In the Greek tradition, the persuasive arts are traced back to Hermes, the messenger and trickster god, or to Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey. Homer employs as many as twenty epithets for Odysseus, more than for any other character, including, ‘the cunning’ [polymetis] and ‘man of many devices’ or ‘man of many twists and turns’ [polytropos]. Homer sang of a pre-literate society in which people thought of rousing speech as inspired [‘breathed in’] by the gods. Still, that Phoenix taught Achilles to be ‘a speaker of words and doer of deeds’ suggests that speaking could also be worked at—and that speaking is related not only to thinking but also to doing.

Hermes married Peitho [Persuasion], the personification and goddess of persuasion. Peitho was what rhetoric was called before the invention of the word ‘rhetoric’. The word ‘rhetoric’ derives from rhetor [orator, speaker], which in turn derives from rhesis [speech] and rhema [‘that which is spoken’]. It first appears in one of Plato’s dialogues, the Gorgias, which came to be subtitled, On Rhetoric. Although written in ~385 BCE, the Gorgias is set a generation earlier, at a time when the sophist Gorgias was one of the most sought-after men in Greece. Plato’s Gorgias claims to be able to answer any question that might be put to him, but, when tested by Socrates, struggles to define his own art. In time, the word ‘rhetoric’ came to denote the civic art of public speaking in deliberative assemblies and law courts, and on formal state occasions.

Cicero reports that Aristotle identified Corax and Tisias as the inventors of rhetoric. But it may be that Aristotle recognized two traditions of rhetoric, the composition of rhetorical handbooks, which he traced back to Corax and Tisias, and the development of the poetic style of speaking and writing, which he traced back through Gorgias to Empedocles.

Gorgias hailed from Leontini in Sicily. He studied rhetoric under Corax and Tisias in nearby Syracuse, and was versed in the teachings of Empedocles. In 427 BCE, he led an embassy to Athens to forge a defensive alliance against an overbearing Syracuse. Gorgias was something of a showman. He specialised in making unconventional, counterintuitive, or downright absurd arguments appear the stronger, and spoke in a florid, rhyming style that hypnotised his audiences. When in the theatre at Athens, he would say, ‘Come, propose me a theme!’ He took pride in his ability to speak on any subject and adopt any position, and founded the art of extempore [‘on the spur of the moment’] oratory. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle characterizes his style as ‘ironic’, so that his own opinions, if he had any, were difficult to decipher. Rather than any positive philosophy, he offered an agnostic art of persuasion which he held to be of the utmost value.

In Plato’s Philebus, the sophist Protarchus tells Socrates:

I have often heard Gorgias maintain that the art of persuasion far surpassed every other; this, as he says, is by far the best of them all, for to it all things submit, not by compulsion, but of their own free will.

Of Gorgias’ works, two short display speeches survive, the Encomium of Helen and the Defence of Palamedes, along with a fragment of a funeral oration and two paraphrases of a lost treatise, On Non-Being.

In the Encomium of Helen, which aims at praising Helen and exculpating her for leaving with Paris and sparking the Trojan War, Gorgias argues that Helen could have been persuaded to leave her husband Menelaus in one of four ways: by the gods; under duress; by the power of love; by the power of speech. But whichever way it was, she herself would have been blameless.

Famously, Gorgias compares the effect of speech on the soul to the effect of drugs on the body:

Just as different drugs draw forth different humours from the body—some putting a stop to disease, others to life—so too with words: some cause pain, others joy, some strike fear, some stir the audience to boldness, some benumb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion.

The Encomium of Helen served as an advert for Gorgias. Although it falls under epideictic rhetoric (the rhetoric of praise or blame), it contains an important element of judicial (or forensic) rhetoric, for example, in the initial dialysis, in which Gorgias lays out the four possible circumstances under which Helen could have left for Troy. The other major branch of rhetoric is deliberative (or political) rhetoric, which involves exhortation or dissuasion. 

