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 Jiří Kraus

Rhetoric in European

Culture and Beyond

K A R O L I N U M

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Rhetoric in European Culture and Beyond

Jiří Kraus

Reviewed by:PhDr. Světla Čmejrková, DrSc.Mgr. Jiří Lukeš, Th.D.

Published by Charles University in PragueKarolinum Press

English translation by Petra KeyEditor Martin JanečekCover and layout by Zdeněk ZieglerTypeset by Karolinum PressFirst English edition

© Charles University in Prague, 2014© Jiří Kraus, 2014

Translation © Petra Key, 2014

ISBN 978-80-246-2215-6ISBN 978-80-246-2588-1 (online : pdf)

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Charles University in Prague

Karolinum Press 2015

www.karolinum.czebooks@karolinum.cz

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION  ........................................................................................... 9History of Rhetoric – A Motionless History? .................................................... 9

1. THE ORIGIN OF RHETORIC IN ANCIENT GREECE ........................................... 24The Search for Techné ..................................................................................... 24Protagoras’s Agonistic Rhetoric ....................................................................... 29First Teachers .................................................................................................. 31 Ancient Rhetoric as a Model of Persuasive Communication ............................. 33Plato’s Unending Dispute with Rhetoric .......................................................... 34Isocrates’s Programme of Rhetoric in Service of Political Culture ..................... 38 Aristotle as Ancient Rhetoric’s Pinnacle ............................................................ 41On the Art of Persuasion in Rhetoric to Alexander  ............................................... 47

2. HELLENISTIC AND ROMAN RHETORIC  ................................................... 50

The Birth of Hellenistic Philology .................................................................... 50Rhetorical Instruction in the Hellenistic Period ................................................ 54Hermagoras of Temnos and the Stasis  Theory ................................................... 56Rhetoric in Ancient Rome ................................................................................ 60 Rhetorica ad Herennium ( Ad C. Herennium de ratione dicendi libri quattuor ) ........... 61Cicero’s Perfect Orator as a Citizen, an Advocate of Law and a Politician ......... 65Quintillian’s Institutes of Oratory  ........................................................................ 70Pliny the Younger and Tacitus on the Role of Rhetoric

in Imperial Rome ....................................................................................... 73The Second Sophistic and Hermogenes’s Rhetoric as a Stasis System ................ 77

3. RHETORIC AND MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN CULTURE ................................. 84Rhetoric and the Seven Liberal Arts Allegory in Martianus Capella .................. 93 Augustine of Hippo – Preacher, Rhetorician, Polemicist .................................. 94Topica Boethii – Rhetoric in Service of Dialectics ............................................... 99Cassiodorus’s Encyclopaedic View of the Christian World ................................ 102Isidore of Seville and the Origin of Scholastic Education ................................. 104Rhetoric as Part of Grammar: The Venerable Bede ........................................... 105 Alcuin of York: a Teacher of Wisdom and Eloquence ........................................ 107 Artes Praedicandi: The Art of Preaching in the Middle Ages ............................. 108

 Artes Dictaminis: The Art of Rhetoric’s New Face ............................................. 114 Artes Poetriae: Theory and Practice of Written Discourse ................................. 122Rhetoric in Medieval Byzantium ...................................................................... 130

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4. FROM HUMANISM TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Rhetoric during Humanism and Renaissance ................................................... 134Lorenzo Valla, a Renaissance Philologist .......................................................... 137George of Trebizond ........................................................................................ 139Byzantine Rhetoric after the Fall of Constantinople ......................................... 140Rudolphus Agricola ......................................................................................... 143Rhetoric in the Works of Desiderius Erasmus ................................................... 144Philipp Melanchthon’s Authority of Protestant Rhetoric .................................. 148Petrus Ramus and Omer Talon. The Tradition

of Philippo-Ramian Rhetoric Books ........................................................... 150Francesco Patrizi’s Perfetta Rhetorica ............................................................... 155

5. BAROQUE RHETORIC IN SERVICE OF THE CHURCH  ............................. 158Soarez’s Jesuit Rhetoric ................................................................................... 161Caussin’s Figures, Symbols and Emblems ........................................................ 162 Jesuit Rhetoric in Bohemia and Poland. Bohuslav Balbín ................................. 163Protestant Rhetoric and Preaching Textbooks .................................................. 164Bartholomaeus Keckermann and the Gdańsk Rhetoric ..................................... 165 Vossius’s Rhetoric of Rhetorical Affects ............................................................ 166Comenius’s Brethren’s Rhetoric ........................................................................ 167Religious, Political and Cultural Prerequisites

for the Rhetorical Boom in Russia and Ukraine .......................................... 172

6. SCHOLARLY COMMUNITY REPLACED BY THE REPUBLIC

OF LETTERS. 

PHILOSOPHY VERSUS RHETORIC

AT THE THRESHHOLD OF A NEW ERA ................................................... 177Bacon’s Polemical Dialogue with Rhetoric ........................................................ 178Hobbes’s Rhetoric as a Political Weapon .......................................................... 181Bernard Lamy’s Cartesian Inspirations ............................................................. 182

7. TASTE NORMS AND CRITERIA IN 18TH-CENTURY RHETORIC  ................ 186Fénelon’s Rhetoric as an Art of Portraiture ....................................................... 187Du Marsais and His Project of Philosophical Rhetoric ..................................... 188 Vico’s Institutiones oratoriae and Project of a “New Science” ............................... 189Rhetoric, Teaching Refined Taste (Bouhours, Rollin, Dubos) ........................... 190 Adam Smith and Scottish Rhetoric .................................................................. 192Rhetoric in Spain and Gregorio Mayans y Siscar .............................................. 196Philological Orientation of Rhetoric in Germany –

 Johann Christoph Gottsched ...................................................................... 198Lomonosov and the Development of Classicism in Russia ................................ 200

8. RHETORIC IN THE 19TH CENTURY ............................................................ 203Friedrich Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Rhetoric ......................................... 20619th-Century Rhetoric in France. Fontanier’s Semantic Theory

of Tropes and Figures ................................................................................. 20819th-Century Rhetoric in England. Whately, Bain, Spencer ............................... 211

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 Jungmann’s Slovesnost  as Rhetoric for Readers’ Edification and Taste ................ 213

9. RHETORIC IN THE 20TH CENTURY ............................................................ 217

Rhetoric – Inspiration for Language, Literary and Philosophical Discourses .... 220Rhetoric in the United States against Barriers in Communication ..................... 222Rhetoric since the Mid-20th Century in Germany and Austria ........................... 227Theory of Argumentation in the Work of Chaim Perelman

and Stephen Toulmin ................................................................................. 229Rhetoric in the Second Half of the 20th Century in Romance Countries ............ 231

10. OTHER RHETORICAL THEORIES AND OTHER CULTURES  ................... 235

EPILOGUE  ...................................................................................................... 251

NOTES ............................................................................................................ 252

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................... 255

NAME INDEX  ................................................................................................. 264

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INTRODUCTION

HISTORY OF RHETORIC – A MOTIONLESS HISTORY?

The content of rhetorical formulas, the normal method of their arrangementand the terminology used have not changed substantially for over two and

a half thousand years. The path man has taken from the theme of speech toits acoustic and written representation has also remained unchanged. In Sep-tember 1416, after an intensive search which enlivened their participation inthe Council of Constance, Humanists Poggio Bracciolini, Cincio Romanoand Bartolomeo Montepulciano discovered the manuscript of the completeversion of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (Institutes of Oratory) in the Abbeyof St. Gall’s dark cellar. This manuscript, which was more than thirteen-hun-dred years old, became for them and their contemporaries not only a source

of knowledge about the admired past, but also a highly prestigious sourceon the norms of contemporary literary language. A similar situation alsooccurred one hundred years later when Bishop Gerardo Landriani foundCicero’s dialogue  De oratore (On the Orator) among ancient manuscriptsin the north-Italian city of Lodi, a text which had until then been knownonly in an incomplete and distorted version. The discovery was immediatelyfollowed by a wave of Ciceronianism, which resulted in numerous commen-taries on Cicero as well as in the production of Cicero-inspired handbookscultivating the language and style of the cultural elite of the time. UmbertoEco, a representative of modern semiotics, attributes an even longer span ofnorm-setting influence to Aristotle’s Poetics  and Rhetoric. Eco cites many the-oretical and artistic works along with movements in modern linguistics andliterary criticism which are “Aristotelian in their spirit, aims, results, and am-biguities.”1 The listed sources include Poe’s Philosophy of Composition, Warrenand Wellek’s Theory of Literature , Russian Formalism, the Prague School,New Criticism, the Chicago School and motifs in Joyce’s artistic work.

