Notes on Precursor Rhetoricians
Preamble
We could spend an entire semester on work leading up to the first text we have that contains the word "rhetoric," Plato's Gorgias, but we are only interested in the milieu from which classical rhetoric emerged. As with probably all peoples' the Greeks always had people who wondered about the world around them, how the stars worked, how plants worked, how the gods worked, and some of these wonderers wrote down and otherwise shared their thoughts. We tend to group them into "schools" because sorting helps us remember and make sense, but there were no schools in those days. Some of these people knew or knew of each other but all were independent contractors rather than participants in a unified endeavor.
It's impossible for us to know how representative anything that's been left us might be about what existed back then. I selected what I'm including here to set the stage for sophisticated skepticism.
If there is an article about the author, you should read that first, for context, and then read the translation of the work provided here. In some cases all we have is fragments. Then you should read my notes. You don't have to learn this way, of course, but I don't want my thoughts infecting Infecting is a disphonism for influencing. Choosing it was rhetorical, of course. If I really wanted you to draw independant conclusions, I would simply have handed you the text and kept my mouth shut. But then I would be a librarian. your interpretations.
Parmenides
Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy entry on Parmenides
Parmenides' "On Nature"
Parmenides From Wiki: "Parmenides of Elea (fl. late sixth or early fifth century BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Elea in Magna Graecia (meaning "Great Greece," the term which Romans gave to Greek-populated coastal areas in Southern Italy). Parmenides of Elea was in his prime about 475 BC. His floruit is placed by Diogenes Laertius in 504-501 BC. But he visited Athens and met Socrates when the latter was still very young, and he himself was about sixty-five years old; so that if Socrates was about twenty, the meeting took place about 450 BC, making Parmenides’ floruit 475 BC. is a Pre-Socratic philosopher. Some other prominent pre-socratics were Pythagoras, Zeno, Empedocles, and Heraclitus. These people were not Sophists like Gorgias nor rhetoricians per se, although of course by our definitions they had a rhetoric. By and large, these people were sophists in the way the term was used prior to Plato, people who pursued and possessed wisdom. They were interested in physical phenomena, the nature of existence, the origin of life and of the earth. They were also interested in mathematics and geometry, and the connection between words and things. They did not have schools in any modern sense; they lived in different places and at different times, but they have come down to us as originary figures in Western Philosophy and Science. I've included Parmenides in this class as an archetype of anti-rhetorical rhetoric.
There are a lot of very unrhetorical things about Parmenides' poem On Nature (Peri Physis). Unrhetorical not in the sense of un-persuasive, nor un-consciously designed, but unrhetorical in the sense of being based on premises which are opposite the kind of sophisticated skepticism that I associate with rhetoric. What I mean by sophisticated skepticism will come out over the next few days as we read Protagoras, Gorgias, and Isocrates. But just to be clear, I'm advocating a particular perspective on rhetoric, one that entails a world view. You don't have to agree with me.
As far as Parmenides goes, it's important to keep in mind that we have only a piece of the original poem, sections that break down into mere fragments without a context. It isn't easy to make sense of what has been left to us, let alone construct a coherent argument about "what it means", if one is even inclined to such an interpretive stance. Still, there are a number of intriguing ideas here. The idea of "being", or nous, has to do with what it means to exist, what characteristics do all things that exist share (other than existence)? And with it comes the inevitable negation, "non-being". Parmenides would of course have us reject non-being as meaningless, and he would do this by creating a poem, not a speech and not a treatise, both of which are later forms of discourse. He insists that there is something permanent, eternal, unchanging, and even super-spacial (if that's a word) and he calls this being Truth or Aletheia. Each of those qualities is the opposite of the rhetorical qualities most associated with what some people would call "sophistic rhetoric" or what we might call a sophisticated view on how language shapes the worlds we choose to inhabit. Sophisticated rhetoric's key terms are temporary, ephemeral, contextual, and local. Opposed to "Truth" is the idea of relativism, whether radical (some say nihilistic) in the way Gorgias seems to use it, or humanistic (or agnostic) in the way Protagoras seems to use it, or contextual in the way the anonymous author of Dissoi Logoi seems to use it. Sophisticated rhetoric would seem also to eschew metaphysics, so any cavorting with goddesses would be purely imagistic, not to be taken literally (or seriously by the initiated). Parmenides's implied author is also quite dictatorial: A goddess is speaking and one must both listen and obey. "I shall not permit you to say or to think ...", "I shall tell you what paths of inquiry alone there are for thinking."
