As explained in Chapter 1, the word “rhetoric” in its primary meaning referred to features of oral discourse. In contrast, “literature,” derived from the Latin word for “letters,” properly refers to written discourse. The modern concept of “literature” as published works of aesthetic quality developed out of the term “belles lettres” in the seventeenth century in France and the eighteenth century in England.1 In Greece and Rome there was no exact equivalent of “literature” in this sense. Its place was taken by the tacit assumption that the traditional literary genres—epic, lyric, and tragic poetry, for example—had special prestige. The only prose genres that came to be regarded as inherently “literary” were oratory, historiography, and some philosophical writing, such as the dialogue form. This view prevailed throughout the medieval and Renaissance period, and these are the literary forms discussed by critics until the eighteenth century, when the novel and other genres began to emerge as also deserving critical attention. In recent times, however, the concept of “literature,” as well as that of genres and canons, has become somewhat problematic as implicitly elitist and sexist.
Rhetoric can be said to be prior to literature in the sense that oral discourse antedates the use of writing by thousands of years. Writing was invented—in the Near East, China, and elsewhere—to meet commercial and religious needs and was only later used for literary purposes, first for poetry, later for prose. Composition and publication long remained oral; written texts represented an attempt to preserve a particular version of an oral poem. Even when, in the sixth and fifth century B.C. in Greece, poets began to compose in writing, most texts were being performed or orally recited, and only later circulated in written form; and throughout antiquity most readers, even privately, read aloud. Writers were well aware of the need to take into account the fact that their works would be heard. One sign of this is the concern with rhythm in written prose.
A great deal of Greek literature is in some sense public address, requiring oral performance and performing religious or political functions within the society similar to those of speeches. The Homeric epics and Greek tragedies and comedies were performed at festivals; much of Greek lyric poetry falls into the genres of wedding hymns, odes for the victors in athletic games, exhortations to military or moral virtue, and the like, all of which required oral performance.
Early Greek literature, imitating the society of which it was a part, made much use of the forms of oratory. We have only to think of the “speeches” in the Homeric poems or in Greek drama. Reports of speeches and debates were also a part of Greek historical writing from the beginning in the works of Herodotus and Thucydides. The use of oratorical forms in literary works continued throughout antiquity and was imitated in later centuries, especially in the Renaissance and early modern period. Furthermore, the fiction of orality, reflecting the priority of speech, has been preserved in modern language. Poets “sing,” controversialists “speak out,” and all writers are quoted as having “said” something.
If literature has been heavily indebted to rhetoric, rhetoric has also had a considerable debt to writing and to literature. It was the literate revolution of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. in Greece that made possible the composition of the earliest handbooks and the preservation of speeches by great orators to be studied and imitated by later readers. Gorgias’s innovative style was derived from imitating devices of poetry. Writers on rhetoric, beginning with Aristotle, constantly drew examples of invention and style from literary sources, and the apt use of quotations from poetry has been an effective rhetorical technique throughout history.
With the increased use of writing for composition and publication in the fourth century before Christ, a “slippage” of the concern of rhetorical studies from an oral to a written art begins to be evident. This process recurs throughout history and affects rhetoric as taught in schools, described in handbooks, and practiced in composition. It has created a “rhetorical literature,” and has been given the name of letteraturizzazione, the “literaturization” of rhetoric.2 Most extant Greek and Latin speeches were published after delivery, often in revised form intended to improve their effectiveness. The result was the adaptation of primary, oral rhetoric into a secondary, literary rhetoric for readers. Isocrates lacked the stamina or nerve for speaking in public; he was the first to write and publish speeches that were never publicly delivered and in so doing helped make oratory a literary genre. His speeches show great amplification and a lack of concern for immediate effect on an audience, at the same time that their smoothness of sound and rhythmical patterns indicate an expectation that they will be read aloud by others.