Rhetoric’s defiance of change throughout history is not only due to the

unexpected appearance of canonical works of Greek and Roman antiquity,representing radically different historical and cultural contexts, however,

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what is even more striking is the unchanged format of rhetoric textbooks,which have solidified over centuries. They lack original ideas, repeatingthe same phrases, examples, anecdotes. In his La Rhétorique, ou les Règles de

l’eloquence  (1730), Balthasar Gilbert, a teacher of rhetoric in Mazarin Col-lege at the University of Paris, proudly announces that he is not presentingunproven rules, but that instead he follows the steps of classical authors,such as Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian ( Nous ne promettons donc pas ici des Règles que personne n’ait encore donné: au contraire, nous faisons gloire de ne suivre, en cette matière, que les traces des Anciens ).

The difference between rhetoric textbooks thus generally lies in accentu-ating different elements of exposition. The sum of these differences, in fact,

demonstrates an apparent shift through history. Rhetoric as a practical set ofinstructions for effective communication is interspersed with the reflectionsof contemporary philosophers and thinkers focusing on linguistic and lit-erary style, the logic of the line of reasoning, the psychology of persuasion,and the education of future intellectuals, politicians, advocates and officials.Rhetoric teaches us how to compose texts as well as how to understandboth contemporary and historical literature, how to understand the normswhich determine the process of language stylization. Over the course of its

long history, rhetoric has ceased to be merely a language about a language(a metalanguage) of exclusively public speeches delivered in political gath-erings or before the court, and has changed into a metalanguage of stagesin the development of culture and civilization. It has thus become the keyto interpreting texts, works of art, communication activities and to under-standing the principles of communication in general.

The very role of the cultural metalanguage, however, is itself subjectto change. The strategies essential to rhetoric’s art of “composing an ef-fective and appropriate speech or a written work” were applied whereverstyle as a set method of choosing and organizing means of expression usinga particular repertoire (words, colours, shapes, tones) was essential. Somestrategies and rules came to existence in the democracies of antiquity andin imperial Rome, others in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, baroque,classical eras and yet others have been brought about in the present time.Giorgio Vasari, an Italian mannerist and arts historian, added that this setof rules also contains licences, intentional exceptions from the rules anddeformations.

The process of accepting or rejecting rhetoric textbooks displays con-siderably greater developmental dynamics than their form and organiza-

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tion. Philosophy, science, school and, last but not least, the legal systemswhich have since the 17th century in most European countries graduallyreplaced direct confrontation between the plaintiff and the defendant with

an elaborate system of evidence procedure, have changed their rational andevaluation attitudes towards rhetoric. The identification of 14th–16th-centu-ry humanist principles with rhetoric is simultaneously being replaced byrationalist efforts to free the thinking subject from the hindrances laid inthe path of the processes of cognition and communication by the meta-phorical languages of rhetoric and rhetorical argumentation open to variousconceits. It is these hindrances that Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, had inmind when he warned against the idols of the marketplace arising from the

“intercourse and association of men with each other.” In his introductorynarrative to the Discourse on the Method , René Descartes denies that rhetoricshould have any role in the education of a young man or in the process ofarriving at the truth:

“I placed a great value on eloquence, and I was in love with poetry,but I thought that both of them were gifts given to the mind rather thanfruits of study. Those who have the most powerful reasoning and who directtheir thoughts best in order to make them clear and intelligible can always

convince us best of what they are proposing, even if they speak only thelanguage of Lower Brittany [language of uneducated people, JK] and havenever learned rhetoric. And those who possess the most pleasant creativetalents and who know how to express them with the most adornment andsmoothness cannot help being the best poets, even though the art of poetryis unknown to them.”2 Descartes’ statement is an anticipation of the revoltrepresented by romanticism in art one hundred years later, a revolt directedagainst the binding norms of discourse which can be memorized, againstthe norms which tie down the originality and unique character of an indi-vidual and his style.

The relationship between rhetoric and philosophy in particular was sub- ject not only to numerous antagonisms throughout the course of history,but it also experienced transformations in how it was regarded by society.Henri-Irénée Marrou, a French historian focusing on European education,characterized its beginnings in this way: “The study of rhetoric dominant inall western cultures until that time had begun as the core of ancient Greekeducation and culture. In ancient Greece, the study of ‘philosophy’, repre-

sented by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, for all its subsequent fecundity, wasa relatively minor element in the total Greek culture, never competitive with

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rhetoric either in the number of its practitioners or in its immediate socialeffects.”3

 We can find several reasons why, from the first half of the 17th century,

rationalism and enlightenment led, intentionally or subconsciously, first tolimiting the influence of rhetoric and later to its almost total demise:

(a) The character of expert and scientific, legal and political speecheschanged. Knowledge and conviction were no longer born in arguments, norwere they based in the confrontation of alternative opinions and the abilityto convince the counterpart, but instead it was formed as a result of a trainof thought, which was based on rational judgement or the analysis of provenempirical facts. The imagery arising from the application of rhetorical rules

and the dependence on canonical models gave way to the clarity and sobri-ety of style. This resulted in the emergence of new stylistic models. Sciencewas characterized by an increasing optimistic belief in the unlimited natureof human cognition.

(b) Rhetoric’s decline can also be attributed to book printing and a gen-eral growth in literacy. As the market for books, encyclopaedias and special-ized journals grew and as the role of human memory and spoken languagein official contact declined, rhetoric began to drown in a sea of printer’s ink.

(c) Originality became newly valued, and came to replace the imitatio method, imitating recognized models. Romanticism created a demand forstylistic innovation in fiction based on the innovative rendering of individ-ual experiences. Science, on the other hand, was marked by efforts to formone’s own perception of the world based on empirically collected materialor on one’s own logical assessment. At the beginning of the 16th century inhis Il Principe (The Prince), the Renaissance politician Niccolo Machiavelliintentionally digressed from the established rhetorical model of the moral-izing “mirrors for rulers” ( speculum regis ) and, with mathematical precisionelaborated a strategy for political struggle consistently aiming to achievea set goal: a per fas et nefas victory, a victory by any and every means.

(d) The unity of the international community of learned men fell apart.The role of Latin was replaced by national languages, which gradually de-veloped their own refined and literary forms. An international version ofLatin was no longer the ideal of the time, which was instead representedby the distinctiveness of many languages and many cultures. It was alsothrough legislation that national languages gradually took up their place

in official public communications. Any attempt to refute this developmentby constructing artificial languages for international communication failed.

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The return to a single language of international communication did notoccur until the second half of the 20th century, when this role was assumedby English.

(e) The birth of historical and comparative linguistics shifted research-ers’ interest towards the study of the inner laws of language development,primarily in phonetics and grammar. The rise of Indo-European studies andhistorical-comparative linguistics as a new philological discipline striving todiscover the oldest documented or reconstructed stages of the linguistic sys-tem caused a revolution in learning about language and its laws. The regardfor the functionally differentiated linguistic discourse as the main object ofrhetoric began to disappear and an attempt to create an exact description

of the language took the place of older, normative approaches. As rhetoricwas fundamentally more limited to a set of practical advice and instructions,it ceased to be considered an equal component of philological research andgradually lost its scientific ambitions.

It was philosophers in particular who reacted to this development. JohnLocke called rhetoric a “powerful instrument of error and deceit,” whileKant criticized it for manipulation and rejected it as a tool for critical com-munication, which was the mission of an independent thinker. Leibnitz and

his followers set out the idea of an artificial language, freed from the temp-tations of rhetorical imagery, polysemy and manipulation.The above causes, which originated during the Enlightenment, have,

however, begun to lose their power since the second half of the 20th centuryand, a movement accelerating at the threshold of the third millennium evento the extent that each has been transforming into its very opposite. In thiscontext, the world marked by postmodern discourse has been witnessingthe return of rhetoric. There are several reasons:

(a) Specialized discourse has become “rhetorized”: it has been losing itsimpartiality and objectivity, and reflects an effort to understand the open-ness and plurality of the world, to express a personal attitude and a personalresponsibility for the problem being addressed. Science has been increas-ingly lending more legitimacy to questions with alternative solutions whichare intelligible only within their respective contexts or paradigms. The con-viction that scientific knowledge’s objectivity is an illusion has been gainingstrength. It is remarkable that this view is also held by representatives ofnatural and physical sciences, not merely by those in social sciences. The

role of axiological statements, paradoxes, chance, probability, alternativesand respect for different world views has been growing. There is a new phe-

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nomenon: an individual, subjective scientific style which intends not only todescribe and analyze, but also to persuade on issues which lack a definitivesolution. This style is also often conditioned by the nature of the language,

national traditions and culture. In a direct continuation of the paradigms ofancient rhetoric, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is the person who formedthe modern roots of this pluralist perception of reality.

