion “thus anyone who seeks a bodyguard seeks tyranny” might be expressed or only assumed. We are told later (1.9.39) that proof by example is more suitable to deliberative than to judicial oratory, since we must predict the future on the basis of knowledge of the past. In chapter 20 of Book 2 the subject of the use of examples is taken up again and they are classified into “historical” and “invented” examples. The instance just given would serve for the historical type. Invented examples are of two sorts: the parable, or comparison, as when Socrates ridiculed the choosing of public officials by lot by comparing the process to choosing athletes or pilots by lot; and the fable, which is an imaginary example such as one of Aesop’s animal fables. Aristotle says that he favors using enthymemes where possible, and then adding an example as a kind of witness to the point. If the speaker puts examples first, a number of them are needed to establish their general implication. But the orator might say, “Dionyius should not be given a bodyguard, for one who seeks a bodyguard seeks tyranny. If you don’t believe me, look at the example of Pisistratus.” Here a general observation, which could have been established by induction, is stated as an enthymeme, its premises being regarded as generally accepted, and then a specific example is added to clinch the point. In a passage in Prior Analytics (2.23) Aristotle recognizes that proof from example can take syllogistic form, and elsewhere in the Rhetoric (2.25.8) he lists example as one of the kinds of premise on which enthymemes are built. It may be that his view on this subject differed at different times or that he used the term paradeigma in two different senses.20
The term enthymeme was used by Isocrates (e.g., Evagoras 10) to mean a thought or idea uttered by an orator. In Prior Analytics (2.27) Aristotle gives the word the technical meaning of a syllogism based on probabilities or signs. One thus might expect it to be commonly used in dialectic, which deals with probabilities; but in the Topics, Aristotle’s discussion of dialectic, enthymeme is only used to refer to an argument in rhetoric (8.14.164a6) and dialectical arguments are called syllogisms. Aristotle seems to have thought that though argumentation in rhetoric, as in dialectic, rested in large part on the use of syllogisms, it was desirable to call rhetorical arguments by a different name to suggest the less rigorous logical context of oratory. Enthymemes are certainly reducible to syllogistic argument but are not usually presented as a formal argument. In particular, the orator often suppresses one of the premises (Rhetoric 1.2.13). For example, “Doreus has been victor in a contest where the prize is a crown, for he has won the Olympic games” is an enthymeme that, in its full form, would consist of the major premise, “The prize in the Olympic games is a crown”; the minor premise, “Doreus has won the Olympic games”; and the conclusion, “Doreus has been victor in a contest where the prize is a crown.” In 2.22.3 Aristotle says that it is not necessary “to include everything” in an enthymeme and conclusions do not need to be drawn only from what is “necessarily valid.” Any syllogistic argument in a rhetorical context is, in Aristotelian terms, an enthymeme whether the premises are certain or only probable and whether all are expressed or not. Most commonly, enthymemes take the form of a statement followed by a reason or are cast in the form of if something is so, then so is something else. Omission of one premise can have the psychological effect of pleasing listeners by appealing to their intelligence and can help to bring listeners into identification with the speaker.21
Aristotle categorizes enthymemes in two different ways: one way is in terms of the source of their premises, whether probabilities or signs; the other way is in terms of the subject discussed. Many of the enthymemes in a speech concern politics, economics, military strategy, or the like. He usually avoids calling these “topics” and refers to them as idia, “specificities,” though they are often known today as “specific topics” or sometimes just “topics.” Rhetoric, of course, makes use of them, but more characteristically rhetorical are what Aristotle initially calls koinoi topoi, “common topics,” which have no specific subject matter and do not make the listener knowledgeable about any one class of things. In 1.2.21 only one is identified, the topic of the more and the less, but in 1.3 and 2.18–19, four koina, “commonalities,” are identified: the possible and the impossible, past fact, future fact, and magnitude (the more and the less, the great and the small). An example of the last is what later came to be known as a fortiori argument: if the harder of two things is possible, so is the easier; similarly, if the less likely of two things occurred in the past, the more likely probably occurred as well. In addition, a third kind of “topic” will be discussed in chapter 23 of Book 2. This kind involves strategies of argument, including argument from opposites, from definition, from division, and many others and have come to be known as “dialectical topics.”
