Ancient Rhetoric

ANCIENT RHETORICS

T H I R D E D I T I O N

ANCIENT RHETORICS

FOR CONTEMPORARY

STUDENTS

SHARON CROWLEY

DEBRA H A W H E E

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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ONTENTS

Preface xiii

C H A P T E R 1

Ancient Rhetorics: Their Differences and

the Differences They Make 1

A History of Ancient Rhetorics 7

Early Rhetors, Rhetoricians, and Teachers 8 The Older Sophists 9

Philosophers on Rhetoric 11 Isocrates 12

An Early Sophistic Textbook 13 Hellenistic Rhetoric 13 Roman Rhetorics 14

Rhetoric in Later Antiquity 15

Some Differences Between Ancient and Modern Thought 16 Just the Facts, Please 17

That's Just Your Opinion 21

On Ideology and the Commonplaces 25 Rhetorical Situations 27

Language as Power 28

EXERCISES 33 NOTES 35

WORKS CITED 35

PART ONE: INVENTION

CHAPTER 2

Kairos and the Rhetorical Situation: Seizing the Moment 36

VI C O N T E N T S

Kairos, Change, and Rhetorical Situations 40 Questions Raised by Kairos 43

An Example of Kairos at Work 43

Urgency: How Urgent or Immediate Is the Issue? 48 Arguments and Interests 49

A Web of Related Issues 50

EXERCISES 51 WORKS CITED 52

CHAPTER 3

Stasis Theory: Asking the Right Questions 53

The Stases and Contrary Arguments 55 Theoretical Versus Practical Questions 56 Putting These Distinctions to Work 60

What Happens When Stasis Is Not Achieved? 62 The Four Questions 67

Elaborating the Questions 68 Using the Stases 74

The First Example: Abortion 75 A Second Example: Hate Speech 83

EXERCISES 92 NOTE 94

WORKS CITED 94

C H A P T E R 4

The Common Topics and the Commonplaces:

Finding the Available Means 95 Ancient Topical Traditions 96

Aristotle's Topical System 98

The Topic of Past and Future Fact (Conjecture) 99 The Common Topic of Greater/Lesser (Degree) 102

The Common Topic of Possible/Impossible (Possibility) 105 Commonplaces and Ideology 106

Commonplaces in American Political Rhetoric 112

C O N T F. N T S V l l

The Common Topic of Conjecture 120 The Common Topic of Degree 120 The Common Topic of Possibility 121 An Extended Example 121

The Example Embedded in a Rhetorical Situation 124 EXERCISES 130

NOTES 132

WORKS CITED 132 C H A P T E R 5

Logical Proof: Reasoning in Rhetoric 133

Probabilities 135

Aristotle on Reasoning in Rhetoric 137 Deduction 137

Induction 140 Enthymemes 141 Rhetorical Examples 146

Historical Examples—Brief and Extended 148 Fictional Example 151

Analogy 152

Similar and Contrary Examples 155 Using Examples 156 Maxims 158 Signs 160 EXERCISES 161 WORKS C I T E D 162 C H A P T E R 6

Ethical Proof: Arguments from Character 163 Ethos in Ancient Rhetorics 166

Invented Ethos 168

Demonstrating Intelligence by Doing the Homework 171 Establishing Good Character 175

Achieving Good Will 179

Voice and Rhetorical Distance 181 Grammatical Person 183

V l l l C O N T E N T S Word Size 193 Qualifiers 193 Punctuation 195 Situated Ethos 196 An Example 199 EXERCISES 202 NOTE 203 WORKS CITED 203

CHAPTER 7

Pathetic Proof: Passionate Appeals 205

Emotions as Rhetorical Proofs 209 The Characters of Audiences 211 Composing Passionate Proofs 213

Enargein 214

Honorific and Pejorative Language 217 EXERCISES 218

NOTE 219

WORKS CITED 219

C H A P T E R 8

Extrinsic Proofs: Arguments Waiting to Be Used 220

Testimony 223

Community Authorities 223

Evaluating Community Authorities 226 Proximo teAu thorities 229

Data 231

Evaluating Data 233 Some Examples 234

EXERCISES 237 WORK CITED 238

CONTENTS IX

PART T W O : ARRANGEMENT CHAPTER 9

The Sophistic Topics: Define, Divide, and Conquer 239 Definition 242 Definition by Species/Genus 242 Enumerative Definition 245 Analytic Definition 245 Etymological Definition 245 Division 250 Classification or Generalization 251 Similarity or Comparison 253 EXERCISES 255 CHAPTER 10

Arrangement: Getting It Together 257 Ancient Teachings about Arrangement 258

The Exordium 260 Introductions 261

Topics for Making Audiences Attentive and Receptive 263 Insinuations 265

The Narrative (Statement of the Case) 265 The Partition 268

The Arguments: Confirmation and Refutation 269 The Peroration (Conclusion) 270

Composing a Summary 270

Composing Appeals to the Emotions 270 Enltancing Ethos 272

An Example 273 EXERCISES 276

WORKS CITED 277

PART THREE: STYLE, MEMORY, A N D DELIVERY CHAPTER 11

Style: Composition and Ornament 278 Correctness 280

Clarity 280

X CONTENTS Ornament 285 Sentence Composition 286 Figurative Language 290 Figures of Thought 298 Trapes 306 EXERCISES 313 NOTES 314 WORKS CITED 315

CHAPTER 12

Memory: The Treasure-House of Invention 316

Memory and Kairos 317

Memory in Ancient Rhetorics 317 Ancient Memory Systems 319

Modern Versions of Ancient Memory Systems 322 Cultural Memory 322

Organizational Memory 323 Literate Memory Systems 325 Electronic Memory Systems 328

WORKS CITED 329

CHAPTER 13

Delivery: Attending to Eyes and Ears 330

Ancient Commentary on Delivery 331 Delivery of Oral Discourse 334 Delivery of Written Discourse 336

Spelling and Punctuation 338 Traditional Grammar and Usage 341 Visual Rhetoric 343 Ocular Demonstration 343 Textual Presentation 344 Picture Theory 346 Cyberrhetors 348 EXERCISES 350

RESOURCES FOR PRINT DESIGN 351 RESOURCES FOR WEB DESIGN 352 WORKS CITED 352

CONTENTS X I

PART FOUR: RHETORICAL EXERCISES

CHAPTER 14

Imitation: Achieving Copiousness 353

Ancient Rhetorical Exercises 354 The Exercises in Ancient Rhetorics 356

Reading Aloud and Copying 356 Imitation 359 Translation 366 Paraphrase 366 Paraphrasing Poetry 372 WORKS CITED 383 C H A P T E R 15

The Progymnasmata, or Rhetorical Exercises 384 Fable 386

Tale 389 Chreia 392 Proverb 395

Confirmation and Refutation 396 Commonplace 399

Encomium and Invective 401 Comparison 407 Character 412 Description 418 Thesis 420 Introduction of Law 424 WORKS C I T E D 4 2 7 Glossary 428

Appendix A: A Calendar of Ancient Rhetorics 440 Appendix B: Signposts in Ancient Rhetorics 441 Bibliography 445

Suggestions for Futher Readings 448 Credits 449

REFACE

Welcome to the third edition of Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (called "ARCS" for short by its authors and editors). Its first author never dreamed she would be writing a preface to a third edition. But here we are. Thanks to all the teachers and students who have said nice things about ARCS, and thanks as well to those who have offered constructive criticisms. We have tried to incorporate those in this edition wherever possible.

