History of Rhetoric

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History of Rhetoric
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OldDeadGreeks
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Rhetoric and Oratory

• the art of swaying an audience by eloquent
  speech. In ancient Greece and Rome oratory was
  included under the term rhetoric, which meant the
  art of composing as well as delivering a speech.
  Oratory first appeared in the law courts of
  Athens and soon became important in all areas of
  life. It was taught by the Sophists. The Ten
  Attic Orators (listed by Alexandrine critics)
  were Antiphon, Andocides, Lysias, Isocrates,
  Isaeus, Aeschines, Demosthenes, Lycurgus,
  Hyperides, and Dinarchus. Classic Rome's great
  orators were Cato the Elder, Mark Antony, and
  Cicero.

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• The theory of rhetoric was discussed by Aristotle
  and Quintilian and three main classes of oratory
  were later designated by classical rhetoricians
  (a) deliberativeto persuade an audience (such as
  a legislature) to approve or disapprove a matter
  of public policy (b) forensicto achieve (as in
  a trial) condemnation or approval for a person's
  actions (c) epideictic "display rhetoric" used
  on ceremonial occasions. Rhetoric was included in
  the medieval liberal arts curriculum. In
  subsequent centuries oratory was utilized in
  three main areas of public lifepolitics,
  religion, and law. During the Middle Ages, the
  Renaissance, and the Reformation, oratory was
  generally confined to the church, which produced
  such soul-searing orators as Savanorola, Martin
  Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox.

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• Classical Rhetoric The eloquence that Nestor,
  Odysseus, and Achilles display in Homer's Iliad
  led many Greeks to look upon Homer as the father
  of oratory. The establishment of democratic
  institutions in Athens in 510 BC imposed on all
  citizens the necessity of public service, making
  skill in oratory essential hence a group of
  teachers arose known as Sophists, who endeavored
  to make men better speakers by rules of art.
  Protagoras, the first of the Sophists, made a
  study of language and taught his pupils how to
  make the weaker cause appear the stronger.

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• The actual founder of rhetoric as a science is
  said to be Corax of Syracuse (fl. about 465 BC),
  who defined rhetoric as the "artificer of
  persuasion" and composed the first handbook on
  the art of rhetoric. Later masters of rhetoric
  were Corax's pupil Tisias (fl. 5th cent. BC),
  also of Syracuse Gorgias of Leontini, who went
  to Athens in 427 BC and Thrasymachus of
  Chalcedon (fl. 5th cent. BC), who also taught at
  Athens. Antiphon (480?-411 BC), the first of the
  so-called Ten Attic Orators, was also the first
  to combine the theory and practice of rhetoric,
  and with Isocrates, the great teacher of oratory
  in the 4th century BC, the art of rhetoric was
  broadened to become a cultural study, a
  philosophy with a practical purpose. Plato
  satirized the more technical approach to
  rhetoric, with its emphasis on persuasion rather
  than truth, in his Gorgias, and in the Phaedrus
  he discussed the principles constituting the
  essence of the rhetorical art.

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• Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, defined the function
  of rhetoric as being, not that of persuasion, but
  rather that of "discovering all the available
  means of persuasion," thereby emphasizing the
  winning of an argument by persuasive marshaling
  of truth, rather than the swaying of an audience
  by an appeal to their emotions. He regarded
  rhetoric as the counterpart, or sister art, of
  logic. The instructors in formal rhetoric in Rome
  were at first Greek, and the great masters of
  theoretical and practical rhetoric, Cicero and
  Quintilian, were both influenced by Greek models.
  

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• Cicero wrote several treatises on the theory and
  practice of rhetoric, the most important being On
  the Orator Quintilian's famous Institutio
  Oratoria still retains its value as a thorough
  treatment of the principles of rhetoric and the
  nature of ideal eloquence. Scholastic
  declamations of the early empire are found in the
  extant suasorioe and controversioe of the
  rhetorician Seneca, the former belonging to
  deliberative rhetoric, the latter dealing with
  legal issues and presenting forensic rhetoric.
  During the first four centuries of the Roman
  Empire, rhetoric continued to be taught by
  teachers who were called Sophists, the term by
  this time used as an academic title.