Forms of Proof in Aristotle’s Rhetoric
Species of Rhetoric
The third chapter begins with identification of the elements in the speech-act as speaker, speech, and audience. Modern rhetoricians would add other factors, including the occasion, which might have proved useful to Aristotle in his subsequent discussion but which he would apparently regard, like the speaker’s authority, as nonartistic. Here he next defines three species of rhetoric on the basis of three kinds of audience that a speaker can address in a speech: judges of past action, judges of future action, and spectators. This is the most influential of all his divisions. Before Aristotle’s time various species of oratory had been recognized, including prosecutions, defenses, funeral orations, and others, but these had not been classified into genres. That he intended the classification to be a universal one can be seen in the universal terms in which it is first laid out. A hearer of a speech, he says, must be a judge or not a judge. In the latter case the hearer is described as a theôros, a spectator. If the hearer is a judge, the hearer is being asked either to judge past fact (Did X perform this act? Was this act illegal?) or to make a judgment about what should be done in the future (Will the proposed policy be advantageous? Should it be adopted?). These two possibilities are the situations of judicial (dikanika) and deliberative (symbouleutika) rhetoric, respectively, and each has its final cause: litigants seek to establish what is just or unjust; the deliberative speaker is fundamentally concerned with establishing that a course of action will be advantageous for the audience, or at least not harmful. The speaker might have something to say about justice, but that would be a secondary consideration. All this is incisively sketched. In chapters 4 through 8 of Book 1 the various subjects, objectives, and contents of deliberative rhetoric are examined in detail, and in chapters 10 through 15 the materials of judicial oratory are considered: incentives for wrongdoing (10–11), the states of mind of wrongdoers (12), the kinds of persons wronged (12), the classification of just and unjust actions (13), and the comparative evaluation of unjust actions (14). In these chapters Aristotle summarizes a great deal of specifics (idia), chiefly from politics and ethics, of which he believes the orator needs knowledge. Indeed, one is reminded of the sophist’s claim in Plato’s Gorgias that if a student did not know enough about a subject, Gorgias would teach him.
The treatment of the situation when the hearer is not a judge is less satisfactory. Aristotle calls such a speech “epideictic,” that is, “demonstrative,” and says it refers to the present time, in contrast with the focus on the past seen in judicial oratory, and on the future in deliberative, though the speaker may remind the audience of the past and project events into the future. In a later passage (2.18.1), however, he admits that the spectator of epideictic is, in a sense, a judge of the effectiveness of a speech. Generally, he thinks of epideictic as praise or blame of a person and says that the final cause of such a speech is demonstration of the honorable or shameful. The category is thus descriptive of funeral oratory or of that kind of sophistic speech exemplified by encomia by Gorgias and Isocrates. In the consideration of epideictic in chapter 9 the subject is somewhat enlarged to include praise of gods, animals, and inanimate objects (1.9.2). Slippage of the moral tone of philosophical rhetoric is first clearly evident in this chapter as Aristotle reaches out to include practical advice on how to praise the subject. For example, he says that when praising “one should always take each of the attendant terms in the best sense; for example, one should call an irascible and excitable person ‘straightforward’ and an arrogant person ‘high-minded,’” etc. (1.9.29). It is also in this chapter that the prescriptive tone associated with rhetorical handbooks becomes evident, including use of the verb in the second person; for example, “If you do not have enough to say about your subject himself, compare him to others, as Isocrates used to do.” (1.9.38).
