In the Rhetoric (4th century BCE), Aristotle identified the three modes of persuasion, or persuasive appeals, that are in: the character of the speaker (ethos), the emotions of the audience (pathos), and the argument itself (logos).
Ethos, pathos, and logos are referred to as artistic means of persuasion, and contrasted to non-artistic means, that is, to hard evidence, such as laws, witnesses, and contracts.
Unlike dialectic (reasoning), rhetoric (speech-making) has no rules: you can commit any fallacy, so long as you can get away with it. But it is a risky business: if you get caught out, you debase your most valuable asset: your credibility as a thinker and speaker—in other words, your ethos.
According to Aristotle, the three qualities of ethos are soundness, virtue, and goodwill, since the lack of either one is likely to lead to untruths or bad advice.
Ethos and decorum
In a speaker, ethos is also a matter of agreeability and meeting the expectations of the audience in terms of appearance diction, and comportment. The Romans referred to this aspect of ethos as decorum.
Anything that grates with the audience, or sets you apart from it, is a violation of decorum. What this might be varies from audience to audience. For example, an audience of academics would expect some jargon, which, however, would jar with a general audience. Boastfulness and vulgarity can be a violation of decorum, as can be, unfortunately, complexity and subtlety.
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle remarks that it is their simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated before a general audience:
It is this simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences—makes them, as the poets tell us, “charm the crowd’s ears more finely.” Educated men lay down broad general principles; uneducated men argue from common knowledge and draw obvious conclusions.
Becoming one with the audience
Like air or manners, decorum is noticeable only in its lack: when it’s there, you don’t give it a second thought. A decorous speaker is one who blends in or even merges with the audience, forsaking “me” and “you” for “we”.
Martin Luther King merged so entirely with his audience that he co-opted them as orators, with their antiphonal responses transforming his speech into something like a Southern Baptist sermon: “One hundred years later—my Lord—the Negro still is not free…”
Rhetoric that is too obviously rhetorical is a violation of decorum in that it looks contrived and manipulative and, in that much, sets the speaker apart from the audience.
Obama, Churchill, and Harris
Obama is often hailed as the greatest rhetorician of our age. His one weakness, if it can be called a weakness, is that he is too good.
This is the same problem that Winston Churchill had: for a long time, people would turn up to the House of Commons to admire his speeches but, ultimately, pay them no heed.
Reading from a prompter can also be a violation of decorum, and for similar reasons. In the run-up to the 2024 United States presidential elections, Kamala Harris delivered several soaring speeches, undermined by her reputation (fair or unfair) for reading from a prompter.
How to sound less suspect and more natural
In public speaking, a lack of polish is often an advantage.
One technique for sounding more natural and ingenuous is the dubitatio, that is, the expression of doubt and uncertainty about what to say.
An especially effective strategy is to begin with a show of awkwardness, and gradually gain in confidence and fluency as if carried by the force of the argument.
Another approach is to tell a story, start a conversation, and ditch the blatant rhetoric. Instead of trying to sell something, try instead to share or give something. No one is in the least suspicious of a TED talk, although that too is rhetoric, rhetoric in disguise.
The symbol of wisdom is the owl, a bird of prey which cleaves through darkness.
Every time I utter the word “wisdom”, someone giggles or sneers. Wisdom, more so even than expertise, does not sit comfortably in an egalitarian, anti-elitist society. In an age dominated by materialism and consumerism, science and technology, and specialization and compartmentalization, it is too loose, too grand, and too mysterious a concept. With our heads in our smartphones and tablets, in our bills and bank statements, we simply do not have the time or mental space for it, or even the idea of it.
But things were not always thus. The word “wisdom” features 222 times in the Old Testament, which includes all of seven so-called ‘wisdom books’: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, the Book of Wisdom, and Sirach.
Here is Ecclesiastes 7:12:
For wisdom is a defence, and money is a defence: but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have it.
The word “philosophy” literally means “the love of wisdom”, and wisdom is the overarching aim of philosophy, or, at least, ancient philosophy.
In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates tells the young Lysis that, without wisdom, he will be of no worth to anyone:
And therefore, my boy, if you are wise, all men will be your friends and kindred, for you will be useful and good; but if you are not wise, neither father, nor mother, nor kindred, nor anyone else, will love you.
The patron goddess of Athens, the city in which the Lysis is set, is none other than Athena, goddess of wisdom, who sprung out from the skull of Zeus. Her symbol, and the symbol of wisdom, is the owl, a bird of prey which cleaves through darkness.
Indeed, “wisdom” derives from the Proto-Indo-European root weid-, “to see”. In Norse mythology, Odin gouged out one of his eyes and offered it to Mimir in exchange for a drink from the well of knowledge and wisdom, symbolically trading one mode of perception for another, higher one.
Wisdom as knowledge
But what exactly is wisdom? People often speak of “knowledge and wisdom” as though they might be closely related or even the same thing. So one hypothesis is that wisdom is knowledge, or a great deal of knowledge. If wisdom is knowledge, then it has to be a certain kind of knowledge, or else learning the phonebook, or the names of all the rivers in the world, might count as wisdom. And if wisdom is a certain kind of knowledge, then it is not scientific or technical knowledge, or else every contemporary person would be wiser than the wisest of ancient philosophers. Any twenty-first century school-leaver would be wiser than a Seneca or Socrates.
Remember: the Delphic oracle pronounced Socrates the wisest of all people not because he knew everything or anything, but because he knew the extent of what he did not know.