Here is a list of the changes we made to this edition. The book has been rewritten for clarity throughout. The chapters on the commonplaces and on ideology, memory, and delivery have been substantially rewritten; sections on cultural memory and visual rhetoric now appear in the chapters on memory and delivery, respectively. New examples were embedded throughout. The history chapter has been folded into the introductory chap-ter, and the chapter on reasoning (logos) now appears prior to its companion proofs, ethos and pathos. The chapter on formal topics has been renamed "Sophistic Topics."

Since this book is about a very old way of thinking, some confusion has arisen about our use of terms relating to time. We do not typically use the term modern in a generic sense meaning "the present." For that use we employ the term contemporary. Throughout, we use modern to indicate a spe-cific set of beliefs about composition and composing. Since we use modern somewhat disparagingly, we want to be clear that we are not talking about contemporary students or teachers when we use that term. Rather, we are referring to the habits of mind that still inform ways of thinking about com-posing. The distinction between modern and contemporary is difficult to maintain, though, since modern ideas still persist in contemporary teaching practices. As a result, the terms we use become slippery because different oppositions are at work: ancient versus modern, modern and contemporary, modern versus postmodern. We write in a postmodern era, an era that embraces change and accepts intellectual discord; hence it demands flexible communication strategies. Most of today's students and many teachers, raised in a complex and stimulating technological and ideological age, hold postmodern attitudes toward composing and composition. We believe ancient rhetorics, which are of course premodern, offer an interesting start-ing point from which postmodern rhetors might think about discourse anew.

While writing Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, we adopted three ancient premises about composing: first, that nobody thinks or writes without reference to the culture in which he or she lives; second, that human beings disagree with one another often and for good reasons; and third, that

xiii

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people compose because they want to affect the course of events. We appealed to ancient rhetoric as the source of our thinking for this book because ancient rhetoricians invented and taught an art that was immersed in the daily traffic of human events and in communal discourse about them. In this the art differed markedly from the modes of composition ordinarily taught in school today, which present writers and speakers with an abstracted set of pseudo-scientific rules that dictate how a finished dis-course ought to look.

Ancient rhetoricians began their instruction about composing by con-sidering the occasions that generated a desire to write or speak. Modern teachers, in contrast, too frequently begin (and end) their instruction with consideration of forms or genres, asking students to begin by composing outlines, thesis statements, or essays. We think that the rich fund of theories and strategies that can be found in ancient rhetorics, particularly instruc-tion about how to address rhetorical situainstruc-tions and how to find arguments (called invention in ancient thought) is far more helpful to students in the stage of the composing process that is most difficult for novices: beginning. We hope that this book will show writers and speakers that their rhetor-ical practice and their ethrhetor-ical obligations are always communal. The need to compose arises from composers' desire to insert their voices into the differ-ences of opinion that occur within the discourse of a community. When they are read or heard, compositions enter into that discourse, either to maintain and reinforce it or to disrupt it. Compositions produced in college are as communal as any other writing. Teachers and peers read student writing or listen to student speeches, and these compositions become part of class-room discourse.

Ancient rhetoricians knew that audiences are never neutral: that is, they never receive a rhetor's discourse neutrally or objectively. The reception accorded any discourse depends as much upon the rhetor's relation to the community and her relation to the issue discussed as it depends upon the content of her discourse. Modern rhetorics, particularly the version taught in college, pretend that this is not the case, that compositions on any topic can be made available to any educated reader, who can consume them with-out prejudice. Ancient rhetoricians, in contrast, taught their students how to analyze the contexts for which they composed and how to adapt their com-posing processes to fit these contexts as closely as possible. They never assumed that a given discursive situation could be adequately met by employment of generic formulas.

Because we have adopted the ancient assumption that rhetoric cannot be fruitfully studied and practiced apart from the issues that engage the communities it serves, this book introduces its readers to some contested topics in contemporary political and ethical discourse. Its examples are drawn from popular and academic writing about controversial issues. We realize that to engage students in talk about values is a departure from tra-ditional approaches to composition instruction. However, we feel that rhetoric cannot be taught without addressing the issues that vitally concern the people who use it. We are aware as well that some of our examples will

P R E F A C E X V

soon become dated. However, it should not be difficult for teachers and stu-dents to supply their own contemporary examples in places where the immediate relevance of our examples is no longer apparent.

The book also includes some features of ancient rhetoric that have not received much attention in modern accounts of its teachings. For example, the book contains a thorough treatment of ancient discussions about figures of thought. There are chapters that show how to compose proofs from char-acter and appeals to the emotions, which, so far as we know, are not treated at length in any other contemporary textbook, even though both are com-monly practiced in contemporary political and commercial rhetorics.

Nearly half of this book (seven chapters) is devoted to invention. This proportion reflects the lavish attention given to invention by ancient rhetoricians. Of the three books in Aristotle's Rhetoric, two are devoted to invention; the third treats delivery, style and arrangement. Of the twelve books of Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory, five are devoted to invention, two are devoted to style, delivery and memory get a chapter each, and the rest of the work concerns the proper education of an orator. Cicero's On Inven-tion, obviously, treats nothing else. These proportions testify to the importance of the first canon in ancient rhetorics. We represent that impor-tance here because all the means of invention defined by ancient rhetoricians are still in use in public discourse.

In ancient rhetorics, a person who was inventing arguments might or might not make use of writing, depending upon the quality of his memory. It is likely that ancient rhetors composed arguments aloud and stored them in memory. The only ancient revision practices that are similar to literate revi-sion occurred when students were working with the elementary exercises called pwgymnasmata. They copied passages onto wax tablets, working either from memory or from a text. They then tried out variations in writing. No doubt they memorized the variations that won the most approval.

However, literate revision practices can be built into the ancient system. Students can compose trial arguments as they work their way through this book, and they can revise their work as they master new rhetorical strate-gies. In other words, the ancient inventional schemes can all be worked out in writing, and so anyone can produce a great deal of writing while using this book. It is organized just as the ancients organized their rhetorical instruction, following the order of the canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Even though its organization dimly reflects modern descriptions of the composing process—which is sometimes characterized as moving through prewriting, writing, revision, and editing—people who use this book will soon discover that the linear economy of the modern composing process is far too simple to accommo-date ancient notions of composing. Ancient teachers emphasized copiousness, or the art of having more to say or write than a rhetor needs for a single occasion. Ancient composing processes did not aim toward the production of a finished product; rather, they equipped rhetors with argu-ments and materials that would be readily available whenever they needed to compose for a given occasion.