Orality remained a major feature of Greco-Roman society throughout its history; the orator remained the highest type of civic excellence as conceived by sophists, Cicero, and Quintilian; the nominal goal of schools of rhetoric was always training in public address. In this, as in other respects, ancient society was highly traditional. Nevertheless, rhetoricians gradually began to give more attention to reading and to written composition. One reason for this is that public debate on political issues declined in Greece after the fourth century with the loss of independence by the historic city-states, and it declined in Rome with the collapse of republican government in the first century B.C. The application of Roman law throughout the classical world reduced the opportunities for purely rhetorical achievements in the lawcourts, as Tacitus explains in his Dialogue on the Orators. Exercises in declamation often lost touch with contemporary realities, a fact lamented by Quintilian, Tacitus, and others. Although declamation provided training in verbal agility, it often came to be regarded as a form of entertainment. The skills students learned in rhetorical schools would be more useful for them now in writing than in speaking, especially if they experimented in later life in literary composition. The influence of rhetoric on literary composition is a striking feature of Greek and Latin literature from the first century B.C. to late antiquity, seen in the use of topics, in the presentation of ethos and pathos, in patterns of arrangement, in application of progymnasmatic exercises and features of declamation, and especially in the use of tropes, figures, and sententiae. Only in the case of epideictic, the most artificial and literary of the rhetorical genres, did the field of oratory somewhat expand, to be exploited by the speakers of the Second Sophistic in Greece and Asia Minor. In its most extreme form, found, for example, in the speeches of Himerius in the fourth century, the epideictic oratory of sophists became prose poems, filling a literary vacuum in a period when original composition in verse was in decay.
The clearest manifestation of letteraturizzazione is the concern of rhetoricians of the Hellenistic and Roman periods with literary composition, with imitation of literary models, and with the development of rhetorical criticism. This concern is seen particularly in monographs on style that are the commonest extant discussions of rhetoric in Greek from the first century B.C. to the second century of the Christian era. Increased interest in style began with the declining political role of public address and with the expanding role of rhetorical schools in education throughout the Greek- and Latin-speaking world.
The earliest surviving monograph on style is probably the treatise Peri Hermeneias, literally “On Expression” but commonly known as On Style.3 It was traditionally attributed to Demetrius of Phaleron, a Peripatetic philosopher and Athenian statesman of the late fourth century B.C., but references in the work as well as some of the contents make this impossible. It was probably written in the mid-first century B.C., after the publication of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which is cited three times, and before emergence of the Atticism movement, which is not mentioned. Attribution to Demetrius of Phaleron may result from the fact that this author’s name was also Demetrius.
The original opening of the treatise may be lost; where the text begins the author is discussing periodic sentences, based on Aristotle’s description but introducing a distinction of three kinds: conversational, historical, and rhetorical. The historical period is regarded as a mean between the other two. The rest of the treatise consists of a discussion of four styles: plain, grand, elegant, and forceful, in terms of diction, composition, and subject matter, each with a corresponding faulty style and each illustrated with examples from classical Greek poetry and prose. The author criticizes earlier writers, probably Theophrastus and his followers, who recognized only two styles, plain and grand, and regarded the others as intermediate. Demetrius offers precepts for good written composition, but his work is also a sensitive piece of literary criticism, based on an implicit concept of taste (see, e.g., §§ 67, 137, and 287). His is the earliest extant Greek work that distinguishes between figures of thought and figures of speech and the earliest to use many technical terms that have become standard names of figures.4
An unusual feature of Demetrius’s work is a discussion of letter writing (§§ 223–35). Letters, we are told, should be written in a mixture of the plain and elegant styles and are like one side of a dialogue. There is a short passage on letters in the late Latin rhetorical handbook of Julius Victor,5 but otherwise the subject was neglected in ancient texts on grammar or rhetoric, surprisingly so, considering the great importance of correspondence in antiquity, the development of bureaucracies, and the publication of collections of letters by or attributed to major authors, including Plato, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Cicero, Pliny, and many later writers. Collections of model letters were made, fragments of which survive on papyrus, and there are a few short handbooks of Greek epistolography, identifying types of letters with examples,6 but the rhetoric of letter writing was not a major concern until medieval times.
Dionysius was a Greek rhetorician who came to Rome about 30 B.C., where he taught composition and wrote a history of Rome and a series of works on style that, like the monograph of Demetrius, can be read as both instruction in prose composition for teachers and students and literary criticism of classical texts for readers. The most important of these works are a series of essays entitled On the Attic Orators—discussing Lysias, Isocrates, Isaeus, Demosthenes, Hyperides, and Aeschines—and a treatise entitled On Composition.7 The introduction to the former work is the earliest statement in Greek regarding the Atticism movement, the attempt to restore style to the standards of the classical period that became a major objective of sophists in the following centuries. Dionysius also outlines stages in the historical development of Greek prose from the fifth to the fourth century, culminating in the artistry of Demosthenes. He distinguishes several types (charactêres) of style and discusses necessary and supplementary virtues of style, but he also considers the authenticity of speeches, the treatment of subject matter, the topics employed in different parts of a speech, and the use of ethos and pathos.