Aristotle admits (1.9.35) that epideictic and deliberative rhetoric overlap and suggests that the difference is often one of style. This is further confirmed by his discussion of epideictic style in Book 3, chapter 12. A great deal of what is commonly called epideictic oratory is deliberative, written in an epideictic style. In many speeches of Isocrates, for example, the objective of the speech is to get an audience (in Isocrates’ case, readers) to make judgments about future policies for Athens or Greece. Conversely, both judicial and deliberative speeches often contain epideictic passages—for example, Demosthenes’ personal attacks on Aeschines in the Greek lawcourts and Cicero’s praise of Pompey in the Roman assembly to secure passage of the Manilian law. Some Christian oratory is deliberative, often with epideictic passages praising God, some is predominantly epideictic: the missionary sermon seeks to convert the heathen to a new faith to the end that the audience’s actions will be consistent with Christian teaching; but a Christian homily, addressed to believers, seeking to deepen their understanding and faith rather than urging them to specific actions, may be regarded as epideictic. A speech of greeting to a visiting dignitary, a speech of thanks, such as Cicero’s to the senate on his return from exile, or speeches of congratulation at birthdays or weddings, which were common in later antiquity, fall within Aristotle’s concept of epideictic, as do modern ceremonial speeches—on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and at graduations, as well as at funerals. At many times in history, praise or blame has been the chief form of speech under autocratic government, allowing an orator to accomplish some other purposes. Such speeches, including encomia of public officials, are often intended, or partly intended, to urge the addressee to some future action or at least to a point of view about possible action. To that extent they logically fall into Aristotle’s concept of deliberative oratory, but his classification recognizes the fact that such speeches are distinctly different in structure and in style from the oratory of political debate. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca in The New Rhetoric (pp. 47–57) suggested that epideictic is noncontroversial and aims at increased adherence to an accepted value. Another way to view it is as “performance rhetoric,” characterized by its association with formal occasions.22 Aristotle’s concept of epideictic is derived from speech genres common in his own society and needs to be generalized to include the rituals, performances, and occasional rhetoric found in cultures all over the world. Much traditional oral poetry is epideictic, and many genres of literary poetry are as well, especially lyric poetry in the form of odes and sonnets celebrating an occasion, describing a work of art, praising a lover, or attacking vice or an enemy.
At the beginning of the second book Aristotle resumes the discussion in 1.2.3–5 of the character of the speaker and the emotions of the audience as artistic modes of persuasion.23 Chapters 2–11 detail propositions about the emotions useful to a speaker in all species of rhetoric, and are the earliest surviving systematic account of human psychology. The discussions of emotions are arranged in contrasting pairs: anger and calmness, friendship and enmity, etc. Chapters 12–17 discuss ethos or character, approaching it in terms of stages in life—young, old, prime—and as affected by birth, wealth, and power. Although in 1.3 and 2.1 Aristotle identified ethos with the projection of the character of the speaker, ethos here is viewed abstractly with no application to rhetoric. Apparently all of chapters 2–17 were written originally in some context not concerned with rhetoric and then incorporated into the Rhetoric as a kind of appendix to the account of ethos and pathos.24 Chapter 18 then resumes consideration of dialectical features of rhetoric, including further discussion of subjects mentioned in 1.2–3: the “commonalities” of the possible and impossible, past and future fact, and magnitude in chapter 19; the example in chapter 20; the maxim as a form of enthymeme in chapter 21; enthymemes in chapter 22; and a list of twenty-eight topoi of enthymemes, that is, dialectical strategies in chapter 23. This chapter contains historical references to events in the late 340s and early 330s and was probably written later than any other part of the work. Book 2 concludes with discussion of real and fallacious enthymemes in chapter 24 and techniques of refutation in chapter 25. At the end of the book Aristotle refers to everything contained in Books 1 and 2 as dealing with the thought (dianoia) of a speech. In the terminology developed in the rhetorical schools in the centuries that follow, these books are thus devoted to heurêsis or inventio, the first of the five “parts” or “canons” of rhetoric.