X V I PREFACE

Given our emphasis on invention rather than convention or form, it fol-lows that students and teachers in both writing and speech classes can use this book profitably. We mean the terms composing and composition generi-cally, to refer to work done by people who are preparing to deliver either oral or written discourse. All of the exercises included here are appropriate for classes in public speaking; indeed, our emphasis on ancient rhetorics harmonizes with the rhetorical approach often used by teachers of speech and communication.

The final chapters introduce students to the composing exercises used by ancient students. Even though these exercises appear at the back of this book, we recommend that teachers exploit them from the beginning, using them along with the work in invention. We explicate each exercise, supply classical and modern examples, and make composing suggestions for each. There are plenty of examples and suggested exercises in the rest of the text, as well, and if readers follow ancient instructions for preparing and com-posing arguments, they will generate a lot of writing.

The exercises that appear at the conclusions of several chapters are gen-erative: they ask students to employ what they have learned in their own reading and writing. There are no drills, and students are seldom asked to analyze or comment on prose written by other people. The book's most important pedagogical feature, we think, is that it provides students with motives for composing.

This book also differs in some respects from the few contemporary text-books about ancient rhetorics that are currently available. It does not treat all the rhetorics produced during antiquity as a monolithic theory of dis-course. Nor does it assume that the principles and techniques isolated by ancient rhetoricians can be usefully transferred to contemporary situations without qualification. Throughout the book we attempt to alert readers to the fact that cultures that are widely separated in time and space differ from one another, even though the cultures under study here are regarded as the sources of what is now called "Western civilization." In the first chapter, we address some important differences between modern and ancient thought about knowledge and its production. We updated or abandoned altogether the features of ancient rhetorics that are simply too foreign to be of use. For example, we altered translations to mitigate the sexism manifested by ancient teachers as well as their modern translators. Where that was not possible, we pointed out the sexism.

Throughout, we followed ancient practice in assuming that everyone who wishes to speak or write possesses something to write or speak about insofar as he or she participates in the common discourse of the communi-ties to which he or she belongs. As a result, this book never asks students to write personal essays or to generate expressive discourse. We do not accept the assumption that writing should begin with personal expression and move outward into expository and persuasive modes. To the contrary, we agree with the ancients that there are no purely personal opinions, just as there can be no private language.

PREFACE X V U

We hope that this book will interest its readers in further study of ancient rhetorics themselves. The major works of several ancient rhetori-cians—Aristotle, Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian—are now available in relatively inexpensive paperback editions. A few anthologies are also avail-able that include portions of their work, along with related ancient treatises on literary composition and elementary exercises. Accompanied by read-ings in ancient texts, this book might profitably be used in humanities or critical thinking classes as an introduction to ancient ways of knowing and thinking. Of course, it should also prove useful in undergraduate and grad-uate courses designed to introdtice students to ancient rhetorics. In our experience, contemporary students find ancient texts difficult to read unless they are contextualized with history and commentary about ancient times. This book attempts to fill that need although its history of ancient rhetorics is quite brief. Those who are interested in the histories of ancient Greece and Rome and their rhetorical traditions should consult the work of historians listed in the bibliography.

The bibliography also lists the citation sources of classical texts. For the most part we opted to put these titles in a concluding list rather than clut-tering up the text with long citations. Prose and poetry by early modern English writers are generally cited from the standard works, where these exist, or collected works.

We included a glossary that defines ancient or technical terms and sup-plies pronunciation guides for a few terms that have no ready equivalent in English. Such terms are printed in bold type when they first appear in the text, as a few do in this preface. The two appendixes contain overviews of the history of ancient rhetorics: Appendix A outlines relevant ancient chronology in a fairly sweeping way, while Appendix B is a more detailed outline of major developments in ancient rhetorics themselves. The bibliog-raphy lists modern sources of our quotations of ancient texts and supplies some suggestions for further reading in ancient rhetorics.

Perhaps a word about our use of the term we is in order. It is a depar-ture to use a familiar pronoun in a textbook. However, we wanted to insure that our readers were regularly reminded that statements put forward in this book issue from actual, fallible, people rather than from some unavail-able site of teacherly authority. Usually, the term we refers to Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee, particularly when we are giving advice and instruction or rendering opinions about current affairs. However, the use of we can slip into a "royal we," taking on precisely the voice we wish to avoid—that of an indisputable authority. We tried to be aware of this use and to eliminate it wherever possible, but we probably did not succeed. In any case, we hope that readers of this book will want to argue with us throughout, and that's one reason why we wrote it in the first person.

The Instructor's Manual offers supplementary suggestions for teaching ARCS. To this end, it tries to help teachers help students meet the challenges posed by a study of ancient rhetoric, offers a repertoire of strategies for link-ing ancient rhetorical concepts to contemporary issues, and provides

X V 1 U PREFACE

additional insight into what the authors were thinking when they wrote the textbook. In addition to suggestions for daily use, the manual features sam-ple syllabi and assignment ideas.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Once again, Sharon thanks Debbie for intellectual inspiration, hard work, moral support. My father used to say that one of the great pleasures of teaching was watching one's students surpass their teachers, and Debbie has proven him correct. I also express my appreciation to deans Dan Bivona and Nancy Gutierrez of the College of Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University for arranging a much needed leave for me. Thanks again to Eben Ludlow, whose editorial style is equal parts tact and urgency. Here's to my companions in crime at PWT and Wednesday afternoons at Bandersnatch. And for a sort of help that can't be readily articulated, I thank my faithful writing companion Margaret Fuller, who has now slept through the composition of three editions of this book.

Debbie thanks Sharon foremost for retenting. She is also grateful for her emails, charmed with frankness, the best of advice, and tales of Arizona hawks. And what other coauthor would withhold details about balmy Ari-zona weather during the coldest of Midwestern winters, opting instead to encourage winter sports? Thanks to Eben Ludlow for seeing this through, and to colleagues in Writing Studies at Illinois for their ongoing collegial support and interest. Special acknowledgement goes to Kathie Gossett and Jim Purdy, graduate students whose insights have helped broaden the book's conception of ancient rhetoric's fourth and fifth canons.

We both extend warm thanks to Kristi VanStechelman, who found new examples and kept track of needed permissions—tedious jobs she per-formed with energy and effectiveness. The book is much better because of Kristi's assistance. We would also like to thank all the people who wrote reviews: Van E. Hillard, Duke University; Mary M. Salibrici, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Elaine Fredericksen, University of Texas-El Paso; and Stacy Thompson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

SHARON CROWLEY DEBRA HAWHEE

C H A P T E R

For us moderns, rhetoric means artificiality, insincerity, decadence. —H. I. Marrou

ANCIENT

RHETORICS: T H E I R

DIFFERENCES AND

THE DIFFERENCES

THEY MAKE

W H E N A M E R I C A N S HEAR the word rhetoric, they tend to think of politicians' attempts to deceive them. Rhetoric is characterized as "empty words" or as fancy language used to distort the truth or tell lies. Television newspeople often say something like "There was more rhetoric from the White House today," and editorialists write that politicians need to "stop using rhetoric and do something," as though words had no connection to action. Many people blame rhetoric for our apparent inability to commu-nicate and to get things done.