On Composition is the most detailed account we have of how educated Greeks reacted to the beauties of their native language. This subject, Dionysius thought, should fascinate the young and would be, more than argumentation, the most suitable object of their study. In none of his works does Dionysius show much interest in rhetoric as an art of persuasion; to him it is an aesthetic, literary subject. He considers the grouping, shaping, and tailoring of clauses; the four sources of “charm” and “beauty”: melody, rhythm, variety, and propriety; and the three kinds of “harmony”: the austere, of which Pindar and Thucydides furnish examples, the “polished,” illustrated by Sappho and Isocrates, and the “well-blended,” as found in Homer and Demosthenes.
Dionysius’s studies of style marked an advance over the simplistic theory of three kinds of style as found, for example, in Rhetoric for Herennius. The approach was continued by later Greek rhetoricians, especially by Hermogenes in his work On Ideas of Style, discussed in Chapter 5.
The Greek word kanôn means “a straight-edge ruler,” and thus “a standard of measure” or a “model.” Dionysius (Letter to Pompeius 3) says Herodotus is the best “canon” of historical writing in Ionic Greek, and Thucydides in Attic Greek; otherwise, the word is not much applied in Greek or Latin to authors or to books until it was taken up by Christians in the fourth century to refer to the canon of the books of the Bible, those regarded as divinely inspired. Nevertheless, a process of canonization of texts is evident in Greece, first informally in the acceptance of the Homeric and Hesiodic poems as the classics of the culture, and later more formally when the librarians at Alexandria drew up lists of literary classics, arranged by genres. We know these lists best from the survey of them given by Quintilian (10.1.46–84 for Greek writers, 85–131 for Latin). Among the works of Plutarch is a spurious treatise On the Ten Attic Orators, and a canon of ten—Antiphon, Andocides, Lysias, Isocrates, Isaeus, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Hyperides, Lycurgus, and Dinarchus—has become traditional, but its origin is uncertain. Cicero, Dionysius, and Quintilian seem unaware of it; they omit reference to some orators in the canon and discuss others who are not in the canon of ten, for example, Gorgias and Demetrius of Phaleron.
More important than the existence of a formal canon of orators was the view, adopted by supporters of Atticism, that the great achievements of Greek literature, including oratory, were to be found in the past in the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus and Thucydides, Plato and Xenophon, and the major orators, especially Lysias, Isocrates, Aeschines, and Demosthenes. These were the classic writers who brought the Greek language and the genres of literature to their highest development. Since then, quality was thought to have decayed. The way to recover standards was by “imitation” of these classics.
The word for “imitation” in Greek is mimêsis, which is used in several senses. To Plato, the visible world around us was a mimêsis of a non-material, eternal reality of “ideas.” In Aristotle’s Poetics, mimêsis is used to mean the imitation of action in the plot of a tragedy; and more generally the arts are said in Greek to “imitate” reality. To Dionysius of Halicarnassus, however, and to rhetoricians of the time of the Roman Empire generally, mimêsis in Greek and imitatio in Latin is the pedagogical method of learning to write by careful imitation of the style of approved models. The subject is discussed in a work called On Imitation, by Dionysius, only partially preserved, and more fully by Quintilian (10.2), who recognizes possible pitfalls if imitation is practiced too rigidly. Cicero is to him the finest model, but one should imitate the best qualities of a variety of models, depending on the subject matter, and weakness in some forms of style can be corrected by imitating passages strong in those characteristics. A student whose style is arid and dry should, for example, practice imitating florid passages, while one who tends to excessive ornamentation should seek models in the plain style. Quintilian’s survey of Greek and Latin literature is not intended as an excursus on literary criticism; it is a series of suggested authors that students seeking to develop their copia, or “supply,” of subjects and words, might imitate.
The most admired discussion of style in Greek is the treatise Peri Hypsous, or On Sublimity, attributed in the best manuscript to “Dionysius or Longinus” and “Dionysius Longinus.”8 In the Renaissance and early modern period the author was assumed to be Cassius Longinus, a rhetorician of the third century after Christ, famous in his own time and author of Art of Rhetoric, partially preserved. For convenience, modern scholars continue to refer to the author as Longinus, but they reject the attribution to Cassius Longinus and regard the treatise as written by an otherwise unknown writer in the first, or more probably in the second century after Christ. On Sublimity was rather little known until the late seventeenth century, when Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, a leading neoclassical poet and critic, published a French translation and commentary. This began the cult of “The Sublime,” which continued through the eighteenth century and will be noted in Chapter 11.