(b) Thanks to television and numerous new information technologies,public communication at the end of the century rediscovered the role of oraldiscourse. The primary form of public communication by scientists, politi-cians, and representatives of the economic and financial spheres is usuallyspoken; after all, the speed and readiness of the computer and communica-

tions technologies have, to a large extent, erased the traditional differencesbetween the written and spoken language. As was the case of the audienceat Athen’s Agora or the Roman Forum, modern TV viewers can also regis-ter every gesture, every tone of voice employed by the people who speakto them, wanting to persuade them, win their support, make the viewersremember them.

(c) Intertextuality has become an important value: both authors andinterpreters of artistic or political texts use quotes, paraphrases, intentional

and unconscious allusions to other texts. Communication is thus enrichedby another type of context awareness: interdiscursivity, in other words, as-sociating texts with established genre or stylistic models, simultaneouslyin imitation and disruption of traditional means of expression. Imitatio, anancient rhetorical principle, has thus been revived and has become botha communication device and strategy.

(d) Media, particularly television channels, have created a new type ofsupranational auditorium bringing events, whose consequences may af-fect the viewers at any moment, closer. As was the case of ancient Latinor Greek, within this community there are also tendencies strengtheningthe role of languages utilized in international communication; the status ofEnglish has been growing stronger in reflection of the world’s increasingglobalization.

(e) The renaissance of rhetoric has also been supported by the turn to-wards communication in contemporary linguistics. Language is now moreoften being studied in pragmatic, social, logical, psychological and philo-sophical contexts. It was the importance of context that was anticipated by

rhetoric’s accentuation of mastering the mutually permeating disciplines ofthe trivium.

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It is therefore not surprising that the expression “rhetoric,” with itsmany and often contradictory meanings, has lately been spreading quicklythrough the languages of science, mass media, and everyday speech. There

is a growing and legitimate concern that every person understands and judges this discipline differently. We can hear voices calling for modernrhetoric, in terms of language, ideas and ethics, to be elevated to a more so-phisticated form in public speeches and communication in general, but alsothose that reject rhetoric as a synonym for ballast, bamboozling, insincerityor intentionally false argumentation.

This discrepancy in the perception of rhetoric is partially due to its statusin the history of European education. The ability to communicate efficiently

was always perceived as an indispensable part of a person’s and citizen’seducation, as the necessary first stage of mastering practical and theoreticalknowledge, as part of an active as well as contemplative life. However, rhet-oric as a school discipline often succumbed to routine and pedantry. Theseincreased particularly in periods in which freedom of speech as an insep-arable attribute of democracy and a precondition of a statesman’s activityand a citizen’s involvement had to give way to the rigid ceremoniousness ofspeeches strengthening the idea of the unchangeability of the social order.

The contemporary renaissance of rhetoric as a discipline whose contentand terminology have been preserved without major change for over twoand a half thousand years seems surprising. This is principally attributableto the fact that it has been inspired not only by the effort to better under-stand the history of human communication, but also by the content of thedisciplines which are predominantly related to the modern developmentof society, such as the theory of communication, media studies, marketing,persuasive strategies, advertising, argumentation theory, speech act analysisand others.

 We have mentioned the causes for this renaissance, which can also beseen in the rapidly growing bibliography of the discipline. We should addthe topicality of the issue and the historically preconditioned transformationof rhetoric’s central theme: speech, oratio. Not only speech as the generallyunderstood result of the human ability to communicate and achieve under-standing, but also as a reflection of particular conditions which determinethe quality and efficiency of an utterance as to its content and function,and further with respect to the situation in which a communication act is

taking place. In accordance with the content of the fundamental summariz-ing work of ancient rhetorical culture, Quintilian’s  Institutio oratoria, these

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conditions also include the personality of the orator (his knowledge, experi-ence, talent, psyche, moral qualities), the nature of the audience, the systemof language and argumentation means the speaker has at his disposal and,

last but not least, functional and thematic differences between individualtypes of speech, be they to inform (docere ) or amuse (delectare ) the listenerand thus inspire an action or a particular stance (movere ).

 Ancient society perceived rhetoric primarily as an art (technē in Greek, arsin Latin) which taught, according to a systematic set of rules or based on animitation of classical models (mimēsis , imitatio), everyone, even those whowere not endowed with a natural talent for speech-making, to be successfulin expressing their opinions in a given situation, whether at an advisory

assembly, in court or on other occasions. The dominant position of rheto-ric in the education of a citizen as a fundamental part of ancient culturalheritage, however, also places the system of rhetorical knowledge not onlyamong practical skills, but also among scientific disciplines. From its veryoutset, rhetoric acted as technē , experience acquired through practice, andempeiria, routine, but also as an important element in the effort to learnabout and explain reality as epistēmē ,  scientia. That ranked it, along withgrammar and logic (dialectics), among the necessary preconditions for the

study of philosophy and, later, theology. Quintilian characterized rhetoricas bene dicendi scientia (further specifying ad persuadendum accommodare di-cere ), that is, as a purpose “to speak in order to persuade.” The word bene ,meaning “well,” expresses a relatively free choice of stylistic means, com-pared to grammar, where the adverb recte , “correctly,” in the definition rectedicendi scientia, clearly aims at the criterion of language correctness: withoutstylistic and rhetorical licenses. Unlike other scientific disciplines, rhetoricwas closer to the sphere of practical activities; it did not only focus on a di-dactically oriented description and explanation of its main components:language correctness, style, methods of logical argumentation, psychologyof the speaker and listeners, etc., but also on contemplation and practicalinstruction. These were related to many things, including the method ofteaching rhetorical skills, the ethics of persuasion, cultivating political and

 judicial practice. An effort to explain what rhetoric in fact includes, what is the scope of its

knowledge and what is its purpose within the former system of basic liberalarts (trivium), does not always lead to univocal results. This is primarily due

to the changeability of rhetoric in periods of social development, from itsoutset in the ancient  polis  to the present day. In antiquity, in the medieval

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educational system and, with even more intensity, in the spiritual life of theEuropean Renaissance, rhetoric was a central element in the education ofa young man and future intellectual, it assumed a prominent position in the

theory and practice of preaching and also served as a key to interpretingbiblical texts and fiction. It was Cartesian philosophy and, in the arts, theromantics’ revolt against the binding norms of the style of the time thatbrought about its decline and later its almost complete demise.

There are several other reasons why it is difficult to define the contentand meaning of rhetoric more precisely. Their source must be sought inthe controversies surrounding the ethical qualification, and often also dis-qualification, of the discipline which, rather than striving for truthfulness,

focused on the probable and trustworthy in the communicated matter, onthe orator’s artistry in being able to take advantage of the immediate sit-uation to persuade listeners and influence their opinion. In the sense ofPlato’s interpretation of sophism, expressed primarily in Gorgias , rhetoric isunderstood as  peithous demiurgos , the creator and confirmer of the convic-tion, and its main role is psychagogia tis dia logōn, the ability to lead (but alsomislead) human souls by means of words. This is also a source of conflictbetween philosophy and rhetoric, the conflict that Plato raised throughout

his oeuvre. The more philosophy focused on metaphysical questions andeternal and unchangeable certainties, the more dramatic the controversybetween philosophy and rhetoric became. The paradox of the ethical dilem-ma of rhetoric lies in the fact that the vast majority of authors of books onrhetoric and rhetoric textbooks repeatedly emphasized the fact that an or-ator cannot survive without reliable knowledge of the matter he was to talkabout. Philosophical, dialectical knowledge and high ethical standards thusappear to be necessary preconditions for producing an effective speech. Onthe other hand, even philosophers were aware of the fact that without at-tention to their own language and their manner of speaking, in other wordsto rhetoric, they could not effectively convey the results of their learning.Thus, among philosophers we can find both opponents of rhetoric, suchas Plato, Descartes, Locke and Kant, as well as thinkers willing to admitit was a useful or neutral tool for communication, such as Aristotle, Vico,Nietzsche, Ricoeur, Gadamer, Bělohradský. After a firm rejection of rheto-ric as a dangerous weapon of sophist persuasion, Plato himself was willingto admit, in  Phaedrus , to the possibility of real rhetoric, of philosophers’

rhetoric which would talk to a human soul through clear and perfect ex-positions on the just, the beautiful and the good; these expositions should,

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according to Plato, be based directly on the orator’s responsibility for hiswords and acts.