The last sentence of Book 2 reads, “It remains to go through the subject of style (lexis) and arrangement (taxis).” This comes as a surprise, since nothing in the first two books has prepared the reader for any such discussion and Aristotle’s remarks in the first chapter of Book 1 seemed to deny the relevance of such subjects. Book 3 was probably originally a separate work; possibly it was added to the Rhetoric by an editor when the treatise was finally published two hundred and fifty years later. There is, however, no reason to doubt that Aristotle wrote what is now Book 3, except perhaps for the passages connecting it to Books 1 and 2, and his interest in style and arrangement is evident in Poetics and other works. The addition of Book 3 to the original plan for the Rhetoric is consistent with the tendency already noted in the work to move from an austere philosophical view of the subject to an account that incorporates many features of rhetoric as understood by others. Although Book 3 takes on some of the quality of a handbook of composition, the theory of style and arrangement it sets out is considerably more thoughtful than what is found elsewhere.
In 3.1 Aristotle makes two important points. The first is the proposal that delivery needs some consideration as a part of rhetoric. Aristotle outlines what would be contained in a discussion of delivery, which no one had yet composed: the use of the voice to express various emotions, which is a matter of megethos, or volume, harmonia, or pitch, and rhythmos, or rhythm. He did not regard delivery as a very dignified subject, since it was associated with acting, but his student Theophrastus took up the suggestion and composed the treatise that is here said to be needed.25 Aristotle reveals some defensiveness about this further step away from philosophical rhetoric. We cannot do without delivery, he says:
Since the whole business of rhetoric is with opinion, one should pay attention to delivery, not because it is right but because it is necessary, since true justice seeks nothing more in a speech than neither to offend nor to entertain; for to contend by means of the facts themselves is just, with the result that everything except demonstration is incidental; but nevertheless, delivery has great power, as has been said, because of the corruption of the audience. (3.1.5)
A second important point in 3.1 is the distinction between the language of poetry and that of prose, which includes rejection of “magical” qualities of language of the sort taught by Gorgias. Poetry was developed first, and thus prose took on a strongly poetic quality when attempts were first made to create an artistic prose style, but Aristotle says that even poetic forms in his time were moving away from affected diction. He inserts a cross-reference to Poetics for those interested in more detail. In Poetics also (e.g., chapter 22) he prefers a simple, clear style of composition.
Chapter 3 begins discussion of style (lexis), first in the sense of choice of words, with identification of what Aristotle calls its aretê, “virtue, excellence.” This he defines as “to be clear and neither flat nor above the dignity of the subject, but appropriate.” If it is not clear, it will not accomplish its purpose; if it is not appropriate, it will not be artistic. The concept of a mean between extremes is a characteristic doctrine of Aristotelian ethics that finds application to rhetoric as well. Aristotle clearly wishes, however, that artistic style have a quality of distinction or unfamiliarity, and a key to that is the proper use of metaphor. Metaphor is especially important in prose, in his opinion, because other forms of poetic language—rare words, compounds, coinages, etc.—will seem strained, whereas metaphor is a natural device of speech and can become the basis for clarity, charm, and distinction. In chapter 3 various faults in the use of words are listed and in chapter 4 the simile, which Aristotle regards as a subordinate type of metaphor, is discussed.26 In chapter 5 he turns to the composition of phrases and sentences, beginning with the requirement of hellenismos, or correctness of Greek grammar. Chapter 6 lists ways to achieve ongkos, “swelling, impressiveness” in composition, and chapter 8 discusses the virtue of to prepon, “the appropriate, propriety,” in composition. The qualities of good style discussed separately by Aristotle were rearranged by his student Theophrastus in his treatise On Style and eventually became a standard list of four virtues: correctness, clarity, ornamentation, and propriety.27 These are discussed in some form in all subsequent treatments of style.
