Classical Rhetoric: 500 BCE - 100 CE

Overview:

In the classical era, Rhetoric was a major cultural force—tied to governmental practice and the rise of textual literacy.

Historical, Political, and Social Contexts for Classical Rhetoric:

Nomadic tribal groups evolve into city states. Systems of governance develop.

Advent of alphabetic literacy—codes, language as artifact, subtler forms of communication, analytical mindset—leads to active philosophical discourse: Hamurabi's Code, The Epic of Gilgamesh, oral tales that would later become The Odyssey and The Iliad.

478 BCE: Greek City states come together as the Delian League, to protect themselves from the Persian Empire. Center of the Delian League is Athens, which grows into a rich city.

449 BCE: Pericles makes peace with Persia & a cultural flowering ensues: Socrates, Sophocles, Hippocrates, etc.

In-fighting within the Delian League (Gorgias vs. Syracuse) leads to the Peloponessian War during the 4th century BCE, but Plato and Aristotle do significant work despite the turmoil.

Peloponessian War weakens the city states, and eventually the Macedonians, under Alexander the Great, conquer the city-states, setting off events which lead, eventually, to the Roman Empire.

The Sophists (or Pre-Socratics): The First Rhetoricians

The Sophists: a diverse group of early philosophers who traveled among the city-states teaching young people (mostly wealthy young men) the art of public speaking.

The Sophistic philosophy (see Protagoras and Gorgias in handout): absolute truth is unavailable to humans, whose senses provide only partial knowledge. Truth, then, can only be subjective. Rhetoric provides a powerful tool for negotiating “probable truth” through dialectic.
Dialectic: pitting opposing sides of an issue against each other for the purpose of arriving at probable truth. Our court system arises from this tradition. So does the Jerry Springer show.

Controversy: those in power believed that chaos would result from radical questioning of belief systems (see Antigone).

Note how empowering the Sophistic philosophy can be: humans can make good decisions and are responsible for the state of the world. It’s not fate or the fickel, pagan gods who are in charge of human societies. It’s people.

Also, Rhetoric threatened the tradition of nobility, since reason could dispute against tradition. If a young man of questionable background became a skilled Rhetor, he could upset the aristocracy (note: we’re still fighting that battle—for example, check sometime to see what percentage of our national politicians come from wealthy backgrounds and Ivy League schools).

Empedocles: widely acknowledged as the first Rhetorician (circa 450 BCE). He sets the stage, really, for the Sophist movement, claiming that human knowledge is innately flawed, but that language can negotiate human understandings.

Protagoras (circa 400 BCE; see reading packet): studied the precise meanings of words in an attempt to create standardized vocabulary for public discourse. Claimed “man is the measure of all things.”

Gorgias (circa 400 BCE; see reading packet): studies and exhibits the power of language to induce belief. He’s poetic. He speaks beautifully. Later thinkers (chiefly Plato/Socrates) will consider him deceptive. Why? Because Gorgias persuaded Athens to lend military aid to his home town of Leontini; eventually, this aid depleted the Athenian military and led to their downfall.

For ages—even today—the word “Sophist” has negative connotations. “Sophistry” is akin to linguistic trickery. In the 20th Century, though, rhetoricians see the relationship between the Sophist movement and post-modern science (the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for instance, calls all human knowledge radically into question, even the most empirically derived data).

There are some opportunities for women in this period: the poet Sappho writes at this time. And Aspasia, a mistress of the Athenian ruler, Pericles, seems to have been a sought-after teacher. Scholars have suggested that the Sophistic movement led to a feminist movement of the time. However, that movement was largely repressed (as was the Sophistic movement) and so there are few remaining texts.

Introduction to the Big Three: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (see reading packet):

Plato writes the Socratic dialogues, which are largely arguments between Socrates and one or more of the Sophists.

Socrates (469-399 BCE) is against the Sophists because he believes that the only worthy goal of Rhetoric is to pursue absolute truth (allegory of the cave, realm of the forms). True Rhetoric, then, is “the method of a philosopher and a pupil who free themselves from conventional beliefs and all worldly encumberances in the pursuit of transcendent, absolute truth” (Bizzell and Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition).