But that isn't the way rhetoricians defined their art in ancient Athens and Rome. In ancient times, people used rhetoric to make decisions, resolve dis-putes, and to mediate public discussion of important issues. An ancient teacher of rhetoric named Aristotle defined rhetoric as the power of finding the available arguments suited to a given situation. For teachers like Aristotle or practitioners like the Roman orator Cicero, rhetoric helped people to choose the best course of action when they disagreed about impor-tant political, religious, or social issues. In fact, the study of rhetoric was equivalent to the study of citi-zenship. Under the best ancient teachers, Greek and

_J

PART I / I N V E N T I O N

Roman students composed discourse about moral and political questions that daily confronted their communities.

Ancient teachers of rhetoric thought that disagreement among human beings was inevitable, since individuals perceive the world differently from one another. They also assumed that since people communicate their per-ceptions through language—which is an entirely different medium than thoughts or perceptions—there was no guarantee that any person's per-ceptions would be accurately conveyed to others. Even more important, the ancient teachers knew that people differ in their opinions about how the world works, so that it was often hard to tell whose opinion was the best. They invented rhetoric so that they would have means of judging whose opinion was most accurate, useful, or valuable.

If people didn't disagree, rhetoric wouldn't be necessary. But they do, and it is. A rhetorician named Kenneth Burke remarked that "we need never deny the presence of strife, enmity, faction as a characteristic motive of rhetorical expression" (1962, 20). But the fact that rhetoric originates in disagreement is ultimately a good thing, since its use allows people to make important choices without resorting to less palatable means of per-suasion—coercion or violence. People who have talked their way out of any potentially violent confrontation know how useful rhetoric can be. On a larger scale, the usefulness of rhetoric is even more apparent. If, for some reason, the people who negotiate international relations were to stop using rhetoric to resolve their disagreements about limits on the use of nuclear weapons, there might not be a future to deliberate about. That's why we should be glad when we read or hear that diplomats are disagreeing about the allowable number of warheads per country or the number of inspec-tions of nuclear stockpiles per year. At least they're talking to each other. As Burke observed, wars are the result of an agreement to disagree. But before people of good will agree to disagree, they try out hundreds of ways of reaching agreement. The possibility that one set of participants will resort to coercion or violence is always a threat, of course; but in the context of impending war, the threat of war can itself operate as a rhetorical strategy that keeps people of good will talking to each other.

Given that argument can deter violence and coercion, we are disturbed by the contemporary tendency to see disagreement as somehow impolite or even undesirable. We certainly understand how disagreement has earned its bad name, given the caricature of argument that daily appears on talk television. In his column "On Television" Bill Goodykoontz had fun with the typical dialogue heard on news talk shows:

After hour upon hour of watching political "discussion" shows, a fever dream follows:

"Good afternoon, and welcome to Crossscreech, where we don't just report the issues, we discuss.them—loudly—and offer you the insight into the story behind the story.

"Let's join our panelists, Larry Liberal and Ronnie Rightwing. Larry?" LARRV. "Thanks. Lef s just jump right to the news of the day: Iraq! Bush! What?!"

CHAPTER 1 / A N C I E N T RHETORICS 3

RONNIE: "Communist! Traitor! Turncoat!" LARRY: "Lackey! Bootlick! Lickspittle!"

RONNIE: "I'd just like to say that ANYONE who expresses ANY doubts about ANYTHING the Bush administration proposes is NOT a patriot! WHY DO YOU HATE THIS COUNTRY?"

LARRY: "Can you not SEE the conspiracy at work here? Are you BLIND? It's all about OIL OIL OIL!"

RONNIE: "I will NOT feel guilt or remorse about driving my Suburban two blocks to work every day."

LARRY: "When I'm riding my bicycle constructed completely out of hemp, I actually feel sorry for you."

RONNIE: "Moron." LARRY: "Pig."

RONNIE: "OK, let's welcome our first guest, Sue U. All, an attorney for the ACLU. Sue, one question: "WHY DO YOU PLATE THIS COUNTRY?"

SUE: "Uh . . . "

LARRY: "Sue, can you please tell this animal in human clothing that until we get the words 'under God' removed from the Pledge of Allegiance, the American people will be living in a virtual police state?"

SUE: "Actually . . . "

RONNIE: "What's next, Sue? Another merry skip down the road to socialism? Stricter gun control? Why not reveal your real plan—to not only have every gun taken away from all God-fearing Americans, but to DIS-ARM THE AMERICAN MILITARY?"

SUE: "Well..."

LARRY: "Sue, please inform this troglodyte that all this country REALLY needs is a good tax increase to get the economy stimulated, to get more money—money without the words 'In God We Trust/ prefer-ably—into the hands of ALL the people?"

SUE: "That's not really my . . . "

RONNIE: "Thanks, Sue, but we're running short on time. Informative as always. OK, parting shot. Can I just remind you, Larry, to KEEP THE GOV-ERNMENT OUT OF OUR LIVES. Except our bedrooms. We really do need to monitor what goes on there."

LARRY: "If I want a Druid commitment ceremony performed in the middle of the town square, I WILL HAVE ONE!"

RONNIE: "And that's it for us, folks. Tune in tomorrow night when we discuss Sesame Street—kids show or tool of the creeping enemy?"

LARRY: "And tax cuts—of the nondenominational evil supreme being? Good night." ("On Television," Arizona Republic December 17,2002, E6) Here Goodykoontz aptly captured the shouting and name-calling that pass for discussion on television shows like his fictitious Crossscreech. The characters he depicts don't actually argue; rather, they shout commonplaces at one another. Neither listens to the other or to the guest,

PART 1 / I N V E N T I O N

who is never allowed to speak. This is an extremely unproductive model of argument because it seldom stimulates anyone to change his or her mind.

Engaging in productive argument is much different from shouting tired slogans. For one thing it is hard intellectual work, and for another, it requires that all parties to an argument listen to positions stated by others. Despite its difficulty, people who live in democracies must undertake pro-ductive argument with one another, because failure to do so can have seri-ous consequences, hr the early months of 2003, for instance, representatives of the United States government tried to convince other members of the United Nations Security Council to authorize an invasion of Iraq. When France and other members of the Security Council refused to support this measure, the government of the United States was faced with several alter-natives: negotiate further with the UN, establish alliances elsewhere, halt its plans for war, or go to war without support from other countries. All of the options except the last require the use of rhetoric, and in each of those cases more deliberation could have limited or halted violence.

Interestingly, some Americans responded to this failure to achieve agreement not by asking for more negotiation but by adopting an anti-French stance. Beth Gillin reviewed some manifestations of this position:

CHEESED-OFF: U.S. BASHES FRANCE LES IOKES, JIBES FLY ABOUT OLDEST ALLY By Beth Gillin

Knight Ridder Newspapers

PHILADELPHIA—On a recent Tonight Show, comedian Dennis Miller told host Jay Leno, "The only way the French are going in is if we tell them we found truffles in Iraq."