 An ethical dilemma also arose in the relation between rhetoric and the-

ology. Many Church Fathers, educated in the spirit of classical Greek andLatin learning, painfully, even existentially, realized that this educationand culture was pagan and hostile. In this lies the dichotomy between theirproclamations against rhetoric and the need, which they plainly acknowl-edged, to use this knowledge in a preacher’s practice and for exegeticalexposition. This need was often accompanied by an admiration for bothbeloved classical authors and for the power and appeal of their words. Thecontroversy over whether or not the Bible, and the New Testament in par-

ticular, should be included in the list of the canonical classical writers rec-ognized as either rhetorical or linguistic and stylistic models, affected mostChristian authors in the 4th and 5th centuries. This controversial approachis particularly symptomatic of St. Augustin, his contemporaries and closefollowers, but it also appears much later. Even Comenius in his text A Reportand Lesson on Preaching , whose content and organization reveal consistentknowledge of ancient models, outwardly turns away from rhetoric: “And sothat who wants to speak from God’s place shall not use his own, or Cicero’s,

or some courtly words, but words of the Holy Spirit.”4

 When speaking about the connections between rhetoric and ethics, wemust not neglect rhetoric’s role in achieving social consensus. This role hada necessary precondition: the freedom of speech granting every citizen theright to participate in public life and defend himself in court. Ancient rheto-ric is rooted in Athenian democracy and in the political and judicial practiceof republican Rome. Consul Crassus, the main orator in Cicero’s dialogue De oratore  says: “nothing seems to me a nobler ambition than to be able tohold by your eloquence the minds of men, to captivate their wills, to movethem to and fro in whatever direction you please. This art of all others hasever found its fullest development in every free community, and more espe-cially in states enjoying peace and tranquillity, and has ever exercised a dom-inant influence” (I.8). Any suppression of the freedom of speech led eitherto the end of rhetoric or to its transformation into a set of instructions, intosuperficial speech mannerism without much content.

In our effort to define rhetoric in this opening chapter, we naturally can-not avoid a search for a satisfactory reply to the highly topical question of

whether the subjects of this discipline are orally delivered speeches exclu-sively or whether its rules apply across the entire range of persuasive com-

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munication, spoken and written, or even discourses carried out exclusivelyin writing, such as diplomatic correspondence, historical documents, genresof an artistic nature and others. The study of circumstances which led to the

birth of rhetoric as well as the study of the oldest classical texts leads us tothe conclusion that the beginnings of rhetoric are associated with the era ofHomer’s Greece, with its exclusively oral culture, but that it soon also in-cluded the written word. When linking Athenian rhetoric with the practicalactivities of logographers, people who would compose speeches for theirclients (or even wrote them out entirely) and then helped them to memorizethe speech and practice its delivery, there is no reason to think that rhetoricwould focus solely on spoken language.

This development is to a much larger extent linked with how Hellenisticauthors of rhetoric examined not only the advisory, judicial and celebratorydiscourses, which were primarily shaped to be delivered orally, but also theartistic, epistolary, historiographic, philosophical and scientific ones. Thegradual transition from the typically spoken, paratactically arranged sen-tence units, which were easier to remember, to a more demanding syntacticstructure which reveals the possible existence of a primary written modelis evident in the languistic means. The study of ancient and later sources

reveals that many speeches by famous orators of Greek antiquity which havebeen preserved in written form were never publicly delivered and thus wereintentionally created to be works of literature. Isocrates’s Panathenaicus  wassaid to have taken three years to write, while the completion of his  Pane- gyricus , which was famous for its subtle argumentation and the elaboraterhythmic structure of the text, allegedly took ten years. However, records ofpreserved speeches must be generally understood as the outcome of later ed-iting, either carried out by the author himself or someone else. Stenograph-ical records of public speeches are somewhat more authentic. The history ofshorthand mentions, for example, Marcus Tullius Tiro, Cicero’s secretary,known for “Tironian notes.” Even in this case, the original text was linguis-tically adjusted and these adjustments affected both the factual content andthe stylistic effect of the speech.

Rhetoric became particularly closely connected with written texts at thepeak of the Middle Ages, when it was called ars dictaminis  and when privateas well as official (diplomatic, in particular) correspondence was its subject. Ars dictaminis or the art of letter writing (from the Latin verb dictare , which

means not only to dictate, but also to write and produce literary texts, cf.dichten in German) emerged in Italy (in Bologna and Monte Cassino) in the

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12th and 13th centuries and became an essential part of instruction for churchdiplomats and the newly emerging city patriciate. The art of letter writingwas also promoted by the Italian-born founder of the rhetorial tradition in

the Czech Lands, Henricus of Isernia, at the end of the 13th century.Our contemplations on rhetoric thus lead, in accord with the extant de-

velopment which started in antiquity, to the gradually wider understandingof the discipline, whose demands accompany a learned person throughouthis or her life and runs the full gamut of communication requirements.

 What we have left to think about is whether rhetoric focused exclusivelyon monologues (spoken or written) or whether it also included everydaydialogues. The suggestion to an answer can be found in Cicero’s De oratore ,

in which one of the figures says: “[…] not to be always thinking of theforum, its courts of justice, public meetings, and senate, what greater en- joyment can there be in times of leisure, what greater intellectual treat thanthe brilliant discourse of a perfect scholar?” (I.8). Clearly, Cicero and manyof his followers also cared for the cultivation of everyday language:  sermo, conversation, which they distinguished from a speech intended for a widerpublic, and contentio, argument.

 We may thus assume that in antiquity and in later authors, there was

something that could be called rhetorica sermonis . Rhetoric textbooks whichsystematically adhere to the classical structure demonstrate that this indeedis the case. The unknown author of  Rhetorica ad Herennium (Rhetoric forHerennius) ascribes four properties to sermo: dignity (dignitas ), clear expli-cation (demonstratio), ability to narrate (narratio) and facetiousness (iocatio).From the end of the 16th century, these very qualities were included in theeducation of noble ladies, who organized and cultivated conversation inthe newly emerging salons. Generally speaking, with the exception of theserather general recommendations, the theme of private conversation defiedsystematic rhetorical codification in its very essence. According to Cicero,these conversations do not constitute the subject matter of rhetoric, butrather of ethics and an effort to achieve spiritual harmony and friendshipbetween people. Speech (in the sense of  sermo) is a natural ability, whichdistinguishes humans from animals, while cultivated speech, eloquence(eloquentia) is an extension of this, the result of systematic education andlong-term cultivation. The personal character of private conversations didnot exclude highly demanding themes, because after all dialogue, albeit

naturally in the form of artistically treated fiction, has always been an im-portant genre of artistic, philosophical, theological and scientific literature.

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If ancient and, later, Renaissance authors ever paid attention to dialogicalsituations, rather than their language features, they praised the relaxed at-mosphere and friendly spirit, which should prevail, the desire to explain mu-

tual contradictions (to achieve harmony in dissonance), or the willingness toaccompany the conversation with a glass of wine, good food and the joy ofthe surrounding beautiful countryside or architecture. This is suggested bythe names of dialogic genres: convivium, colloquium (inter nos), disputationesmatutinae , in Greek: symposion, deipnon (feast). Thus systematic expositionsin rhetoric textbooks utilized the language of dialogues ( sermocinatio in Lat-in) to adopt only those fixed tropes and figures of speech which give the im-pression that the orator is the listeners’ equal, that he converses with them.

The classification of liberal arts (artes liberales ) understood by ancientauthors to be man’s intellectual creative activities pursued in his free timedetermines rhetoric’s status. In its essence, this discipline, along with act-ing, dance, singing, recitation, sports achievements, is one of practical arts(technai praktikai, artes in agendo positae ), based on performing a particularactivity (actio). In rhetoric, this activity is demonstrated through delivery,whose effect is based on the acoustic properties of speech, gestures andfacial expressions. Efforts to preserve the delivered speech, and many au-

thors even wrote texts without requiring they be delivered orally (Isocrates,Lysias), included rhetoric among the arts targeting a material product (tech-nai poiētikai, artes in effectu positae ). This product was a piece of work, opus ,created by an author, artifex, complying with certain rules, praecepta. Unlikepractical arts, in which the spectator or listener, spectator or auditor , encoun-ters a narrative, which is only preserved in his memory, the reader of poetry,along with the observer of sculptures, paintings and buildings, can return tothese works because they are always available to him. Finally, rhetoric alsobelongs among the theoretical arts (technai theōretikai, artes in inspectione re-rum positae ), which are based on observing and evaluating things. It focusesneither on the actor , the orator, actor, athlete, nor on the artifex, the poet,painter, sculptor, composer, as was the case in the previous categories, butrather on the reader and listener (theōros ), who may be a lay observer, butalso a critic or qualified researcher. The almost two-and-a-half-thousand-year development of rhetoric is thus marked by the alternating accentuationof its affiliation with the first, second or third category of human skills.