On Sublimity is explicitly intended to help a young student understand elevation in style by study and imitation of great literary models. “Sublimity,” Longinus says in the preface,
is a kind of summit or excellence of discourse and is the source of the distinction of the greatest poets and prose writers and the means by which they have given immortality to their fame. Whatever is beyond nature does not lead the hearers to persuasion but to ecstasy; and the marvelous combined with astonishment always prevails over the persuasive and pleasant because persuasion for the most part is in our own power, while the marvelous and astonishing exert invincible power and force and overwhelm every hearer. Experience in invention and in ordering and arranging material is not something seen in one or two passages but something we gradually see emerging in the web of the whole work. Sublimity, on the other hand, produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator’s collected power. (1.3–4)
Although here Longinus draws a distinction between sublimity and rhetorical persuasion, he makes many uses of rhetorical concepts throughout the work. In chapter 8, he identifies five sources of sublimity: the power to conceive great thoughts and the use of strong and inspired emotion (pathos), which are aspects of rhetoric invention; and figures, word choice, and composition or word arrangement, which are three features of rhetorical style. He gives special emphasis to Plato and Demosthenes as stylistic models and compares Demosthenes with Cicero (12.4), one of very few references to Cicero by a Greek rhetorician.
Admiration for Longinus’s treatise derives from his description of genius, in which he both uses and surmounts ordinary rhetorical concepts, and from the sensitive literary criticism found in his discussion of passages from Greek literature, including an appreciation of a poem by Sappho (10.2), which would otherwise have perished, and citation (9.9) of the opening of the Book of Genesis as an example of sublimity, something unparalleled on the part of a pagan Greek. The work ends (44) with discussion of the “decline” of eloquence, somewhat resembling what we found in Tacitus’s Dialogue on the Orators. Here Longinus rejects what he calls “the explanation generally mentioned,” that is, the loss of political freedom and loss of political reward. The fundamental cause, he concludes, is greed, pride, love of luxury, and idleness, which could be said to have dulled perception, turned ambition from civic duty to personal gain, and eroded cultural values.
A few words can be added here about the relationship between rhetoric and poetics as perceived in antiquity. Literary criticism is found in a variety of contents in Greek and Latin literature. Early examples include Aristophanes’ comedy Frogs, which compares the styles of Aeschylus and Euripides, and Plato’s dialogue Ion, which deals with poetic inspiration. Aristotle, who first defined many of the disciplines of learning, was the author of the first systematic treatise on poetics. In chapter 19 of that work he notes that what has been said about reasoning, i.e., demonstration and refutation, the use of emotions, and arguments about what is important or not important, in his work on rhetoric equally applies to the composition of speeches in tragedy. Conversely, a passage in the Rhetoric (3.2) refers the reader to the Poetics for more information on kinds of words.
Reading and analysis of poetry was an important activity in Greek and Roman grammar schools, and the technical features of poetry—principles of versification and identification of tropes and figures—were discussed in works on grammar. This tradition continued into the Middle Ages and, together with some other parts of rhetoric, contributed to the Artes Poetriae, to be discussed in Chapter 9. Several Hellenistic philosophers, however, followed Aristotle’s lead in writing treatises on poetics; the only such work to survive is that by Philodemus, part of which was rescued among papyri buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Hellenistic speculations about poetry, and especially the lost work of Neoptolemus of Paros, are major sources for the versified Art of Poetry by Horace, written near the end of the first century B.C. It too was an important source for medieval discussions of poetry.9
Study of rhetoric was a central feature of ancient education, and rhetorical theory was both more fully developed and more widely understood than poetic theory. It is not surprising, therefore, that commentaries on classical texts from Roman and Byzantine times make great use of rhetorical concepts. Examples include the large commentaries on the Homeric poems by Eustathius and on Virgil’s Aeneid by Servius. Commentaries were also written on the orators, surviving chiefly in the form of marginal notes in manuscripts. Those in Greek often apply the rhetorical theory of Hermogenes to explication of the text.
Overall, poetics can be regarded as parallel to and overlapping with rhetoric. Both share a concern with style, including word choice, tropes, figures, sentence structure, and rhythm. Ancient discussions of poetry are largely devoted to epic and drama, where speeches are attributed to characters, and both rhetoric and poetics are thus concerned with ethos and pathos and with the suitability of what is attributed to the character. “Decorum,” corresponding to propriety as a virtue of rhetorical style, is a major theme in Horace’s poem and in the literary criticism of later times that derives from his work. Rhetoric has its genres of deliberative, epideictic, and judicial oratory; poetics considers the conventions of epic, elegiac, lyric, tragic, comic, and pastoral poetry. Finally, exercises in progymnasmata—especially fables, narratives, descriptions, and comparison—were preparations for the study of rhetoric but were also preparatory for poetic composition.