On the Late Show, David Letterman observed, "France wants more evidence. , . . The last time France wanted more evidence it rolled right through France with a German flag."

Such jibes at America's oldest ally aren't coming solely from late-night comedians.

Several weeks ago, Jed Babbin, a former deputy undersecretary of defense, told Chris Matthews on Hardball that "going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion; you just leave a lot of useless, noisy baggage behind."

Call it, as the French daily newspaper Liberation did, "le frog-bashing." Annoyed that France is backpedaling from earlier support of a U.N. resolution to disarm Iraq, entertainers and commentators are channeling their frustration into sarcasm.

Consider satirist Andy Borowitz, a contributor to CNN's American Morning. Recently, he capped off a discussion of Michael Jackson's plastic surgery by quipping, "The French, of course, don't believe it and are demanding further inspections."

The French are reacting with their usual shrug, even as they puzzle over the meaning of the Yankee insult "cheese-eating surrender monkeys."

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"It's a little tiresome," an unidentified French diplomat told the Times of London. "The Americans always throw tantrums like this when they don't get their way."

Indeed, such jokes as "What do you call 100,000 Frenchmen with their hands up? The army," and "Why are there no fireworks at EuroDisney? Because every time they went off, France tried to surrender," accurately reflect the growing displeasure with France in the United States, as measured by a Feb. 3-6 Gallup Poll.

France's image among Americans is at its lowest point in a decade, the Gallup Organization said. France's net favorable rating fell to 26 percent this month from 63 percent last year.

Germany and North Korea don't win popularity contests, either. But France's image "has undergone the most significant change of any of the coun-tries tested," Gallup said.

This explains why, when the subject is France, callers to Glenn Beck's Philadelphia-based national radio talk show jam the lines.

Beck said, "The French haven't done a thing for us since they gave us the Statue of Liberty. Well, OK, let's box it up and send it back. As long as they'll pay for shipping, I'm fine with that."

All this is nothing new, of course. "A Frenchman's home is where another man's wife is," Mark Twain jotted in his 1878-79 journal. But it was a Simpsons episode eight years ago that spawned an insult for the ages. Groundskeeper Willie, forced by budget cuts to teach French at Springfield's elementary school, bellows to the class in his rich Scottish burr, "BONJOURRRRRR, ye cheese-eatin' surrender monkeys."

The phrase has caused puzzlement in France. This month, the conservative newspaper Le Figaro translated it as "primates capitulards et toujours en quete de fromages," or, roughly, "capitulating primates always questing for cheeses."

Le Figaro went on to suggest Americans are being whipped into a frenzy by "pen-wielding warmongers" in the White House led by "le cowboy Bush," who are enraged at France over "the affront which it has inflicted on the muscular diplomacy of Uncle Sam."(Arizona Republic February 21, 2003, A7)

The popularity of such jokes suggests that some Americans would rather slander those who oppose their views than look for alternative courses of action.

Indeed Americans often refuse to talk with each other about important matters like religion or politics, retreating into silence if someone brings either subject up in public discourse. And if someone disagrees publicly with someone else about politics or religion, Americans sometimes take that as a breach of good manners. This is so because we tend to link a per-son's opinions to her identity. We assume that someone's opinions result from her personal experience, and hence that those opinions are somehow "hers"—that she alone "owns" them. If someone we know is a devout Catholic, for example, we are often reluctant to share with her any negative views we have about Catholicism, fearing that she might take our views as a personal attack rather than as an invitation to discuss differences. This habit of tying beliefs to an identity also has the unfortunate effect of allow-ing people w h o hold a distinctive set of beliefs to belittle or mistreat

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people who do not share those beliefs. The reasoning here seems to be that superior people hold superior beliefs; thus nonbelievers are inferior people who are unworthy of equal treatment.1

The intellectual habit that assumes religious and political choices are tied up with a person's identity, with her "self," also makes it seem as though people never change their minds about things like religion and pol-itics. But as we all know, people do change their minds about these matters; people convert from one religious faith to another, and they sometimes change their political affiliation from year to year, perhaps voting across party lines in one election and voting a party line in the next.

The authors of this book are concerned that if Americans continue to ignore the reality that people disagree with one another all the time, or if we pretend to ignore it in the interests of preserving etiquette, we risk undermining the principles on which our democratic community is based. People who are afraid of airing their differences tend to keep silent when those with whom they disagree are speaking; people who are not inclined to air differences tend to associate only with those who agree with them. In such a balkanized public sphere, both our commonalities and our differ-ences go unexamined. In a democracy, people must call the opinions of oth-ers into question, must bring them into the light for examination and negotiation. In communities where citizens are not coerced, important deci-sions must be made by means of public discourse. When the quality of pub-lic discourse diminishes, so does the quality of democracy.

Ancient teachers called the process of examining positions held by oth-ers "invention," which Aristotle defined as finding and displaying the available arguments on any issue. Invention is central to the rhetorical pro-cess. What often passes for rhetoric in our own time—repeatedly stating (or shouting) one's beliefs at an "opponent" in order to browbeat him into sub-mission, in the manner of the television program Crossfire—is not rhetoric. Participation in rhetoric entails that every party to the discussion be aware that beliefs may change during the exchange and discussion of points of view. All parties to a rhetorical transaction must be willing to be persuaded by good arguments. Otherwise, decisions will be made for bad reasons, or

interested reasons, or no reason at all.

Sometimes, of course, there are good reasons for remaining silent. Power is distributed unequally in our culture, and power inequities may force wise people to remain silent on some occasions. We believe that in contemporary American culture people who enjoy high socioeconomic sta-tus have more power than those who have fewer resources and less access to others in power. We also hold that men have more power than women and that white people have more power than people of color (and yes, we are aware that there are exceptions to all of these generalizations). We do not believe, though, that these inequities are a natural or necessary state of things. We do believe that rhetoric is among the best ways available to us for rectifying power inequities among citizens.

The people who taught and practiced rhetoric in Athens and Rome dur-ing ancient times would have found contemporary unwilldur-ingness to engage

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in public disagreement very strange indeed. Their way of using disagree-ment to reach solutions was taught to students in Western schools for over two thousand years and is still available to us in translations of their text-books, speeches, lecture notes, and treatises on rhetoric. Within limits, their way of looking at disagreement can still be useful to us. The students who worked with ancient teachers of rhetoric were members of privileged classes for the most part, since Athens and Rome both maintained socioeconomic systems that were manifestly unjust to many of the people who lived and worked within them. The same charge can be leveled at our own system, of course. Today the United States is home not only to its native peoples but to people from all over the world. Its normative citizens arrived here under vastly different circumstances, ranging from colonization to irnmigration to enslavement, and their lives have been shaped by these circumstances, as well as by their genders and class affiliations. Not all—perhaps not even a majority—have enjoyed the equal opportunities that are promised by the Constitution. But unfair social and economic realities only underscore the need for principled public discussion among concerned citizens.