The history of rhetoric is, in fact, a history of the culture of a public

discourse. This also means that the contemplations of the first generationauthors of books on rhetoric with striking accuracy anticipated the content

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formation of an international community of learned men. The key to partic-ipation in this community in Europe for many centuries was principally theknowledge of Latin. However, even after this was gradually replaced by na-

tional languages, rhetoric did not cease to fulfil its integrationist role. Beforethis, it had instilled order in individual genres, stylistic and compositiontechniques, had passed on the traditional loci communes .5 Along with this,it also formed an educational system which enabled students to effortlesslychange schools and universities, thus strengthening their awareness of anintegrated community of intellectuals.

Rhetoric in itself has not only been the result of integration tendenciesin European thinking and communication, but also greatly contributed to

their formation. It was based in the four main pillars of European thought –the Greek love for wisdom, the Roman belief in justice, embodied by thesystem of Roman law, the Judeo-Christian notion of religious belief andthe Renaissance trust in man and in the power of his creative skills. In thissense, rhetoric, open to future development, never ceased to serve as thekey-stone to the arch of European education and culture, which continuesto rest on these pillars.

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1. THE ORIGIN OF RHETORIC IN ANCIENT GREECE

THE SEARCH FOR TECHNÉ

The capacity to use the power of words to tell a story and to persuade oth-ers was highly respected throughout antiquity, the foundation of European

education. Although the spread of the word and concept of rhētorikē , rheto-ric, was associated with Plato’s dialogues, rhetorical skills were esteemed asearly as the Homeric period of Greek history. In Homer’s  Iliad  and Odyssey,the rhētēr , rhetor, also sometimes called the rhétér mythōn, the narrator ofancient stories, was a highly regarded authority, who could, like the sageNestor, speak in public, give advice, captivate, win general consent and ad-miration. This is also related to the words rhēsis, rhētra, speaking, narration,utterance, speech discourse, and rhētos  which refers to what has been said,

uttered, or named. Rhetoric was the art of mastering the word, logos , as wellas a discipline which rationally reflected on the different uses of the logos,captured its laws and attempted to codify them through an arranged set ofrules.

Documents regarding life in ancient Greece and the earliest referencesto political and judicial speeches make manifest that the rise of rhetoric asa discipline focusing on technē , persuasive speech making, is many decadesolder. It is particularly Thucydides’s History of The Peloponnesian War  whichdemonstrates that ancient politicians and military leaders made speeches.This is undoubtedly true of Pericles’s speech over the fallen (epitafios logos )during the war’s first year. The authenticity of the preserved extract is, how-ever, questionable and it was likely the subject matter of later stylization.Speeches by politicians and leaders, which very likely lacked written prepa-ration, were thus preserved only in paraphrase. In Phaedrus , Plato uses thecharacter of Phaedrus to claim that: “…the greatest and most influentialstatesmen are ashamed of writing speeches and leaving them in a writtenform, lest they should be called Sophists by posterity” (Plat. Phaedrus 235).

On the other hand, speeches delivered in court were preserved in manycollections and their authorship ascribed to famous logographers. These

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speeches, often recognized as practical models for further speech making,were preserved in libraries and even traded. Oldest among the canon ofancient orators was Antiphon of Ramnos (ca. 480–411 BCE), a supporter

of the oligarchic Four Hundred government, which was later overthrown.His works were compiled by Caecilius of Calacte at the beginning of themodern era. Three of his court speeches concerning murders, along with15 speeches written for other occasions, have been preserved in full andanother 60 are known of either from fragments or by name. Antiphon wasalso possibly the first orator who preserved his court speeches in writingand sold them for money, as was ironically noted in Aristophanes’s comedyThe Wasps (422 BCE).

From the outset, however, rhetoric did not include all speech functions,and instead primarily focused on those aiming to influence the audience ata particular moment and through particular circumstances surrounding thespeech. It was the orator’s task to take advantage of anything that couldhelp persuade the audience in the given situation. The earliest teachers ofrhetoric did not merely formulate the principles of an effective speech, butalso persuaded the audience that these principles could be learnt at school.The Czech philosopher Jan Patočka characterized the dissemination of an-

cient rhetoric in the following manner: “Educating people to enable themto engage in political life, to provide them with an instrument for success inthis life primarily meant teaching them rhetorical skills, teaching them thepower of speech.”6

Since its outset, rhetoric has been based on two fundamental prerequi-sites: freedom of speech,  parrēsia, and freedom to act, which allowed theaudience to lean towards the most persuasive of the possible behaviouralvariants, towards the best of presented arguments, without being forcedto take a particular stance. Rhetoric thus does not concern the domain ofirrefutable knowledge, apodeixis , or threats and verbal violence, instead itfocuses on the area of opinion, doxa. Stoic philosopher Zeno of Citium illus-trated the difference between dialectic, whose realm consists of irrefutablepropositions, and rhetoric, which seeks what appears probable (eikos ), bycomparing the symbol of a firmly closed fist (a succession of logical proofs)with the symbol of an open hand (the strategic arrangement of rhetori-cal arguments). The etymology of the Greek words  peithein, to persuade,and  pistis, persuasion, are close in meaning to the Latin word  fides , faith,

clearly expressing the extent of freedom and personal involvement whichdistinguishes the subject matter of rhetoric from what a man perceives as

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necessary and thus immutable. The etymology of the Latin verb persuadere ,to persuade, provides yet another perspective on the essence of rhetoric: theassumed Indo-European basis svadūs , sweet, pleasing (corresponding to the

Slavic root sladk-, English sweet  or German süss ), evokes an activity related todelight and intoxicating illusion, something rhetoric has been reproachedfor since Plato’s time.

The prestige of an appropriately delivered speech and, to the same de-gree, an awareness of the effects of words, cultivated by reciting rhapsodiesand ancient drama, these are the foundations from which rhetoric sproutedin the 5th century. Impulses for its formation arose from two significant po-litical transformations within Greek society: from Ephialtes’s justice reform

and Cleisthenes’s democratic constitution, which enacted a new system ofcity administration. Both changes caused an unprecedented surge in civicactivities fundamentally connected with increased demands for political and

 judicial oratory.These demands became manifest most notably in judicial practice. In

462 BCE, Ephialtes, the leader of the democratic party in Athens, intro-duced the institution of jury and appellate courts, hēliaia, which replacedthe judicial power of the traditional aristocratic council, areopagus. After

the establishment of hēliaia, the traditional aristocratic council which wasmade up of life-members, archons , it was assigned the duty of making de-cisions concerning capital crimes. The hēliaia had 6,000 drawn jurors (hēli-astai) who made decisions in councils (discateria), with the number of jurorsfor individual hearings ranging from 201 to 1501. They did not have anyspecialized judicial education and could only be informed about the casefrom the speeches delivered by the prosecution and defence. The jurorshad to swear that they would be impartial (homoios ) and that they wouldnot allow personal relationships or animosities to affect their judgement.The prosecutor and defendant were not only to provide a convincing de-scription of the case, but also to apply and interpret any pertinent laws. Ineach lawsuit, views and opinions were to be presented by the individual andnobody was allowed representation. The only help to be used was that ofa paid expert, logographer , who wrote the speech and rehearsed its deliverywith the client.

This was the origin of the oldest types of court speeches (dikanikon genos ): accusation (katēgoria) and defence (apologia). As Aristotle states

(Rhet. 1359b), they concern actions that have or have not occurred in thepast and it is the role of the hēliastic court to judge these actions from a legal

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 apatē , an illusion, among the audience, is what rhetoric and magic have incommon. Rhetoric as a rationally developed skill, technē , is contrasted withthe commonly used and misused view of speech which acts like a power-

ful ruler (dynastēs megas ) capable of manipulating people, akin to deceitinspired by unearthly beings (entheos epoidos ), magical power (dynamis ) andsorcery ( goēteia). Both principles, the factual and magical, are ever-presentin the semantic field of rhetoric and the contradiction between them inspiresnumerous reflections on the role of the word in human community.