"Whatever can be spoken or thought of necessarily is" -- is this a kind of psychic realism or something?
"For never shall this be proved: that things that are not are. But do restrain your thought from this path of inquiry, and do not let habit, born from much experience, compel you along this path, to guide your sightless eye and ringing ear and tongue. But judge by reason the highly contentious disproof that I have spoken." This seems like the central assertion, but I'm not sure what to make of it.
View on the limits of human reason: "carried, deaf and blind alike, dazed, uncritical tribes". This is an interesting point of comparison with Gorgias, though their answers, metaphysics on Parms' side and some kind of skeptical rhetoricalism on Gorgs' side, are diametrically opposed.
Practical Rhetoric
Thucydides
Thucydides wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War (431 - 404 BCE) in which he recounted the battles and the speeches that preceded the battles. He is widely regarded as one of the the first historians (Gk. historia, an inquiry). Among the many speeches contained in the work, the most famous is Pericles' Funeral Oration. Pericles (495 - 429 BCE) was the Athenian general at the start of the Peloponnesian war, which was actually three distinct sets of conflicts between Sparta and Athens (with much of the rest of the Greek world mixing in in various ways). This was a battle between city states, but it was also a battle between political ideals, democracy on the one hand (Athens) and oligarchy on the other (Sparta). But in fact there were factions on all sides and other cities were dragged in and allied and alienated during the protracted conflict. In the end, Athens lost. For a time its democratic institutions were replaced with oligarchic ones. Eventually the democratic forces regained the city and executed the oligarchs and their sympathizers. At any rate, early on in the conflict, after the first year of battle, Pericles gave the funeral oration to the people of Athens, to mourn the dead, soothe the mourners, and rally the troops. It is in many ways a traditional piece of standard rhetoric. A public speech about momentous civic matters. I've included it here as a representation of what practical rhetoric might have looked like at the time. But of course this isn't a transcript of an actual speech. It is possible that someone remembered it verbatim and conveyed it to Thucydides or that it was written down and he got a copy of it but it is also possible that he made it up himself. Certainly the The Peloponnesian War contains speeches he could not have heard.
I'm including "The Funeral Oration" here because it is arguably the most famous speech of it's time, like Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" is of ours. It's also an example of a paradigmatic genre of rhetoric, an epideictic speech (Aristotle), one man speaking to a crowd in order to control public sentiment. In this sense it is an example of "practical" rhetoric, a person speaking to a group in order to get something done.
Sophistic "Rhetoric"
The Sophists (see also ) The Stanford Encyclopedia article
Protagoras
Protagoras From Wiki: " (c. 490 BC – c. 420 BC)[1] was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. He is numbered as one of the sophists by Plato. In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato credits him with inventing the role of the professional sophist." is significant to the history of rhetoric because he seems to have contributed several archetypal ideas. All we have left are fragments. Below are what I think are the most rhetorically important ideas.
I'm including Protagoras because some of his fragments underwrite sophisticated skepticism. Below are the fragments that I think suggest a way of perceiving the world which is profoundly rhetorical in the sense of seeing "the world" as available to human creation, not a divine construct but a human one. Protagoras suggests an intellectual transition for mythos to logos, from religious belief to dialectic and logic and rhetoric.
Here are the fragments that seem to underwrite this transition. Keep Parmenides in mind as a counter-balance.
Each of these fragments is worth pondering at length. I'm not asking to question what he might have meant, but rather what you make of the ideas that seem to be here. Do you agree? If so how and why? If you disagree, how and why? What are some of the implications of these ideas if they form premises of a way of being or a way of thinking about how language works?
Gorgias of Leontinoi
Gorgias From Wiki: "Gorgias[a] (483 - 375 BCE)[2] was an ancient Greek sophist, pre-Socratic philosopher, and rhetorician who was a native of Leontinoi in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophists. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger. "Like other Sophists, he was an itinerant that practiced in various cities and giving public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centers of Olympia and Delphi, and charged fees for his instruction and performances. A special feature of his displays was to ask miscellaneous questions from the audience and give impromptu replies."[3] He has been called "Gorgias the Nihilist" although the degree to which this epithet adequately describes his philosophy is controversial.