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• Protagoras, the first of the Sophists, made a
  study of language and taught his pupils how to
  make the weaker cause appear the stronger. The
  actual founder of rhetoric as a science is said
  to be Corax of Syracuse (fl. about 465 BC), who
  defined rhetoric as the "artificer of persuasion"
  and composed the first handbook on the art of
  rhetoric. Later masters of rhetoric were Corax's
  pupil Tisias (fl. 5th cent. BC), also of
  Syracuse Gorgias of Leontini, who went to Athens
  in 427 BC and Thrasymachus of Chalcedon (fl. 5th
  cent. BC), who also taught at Athens. Antiphon
  (480?-411 BC), the first of the so-called Ten
  Attic Orators, was also the first to combine the
  theory and practice of rhetoric, and with
  Isocrates, the great teacher of oratory in the
  4th century BC, the art of rhetoric was broadened
  to become a cultural study, a philosophy with a
  practical purpose.

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"KAKOU KORAKOS KAKON OONRhetoric the Story of
Corax vs. Tisias

• The Scene "Corax and his pupil Tisias were
  reputedly the first Sophists. Like many young men
  with an appetite for worldly success, Tisias
  sought training from Corax in the hope of being
  able to sue his way to wealth and influence.
  Wishing to make sure he was not duped by his
  teacher, Tisias contracted to pay Corax only
  after he had actually won a law suit. On this
  condition his training commenced and soon enough
  was over. But Tisias became complacent. Years
  went by and Tisias brought no suits against
  anyone. Corax had been willing to wait to be
  paid, but not forever, so he brought a suit
  against Tisias to recover his fee" --
  Britannica.com

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• Tisias Your Honors, I stand before you today in
  humility of spirit and purity of motive. I ask
  only that you listen patiently and judge rightly
  in issuing your verdict.
• Your Honors, I charge Corax for failing to teach
  me well the art of Rhetoric. The proof of this
  charge is here before us today. For if I should
  lose my case, it will surely prove that I was not
  taught Rhetoric very well. And this being the
  case I should NOT have to pay the tuition. For no
  one should have to pay for services that weren't
  rendered according to what was promised.
• On the other hand, if I win the case, it shows
  that I had enough sense and talent to figure out
  the art of Rhetoric out on my own, despite the
  negligence of my instructor. But even this is not
  necessary to my case. For a ruling against Corax,
  is a ruling for me. And a ruling for me means I
  do not have to pay tuition. In either case, then,
  I should NOT have to pay tuition.  

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• Corax  Your Honors, I, too, stand humbly before
  you. I, too, recognize, in years far more
  experienced than that of my adversary, your
  outstanding record of prudent and just decision
  making on behalf of those whose cause is just. We
  are indeed fortunate to gain a hearing before
  you. This, then, is my case.
• I have given Tisias the very best education in
  rhetoric of which I am capable, on the condition
  that he would at some point in his career pay my
  tuition. This he has not done. Now, if you rule
  against me -- that is if Tisias does in fact win
  his case -- it serves to show that I taught him
  Rhetoric well, in which case he should be
  required to pay my tuition. If, however, Tisias
  does not win his case, that would show him to be
  a poor, or rather bad, student. (We already know
  he is poor.) Those who are wise well know that a
  teacher is not to be faulted if, in discharging
  his services well and faithfully, the student is
  simply too stupid or too lazy (or too both) to
  take advantage of those services, expertly
  rendered.
• But even this is unnecessary to my case. For a
  ruling against Tisias is a ruling in favor of me.
  Such a ruling would, of course, mean that Tisias
  must pay my tuition. In either case, then, my
  tuition should be paid.

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The Decision "KAKOU KORAKOS KAKON OON"

• Translation "From a bad crow, a bad egg." Or,
  "When a mischievous bird of prey lays an egg, the
  egg too is mischievous."
• The verdict was actually a play on words Corax
  means "crow and Tisias means "eggs
• The case was, in effect, thrown out of court.

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Modern Version

• The following argument reworks the traditional
  sophist's argument for buying lessons in rhetoric
  ("You should buy my lessons so that you can
  evaluate my argument that you should buy my
  lessons") by developing the infinite regress
  implicit in recursive consultation.