The modern view of rhetoric’s history is marked by significant changesin the perception of the role of celebratory speeches in ancient society. Theywere originally perceived as unimportant as they did not urge the audi-

ence to make weighty decisions or engage in activities, as was the case with judicial and political speeches, but merely to think about methods usedin depicting the topic and the aesthetic values of the linguistic means em-ployed. This effectively made the orators’ role closer to that of playwrightsor actors. Epideictic speeches also generally lacked the controversial char-acter of opposing views, and the listener was not enthralled by the duel ofideas, agōn, but rather by the speaker’s stylistic virtuosity, sometimes lapsinginto mannerism. A speech delivered on a festive occasion became a social

ritual. In ritual, what is said is necessarily subservient both to the momentand time in which it is said and the methods the speaker uses to convey this.Speech in itself becomes an important social act, and it is through this actthat the audience realizes the cohesion of its shared values, which combineto delineate the community’s fate and future. The epideictic genre gave birthto Greek patriotism and awakened the awareness of allegiance to their an-cestors’ ideas while simultaneously pinning their hopes in the generationsto come. The epideictic genre may be illustrated by Thucydides’s impressiverendition of Pericles’s funeral oration over the fallen in the Peloponnesian

 War (Thuc. 2.36).Due to the emergent social reality, free Greek citizens had no choice

but to face the pressing need to learn the art of oration, to master the mostimportant tool for political success – logos, the art to prove, the power ofspeech. This task was assumed by travelling teachers of rhetoric, Sophists( sofistai, promoters of the principles of practical wisdom), who innovatedteaching, being the first to charge fees. In Plato’s dialogue  Meno, Socratesclaims he “knew of a single man, Protagoras, who made more out of his

craft than the illustrious Pheidias, who created such noble works, or any tenother statuaries” (91d). What and how Sophists taught we only know from

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their opponents, as it was they who, in their works, preserved statements ofthe earliest Sophist exponents, albeit in escalated or ironical form. Harshcondemnations of Sophists and their concept of rhetoric is an omnipresent

theme throughout Plato’s dialogues, who thus stands at the outset of long-term conflict between rhetoric and philosophy. In reality, however, the con-tradiction between the Sophists’ epistemological relativism and the constantrealm of Plato’s ideas attest to the fact that this concerns a conflict withinphilosophy itself which has continued to the present day.

Only recently have researchers such as Hans Blumenberg7 credited theSophist merit with turning the attention of Greek philosophy from cosmo-gonic and metaphysical questions to everyday problems and free discussions

on civic matters. Blumenberg realized that as long as man strove to graspthe world in its totality through philosophy and as long as he needed toreassure himself of the existence of the unchangeable metaphysical truth,sophistry must have represented a deterrent careless error in the matters ofspiritual life and morals.

PROTAGORAS’S AGONISTIC RHETORIC

Considering that rhetoric coalesced as a discipline relatively late, theteaching of Protagoras of Abdera, representative of the first generationof Sophists (some believe he lived between 485–415 BCE, others between500–430 BCE), are not associated with rhetoric as technē , but rather with thefact that this philosopher, for the first time in history, examined language,logos , as an independent subject of research. Language loses its seeminglyunproblematic nature and becomes an important tool of framing strategicbehaviour. Protagoras does not consider meaning to be the reflection ofan unchanging concept of a thing, rather that it takes on its own life andchanges in the process of communication and interpretation. In his teach-ing, Protagoras thus anticipated the thesis that the use of language is nota neutral and transparent reflection of inherent semantics, but is insteadintentional or unintentional influencing, which is part of the battle (agōn)between the two participants in a controversy. This leads to an interest incultivating dialectic skills in a discourse which manipulates words and po-tentially even transform their meanings to their very opposite. This manip-ulation is applied in monologues as well as in solving a problem through

dialogue, asking short, and often artful and leading questions, which latercame to be known as the Sokratikos logos.

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Protagoras believed that rhetorical and political skills (aretē ) could beacquired through systematic teaching and practice. This idea could be fullydeveloped only after rhetoric had elaborated its own system based on the

arrangement of speech, the semiotic relation between the form and meaningof words, as well as the laws of dialectics. Protagoras favoured analogy asa method of argumentation.

Protagoras made a special contribution to Sophistic rhetoric with histhree claims. The first is the homo mensura maxim, the second is the notionof duo logoi and, finally, the claim that an orator must be able to “make theweaker argument appear the stronger.”

Czech philosopher Jan Patočka sees the importance of Protagoras’s claim

that “man is the measure of all things ( pantōn tōn chrēmatōn anthrōpos metronestin); of things that are not, that they are not; of things that are that theyare” in that “no matter what one chooses from reality, no matter whetherhe means it in this or the opposite manner, every opinion will always belegitimate in it.”8 This potential for conflict is developed by another of Pro-tagoras’s claims: every argument can be met with a counterargument (dissoilogoi). However, this does not mean that both arguments are of equal value.

 An orator has to ensure that the argument he supports does not ultimately

end in a disadvantage, even though it may be or seem to be weaker. Thisis the origin of Protagoras’s frequently criticized requirement ton hettō log-on kreitō poein, to make a weaker argument stronger. The attribute “weak-er” does not necessarily mean, as Protagoras in particular and Sophists ingeneral were reproached, that it is a false argument or an argument that ismorally unjustifiable. On the other hand, logos  may become weaker due tovarious external and unfavourable circumstances. “And this is where theimportance of rhetoric, the art of orator’s logos, lies: making the issue atstake valid under any circumstances,”9 says Patočka highlighting Protago-ras’s “lawyer’s mentality” and “lawyer’s philosophy.”

Protagoras’s claim regarding the contrast between stronger and weakerlogoi leads to the conclusion that any decision regarding the validity of eitherone can only be made through a clash of arguments, through efficient work( poein). This is where the art of persuasion through efficient speech, the artof rhetoric, has its origins.

The homo mensura claim has also been subject to many analyses and in-terpretations throughout the history of philosophy (Taureck, 1995). While

in the past, many philosophers considered this to be one of the most an-cient formulae of gnoseological relativism, contemporary scholars continue

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to search for the link between the Sophists and Wittgenstein’s theory oflanguage-games which determine the grammar of a language and, hand inhand with this, human behaviour in the world. Michel Foucault also claims

allegiance to Sophist teachings in his belief that every social system createsits discourse in order to gain and secure power. Phrased generally, Protag-oras’s claim that man is the measure of all things is most clearly supportedby those philosophical movements that are based on the assumption thatman is not able to mirror or represent “real things as such.” The world isaccessible to him only through his social experience, through his measure.

FIRST TEACHERS

Corax and Tisias are considered to be the first teachers of rhetoric. Theywere both from Sicily, where the tradition of Empedocles’s impressive rhe-torical art was undoubtedly still alive while they taught there. The demo-cratic revolutions in Acragas (472 BCE) and Syracuse (466 BCE) createdunusually favourable political circumstances for rhetoric’s rise. Corax isoften ascribed authorship of the art of oratory’s oldest textbook, whileTisias is believed to have divided speeches into three parts: introduction

( prooimion), the treatise (agōn, struggle) and conclusion (epilogos ). The mainbody of the speech, the treatise, was further subdivided into a descriptionof the event (diēgēsis ) and justification of orator’s viewpoints ( pistis ). Thisfirst era also witnessed the rise of teaching the three essential prerequisitesfor mastering rhetoric; natural talent, mastering the rules of rhetoric andpractice.

The practices of Sicily’s orators spread to Athens thanks to Gorgias of Le-ontini (ca 483–380 BCE), who arrived there in 427 BCE, having been sent byhis community to head a delegation seeking assistance in their fight againstSyracuse. The mission was not successful and Leontini was destroyed byits more powerful neighbour within three years, however Gorgias’s arrivalin Athens was of immense significance for the history of rhetoric and thusfor the overall cultural development of ancient Greece. In Athens, Gorgiasgained not only a great deal of money and many pupils from his teaching,but also many opponents. Plato regarded him as someone “who sees thatlikelihoods are to be more esteemed than truths, who makes small thingsappear great and great things small by force of words; who talks of what

is new as though it were old, and of what is old as though it were new”(Phaed. 276a). Gorgias is remembered in history as an orator rather than

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as a philosopher. Of his work, only a few textual fragments and two decla-mations,  Encomium of Helen (Helenés enkomion) and  Defence of Palamedes(Palamēdous apologia), have been preserved.

