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, he led an embassy to Athens to forge a defensive alliance against an overbearing Syracuse.
Gorgias was something of a showman. He specialized in making unconventional, counterintuitive, or absurd arguments appear the stronger, and spoke in a florid, rhyming style that hypnotized his audiences. When in the theatre at Athens, he would say, ‘Come, propose me a theme!’ He took pride in his ability to take any position, on any subject, and founded the art of extempore oratory. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle characterizes his style of oratory as ‘ironic’, so that his own opinions, if he had any, are hard 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.
Works
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 Sparta with Paris and sparking the Trojan War, he 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.
In sum, he argues that Helen could have been persuaded to leave in one of four ways: by the gods; by physical force; by the power of love; by the power of speech. But whichever way it was, she herself would have been blameless.
In On Not-Being, he parodies and refutes Parmenides by arguing that:
Nothing exists.
Even if something did exist, nothing could be known about it.
Even if something could be known about it, this knowledge could not be communicated to others.
Even if it could be communicated to others, it could not be understood.
But as ever with Gorgias, it is far from clear whether these stood among his own opinions.
Later Life
Gorgias spent much of his long life in Thessaly where he enjoyed the patronage of Aristippus of Larissa and Jason of Pheræ. He taught Aristippus’ one-time 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; he lived a long life and devoted himself to the making of money; he had no fixed domicile in any city 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…
Many Oxford University students have thanked me for teaching them the six parts of discourse—which, for many centuries, used to be common knowledge.
Since at least Cicero (d. 43 BCE), speeches have been divided into six parts, known as the ‘six parts of discourse’:
Introduction (exordium)
Narration (narratio)
Division (divisio or partitio)
Proof (confirmatio)
Refutation (confutatio)
Conclusion (peroratio)
The six parts of discourse are, of course, just as good for structuring essays, so let’s look at each one in turn.
1. Introduction
In the exordium, you might announce the subject and purpose of the speech/essay and lay out your credentials for speaking/writing.
All the better if, at the same time, you can hook your audience, for instance, by creating a sense of urgency.
Keep the exordium as short and clear as possible, A speaker/writer should never bore, confuse, or test their audience, and the beginning would be the worst time to do so.
2. Narration
In the narration, you lay out the facts of the case and issues at stake. What is the background to this problem, how did it arise, what has it led to, what has so far been said and done about it, what does the research indicate, have there been any similar problems, and so on.
The narration may seem neutral and objective, but is in fact an opportunity to frame the debate/discussion.
3. Division
Division is the turning point in your speech/essay. ‘So this is what is at stake, this is why you should care about it, and this is what we should do about it.’
Like the exordium, the division ought to be brief if it is not to reek of artifice.
The rhetorical handbook Ad Herennium (c. 80 BCE) provides a couple of examples of division, concerning dilemmas in Greek mythology.
Orestes killed his mother [Clytemnestra]; on that I agree with my opponents. But did he have the right to commit the deed, and was he justified in committing it? This is in dispute.
You admit that Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon; yet despite this they say that I ought not to have avenged my father.
4. Proof
The proof is your argumentation. This includes logos (arguments), of course, usually in the form of enthymemes (informal arguments) and examples, but it also includes non-technical proofs such as laws, witnesses, and contracts.
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle (d. 322 BCE) advises that if the written law is against us, we should claim that it is more equitable to fall back on the general law (natural law), as Antigone did when she buried her brother Polynices against Creon’s edict. Alternatively, we might argue that the law is antiquated, that it contradicts itself or another law, or that it is ambiguous or open to interpretation.