His chief claim to recognition is that he transplanted rhetoric from his native Sicily to Attica, and contributed to the diffusion of the Attic dialect as the language of literary prose.
is important to the history of rhetoric for several reasons. He is credited with having exported rhetoric from Sicily to Athens when he went to Athens on an Embassy to sue for piece. (427 BCE). He was, apparently, so successful that he stayed on. He is said to have made a show of offering an extemporaneous speech on any subject matter whatsoever, thus starting the tradition of extemporaneous speaking as the goal of rhetorical training. He was known also for his rhythmical, almost poetic, prose style, which many contemporaries thought was over wrought.
I think his I say his but we only have hearsay evidence of the text, whereas we do apparently have the text of his Encomium of Helen. piece "On Being or On Nature" is critical to understanding sophisticated skepticism because it seems to demonstrate or at least offer an exegesis of the idea that language and reality, linguistic representation of ontology is merely representative. Words are not things, but people forget this if they ever knew it and so are convinced that imaginary beasts exist, "beast" here being a metaphor for the whole content of human understanding. Rhetoric is as powerful as it is because people think words are things or that they actually represent things. From Gorgias' perspective, or at least mine on his, once you embrace the idea that words have nothing to do with reality you are liberated from Ideology, Religion, Philosophy, and any other system that would have you "see" the world as being one way or perhaps two ways, one good, the other evil. If you like poetry as a mnemonic tool, I think of Shakira's "Temor," sung ironically: "It's all right. It's all right. The system never fails. The good guys are in power and the bad buys are in jail."
You can believe anything you can say, and you can get others to follow you if you create attractive beliefs, picking up ideas as their expedience becomes apparent and abandoning them the minute they seem no longer useful. But this ultra-rhetorical perspective is fraught with obvious danger (bleach harms the host more than the virus, for example), and it is no wonder that nearly all subsequent rhetoricians tried to dismiss or constrain Gorgias, chief among them Plato who used his representation of Gorgias to promote dialectic, the practice of identifying and securing consensus about what is true through disciplined discourse.
Sextus Empirics' Summary of "On Being"
- Nothing Exists.
- If it did we couldn't know it.
- If we could know it we couldn't communicate it.
"that with which we communicate is speech, and speech is not the same thing as the things that exist"
Is it true that the broader your vocabulary, the richer your experience of the world? Or is it just that you can provide evidence of that experience through expression? Bit of a tree-in-the-forest thing (thought? expression?) that, but worth thinking about, I think.
"so that it is not speech which communicates perceptibles, but perceptibles which create speech" -- relationship between words and things, words and "things" of the mind. Plato called things of the mind ideas, representations of things of the world, i.e., realities. To say that we have ideas in our head, rather than words in our head, is to make something out of something else. On the other hand, if it's all words, and words are "just words" then a great deal of what we do and everything we believe, rests on nothing, "just words". What is it to think wordlessly? Imagistic thinking is an option, though that might shade quickly into symbolic thought, which seems like language again, if not words. At any rate, if we think of words as an intangible medium of exchange (like credit rather than money) then every word-thing rests on agreements and disagreements among people. This way we are not confusing what we can say with what is, nor are we insisting on an absolute division between grammar and ontology; we've created a new category of things -- social networks, a collection of connections between and among people made possible (brought into existence?) by words.
Gorgias' Encomium of Helen
I guess the first thing one notices about this piece is how distinctive the language is. Ponderous, sibilant, antithetical (lots of opposites -- "speak the needful rightly and the refute the unrightfully spoken"). A number of scholars, Susan Jarrett comes to mind, have observed that Gorgias's prose is very poetic and stands in the space between a shift from mythos to logos, from poetic expression of ideas to a more prosaic expression of ideas. This view is supported, somewhat, I think, by the notion that language acts like magic and medicine, depriving people of their consciousness and doing both good and ill.
Sacred incantations sung with words are bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain, for, merging with opinion in the soul, the power of the incantation is wont to beguile it and persuade it and alter it by witchcraft. There have been discovered two arts of witchcraft and magic: one consists of errors of soul and the other of deceptions of opinion.
"what lingers is exactly analogous to what is spoken"
Topic of the greater and the lesser -- "If, being a god, Love has the divine power of the gods, how could a lesser being reject and refuse it?"