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• Medieval and Renaissance Rhetoric Rhetoric
  constituted one of the subjects of the trivium,
  or three preliminary subjects of the seven
  liberal arts taught at the universities, the
  other two being grammar and logic. The chief
  medieval authorities on rhetoric were three Roman
  scholars of the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries
  Martianus Capella (fl. late 4th cent. and early
  5th cent.), author of an encyclopedia of the
  seven liberal arts (arithmetic, astronomy,
  geometry, and music, in conjunction with grammar,
  logic, and rhetoric) Flavius Magnus Aurelius
  Cassiodorus, historian and founder of
  monasteries, famed especially for his
  Institutiones Divinarum et Humanarum Lectionum,
  the second book of which contains an account of
  the seven liberal arts and Isidore of Seville, a
  Spanish archbishop who compiled an encyclopedic
  work setting forth the erudition of the ancient
  world.

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• During the Renaissance, the study of rhetoric was
  again based on the works of such writers of
  classical antiquity as Aristotle, Cicero, and
  Quintilian. A number of contemporary
  dissertations were produced, among them the Art
  of Rhetorique (1553) by the English statesman and
  writer Thomas Wilson (1525?-81), the Art or Craft
  of Rhetoryke by the English schoolmaster Leonard
  Cox (fl. 16th cent.), and treatises by Pierre de
  Courcelles (fl. 16th cent.) and André de
  Tonquelin (fl. 16th cent.), both French
  rhetoricians. Rhetoric was a prescribed subject
  in colleges and universities, public disputations
  and competitive exercises keeping the practice
  long alive.

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• In the first half of the 20th century, a revival
  of the study of formal rhetoric, encouraged
  largely by the exponents of the linguistic
  science known as semantics, occurred throughout
  the English-speaking countries of the world.
  Among the modern educators and philosophers who
  made notable contributions to the study of
  rhetoric were the British literary critic I. A.
  Richards and the American literary critics
  Kenneth Duva Burke (1897-1993) and John Crowe
  Ransom.

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• Modern Rhetoric In the early 18th century,
  rhetoric declined in importance, although more on
  its theoretical than on its practical side, since
  the political arena and the debating platform
  continued to furnish numerous opportunities for
  effective oratory. For the succeeding
  half-century, the art of rhetoric had
  increasingly fewer exponents. The Lectures on
  Rhetoric (1783) by the Scottish clergyman Hugh
  Blair (1718-1800) achieved considerable
  popularity in the late 18th and early 19th
  centuries, as did the Philosophy of Rhetoric
  (1776) by the Scottish theologian George Campbell
  (1719-96) and the Elements of Rhetoric (1828) by
  the British logician Richard Whately (1787-
  1863).

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• Old Dead Greeks, Part Two
• Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

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• The Sophists were men whose responsibility it was
  to train and educate the sons of Athenian
  citizens. There were no formal school as we know
  them today. Instead, these were peripatetic
  schools, meaning that the instructor would walk
  with students and talk with them for a fee, of
  course. The Sophists taught the skills (sophia)
  of rhetoric and oratory. Both of these arts were
  essential for the education of the Athenian
  citizenry. After all, it was the sons of the
  citizens who would eventually find themselves
  debating important issues in the Assembly and the
  Council of Five Hundred. Rhetoric can be
  described as the art of composition, while
  oratory was the art of public speaking.
• The Sophists abandoned science, philosophy,
  mathematics and ethics. What they taught was the
  subtle art of persuasion. A Sophist was a person
  who could argue eloquently and could prove a
  position whether that position was correct or
  incorrect. In other words, what mattered was
  persuasion and not truth. The Sophists were also
  relativists. They believed that there was no such
  thing as a universal or absolute truth, valid at
  all times. According to Protagoras (c.485-c.411
  B.C.), "Man is the measure of all things."
  Everything is relative and there are no values
  because man, individual man, is the measure of
  all things. Nothing is good or bad since
  everything depends on the individual. Gorgias of
  Leontini (c.485-c.380 B.C.), who visited Athens
  in 427, was a well-paid teacher of rhetoric and
  famous for his saying that a man could not know
  anything. And if he could, he could not describe
  it and if he could describe it, no one would
  understand him.

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• The Sophistic movement of the fifth century B.C.
  has been the subject of much discussion and there
  is no single view about their significance.
  Plato's treatment of the Sophists in his late
  dialogue, the Sophist, is hardly flattering. He
  does not treat them as real seekers after truth
  but as men whose only concern was making money
  and teaching their students success in argument
  by whatever means. Aristotle said that a Sophist
  was "one who made money by sham wisdom."
• At their very best, the Sophists challenged the
  accepted values of the fifth century. They wanted
  the freedom to sweep away old conventions as a
  way of finding a better understanding of the
  universe, the gods and man. The Sophists have
  been compared with the philosophes of the 18th
  century Enlightenment who also used criticism and
  reason to wipe out anything they deemed was
  contrary to human reason. Regardless of what we
  think of the Sophists as a group or individually,
  they certainly did have the cumulative effect of
  further degrading a mythical understanding of the
  universe and of man.