For Aristotle, witnesses can include ‘ancient witnesses’ such as Homer, Hesiod, Solon, proverbs, and received wisdom … and, nowadays, old Aristotle himself. Ancient witnesses can be appealed to indirectly, as when Barack Obama echoed Martin Luther King, who himself echoed Abraham Lincoln, who himself echoed the King James Bible, notably in the first line of the Gettysburg Address of 1863:
Four score and seven years ago [i.e. 87 years ago] our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
5. Refutation
Refutation, in which you acknowledge and address the other side of the argument, need not be fair or principled. You might exaggerate, misrepresent, or caricature your opponent’s stance (for example, refer to their plan to fund social care as a ‘dementia tax’ or ‘death tax’), indignantly deny a made-up or unrelated charge, or equivocally deny an actual charge.
If it helps, you can also concede an argument while framing it within your own, stronger argument. Far from being a retreat or capitulation, concession (concessio, synchoresis, paromologia) makes you seem agreeable, honest, and fairminded, while deflating your opponent and reframing the debate to suit your strengths: ‘Yes, that’s correct. I’ve read the report myself and seen the numbers. But the real question is…’
If your proof is insubstantial, you might instead begin with a vehement refutation in the hope that no one notices your lack of argument. Since Plato’s Phaedo, and even a little before, the Western mind has been marked by deep divisions or dualities, such as soul and body, mind and matter, reason and sense experience, reason and emotion, reality and appearance, good and evil, heaven and hell… This binary thinking carries over to dialectic and rhetoric, in which it is often one thing or the other, rather than both or several or neither. Thus, in the Western mind, knocking down your opponent’s argument is tantamount to validating your own. Notice that the very concept of a debate with an ‘opponent’ is confrontational, when the exercise could instead be cooperative and conversational, as in the Upanishads.
6. Conclusion
Finally, the peroration often includes a forceful summarising of the key points together with a pathetic (emotional) appeal and call to action.
For example, this is how President Franklin D. Roosevelt concluded his Day of Infamy Speech, delivered to a Joint Session of Congress on December 8, 1941, a day after the Attack on Pearl Harbour:
Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.
With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.
I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.
Caveats
Although many great talks deliberately or naturally follow this six-part scheme, it is important to remember that a speech should sound artless and authentic rather than contrived and formulaic.
Once they have been assimilated, it is possible to break the rules, as Cicero himself did in the first line of the First Catilinarian, first, by addressing Catiline directly in the Senate chamber, and, second, by overlooking his own advice ‘not to spring at once into the passionate portion of your speech’ [Orator 2.213-14].
When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end to that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?
In some speeches, entire parts may be missing, or not clearly distinguished. Indeed, Aristotle identified only two necessary parts, statement and argument, that is, narration and proof, which might be supplemented by an introduction and conclusion [Rhetoric 3.13]. Other ways of seeming natural are to use simple and direct language, express doubt about what to say (dubitatio), and correct yourself aloud (epergesis). Dubitatio and epergesis can also make you seem more even-minded and scrupulous.
Craft is something that you learn; art, that you unlearn.
The first Roman orator of whom we can form a distinct impression is Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 BCE), also known as Cato the Elder or Cato the Censor—known, ironically, for his austere conservatism and staunch opposition to Hellenization [Greek influence]. Despite his high senatorial rank, Cato rode a packhorse laden with saddlebags. He made a point of writing his history of Rome and his treatise on agriculture in Latin instead of the more usual and scholarly Greek. ‘The words of the Greeks’ he said, ‘are born on their lips, but those of the Romans in their hearts.’ Today, his De agri cultura [On the Cultivation of the Fields] is the oldest extant work of Latin prose.
Cato wrote a kind of encyclopaedia for his son, which includes a part on rhetoric. In it, he says, ‘An orator, son Marcus, is a good man skilled at speaking.’ Cato is reputed to have ended every speech in the Senate with the words, Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam [‘Moreover, I think Carthage should be destroyed]—often abbreviated or simplified to Carthago delenda est. His speech, On His Own Expenses, is remembered for mentioning the topics that he will not mention, a figure of speech known as apophasis, paralipsis, or praeteritio—a classic example being, ‘No point saying that I told you so.’ Or Monica from Friends: ‘Chandler, you know, the old Monica would remind you to scrub that Teflon pan with a plastic brush. But I’m not going to do that.’