Antiphon (ca. 480 - 411)
The First Tetralogy (Login: classical / Password: rhetoric)
By coincidence, perhaps, the Greek word anitphon means opposite voices and The Tetralogies sets of four (tetra) speeches (logies) present arguments for and against an accusation (followed by rebuttal of the accusation and rebuttal of the rebuttal, hence 4 speeches). There is some controversy about who wrote The Tetralogies. Some have argued that there were actually 4 Antiphons, a conservative Athenian politician, a sophist, a poet, and a dream interpreter. The Tetralogies are usually attributed to either the politician or the sophist, or to none of the above. A more recent view, one argued by Michael Gagarin, is that there was really only one Antiphon, the politician who rarely acted publicly but who wrote speeches for others and also speeches for distribution among friends and interested parties, in particular The Tetralogies. (There was no such thing as publication at the time. People sometimes made copies of speeches they had delivered in the courts or the ekklesia, and sometimes they wrote speeches for others to deliver, and sometimes they wrote speeches that were never intended for delivery. Regardless of intention, speeches would sometimes be written down and copies made to be given or sold to other people who used them as models or as entertainment.) For our purposes, paternity disputes don't matter much. The texts are all we have time to be interested in during this brief survey. Nevertheless, here is Gagarin's setup on Antiphon:
Antiphon (ca. 480 - 411) was the first logographer (speech writer); he began writing speeches for use in the law courts about 430-425. Greeks had been giving speeches, of course, in many different settings from the time of Homer, and undoubtedly earlier, but Antiphon was the first to write down a speech for delivery in court" (Gargarin, 2)
He was a leading Athenian intellectual, an important contributor to the debates of the Sophists, and a pioneer in forensic rhetoric who laid the groundwork for this flourishing genre of oratory, especially forensic oratory (7)
Regardless of paternity, The Tetralogies, or four part speeches, represent an interesting take on how one might have practiced (in the sense of prepared for) rhetorical activities in the law courts. They may also represent one form of rhetorical instruction. Given a scenario, write the accusation and then write the defense, then write the rebuttal and then the rebuttal of the rebuttal.
An earlier scholar, Richard Claverhouse Jebb, in a well known book called the The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Iaeos offers this context for Antiphon:
The Tetralogies have this special interest, that they represent rhetoric in its transition from the technical to the practical stage, from the schools to law courts and the ekklesia. Antiphon stood between the sophists who preceded and the orators followed him as the first Athenian who was at once a theorist of rhetoric and a master of practical eloquence. The Tetralogies hold a corresponding place between merely ornamental exercises and real orations. Each of them forms a set of four speeches supposed to be spoken in a trial for homicide. The accuser states his charge and the defendant replies. The accuser then speaks again and the defendant follows with a second reply. The imaginary case is in each instance sketched as lightly as possible; details are dispensed with; only the essential framework for discussion is supplied. Hence in these skeleton speeches the structure and anatomy of the argument stand forth in naked clearness stripped of everything accidental and showing in bold relief the organic lines of a rhetorical pleader's thought It was the essence of the technical rhetoric that it taught a man to be equally ready to defend either side of a question. Here we have the same man, Antiphon himself, arguing both sides with tolerably well balanced force and it must be allowed that much of the reasoning especially in the Second Tetralogy is in the modern sense sophistical. In reference however to this general characteristic one thing ought to be borne in mind. The Athenian law of homicide was precise but it was not scientific. The distinctions which it drew between various degrees of guilt in various sets of circumstances depended rather on minute tradition than on clear principle. A captious or even frivolous style of argument was invited by a code which employed vague conceptions in the elaborate classification of accidental details. Thus far the Tetralogies bear the necessary mark of the age which produced them. But in all else they are distinguished as widely as possible from the essays of a merely artificial rhetoric not less from the displays of the elder sophists than from the declamations of the Augustan age. They are not only thoroughly real and practical but they show Antiphon in one sense at his best. He argues in them with more than the subtlety of the speeches which he composed for others for here he has no less an antagonist than himself he speaks with more than the elevation of his ordinary style for in the privacy of the school he owed less concession to an altered public taste . (The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos, 45-7.) The Attic orators from Antiphon to Isaeos By Richard Claverhouse Jebb
Antiphon is the only Athenian numbered among "the sophists". The other sophists were metics, resident aliens living in Athens, free to pay taxes but not to own land or engage in politics or defend themselves in court. Antiphon was like the other sophists in that he never directly engaged in either politics or law but wrote so that others might engage. The only real speech he ever gave was at his own sedition trial and though he gave what was considered a great speech, he lost and was executed. He had, after all, backed the people who had overthrown the democracy and so when democracy was re-established, there was little anyone might have said to save his life.
See Gagarin, Michael. Antiphon the Athenian : oratory, law, and justice in the age of the Sophists. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.