Both declamations, the first of which is a tribute to, the other a defenceof literary characters, may merely be examples of model texts for rhetoricalpractice, their goal being to prove that a person who has mastered the artof logos can speak highly on the topic at hand, or, conversely, completelydishonour it. In reality, what the two declamations concern is not a trib-ute to a beautiful woman or a defence of Odysseus’s adversary, but rathera tribute to and defence of speeches and the art of rhetoric. It is the magicalpower of logos that is able to refute even such a deeply rooted belief as the

general conviction that it was the beautiful Helen who was guilty of start-ing the Trojan War. Both declamations are characterized by Gorgias’s useof conventions distinguished by effusiveness and closeness to the poeticrhythm of speech, including paronomasia (repetition of the same or similarword roots), antithesis (the use of opposites to formulate paradoxical con-clusions wherein the opposition of expressions is heightened by assonanceand rhyme), parison (a figure based in the use of the same number of wordsor syllables in adjoining text segments). Gorgias’s exalted stylistics may be

contrasted with that of Lysias, an orator and logographer, whose speeches,quite probably composed as models for practice in schools of rhetoric, arecharacterized by a shift towards the simple vernacular and straightforwardand natural expression.

Later quotations in Sextus Empiricus’s works also reveal the focus ofGorgias’s philosophical work On Non-existence or On Nature (Peri tou mēontos ē peri fyseōs), a paradoxical escalation of the principles of Eleatic di-alectics. According to ancient authors, its content centres on three scepticalclaims: “Nothing exists. – If anything did exist, we could not know it. – Ifwe could know that something existed, we would not be able to communi-cate it to anyone else.” The German researcher Heinrich Gomperz10 does notconsider these statements to be a starting point of the compact philosophi-cal concept of relativism, but as an attempt to demonstrate alternatives theart of rhetoric may offer to man; after all, Gorgias’s contemporaries calledhim an orator rather than a philosopher. For, as Wilhelm Nestle11 and Wil-helm Windelband12 point out, it cannot be ruled out that in wording hisclaims, Gorgias intended to ridicule and disparage the subject of research

along with the metaphysical focus of philosophers who opposed both rhet-oric and Gorgias.

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ANCIENT RHETORIC AS A MODEL OF PERSUASIVE COMMUNICATION

Preserved extracts of Sophists’ works demonstrate that they were concerned

with educating people in order to play an active role in political life. A suc-cessful politician’s main tool was mastering the power of speech as had beenproved by Empedocles, a philosopher and polymath from Acragas, who haddeveloped a literary tradition of effective oratory which was once typical ofthe wise old men in Homer and Hesiod’s works. It was Empedocles’s schoolthat Gorgias and Protagoras’s work was based on.

 When comparing Protagoras’s and Gorgias’s teaching of persuasivespeech, we can see one fundamental difference despite the many shared fea-

tures. According to Protagoras, the speaker and listener can exchange roles,their behaviour is based on symmetry represented by a dialogue in whicheach party tries to assert their view, each wants to dominate their partnerand opponent, to influence their opinion through the quest for the best pos-sible arguments. Gorgias’s orator, on the other hand, stands high above theaudience and is able to manipulate them thanks to his mastery of the art ofwords and the ability to use logical proofs and paradoxes. The relation hereis one of asymmetry, along with a monologue characterized by the orator’s

virtuosity and the audience’s speechless astonishment and admiration. It isboth the apparent and the hidden presence in both these models, adaptableto any communicative situation, that concurrently anticipate the entire fu-ture development of rhetoric.

Sophist instruction was based on a technique using the analysis and im-itation of examples. This is also indicated in preserved texts, such as  Dis- soi logoi, a collection of opposing arguments, written around 400 BCE andchallenging the moral contrast between good and evil, beauty and ugliness,

 justice and injustice, and Antiphon’s Tetralogy, a collection of court cases inwhich arguments in favour of a certain view alternate with those againstit. The  prooimia, examples of introductory speech sections and ascribedto Demosthenes, represents a similar textbook. Similarly, it is likely thatboth preserved declamations by Gorgias had the function of paignion or jeud’esprit , sample texts for stylistic practice. Eristic exchanges (eris , wrangle,strife) as described by Plato in his dialogue Euthydemos  also frequently hadthe character of paignia. Eristic practice focused primarily on the techniqueof argumentation and finding solutions to logical paradoxes and polysemy.

The Sophists’ educational practice, which was based on the principle ofthe capacity to learn Greek areté , along with their focus on the technical

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aspects of persuasion, stylisation and logical formalism exposed rhetoric tofundamental criticism from philosophers. This criticism is most relentlessand most forthright in Plato’s work.

PLATO’S UNENDING DISPUTE WITH RHETORIC

Plato devoted two of his dialogues, Gorgias and Phaedrus , to rhetoric and thepossibility of mastering its principles. In reality, however, his argument withSophists pervades his entire body of work. He calls into question the notionof the orator’s competence and its relation to general civic and human com-petence. Using Socrates, the main character in all his dialogues, Plato asks

to what extent the rhetorical aretē can not only teach a person the techniquesof convincing speech, but also make him good in the sense of the Greekagathos , which includes the meanings of “beneficial for the community” and“just.” What Plato was searching for was consistent liberation of the no-tions of aretē and agathos  from Sophistic relativism. If he concedes anythingto rhetoric’s legitimacy as a discipline whose goal it is to induce opinions(doxazein) through speech, it is only when it is subordinated to philosophy.Philosophy is the only discipline that should lead people, through “recollec-

tion” (anamnesis ) to the eternal and motionless world of Forms and Ideas, totrue wisdom as the highest good. It must be conceded that even philosophymay need rhetoric. Within Platonic paradigms, because truth cannot becommunicated, philosophy has to use foreign and auxiliary means to conveyits principles. They may be myths that embody metaphysical notions includ-ing live images and pictures, or rhetorical performances which in themselvescannot fully convey their philosophical content, but they can encourage andinspire learning.

Plato refuted rhetorical ontological validity, as it only creates the illu-sion of truth rather than truth itself, as well as epistemological validity asit only examines opinions and fails to search for true knowledge. Similarly,he rejected the Protagoras’s model of speech communication between twoequal partners and their arguments, as this model also lacks ethical values,with its sole purpose being to make a weaker logos stronger. In  Phaedrus ,he says of Protagoras that “he can put a whole company of people into andout of a passion through his mighty magic, and is first-rate at inventing ordisposing of any nature of calumny on any grounds or none” (Phaed. 267c).

Plato holds that the truth does not arise as the result of mutual agree-ment and exchange of opinions, rather that it exists a priori and is accessible

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only through philosophical understanding. No speech contains absolutetruth, the most it can do is strive for truth, which is why it cannot be com-municated in complete form, it may only stir up the listener to participate in

the search. Plato’s attitude to rhetoric is revealed in his Theaetetus  dialogue,in which he seeks an answer to the question of what knowledge (epistēmē )is and how it is approached differently by the Sophists and philosophers.The identification of real knowledge through personal experience, as pro-fessed by Protagoras, is deceptive because, based on sensory perception ofchanging things, we can merely form an opinion, not acquire real and trueknowledge.

Despite his open hostility to rhetoric, Plato was deeply interested in its

technical aspects, particularly in dialectical thinking, the meaning of wordsand the structure of speeches. This is demonstrated both in the stylistic andcompositional brilliance of his texts and examples of the speeches Socrates,his main protagonist, delivers (such as the funeral oration in  Menexenus  orthe celebration of love in Phaedrus ). In both the Cratylus  and the philosoph-ical digressions in the Seventh Letter , he argues against the claim that wordsare the only and reliable means of knowing reality. This dialogue furthersan old dispute brought forth from Sophists as to whether a word’s form is

predicated by its meaning or created by convention. In Plato, words arenot exact copies of things and so they do not represent the substance ofexistence, and instead merely serve as one of the tools for learning about it.It is thanks to Cratylus  that we are fully able to understand Plato’s opinionsof rhetoric. For Sophists, words were something whose meaning was to beconstantly renewed, something also encroached upon by logical paradoxesand semantic shifts. Words are employed more to influence listeners thanthey are to label. Plato, however, is convinced that using linguistic meansacting in the service of the truth that is being discovered.

Plato voices his criticism of rhetoric most openly in his dialogue Gorgias ,seeing in rhetoric the danger that it can enable an ignorant person to bemore persuasive than a knowledgeable one. If a speaker does not have trueknowledge of the thing itself, rhetoric becomes a mere knack (empeiria),equal to cookery, which simply produces pleasing and agreeable sensationsthrough flattery. Pleasure as a result of ingratiating flattery does not, how-ever, protect from lies and so it is not equal in meaning to good (agathon),which is a spiritual value, an achievement of order in both the human soul

and universe. This notion of good can only be attained through dialecticcontemplation, based on modesty ( sofrōsynē ) and far from the swings of spir-

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it and passions that characterize Gorgiasian effusiveness. The end of thedialogue rejects rhetoric on the grounds that, although it does attempt todefend people against injustice, it is incapable of eradicating something far

worse: committing injustice.Unlike Gorgias ,  Phaedrus , which was probably written later,13 acknowl-

edges rhetoric as an option. In Phaedrus , Plato continues to reject the Soph-ists’ rhetoric, instead outlining a philosophers’ rhetoric which enables thesoul to access the truth embodied in the ideas of justice, good and beauty.