The aim of ancient rhetorics was to distribute the power that resides in language among all of their students. This power is available to anyone who is willing to study the principles of rhetoric. People who know about rhetoric know how to persuade others to consider their point of view with-out having to resort to coercion or violence. For the purposes of this book, we have assumed that people prefer to seek verbal resolution of differences to the use of force. Rhetoric is of no use when people determine to use coer-cion or violence to gain the ends they seek.

A knowledge of rhetoric also allows people to discern when rhetors are making bad arguments or are asking them to make inappropriate choices. Since rhetoric confers the gift of greater mastery over language, it can also teach those who study it to evaluate anyone's rhetoric; thus the critical capacity conferred by rhetoric can free its students from the manipulative rhetoric of others. When knowledge about rhetoric is available only to a few people, the power inherent in persuasive discourse is disproportion-ately shared. Unfortundisproportion-ately, throughout history rhetorical knowledge has usually been shared only among those who can exert economic, social, or political power as well. But ordinary citizens can learn to deploy rhetorical power, and if they have a chance and the courage to deploy it skillfully and often, it's possible that they may change other features of our society, as well. In this book, then, we aim to help our readers become more skilled speakers and writers. But we also aim to help them become better citizens. We begin by offering a brief history of ancient rhetorical thought.2

A H I S T O R Y OF A N C I E N T R H E T O R I C S

Something quite remarkable happened in the small Greek city of Athens during the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE. During this period, the cit-izens of that community evolved a form of government they called

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demokratia (demos [people] and kratos [political power]). Any Athenian who was defined as a citizen played a direct role in making important decisions that affected the entire community: whether to go to war, to send ambas-sadors to neighboring countries, to raise or lower taxes, to build bridges or walls, to convict or acquit people accused of crimes against the state or other citizens.

In the Athenian political system, citizenship was determined by birthright and thus was awarded to any adult male who could establish his Athenian heritage, whether he was wealthy or not, aristocratic or not. These were very inclusive requirements for the time, even though they excluded the bulk of the population who were women, foreign-bom men, or slaves. Because of this, classical Athens can hardly be said to have been a democracy in our more inclusive sense, although we remind readers that for almost half of its history, the United States limited suffrage to white males. Nor was Athens a representative democracy, as ours is said to be, since the few hundred people who were defined as Athenian citizens par-ticipated directly in making political and judicial decisions rather than act-ing through elected representatives.

The citizens met in the Assembly to make political decisions and acted as jurors at trials. Athenian men apparently took their civic responsibilities seriously. Despite the difficulties entailed in meeting this responsibility— leaving work undone for several days, traveling to the city from outlying farms—as many as five hundred or more citizens could be expected to attend and vote in the Assembly when it was in session.

Sometime during the fifth century BCE, all citizens earned the right to speak in the Assembly. This right was called isegoria ("equality in the agora" or assembly place). Most likely, very few citizens exercised their right to speak. When five hundred Athenians met to deliberate on impor-tant issues, not everyone could speak at once, nor was everyone sufficiently informed about the issue at hand to speak effectively. The task of filling in the details and of arguing for a course of action fell to people who were trained in speaking, who had sufficient education to understand the issues, and who had the leisure to study the issues at hand. These were the pro-fessional rhetores. In the fifth-century, the term rhetor referred to someone who introduced a resolution into the Assembly, but by the fourth century BCE the term meant something like "an expert on politics." Later it came to mean "one skilled in public speaking" as well. In this book, we refer to peo-ple who practice rhetoric as rhetors. We refer to peopeo-ple who teach it or the-orize about it as rhetoricians.

Early Rhetors, Rhetoricians, and Teachers

Ancient sources do not agree about who invented rhetorical theory. Some credit its invention to Empedocles, a sixth-century philosopher, poet, and magician. Others say that two Sicilian rhetoricians, Corax and Tisias, turned rhetoric into a teachable art, and some say as well that one or both

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of them wrote a handbook of rhetoric. There is a wonderful legend about these two fellows. According to this story, Corax was the teacher of Tisias. Tisias refused to pay for his rhetoric lessons until he won his first case. After a year had passed, Tisias had still not paid for his lessons, and Corax took Tisias to court. Corax argued that if he won his suit, Tisias would have to pay for the lessons since the court decreed it. If Corax lost, that would prove the worth of his lessons because Tisias had become a skilled enough advocate to win a suit. So, by Corax's logic, Tisias would have to pay no matter whether he won or lost. But Tisias argued that if the court decreed in his favor, he would not have to pay up, and if he lost, he would not have to pay either, since his inability to convince the court would prove that Corax's lessons were worthless. They were both kicked out of court, the story goes, and the judge said of them: "A bad egg from a bad crow"

(korax).

During the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, many Greek orators achieved such fame that their speeches were written down and passed on to us. Among the more famous were Pericles and Demosthenes, whose careers exemplify the close connection of oratory to politics in ancient Athens. Pericles is usually credited with the establishment of democracy in that city: he began the practice of paying people to perform public service, and he may have opened an important office to poorer citizens. His democratic ideal, wherein citizens rendered free and intelligent obedience to a fair sys-tem of laws, is represented in the funeral oration attributed to him in Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War. Demosthenes was also inti-mately involved in the affairs of the city, although the major work of his career concerned Athens's uneasy relations with the Macedonian king Philip and his son, Alexander the Great. Demosthenes wrote and delivered many speeches against Philip in an attempt to alert Athenians to the king's acquisitive aims. He was widely regarded during antiquity as the greatest of the Greek orators, and his "On the Crown," a vindication of his political life, is still read as an outstanding example of the persuasive power of rhetoric.

The Older Sophists

Rhetoric was so obviously useful in the new Athenian democracy that teachers and practitioners of rhetoric flocked to Athens from other cities. Among these was a group now called the Older Sophists. Sophos meant "wise one" or "teacher" in ancient Greek (hence our word philosopher, meaning "lover of wisdom" and our ironic sophomore.) The most famous of the Older Sophists were Gorgias and Protagoras, but other people have also earned this title from historians: they include Hippias, Prodicus, Antiphon, and Thrasymachus.

Unfortunately we must reconstruct what the Older Sophists taught from secondary sources. We possess only two speeches and some frag-ments of other works attributed to Gorgias. None of these were written

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down by him but were recorded later by scribes or scholars called doxog-raphers ("writers of opinion"; rendered more liberally, doxogdoxog-raphers are recorders of important traditions). We have only a few recorded sayings and fragments from Protagoras. Unflattering portraits of both rhetors appear in Plato's dialogues named after them. Plato was an Athenian aris-tocrat, an enemy of democracy, and a bit of a xenophobe (someone who fears foreign influences). He opposed rhetoric on the ground that rhetori-cians did not search for truth but aimed instead to persuade people to believe. Despite Plato's reservations about them, the Older Sophists pros-pered in Athens, attracting many students to their instruction. Plato described a visit to Athens by Protagoras as follows:

When we were inside [the house of Callias], we came upon Protagoras walk-ing in the portico, and walkwalk-ing with him in a long line were, on one side Callias, son of Hipponicus; his stepbrother Paralus, the son of Pericles; and Charmides, son of Glaucon; and on the other side Pericles' other son, Xanthippus; Philippides, son of Philomelus; and Antimoerus of Mende, the most eminent of Protagoras' pupils, who is studying professionally, to become a Sophist. Those who followed behind listening to their conversation seemed to be for the most part foreigners—Protagoras draws them from every city that he passes through, charming them with his voice like Orpheus, and they fol-low spellbound—but there were some Athenians in the band as well. As I looked at the party I was delighted to notice what special care they took never to get in front or to be in Protagoras' way. When he and those with him turned round, the listeners divided this way and that in perfect order, and executing a circular movement took their places each time in the rear. It was beautiful.