In connection with the virtues of style, Aristotle discusses prose rhythm and periodicity in chapters 8 and 9. Interest in rhythm as a feature of good prose had developed in the late fifth century and was a major consideration to masters of fourth-century prose like Demosthenes. Rhythm in classical Greek is a matter of the proportion of long and short syllables, not of the recurrence of stress. Aristotle attempted to formulate a principle of prose rhythm as a mean between the rhythmical regularity of verse and a complete absence of rhythm. He found such a mean in the rhythmic feet called paeons, and he recommends beginning a sentence with a long syllable, followed by three short syllables, and ending with three short syllables followed by one long. Although such rhythms can be found in artistic Greek (and Latin) prose, and although later discussions of rhythm often also recommend these metrical feet, other combinations were more often sought. Aristotle seems to have laid down too narrow a rule, derived from his favorite principle of a mean. The discussion of the period in chapter 9 distinguishes a running style, in which phrases or clauses are joined by coordinating conjunctions, from a periodic style, made up of units with a distinct beginning and ending and having magnitude easily grasped by the hearer or reader. He thinks of a period has having two phrases or clauses, either parallel in sense or antithetical, and cites examples from speeches of Isocrates, but he does not undertake analysis of extended complex sentences like the one from Isocrates quoted in chapter 3 and those common in later writers.
Chapters 10 and 11 continue the discussion of ornamentation with further examination of metaphor and stress what Aristotle calls “setting-before-the eyes,” “visualization,” as a way to make style vivid. Chapter 12 discusses the difference between oral and written style and between the style appropriate to each of the three species of rhetoric. Written style, which includes epideictic, should be more polished than oral style, and the style and argument of juridical oratory should be worked out in greater detail than that of deliberation, which he compares to scene painting, intended to be seen from a distance. An analogy between rhetoric (or poetry) and the arts is pointed out by many ancient writers on rhetoric.
The second half of Book 3, chapters 13 to 19, discusses taxis, “arrangement” of the parts of an oration. Aristotle begins with a view consistent with philosophical rhetoric as outlined at the beginning of Book 1, saying that there are only two necessary parts, the statement or proposition and the proof. He ridicules the several parts defined by handbook writers, but then, just as elsewhere he has modified his austere pronouncements in the direction of contemporary practice, acknowledges that “at most” there might be proemium, statement, proof, and epilogue, and in the following chapters he includes narration as well. His discussion takes account of epideictic, judicial, and deliberative speeches. In discussing the proof as a part of a speech (3.17; see also 3.16.6) he identifies what he calls four amphisbêtêseis, “points open to dispute”: whether something was actually done, whether it did any harm, whether it was of any importance, and whether it was just. This is the earliest reference to what came to be called the determination of the stasis, or “question at issue,” of a speech. Aristotle has rather little to say on the subject, but later rhetorical treatises made stasis fundamental to argumentation.
Aristotle’s students in the Peripatetic School, especially Theophrastus, his successor as head of the school, continued his study of rhetoric and modified some of his views.28 As mentioned earlier, Theophrastus wrote treatises on delivery and style, developing Aristotle’s suggestions in Rhetoric 3, and he probably created the concept of the epicheireme, or fully stated rhetorical argument, in contrast to the enthymeme, or truncated argument with one premise assumed.
Since Aristotle did not publish his treatise on rhetoric, his ideas were largely known to philosophers and teachers of the Hellenistic period through an oral tradition from his students. According to the first-century geographer Strabo (13.609), the unpublished treatises in Aristotle’s library were removed to Asia Minor after his death, stored and forgotten, and only rediscovered in the early first century B.C., at which time they were brought to Rome, edited, and published. This tradition may be exaggerated—some copies of the Rhetoric may have existed—but it is generally confirmed by the absence of direct references to the work earlier than Cicero’s On the Orator, written in 55 B.C. Subsequently, there are occasional quotations from or references to the Rhetoric in Greek and Latin writers,29 but the Rhetoric was overshadowed by the many new treatises and handbooks on the subject published from the second century B.C. to the end of antiquity, especially works that discussed aspects of rhetoric not identified by Aristotle, including stasis theory and figures of speech. Two Latin translations were made in the thirteenth century, read primarily for their discussion of politics and ethics, but the treatise was not a major influence on the teaching of rhetoric until it was re-discovered and translated into Latin by George Trebizond in the fifteenth century and first printed early in the sixteenth century.