Gorgias spent much of his long life (he died at the age of 108) in Thessaly where he enjoyed the patronage of Aristippus of Larissa and Jason of Pherae. He taught Aristippus’ some-time eromenos [beloved], the Meno who lent his name to Plato’s Meno, as well as the orator Isocrates, who came to rank among the ten Attic Orators.

In his autobiographical Antidosis, Isocrates tells us that Gorgias:

…spent his time in Thessaly when the Thessalians were the most prosperous people in Hellas [Greece]; he lived a long life and devoted himself to the making of money; he had no fixed domicile in any city state and therefore paid out nothing for public weal nor was he subject to any tax; moreover, he did not marry and beget children, but was free from this, the most unremitting and expensive of burdens…

Gorgias formed part of the sophistic movement, which centred upon Golden Age Athens (480-404 BCE). Following the reforms of Kleisthenes in 508 BCE, Athens became an extreme participatory democracy in which power accrued to those best able to carry the crowd. In the Gorgias, the politician Callicles, who is hosting Gorgias in Athens, goes so far as to imply that democracy is a kind of subterfuge in which the strong are still able to dominate the weak, not by brute force as in the state of nature but by the verve of their rhetoric. As well as deliberative rhetoric, ambitious aristoi needed to be trained in judicial rhetoric to defend themselves against vexatious or politically motivated lawsuits that could lead to ostracism (a 10-year exile) or even execution. Athenian juries—essentially, a rabble that had turned out for the modest jury fee—were notoriously keen to convict, and enjoyed cutting their betters down to size.

The sophistic movement grew out of this urgent demand for rhetoric, especially although not only in Athens, which had risen into the capital of a prosperous maritime empire.

From the late fifth century, it became possible for defendants to hire a logographer, that is, a speechwriter, although they still had to stand up and deliver the speech themselves. Some of these paid-for speeches, by the likes of Demosthenes, Lysias, and Isocrates, can still be read today.

The Founding Fathers, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and others, were familiar with Athenian history, and front of their mind in framing the United States Constitution was to guard against the excesses of an extreme democracy. In the next few years, their blueprint will be tested more than ever before.

Isocrates became a logographer after being deprived, by war, of his family’s property. In about 390, he opened the first school of rhetoric in the Lyceum of Athens. He taught not only rhetoric but also subjects such as philosophy and history which pupils could draw upon to lend substance to their speeches. Although he charged high fees, he imposed stringent entry requirements and accepted no more than nine pupils at a time. What he taught was neither philosophy nor rhetoric, but something in-between, which Aristotle would later call practical wisdom. At the age of 82, he wrote the Antidosis, in which he imagines himself on trial à la Socrates and mounts his own defence.

If Aristotle stooped down to write a treatise on rhetoric, it was probably to compete with Isocrates for pupils. The brilliance of the work and the renown of its author assured rhetoric its place among the liberal arts. In Book 1, Aristotle identifies the three branches of rhetoric, deliberative, judicial, and epideictic, and the three modes of persuasion (or persuasive appeals), ethos, pathos, and logos—roughly, character, emotion, and argument. Book 2 treats of the emotions of the hearers and the character of the orator, and Book 3 of style and delivery.

Aristotle’s Rhetoric is one of only two surviving rhetorical works from the Greek classical period, the other one being the Rhetoric for Alexander, probably by Anaximenes of Lampsacus (d. 320 BCE), who, like Aristotle, had been a teacher of Alexander the Great.

Another exact contemporary of Aristotle, Demosthenes (d. 322 BCE), inveighed against the expansionism of Alexander and his father Philip II of Macedon, and is remembered as one of the greatest orators of all time. According to Cicero, Demosthenes excelled among all; according to Quintilian, he was ‘almost the standard of oratory’ [lex orandi]. Unfortunately, Demosthenes never wrote a treatise of rhetoric, although several of his speeches survive.

Cicero reports that Cleanthes (d. c. 230 BCE) and Chrysippus (d. c. 206 BCE) [respectively, the second and third heads of the Stoic school] each wrote an Art of Rhetoric, ‘but of such sort that it is the one book to read if anyone should wish to keep quiet…’

Neel Burton is author of How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.