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Socrates From the ranks of the Sophists came
SOCRATES (c.469-399 B.C.), perhaps the most noble
and wisest Athenian to have ever lived.

• Socrates was that he was remarkable for living
  the life he preached. Taking no fees, Socrates
  started and dominated an argument wherever the
  young and intelligent would listen, and people
  asked his advice on matters of practical conduct
  and educational problems.
• Socrates was not an attractive man -- he was
  snub-nosed, prematurely bald, and overweight.
  But, he was strong in body and the intellectual
  master of every one with whom he came into
  contact. The Athenian youth flocked to his side
  as he walked the paths of the agora. They clung
  to his every word and gesture. He was not a
  Sophist himself, but a philosopher, a lover of
  wisdom.
• In 399 B.C., Socrates was charged with impiety by
  a jury of five hundred of his fellow citizens.
  His most famous student, Plato, tells us, that he
  was charged "as an evil-doer and curious person,
  searching into things under the earth and above
  the heavens and making the worse appear the
  better cause, and teaching all this to others."
  He was convicted to death by a margin of six
  votes. Oddly enough, the jury offered Socrates
  the chance to pay a small fine for his impiety.
  He rejected it. He also rejected the pleas of
  Plato and other students who had a boat waiting
  for him at Piraeus that would take him to
  freedom. But Socrates refused to break the law.
  What kind of citizen would he be if he refused to
  accept the judgment of the jury? No citizen at
  all. He spent his last days with his friends
  before he drank the fatal dose of hemlock.

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Plato Socrates wrote nothing himself. What we
know of him comes from the writings of two of his
closest friends, Xenophon and Plato.

• Our knowledge of Socrates comes to us from
  numerous dialogues which Plato wrote after 399.
  In nearly every dialogue and there are more
  than thirty that we know about Socrates is the
  main speaker. The style of the Plato's dialogue
  is important it is the Socratic style that he
  employs throughout. A Socratic dialogue takes the
  form of question-answer, question-answer,
  question-answer. It is a dialectical style as
  well. Socrates would argue both sides of a
  question in order to arrive at a conclusion. Then
  that conclusion is argued against another
  assumption and so on. Perhaps it is not that
  difficult to understand why Socrates was
  considered a gadfly!
• There is a reason why Socrates employed this
  style, as well as why Plato recorded his
  experience with Socrates in the form of a
  dialogue. Socrates taught Plato a great many
  things, but one of the things Plato more or less
  discovered on his own was that mankind is born
  with knowledge. That is, knowledge is present in
  the human mind at birth. It is not so much that
  we "learn" things in our daily experience, but
  that we "recollect" them. In other words, this
  knowledge is already there. This may explain why
  Socrates did not give his students answers, but
  only questions. His job was not to teach truth
  but to show his students how they could "pull"
  truth out of their own minds (it is for this
  reason that Socrates often considered himself a
  midwife in the labor of knowledge). And this is
  the point of the dialogues. For only in
  conversation, only in dialogue, can truth and
  wisdom come to the surface.
• Plato's greatest and most enduring work was his
  lengthy dialogue, The Republic. This dialogue has
  often been regarded as Plato's blueprint for a
  future society of perfection. I do not accept
  this opinion. Instead, I would like to suggest
  that The Republic is not a blueprint for a future
  society, but rather, is a dialogue which
  discusses the education necessary to produce such
  a society. It is an education of a strange sort
  he called it paideia. Nearly impossible to
  translate into modern idiom, paideia refers to
  the process whereby the physical, mental and
  spiritual development of the individual is of
  paramount importance. It is the education of the
  total individual.