{Protagoras, 315a-b)

Protagoras's host, Callias, was a very rich man, and the young men listed here came from the best families in Athens at the time. Plato's account showed just a little contempt for the fashionableness of Protagoras's teaching and the obvious hero worship of the young men.

The Older Sophists taught by example rather than precept. That is, they prepared and delivered specimen speeches for their students to imitate. Some may have prepared lists of sample arguments, later called topics, that could be inserted into any speech for which they were appropriate. Such collections, if they existed, would have been called arts (technai) of rhetoric; that is, they would have been the rhetoric textbooks of the day, The Greek word for art, techne, means roughly "knowledge generalized from experi-ence," and so an "art" of rhetoric could consist of a set of examples, instruc-tions, or even principles that had been collected for the use of students by rhetors and teachers of rhetoric. Certainly imitators and students of the Older Sophists composed and collected lists of topics, since several of these collections were available in Athens by the fourth century BCE.

The Older Sophists were skeptical that anyone could easily discover truth. Rather than philosophizing, they turned their attention to politics and ethics, teaching their students that vigorous rhetorical practice was essential to a stable, healthy community. Thoroughly pragmatic, they

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believed that people had to adjust their notions of what is good, useful, and true to the circumstances in which particular communities found them-selves. Gorgias argued that rhetors had to take their immediate surround-ings into account when they attempted to persuade people to a course of action and so they could not worry about whether their message was true for all people at all times. Their rather casual approach to truth does not mean that the Older Sophists' teaching was unprincipled; in fact, a case could be made that their care for finding solutions to immediate problems rendered their practice more ethical than that of the philosophers who looked for some universal and timeless good.

Philosophers on Rhetoric

Plato was the first in a long line of Western philosophers to condemn the Older Sophists' insistence on immersion in the moment. Because of this, the rhetorical practice associated with their epistemology, called sophistry, now has a pejorative connotation that is unfair to them and their work. Even though Plato was opposed to sophistry, he appears to have under-stood the importance of rhetoric. In his dialogue Phaedrus he developed a philosophical rhetoric that could supposedly be used to find truth. This Platonic rhetoric involved studying the souls of human beings and learn-ing how to properly define and divide an issue into its constituent parts (Phaedrus 271). However, Plato's famous student Aristotle was the first teacher who developed a fully theorized account of rhetoric.

During the fourth century BCE, Aristotle collected the rhetorical hand-books or "arts" of rhetoric that were then available and assembled them into a collection called the Synagoge Technon (Synthesis of Arts). This research apparently convinced him that the current state of rhetorical theory was unacceptable. Since he was interested in theorizing about practice, Aristotle tried to discover general rules for rhetoric that would work in any given sit-uation. While the Older Sophists taught by example, he preferred to develop principles that could be passed on to future students. Presumably, the text we now call the Rhetoric represents his lecture notes. In the open-ing of that work, Aristotle wrote:

Rhetoric is an antistrophe to dialectic; for both are concerned with such things as are, to a certain extent, within the knowledge of all people and belong to no

separately defined science. A result is that all people, in some way, share in both; for all, to some extent try both to test and maintain an argument and to defend themselves and attack. Now among the general public, some do these things randomly and others through an ability acquired by habit, but since both ways are possible, it is clear that it would also be possible to do the same by [following] a path; for it is possible to observe the cause why some succeed by habit and others accidentally, and all would at once agree that such obser-vation is the activity of an art. (I i 1354a)

Aristotle infers that all people learn how to argue in the course of their daily affairs. However, picking up the knack of arguing through experience

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may not be as helpful as studying the principles of argument, which Aristotle claims to have discovered by studying the practices of successful rhetors.

The Rhetoric is the earliest extant example of a complete techne, or art, of rhetoric. Aristotle's major contribution to rhetoric was his systematic and thorough treatment of invention—the art of finding the available argu-ments in a given case. We review many of these in this book: common-places, enthymemes, examples, maxims, and signs, as well as ethical and pathetic proofs. While Aristotle may have borrowed some of these proofs from other rhetoricians, he was the first to combine them into a systematic treatment of available argumentative strategies. In fact, the Rhetoric may have been part of a more ambitious project. Aristotle may have intended to create a comprehensive methodology, a set of intellectual tools that would help people to discover knowledge about anything whatsoever. If so, the methodology would also have included his treatises on logic (the two Analytics and the Sophistic Fallacies, Topics, and Categories) as well as the Poetics, which is about the composition of drama and lyric poetry.

Aristotle's students and followers were called Peripatics (peripatein, "walking about," from their habit of strolling up and down the halls of the Lyceum while they lectured). They were interested in rhetoric only as a sideline, which lessened the chance that they would preserve the Rltetoric as carefully as they did Aristotle's more philosophical works. Apparently a few copies were housed in the famous library at Alexandria, which was burned to the ground by the Roman general Octavius during the first cen-tury BCE. Fortunately, Arab scholars who had worked at Alexandria pre-served copies of the Rhetoric intact throughout the period that Western historians call the Middle Ages. During the Crusades, northern Europeans reestablished contact with Islamic scholars, and as a result the Rhetoric was introduced into European universities during the twelfth-century CE. In modern times its popularity has eclipsed that of Cicero's works, which were the basic texts for the study of ancient rhetoric throughout the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Indeed, Aristotle's text on rhetoric received more scholarly attention during the twentieth century than it did during its first 2,200 years of existence. Probably for this reason, the Aristotelian theory of rhetoric is usually what is meant when a con-temporary scholar or teacher refers to "classical rhetoric."

Isocrates

Despite Aristotle's current fame, his rhetorical theory was completely eclipsed during his lifetime by that of Isocrates. Some sources say that Isocrates studied with Gorgias, from whom he acquired his interest in style. Isocrates started out as a logographer—someone who wrote speeches for people who for some reason couldn't compose a persuasive speech for themselves. Later, he established a famous and influential school of rhetoric that was attended by ambitious young men from all the Greek city-states.

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Throughout his long career, Isocrates taught young men the art of rhetoric so that they could become capable and cultured citizens. In Antidosis he wrote about the purpose of rhetorical study as follows:

When anyone elects to speak or write discourses which are worthy of praise and honor, it is not conceivable that such a person will support causes which are unjust or petty or devoted to private quarrels, and not rather those which are great and honorable, devoted to the welfare of humanity and the common good. It follows, then, that the power to speak well and think right will reward the person who approaches the art of discourse with love of wisdom and love of honor (276-78).