The Gracchi
The most notable orators of the late second century are the aristocratic grandsons of Scipio Africanus, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, also known as the Gracchi brothers.
In 133 BCE, as tribune of the plebs, Tiberius introduced a land reform to benefit the poor. When he met with opposition, he persisted with his reform and was beaten to death.
Some ten years later, Gaius in turn became tribune of the plebs and took up the mantle of his late brother—and ended up either being killed, or committing suicide to avoid being killed.
His most famous words, spoken on the last day of his life and recorded by Cicero as an epitome of delivery, brought even his enemies to tears:
Whither shall I, unhappy wretch, betake myself? Whither shall I turn? To the Capitol? But that is drenched with the blood of my brother! Or to my home, that I may see my afflicted mother in all the agony of lamentation?
Cicero
The greatest of all Roman orators is, of course, Cicero himself.
The name of Cicero is regarded not as the name of a man, but of eloquence itself. Let us, therefore, fix our eyes upon him, take him as our pattern, and let the student realize that he has made real progress if he is a passionate admirer of Cicero. —Quintilian X, 2.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) was born in Arpinium, around 60 miles south of Rome, into a wealthy equestrian family. He began practising the law in around 83-81, and, in 80, made his name on the back of his brilliant defence of Sextus Roscius against a fabricated charge of patricide. He climbed the cursus honorum, or ‘ladder of offices’, holding each office at or near the youngest possible age: quaestor in 75, aedile in 69, praetor in 66, and consul in 63. He became consul at the age of just 42, making him the youngest non-patrician to serve as a consul in the five-hundred-year history of the Republic.
As quaestor in Western Sicily, Cicero seemed so formidable that the locals asked him to prosecute Gaius Verres, who, as governor, had plundered the province. He fought the case with such aplomb that he came to be regarded as the greatest orator in Rome. As praetor, he made his first big speech in the senate, in favour of conferring upon Pompey the command of the campaign against Mithradates VI, King of Pontus. But the crowning glory of his career came in his consulship, when, by the force of his four Catiline Orations, he put down the Catiline conspiracy to overthrow the Republic. He had five of the conspirators executed and announced their deaths to a cheering crowd with the single word, Vixerunt [‘They lived’]. For ‘saving the Republic’ (as he liked to boast), he received the honorific Pater Patriae [‘Father of the Fatherland’] from his ally Cato the Younger (the Stoic great-grandson of Cato the Elder), but lived forever after in fear of reprisal for having put Roman citizens to death without trial.
Cicero was not a party to Caesar’s assassination in 44, although Brutus did call out his name upon raising his blood-soaked dagger, beseeching him to ‘restore the Republic’. Cicero later wrote to one of the conspirators, ‘How I wish that you had invited me to that most glorious banquet on the Ides of March.’
Mark Antony, as consul, leader of the Caesarian faction, and unofficial executor of Caesar’s public will, began throwing his weight around. Cicero, who had been hoping to restore the Republic, responded by playing the young Octavian, Caesar’s grandnephew, adopted son, and heir, against Antony. More than that, he overtly and vehemently attacked Antony in a series of speeches which he referred to as the Philippics, after the speeches delivered by Demosthenes to rouse the Athenians into fighting Philip II of Macedon. But this strategy backfired when Octavian and Antony reconciled and joined forces with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate.
Estimating that Caesar had been undone by his clemency, the Second Triumvirate brought back the ruthless proscription [the legally sanctioned murder of opponents and rivals], not seen in Rome since the time of Sulla. When Antony put Cicero at the head of the proscription list, Octavian tried to have him removed but, it would seem, did not insist or prevail. On 7 December 43, Cicero, betrayed by a freedman [former slave] of his brother, was intercepted near his villa at Formiae, travelling down to the coast in a bid to escape to his son in Greece. He literally bowed to his assassins, extending his neck out of his litter to ease their task. After killing him, they hacked off his head and hands so that Antony could have them displayed on the Rostra in the manner of Marius and Sulla. According to the historian Cassius Dio (d. 235 CE), Antony’s wife Fulvia took up Cicero’s severed head, pulled out his tongue, and jabbed at it with her hairpin.