Plato (428-347 BCE) is a student of Socrates. Some of his most important contributions to Philosophy are the Socratic dialogues he composes. He also wrote The Republic, a utopian treatise on the nature of the ideal society.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was a student of Plato’s, who went on to found his own school (one of his pupils was the ruler Alexander the Great) and to become one of the widest ranging and most important writers in the Western tradition. His Rhetoric is still essential reading for anyone pursuing advanced studies in philosophy, law, or English.

Though we are not studying them here, later Rhetoricians of the classical period, such as Cicero and Quintilian, further perfected the art of speaking well and considered questions of Rhetoric’s relationship to truth.

Plato (428-347 BCE): True and False Rhetoric and Transcendental Truth

Plato studies under Socrates, whose goal was to change history by teaching young people not simply accept the traditional beliefs of their forebears.

Both Plato and Socrates fault the Sophists for not using Rhetoric to pursue absolute truth (ignoring the fact that the Sophists don’t believe that humans can know absolute truth).

Phaedrus is a Socratic model dialogue, in which Socrates and a trusting pupil literally walk away from society, into a rural setting, where they can free their minds from the encumberances of conventional beliefs and pursue absolute truths.

Plato sanctions two uses of Rhetoric to teach truth: 1) to convey truth that is already in the rhetor’s possession to an ignorant audience; 2) dialectic, or conversation between two people who seek to understand absolute truth.

According to Socrates, how can humans know transcendent, absolute truth? Because we “knew” it before our birth, when our souls were part of the Divine. Trying to find truth during mortal life is difficult because we have to strip away layer after layer of corrupt knowledge in an effort to “remember” the truth.

For Plato and Socrates, “bad Rhetoric” is like lustfulness—unloving, exploitative. “Good Rhetoric” is like love, which seeks to improve all participants.

Plato’s Socratic dialogues are seen as literary works, in which Socrates is a character. They were probably based on true events, but should not be seen as transcriptions.

Socrates mistrusted the written word, because it could disguise its goals more craftily. In oral dialogue with someone, it’s easier to discern a speaker’s intentions by their tone, body language, etc. It’s ironic, then, that Plato chose to write down the Socratic dialogues.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE): Systematic Rhetoric

A consummate classifier, Aristotle tried to order all of human knowledge.

3 categories of speech: 1) political oratory that persuades to action, 2) ceremonial oratory that offers praise or blame, and 3) legal oratory that attempts to reach a judgment.

Aristotle’s detailed study of audiences—their cultural identities, their emotional leanings, their age and social class—can be seen as the first systematic study of Psychology.

3 varieties of appeal in argument: 1) Logos: appeals to logic or reason, 2) Ethos: appeals to the credibility of the speaker, and 3) Pathos: emotional appeals. Aristotle prefers logical appeals, and feels that these should be the primary basis of decisions, but he acknowledges the importance of ethos and pathos in the deliberations of audiences.

Aristotle does not consider transcendental knowledge or absolute truth. He is scientifically minded. “Demonstration” is the process of exhibiting knowledge through experiment or empirical proof.

“Dialectic,” then, cannot be used to reach the transcendental. Aristotle still values it, though, as a rigorous form of deliberation, useful when no demonstration is available.

Cicero (106-43 BCE) and the Five Canons of Rhetoric

Cicero was a prominent political orator and rhetorician of the Roman Empire. Of his many significant contributions to Rhetoric, perhaps the one that holds the most long-standing significance is his idea of the 5 Canons of Rhetoric. A “Canon” is basically a stage in the process of developing a piece of rhetoric. The 5 stages are “invention,” “arrangement,” “style,” “memory,” and “delivery.” These still influence contemporary thinking on speech communication and written composition.

Cicero was assassinated (a testament to the real power of his speaking and teaching), when he tried to sway the public against Mark Antony’s bid to seize power following the death of Julius Caesar.