A modified “philosophical” tradition can be traced through later centuries. Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus were well-known and contributed to attacks on rhetoric by teachers of philosophy in the second century B.C., motivated in part by the increasing popularity of rhetorical schools not only with Greeks but with upper-class Romans. The Stoic School, founded by Zeno in the generation after Aristotle, provided a small place for rhetoric as a counterpart to dialectic in its curriculum. A summary of Stoic views of rhetoric is given by Diogenes Laertius (7.42–43). The Stoics also made major contributions to logic and to language theory, including distinctions between tropes, like metaphor, and figures of speech, a large number of which had been identified and named by the end of the second century B.C. The Epicurean School scorned rhetoric until Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher of the first century B.C., turned attention to it, criticized views of others, and expounded a theory of artistic epideictic in a work that has partially survived on papyrus buried in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.30
The most important expressions of a version of philosophical rhetoric in the Greek-speaking world of later antiquity came from the Neo-platonist philosophers, who regarded the works of Plato and Aristotle as in essential harmony and who created a curriculum in which study of rhetoric was primarily an exercise in training the mind. They accepted as basic texts the rhetorical writings of Hermogenes (second century after Christ) on stasis theory and style rather than Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and under their influence a series of prolegomena, or introductions to the Hermogenic texts, were composed that defined the legitimate place of the subject within the fields of learning. Neoplatonists also studied Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus and wrote commentaries on them, reconciling the contents to each other and to their new system of Platonic-Aristotelian thought. The Neoplatonic synthesis of philosophical and handbook rhetoric continued to be influential throughout the Greek Middle Ages.31
In the Latin-speaking West, the most influential statement of the relationship of philosophy and rhetoric was the preface that Cicero wrote about 89 B.C. to his handbook On Invention. The passage is frequently quoted or imitated from late antiquity to the Renaissance. Cicero was a very young man at the time, and despite his claims to originality what he says in this work was drawn almost entirely from Greek sources:
Often and long have I debated with myself whether facility at speaking and great zeal for eloquence have contributed more good or bad to mankind and communities. For when I consider the troubles of our republic and survey in my mind the ancient ruin of great cities, I see that no small part of the disasters was brought on by men skilled at speaking. When, however, I begin to search from written records knowledge of events remote from our memory because of their old-ness, I recognize that many cities were founded, very many wars extinguished, and that the strongest alliances and most sacred friendships have been formed not only by reasoning of the mind but also more easily by eloquence. For my part, after long thought, reason itself has led me to this opinion first and foremost: that wisdom without eloquence does too little benefit to states but that eloquence without wisdom for the most part does too much harm and is never advantageous. Therefore, if anyone, neglecting the most correct and honorable studies of reason and duty, gives all his attention to the practice of speaking, he is nurtured in a way useless to himself and pernicious to his country; but he who arms himself with eloquence in such a way as not to attack the welfare of his country but to be able to defend it, this man, it seems to me, will be a citizen most useful and most devoted both to his own and to public affairs. (On Invention 1.1)
Many years later, after acquiring extensive political experience and after intermittent study of philosophy, Cicero composed the dialogue On the Orator, which attempts a synthesis of philosophical and handbook rhetoric, drawing on Plato, Aristotle, and technical sources, incorporated within the original sophistic concept of the orator as statesman and leader of society. Crucial to the formation of this ideal figure is knowledge of philosophy and law, moral standards, and commitment to the best traditions of Roman society. This work was an important influence on Quintilian, writing over a century later, though Quintilian is less sympathetic to formal philosophical studies than was Cicero, and it is also one of the sources for the discussion of rhetoric in the fourth book of Saint Augustine’s On Christian Learning, to be discussed in Chapter 7.