He repeatedly argued that achieving this goal required three things: native ability, study, and practice. Some authorities credit Isocrates with establishing the public speech as an art form. Certainly his surviving speeches are highly polished works of art, and he is said to have worked on some of them for as long as fifteen years. Isocrates' Art of Rhetoric does not survive but we do have most of his speeches and letters.

An Early Sophistic Textbook

We do have another rhetoric text available from Aristotle's and Isocrates' time: the Rhetoric to Alexander (in Latin, Rhetorica ad Alexandrum). Ancient scholars thought that Aristotle had written it, since it is prefaced with a ter from Aristotle to his famous student, Alexander the Great. But this let-ter is a lalet-ter addition to the treatise. The ad Alexandrum is so different from the Rhetoric that it probably represents another scholarly or pedagogical tradition altogether. It is not a theory of rhetoric, as Aristotle's Rhetoric is; it simply lists and discusses the appropriate arguments to use in each part of a speech. The author of the ad Alexandrum was probably one of many teach-ers working at Athens who called themselves "sophists." These teachteach-ers should not be confused with the Older Sophists; Isocrates considered them to be cheats and parasites who promised to teach their students the art of living a happy life, when what they really did was hand out lists of stale formulas for putting arguments together.

Hellenistic Rhetoric

Aristotle, the great Greek rhetorician, and Demosthenes, the great Greek rhetor, both died in the same year: 322 BCE. Scholars use this date to mark the close of the classical period of ancient Greek culture. Ancient scholars realized almost immediately that the intellectual work done during the classical period was important. During the Hellenistic period (roughly 300 BCE to 100 CE), Greek rhetoricians codified classical rhetorical lore into a coherent system that could be easily taught to young people. One of these teachers, Hermagoras of Temnos, added something new to the two rhetor-ical traditions—Aristotelian and sophistic—that were handed down from

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the classical period. Hermagoras, who lived during the second century BCE, is thought to have invented stasis theory, a means of invention that was simpler and less philosophical than Aristotle's and which was somewhat better adapted to the needs of courtroom rhetors, as well. Versions of stasis theory either replaced earlier inventional schemes or were incorporated into them in many post-Hellenistic rhetorical treatises.

We have a very full treatise on Greek rhetorical theory from this period, written in Latin. It is called the Rhetorica ad Herennium, because its author dedicated the work to one Gaius Herennius. Modern scholars are uncertain about its authorship, although for awhile during the Middle Ages it was thought to have been written by Cicero. In any case, this work gives us a very complete picture of Hellenistic rhetorical theory, and it is especially valuable because it includes a very full discussion of an ancient art of memory.

Roman Rhetorics

During the Hellenistic period of Greek culture, the city of Rome, located on seven hills in what is now south-central Italy, became the economic and military ruler of the known world. Even then Rome was a very old city. Early on, it was governed in a fashion quite similar to that of other city-states, where all those defined as citizens (plebeians) gathered to vote on pressing issues. By the second century BCE, however, the people's assembly had become a working fiction, and the city was in fact governed by a Senate made up of persons who made more or less recent claims to the sta-tus of patrician, or aristocrat, by virtue of their ancestry or service to the state. This Senate had no legitimate constitutional authority, having wrested political control away from the plebeian assembly. Because of the political instability of this situation, terrible political turmoil wracked Rome throughout the second and first centuries BCE, until the Empire was firmly established under Octavius shortly before the beginning of the Common Era.

Marcus Tullius Cicero was an important actor in the declining years of Rome's so-called Republic. He was a member of the Roman Senate; but more important for our purposes, Cicero is the most influential practitioner and theorist of ancient rhetoric who ever lived. While he was active in Roman politics, Cicero gave many speeches and managed as well to write works on literature, philosophy, and rhetorical theory. Cicero's politics were unrelentingly republican, which means that he supported the power of the Senate on all issues. Hence he was able to forge only temporary alliances with the succession of powerful generals who wanted to turn Rome into an empire, and it was inevitable that he would sooner or later run afoul of some powerful pretender to the title of emperor. In 43 BCE he was murdered by an assassin sent by Marc Antony. Some ancient sources say that the dead Cicero's hands were cut off, since he used these to write his powerful speeches; other authorities suggest that Cicero's head was dis-played in the forum with a golden pin stuck through the tongue. Such was the power of his rhetoric.

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Cicero's rhetorical works were read in schools throughout the Western Middle Ages. During the European Renaissance, many thought his literary style to be the finest ever achieved and the only one worthy of imitation. While Cicero was alive, his skill as an orator was respected and feared; indeed, even when he lost (as in his defense of Milo), his speeches were so powerful and skillful that they are still read today. We rely upon Cicero's De Inventione (On Invention), Orator, Parlitiones Oratoriae (The Paris of Speaking), Topica (the Topics), and the De Oratore (On the Art of Oratory) in this book. The early treatise On Invention was heavily indebted to Hellenistic rhetoric, but Cicero's more mature rhetorical treatises were influenced by the work of Aristotle, as well as that of other Greek rhetori-cians and philosophers. But the real shaping force on Cicero's work was the Roman state—its respect for authority and tradition, its political fluctua-tions, and its ethical dilemmas.

The other important figure in Roman rhetoric is Marcus Fabricius Quintilian, who may be the most influential teacher of rhetoric who ever lived. His Institutio Oratorio (Institutes of Oratory) was considered to be a classic work on education almost from the day he published it in 90 CE. Quintilian's influence is evident in the work of his contemporaries, such as the poet Juvenal and the historian Tacitus, and in that of the early Christian fathers as well. Sometime during the Middle Ages, all the complete manu-scripts of the Institutes disappeared. But in 1416 an Italian scholar named Poggio Bracciolini rediscovered a complete copy of the work in a dusty monastery library. Poggio knew the value of what he had found. He imme-diately made a handwritten copy of the entire manuscript, thus preserving this ancient work for future generations to enjoy.

The Institutes is particularly valuable because it is a compendium of the best of ancient rhetorical theory, composed near the end of its theoretical development. Quintilian was a careful scholar, and his discussions of the competing theories of this or that ancient rhetorician often give us the best (and sometimes the only) information we have about them. Quintilian's theory of rhetoric was thoroughly indebted to Roman practical ethics. The education he prescribed for young citizens was aimed at producing speak-ers and writspeak-ers who had the best aims of their community at heart. Many of the practices he recommended were used in Roman schools at least until the collapse of the Empire, and probably beyond.

Rhetoric in Later Antiquity

When political power was solidified within the Roman Empire, the great age of ancient rhetorical theory was past. No new theorists of the caliber of Gorgias or Aristotle appeared. The practice of rhetoric changed greatly under the restrictions imposed by the succession of Roman emperors. Rhetors no longer advocated policy; they no longer dared to blame the powerful for their shortcomings or to celebrate with the people alternative versions of community. Instead, they became performers. They used their art to create dazzling displays of highly ornamented variations on harmless