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• The Republic discusses a number of topics
  including the nature of justice, statesmanship,
  ethics and the nature of politics. It is in The
  Republic that Plato suggests that democracy was
  little more than a "charming form of government."
  And this he is writing less than one hundred
  years after the brilliant age of Periclean
  democracy. So much for democracy. After all, it
  was Athenian democracy that convicted Socrates.
  For Plato, the citizens are the least desirable
  participants in government. Instead, a
  philosopher-king or guardian should hold the
  reigns of power. An aristocracy if you will an
  aristocracy of the very best the best of the
  aristoi.
• Plato's Republic also embodies one of the
  clearest expressions of his theory of knowledge.
  In The Republic, Plato asks what is knowledge?
  what is illusion? what is reality? how do we
  know? what makes a thing, a thing? what can we
  know? These are epistemological questions that
  is, they are questions about knowledge itself. He
  distinguishes between the reality presented to us
  by our senses sight, touch, taste, sound and
  smell and the essence or Form of that reality.
  In other words, reality is always changing
  knowledge of reality is individual, it is
  particular, it is knowledge only to the
  individual knower, it is not universal.
• Building upon the wisdom of Socrates and
  Parmenides, Plato argued that reality is known
  only through the mind. There is a higher world,
  independent of the world we may experience
  through our senses. Because the senses may
  deceive us, it is necessary that this higher
  world exist, a world of Ideas or Forms -- of what
  is unchanging, absolute and universal. In other
  words, although there may be something from the
  phenomenal world which we consider beautiful or
  good or just, Plato postulates that there is a
  higher unchanging reality of the beautiful,
  goodness or justice. To live in accordance with
  these universal standards is the good life -- to
  grasp the Forms is to grasp ultimate truth.
• The unphilosophical man that is, all of us is
  at the mercy of sense impressions and
  unfortunately, our sense impressions oftentimes
  fail us. Our senses deceive us. But because we
  trust our senses, we are like prisoners in a cave
  we mistake shadows on a wall for reality. This
  is the central argument of Plato's ALLEGORY OF
  THE CAVE which appears in Book VII of The
  Republic.

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Plato's most famous student was ARISTOTLE
(384-322 B.C.).

• At the age of eighteen, Aristotle became the
  student at the Academy of Plato (who was then
  sixty years of age). Aristotle also started his
  own school, the Lyceum in 335 B.C. It too was
  closed by Justinian in A.D. 529. Aristotle was a
  "polymath" he knew a great deal about nearly
  everything. Very little of Aristotle's writings
  remain extant. But his students recorded nearly
  everything he discussed at the Lyceum. In fact,
  the books to which Aristotle's name is attributed
  are really little more than student notebooks.
  This may account for the fact that Aristotle's
  philosophy is one of the more difficult to
  digest. Regardless, Aristotle lectured on
  astronomy, physics, logic, aesthetics, music,
  drama, tragedy, poetry, zoology, ethics and
  politics. The one field in which he did not excel
  was mathematics. Plato, on the other hand, was a
  master of geometry.

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• For four years, Aristotle served as the teacher
  of a thirteen year old Alexander, son of Philip
  of Macedon.  In 334, he returned to Athens and
  established his school of philosophy in a set of
  buildings called the Lyceum (from a name for
  Apollo, the shepherd).  The beautiful grounds
  and covered walkways were conducive to leisurely
  walking discussions, so the students were known
  as peripatoi (covered walkways).
• First, we must point out that Aristotle was as
  much a scientist as a philosopher.  He was
  endlessly fascinated with nature, and went a long
  way towards classifying the plants and animals of
  Greece.  He was equally interested in studying
  the anatomies of animals and their behavior in
  the wild.
• Aristotle also pretty much invented modern
  logic.  Except for its symbolic form, it is
  essentially the same today.

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• Aristotle's rhetoric has had an enormous
  influence on the development of the art of
  rhetoric. Not only authors writing in the
  peripatetic tradition, but also the famous Roman
  teachers of rhetoric, such as Cicero and
  Quintilian, frequently used elements stemming
  from the Aristotelian doctrine. Nevertheless,
  these authors were neither interested in an
  authentic interpretation of the Aristotelian
  works nor in the philosophical sources and
  backgrounds of the vocabulary that Aristotle had
  introduced into rhetorical theory. Thus, for two
  millennia the interpretation of Aristotelian
  rhetoric has become a matter of the history of
  rhetoric, not of philosophy.

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• His theory of rhetorical arguments, for example,
  is only one further application of his general
  doctrine of the sullogismos, which also forms the
  basis of dialectic, logic and his theory of
  demonstration. Another example is the concept of
  emotions though emotions are one of the most
  important topics in the Aristotelian ethics, he
  nowhere offers such an illuminating account of
  single emotions as in the Rhetoric. Finally, it
  is the Rhetoric too which informs us about the
  cognitive features of language and style.