Aristotle’s view of rhetoric as a counterpart to dialectic remained strong among philosophers, and philosophy exercised much of its influence on the teaching and practice of rhetoric through the study of dialectical topics. On eight occasions the reader of the Rhetoric is referred to the Topics, Aristotle’s treatise on dialectic, for further information on matters of argumentation. The reference at Rhetoric 2.22.10 says that “[i]t is evident that it is first necessary, as described in the Topics, to have selected statements about what is possible and most suited to the subject, and when unexpected problems occur, to try to follow the same method, looking not to the undefined but to what inherently belongs to the subject of the discourse.” Topos in Greek means “place,” and a logical or rhetorical “topic” is thus a finding-place for an argument. Aristotle may have borrowed the concept of a topic from the “places” in a handbook where examples of argument from probability or other rhetorical techniques were to be found,32 or the meaning may be derived from the mnemonic system in which images of words or ideas to be remembered were imagined against a background of places (see Topics 8.14.163b28).
Aristotle’s Topics is a treatise in eight books, to which his work On Sophistical Refutations is an appendage. In Book 1 he distinguishes scientific demonstration from probable reasoning, or dialectic, and, as mentioned earlier, explains that a knowledge of topics is useful in mental training, in debate, and in establishing the premises of the sciences. Propositions are of three sorts, ethical, physical, and logical, and become the basis of inductive or deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is the more important and takes the form of the syllogism. Every logical proposition or problem involves four predicables: definition, property, genus, and accident (1.4.101b25). These are found in ten “categories”: essence, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, activity, and passivity (1.9.103b20–24). Aristotle also wrote a treatise called Categories, which has a similar but not identical list. Syllogisms can be supplied by four means: the provision of propositions, an ability to distinguish different meanings of words, the discovery of differences, and the investigation of similarities (1.13.105a20–34). Books 2 through 7 then give a collection of topics dealing with accident, genus, property, and definition, in that order. One topic is to see if your opponent has treated a genus as an accident: white, for example, is not an accident of color but a member of the genus color. The categories come into such matters in that, for example, white color is an essence (in Greek “some thing”) and also indicates a quality. The eighth book of the Topics gives advice about reasoning—how to formulate or refute questions in debate. Thus the Topics deals with both the finding or invention of arguments and their evaluation, which comes to be called “judgment.”
Dialectic, and the arguing of theses, was an important exercise in Greek philosophical schools in the Hellenistic period. Predicables and categories proved useful in many ways, for example, in the study of grammar, which was a special interest of the Stoics. They also had application to the study of rhetoric. Stasis theory as developed by Hermagoras in the second century made use of the concepts of definition and quality, and the categories are used as a kind of checklist in the later rhetorical handbook of Cassius Longinus to suggest things a student might say in developing a narration or an argument. Cicero discusses dialectical topics in On the Orator (2.162–73) and composed a short treatise call Topics, allegedly a Latin version of Aristotle’s work with the same title but largely drawn from the list of topics in Rhetoric 2.23 or from Stoic sources. Following the general lead of Aristotle, Cicero divided argumentation into two arts, which he called the art of invention, or topics, and the science of judgment, or dialectic. His overall view was to subsume both invention and judgment under rhetoric.
Dialectic was not a subject that appealed to many Romans; they regarded it as abstruse and given to hairsplitting, something best left to impractical Greeks. An exception in late antiquity was Boethius, who was a Roman consul in A.D. 510 and held other high offices but was accused of treason and put to death in 524. He was one of the last thinkers in the West to have a good knowledge of Greek and had a special interest in Aristotle’s logical works, some of which he translated into Latin. He also wrote a work entitled De Topicis Differentiis, or On Topical Differentiae, the fourth book of which is a discussion of rhetoric as a special form of dialectic applied to political questions. This work will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9. Although Boethius does not seem to have known Aristotle’s Rhetoric, his work introduced a form of philosophical rhetoric into the western medieval tradition. It is a highly abstract work, with no attempt at practical application, but appealed greatly to scholastic philosophers, and in the thirteenth century was made the basic text for teaching a theory of rhetoric at the University of Paris. A form of the philosophical tradition of rhetoric in the Middle Ages is also found in the Didascalion of Hugh of Saint Victor, written in the twelfth century, and the treatise On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology by Bonaventura, written in the thirteenth. Philosophical approaches to rhetoric then emerged in the Renaissance and Neoclassical periods (to be discussed in Chapters 10 and 11).