Many years later, Octavian, now Augustus, chanced upon one of his grandsons reading a book by Cicero. The boy tried to hide the book in his gown, but the emperor took it from him and stood a long time leafing through its pages. Finally, he handed it back, saying, ‘My child, this was a learned man, and a lover of his country.’
Atticism vs Asianism
In his 12-volume Institutes of Oratory, Quintilian contrasts the style of Cicero to that of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, whom both Cicero and Quintilian held in the highest esteem:
Demosthenes is more concentrated, Cicero more copious… from Demosthenes’ speeches nothing can be taken away, to Cicero’s nothing can be added…
In the Orator, one of his latest works, Cicero paints a picture of the ideal orator, and responds to criticisms, from Brutus and other so-called Atticists, of his abundance and elaboration of style.
The Atticists, so called because they took for models the Attic writers of the fifth and early fourth centuries BCE (Lysias, Demosthenes, Hyperides…), argued that the spread of Greek into Asia in the wake of Alexander had led to a degeneracy of style, and called for a return ad fontes [to the sources]. This unadorned plain speaking chimed with the Stoicism or Stoic leanings of many Atticists, including Brutus himself.
Hortensius
The orator Quintus Hortensius Hortalus (114-50 BCE), second only to his friend Cicero, and more florid, had the good fortune of dying a year before Caesar crossed the Rubicon—of dying, if you will, with the Republic that had afforded him the freedom to speak. A noted piscinarius [‘fish-fancier’], Hortensius bred fish (possibly lampreys, eels, or mullet) in pools, and may have introduced the peacock to the Roman table. As an orator, he so perfected the swish of the toga that actors came to watch and learn from him. Cicero entitled his invitation to philosophy, the Hortensius, after him, and dedicated his history of Roman oratory, the Brutus, to his memory.
Rhetoric After the Republic
Fortunately, rhetoric, unlike Hortensius, did not die with the Republic. Au contraire, as if to compensate for its newfound impotence, it rose into the pinnacle of education.
In the Hellenistic period, a distinction had been drawn between the elementary teaching of the grammarian and the more advanced instruction of the rhetorician, which boys of a certain background might begin between the ages of 12 to 14. Even before Cicero, who listed them, rhetorical instruction consisted of five parts, or canons: invention (what to say), arrangement (how to lay it out), style (how to say it), memory (how to commit it to memory), and delivery (how to convey it with more than just words).
For centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, rhetoric remained the cornerstone of Western education. Five of the major Latin fathers of the Church had been teachers of rhetoric prior to their conversion: Tertullian (d. 240 CE), Cyprian (d. 258), Lactantius (d. c. 325), Arnobius (d. c. 330), and Augustine (d. 430). In 425, to train administrators, the Eastern Roman emperor Theodosius II founded the Pandidacterium, the first incarnation of the University of Constantinople, with 31 chairs—of which ten in Greek grammar, five in Greek rhetoric, ten in Latin grammar, three in Latin rhetoric, two in law, and one in philosophy.
During the Middle Ages down to Shakespeare’s time at school, boys began with the study of grammar, dialectic (or ‘logic’), and rhetoric. Having completed this so-called trivium, they could progress to the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. These seven ‘liberal arts’ were regarded as ‘thinking skills’, and distinguished from practical arts such as medicine and architecture.
Cicero’s On Invention
At the age of just 16 or 17, Cicero had written a handbook of rhetoric, On Invention, which contains the first recorded use of the term ‘liberal arts’. During the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance, On Invention became the standard text for the teaching of rhetoric, alongside the anonymous Rhetoric for Herennius, which benefited from being attributed (or rather, misattributed) to the great Cicero. Cicero himself regarded On Invention as superseded by his mature works on rhetoric, On the Orator, Brutus, and Orator, but these were little known after the classical period, until the Renaissance.