 An orator should not persuade their listeners of the existence of these ideas,but rather lead their souls to recall them.

 We shall endeavour to construct the technē  of this ideal rhetoric based

on Plato’s dialogues. According to its strictures, an orator should be able todialectically define a notion, divide (diatemnein) it into genera and species,understand both the role of definition and the logical relations betweennotions (koinōnia).

His teachings regarding the soul and varieties of human nature occupyan important place in Plato’s system of rhetorical knowledge. In  Phaedrus ,Socrates says “Oratory is the art of enchanting the soul, and therefore hewho would be an orator has to learn the differences of human souls – they

are so many and of such a nature, and from them come the differences be-tween man and man. Having proceeded thus far in his analysis, he will nextdivide speeches into their different classes: – ‘Such and such persons,’ hewill say, ‘are affected by this or that kind of speech in this or that way,’ andhe will tell you why. The pupil must have a good theoretical notion of themfirst, and then he must have experience of them in actual life, and be able tofollow them with all his senses about him, or he will never get beyond theprecepts of his masters. But when he understands what persons are persuad-ed by what arguments, and sees the person about whom he was speakingin the abstract actually before him, and knows that it is he, and can say tohimself, ‘This is the man or this is the character who ought to have a certainargument applied to him in order to convince him of a certain opinion;’ –he who knows all this, and knows also when he should speak and when heshould refrain, and when he should use pithy sayings, pathetic appeals, sen-sational effects, and all the other modes of speech which he has learned; –when, I say, he knows the times and seasons of all these things, then, andnot till then, he is a perfect master of his art”(Plat. Phaedrus 271c–272b).

Socrates’s criticism of Lysias’s paean to love in  Phaedrus  is a remarkableexample of the stylistic analysis of a speech (many researchers agree that the

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quoted examples in reality represent a selection from several of Lysias’s textscompiled by Plato). Essentially, it is a comparative analysis as, through-out the dialogue, the same subject matter is addressed by Socrates himself.

His young partner in discussion, Phaedrus, at first does not hide that he isthrilled by Lysias’s composition, he has even copied the text and learnedit by heart. Socrates, on the other hand, only hesitantly acknowledges toa portion of its merits, in which we are able to identify aspects of stylisticevaluation used at the time: it is comprehensible ( safe ), concise ( strongyla),each word is chosen carefully and accurately (akribiōs )14. He is, however, notsatisfied with the arrangement, the structure of the text: “I thought […] thathe repeated himself two or three times, either from want of words or from

want of pains” (Plat. Phaedrus 235a).“To me he ostentatiously appeared to exult in showing how well he couldsay the same thing in two or three ways” (Plat. Phaedrus 235a). Socratesthen presents his own elaboration on the theme and summarizes his per-ception on text composition, pointing out the importance of “dividing ac-cording to different contexts and along natural formations, locating thenatural intersections, not breaking any part as a bad carver might” (Plat.Phaedrus 265c). Plato again summarizes his concept of rhetoric in Phaedrus  

by emphasizing the necessity of a philosophical base in the art of oratory:“Until a man knows the truth of the several particulars of which he iswriting or speaking, and is able to define them as they are, and having de-fined them again, to divide them until they can be no longer divided, anduntil in like manner he is able to discern the nature of the soul, and discoverthe different modes of discourse which are adapted to different natures,and to arrange and dispose of them in such a way that the simple form ofspeech may be addressed to simpler nature, and the complex and compositeto more complex nature – until he has accomplished all this, he will be un-able to handle arguments according to the rules of art, as far as their natureallows them to be subjected to art, either for the purpose of teaching orpersuading” (Plat. Phaedrus 277b–277c).

It may not be surprising if we conclude our exposition on Plato’s rhetoricby saying that its communication model is as asymmetric and unidirectionalas that of Gorgias. Unlike Gorgias, whose superiority is based in the magicand virtuosity of speech, Socrates finds his confidence through dialecticalcontemplation and an understanding of philosophy. The strategy of Socra-

tesian reasoning, however, does not allow his partner to become an equalparticipant in the dialogue, instead directing him to the pre-determined

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goal. That is why in the dialogue Theaetetus , Socrates remarks that from hismother Phainarete he inherited technē maieutikē , the art of obstetrics, whichhe understands metaphorically as the ability to help bring ideas to life based

on his own intentions. Protagorian argumentation cannot offer an escaperoute from this circle enclosed by the maieutic method.

ISOCRATES’S PROGRAMME OF RHETORIC IN SERVICE OF POLITICAL CULTURE

 At the end of  Phaedrus , Socrates predicts a promising future for the youngIsocrates, whose intellect demonstrates a natural inclination to philosophy.Three and a half centuries later, Cicero confirms the legitimacy of this pro-

 jection with the following words of appreciation: “Then behold ! there aroseIsocrates, the Master of all rhetoricians, from whose school, as from theHorse of Troy, none but leaders emerged, but some of them sought glory inceremonial, others in action” (De or. 2.22). Emphasizing the content of andinvolvement in civic affairs, Isocrates’s texts are in truth extensive politicaltreatises, which resemble delivered speeches only because of their numerousdigressions and comments related to the art of rhetoric.

If we understand the development of rhetoric in ancient Greece as the

gradual formation of the principles governing the rhetorical technē , thenIsocrates deliberately turns away from this development. He rejects the rulesof technē ’s rigid application as he is convinced that the study of rhetoric de-pends on both the pupil and teacher’s particular qualities, as well as on theuniqueness of each speech’s context.

Isocrates, a leading promoter of Panhellenism, was born in 436 BCE in Athens to the family of a relatively wealthy flute maker. He received a goodeducation, studied under the Sophist Prodicus and later Gorgias, and asa young man worked as a logographer, a professional speechwriter. Thelegend of his not becoming an orator due to his weak voice may be con-sidered an anecdote. Anecdotes were occasionally told about other oratorsfor didactic reasons. This may, however, explain why he wrote his speechesfor the specific purpose of being primarily read and studied. In his  Addressto Philip, King of Macedonia, he explains: “But you will be in the best po-sition to discover with accuracy whether there is any truth in what I say ifyou put aside the prejudices which are held against the sophists and againstspeeches which are composed to be read, and take them up one by one in

your thought and scrutinize them, not making it a casual task, nor one to beattacked in a spirit of indifference, but with the close reasoning and love of

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knowledge which it is common report that you also share” (Isoc. 5.29). Iso-crates is said to have died very old, aged 98, in 338 BCE, by which time hehad been a contemporary, critic and competitor to practically all concepts

and schools associated with the beginnings of Greek rhetoric.Of Isocrates’s body of work, six judicial speeches, fifteen festive speeches

and nine letters15 have been preserved. He did not attempt to create a sys-tematic method regarding the general theory of persuasive speech in text-book form, instead he explained his views on rhetoric in his speeches Againstthe Sophists ( Kata ton sofiston), On Exchange of Properties ( Peri antidoseōs ) and Helen ( Helenē ). It is these writings which will serve as the basis for our ex-position.

Isocrates understood the notion that people had the ability to learn rhet-oric’s art in a fundamentally new way. For Sophists, rhetoric was a particularbrand of generative theory of text, according to which the pupil had tolearn a system of pre-set abstract principles in the form of rules (technē ).This knowledge and appropriate application would lead him step by stepto a successful universal result. Isocrates disagreed, saying that “discoursesthat are of general applicability, and trustworthy, and of a similar nature,can only be composed and uttered with the aid of a variety of forms and

suitable expressions that are hard to learn” (Hel. 11). He thus developedGorgias’s notion of kairos  as a sense of a pinpointing the right moment forand the right manner of speech. Closely related to kairos  is prepon, which ex-presses an intuitive aptitude for satisfactory speech stylization. The contentof these key notions of ancient rhetoric corresponds to the Latin expressionof decorum, spread mainly through Cicero’s works. Isocrates thus lacks thearrogance of imagining that learned rules may once and for all equip a pupilto solve all his future problems concerning the stylization and delivery ofa speech. Instead of a compact theory, Isocrates favours the patient edu-cation of future orators based on a teacher’s moral res