Although practical in scope, On Invention opens with a preface in which Cicero reflects upon the relationship between dialectic and rhetoric, concluding from the height of his teenage years that
wisdom without eloquence has been of little benefit to states, but eloquence without wisdom has for the most part been a great hindrance and never an advantage’.
Until recently, everyone who was anyone would have read this.
Rhetoric Today
Cicero’s influence perdured well into the twentieth century, and it is not until the 1960s that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge dropped the matriculation [entry] requirement for an O level in Latin.
Speaking at her old school in 1982, Margaret Thatcher, by then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, recounted her struggle to learn Latin to apply for chemistry at Oxford:
Well, there you are, I was taught Latin and I must tell you—anyone who wishes to do an O level in Latin can do it in ten weeks flat.
A decade later, in a 1991 KERA interview, the journalist Lee Cullum challenged Thatcher on the benefits and relevance of a classical education:
I read several years ago in the Sunday Times that a classical education, for which Oxford and Cambridge are so famous, is fine for running an empire, but not so good for running an economy. Do you think there is any truth in that?
No, I don’t. If you excel at a classical education, Latin and Greek, not only at the language but at learning the literature, you will have learnt a great deal about the philosophy of life, about democracy, about fundamental principles, and you will have a very good mind … Heaven knows, these days, we are still up against human nature rather more than anything else.
Embassy to Achilles. On the left, Ajax and Odysseus standing, facing Achilles seated and Phoenix standing on the right.
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. InBook 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…’
The most ancient mnemonic device, and the gruesome story behind it.
Although mnemonic devices far predate the written word, both Cicero and Quintilian name Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-468 BCE) as the first teacher of an art of memory.
This is the same Simonides who composed the epitaph for the three hundred Spartans who died at Thermopylae:
Go tell the Spartans, passerby That here, by Spartan law, we lie.
According to Plutarch, Simonides once dismissed the Thessalians as ‘too ignorant’ to be moved by poetry. Yet, after the assassination of Hipparchus in Athens, he found himself in the patronage of the Thessalian aristocrat Scopas.
One day, at a banquet, Simonides sung a lyric poem in honour of Scopas. But the poem contained so many references to Castor and Pollux (the Dioskouroi, or Gemini) that Scopas told Simonides that he would only pay him half the agreed fee, and he could go claim the other half from Castor and Pollux.
A little later, Simonides was called out of the banqueting hall to meet two young men who had just arrived and were asking for him. When he went out, he saw no one, but when he turned around the banqueting hall collapsed, killing Scopas and everyone within it.
Their bodies were so mangled as to be unrecognisable. But because he remembered everyone’s position around the table, Simonides was able to identify them. This experience led him to develop a system of mnemonics based on images and places called the method of loci.
How it works
The method of loci, also called the journey method or memory palace, involves placing a mnemonic image for each item to be remembered at a defined point along an imaginary route.
First, choose a very familiar environment, for example, your house or garden or favourite walk. This is your backdrop: it is fixed, and you can reuse it for talk after talk.
Within this setting, there will be a number of distinct locations, or loci, such as your front door, the doormat, the entrance hall, the stairway, your study to the left and the snug to the right… You do not have to have a mansion with many rooms, like Jesus’ father. Instead, you can think of the snug as, say, three separate loci: the fireplace, the sofa, and the alcove. But you must always make the same journey through your memory palace and come to the loci in the same sequence.
Then, in each locus, place a mnemonic image that represents the thing to be remembered at that point in your talk, for example, a goose, to trigger your story about visiting a goose farm in Extremadura.
Once you’ve furnished your memory palace, keep on running through it until you’ve memorised your talk.
There is much more to mental health than the mere absence of mental disorder. Today, I write about all the things that I was never taught. Click here to find out more.
You must be logged in to post a comment.