Still, there seems to be more to wisdom than mere “negative knowledge”, or else I could simply be super-skeptical about everything and count myself wise…
Or maybe wisdom consists in having high epistemic standards, that is, in having a high bar for believing something, and an even higher bar for calling that belief knowledge. But then we are back to a picture of wisdom as something like science…
Wisdom as correct opinion
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates notices that people of wisdom and virtue seem to be very poor at imparting those qualities. Themistocles was able to teach his son Cleophantus skills such as standing upright on horseback and shooting javelins, but no one ever credited the poor wretch with anything like his father’s wisdom; and the same could also be said of Lysimachus and his son Aristides, Pericles and his sons Paralus and Xanthippus, and Thucydides and his sons Melesias and Stephanus. And if wisdom cannot be taught, not even by the wisest of Athenians, then it is not a kind of knowledge.
If wisdom cannot be taught, how, asks Meno, did good people come about? Socrates replies that right action is possible under guidance other than that of knowledge: a person who has knowledge of the way to Larisa (a city-state in Thessaly) may make a good guide, but a person who has only correct opinion about the way, but has never been and does not know, might make an equally good guide. Since wisdom cannot be taught, it cannot be knowledge; and if it cannot be knowledge, it can only be correct opinion—which explains why paragons of wisdom such as Themistocles, Lysimachus, and Pericles were unable to impart their wisdom even unto their own sons. Wise people are no different from soothsayers, prophets, and poets, who say many true things when they are divinely inspired but have no real knowledge of what they are saying.
Wisdom as the understanding of causes
Aristotle gives us another clue in the Metaphysics, when he says that wisdom is the understanding of causes. None of the five senses are regarded as wisdom because, although they give the most authoritative knowledge of sense particulars, they are unable to discern the distal causes of anything. Similarly, we suppose artists to be wiser than artisans because artists know the “why” or cause, and can therefore teach, whereas artisans do not, and cannot. In other words, wisdom is the understanding of the right relations between things, which calls for more distal and removed perspectives, and maybe also the ability or willingness to shift between perspectives.
In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero cites as a paragon of wisdom the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, who, upon being informed of the death of his son, said, “I knew that I begot a mortal.” For Cicero, true sapience consists in preparing oneself for every eventuality so as never to be taken, or overtaken, by surprise. And it is true that wisdom, the understanding of causes and connexions, has forever been associated with both insight and foresight.
In conclusion
In sum, wisdom is not so much a kind of knowledge as a way of seeing, or ways of seeing. When we take a few steps back, like when we stand under the shower or go on holiday, we begin to behold the bigger picture. In common parlance, “wisdom” has two opposites: “foolishness” and “folly”, which both derive from the Latin follis [bellows, bag], and involve, respectively, lack and loss of perspective.
In cultivating a broader perspective, it helps, of course, to be knowledgeable, but it also helps to be intelligent, reflective, open-minded, and disinterested—which is why we often seek out and pay for “independent” advice.
Above all, it helps to be courageous, because the view from on high, though it can be exhilarating, and ultimately liberating, is at first terrifying … not least because it conflicts with so much that we have been taught or enculturated to think.
Courage, said Aristotle, is the first of the human qualities, because it is the one which underwrites all the others.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) was born in Arpinium, around 60 miles south of Rome, into a wealthy equestrian family. His cognomen, or personal surname, derives from the Latin for ‘chickpea’ [cicer], by which his ancestors may have prospered. He lived through a time of great civil unrest, famously decrying, O tempora, O mores [‘Oh the times, oh the customs’]. Despite his frail and sickly constitution, he served in the army in 89-88, notably under Pompey’s father, Pompeius Strabo. But what he lacked for in virility and nobility he more than made up in study and oratory. In 87, Philo of Larissa, the last undisputed scholarch of the Academy, arrived in Rome, and Cicero came to sit at his feet—later opining that, if Zeus were to speak, it would be in none other than the language of Plato. He studied law under Quintus Mucius Scævola, who founded the study of law as a systematic discipline.
Cicero began practising the law in around 83-81, and, in 80, made his reputation on the back of his brilliant defence of Sextus Roscius against a fabricated charge of patricide. In 79, he made a marriage of convenience to Terentia, who came with property and a dowry of 400,000 sesterces, and who bore him a daughter, Tullia, and a son, Cicero Minor (later, Cicero the Younger). In the same year, partly on account of his health, he travelled to Greece, Asia, and Rhodes, and met with several leading philosophers including, in Athens, Antiochus of Ascalon. Antiochus had studied under Philo of Larissa but had come to reject Academic Skepticism. By seeking to fold the doctrines of the other schools into Platonism, he inaugurated the stage of Platonic philosophy known as Middle Platonism. While in Greece, Cicero asked the oracle at Delphi how he might attain the greatest glory. The pythoness [high priestess] replied, ‘By making your own genius and not the opinion of the people the guide of your life.’
Ladder of Offices
In the next period, Cicero climbed the cursus honorum, or ‘ladder of offices’, holding each office at or near the youngest possible age: quæstor in 75, ædile in 69, prætor in 66, and consul in 63. He became consul at the age of just 42, making him the youngest non-patrician to serve as consul in the five-hundred-year history of the Republic. As quæstor in Western Sicily, he 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. In Sicily, he took it upon himself to rediscover the tomb of Archimedes, which he described as surmounted by a sphere and cylinder. He then chided the Syracusans for leaving it to a man from Arpinium to remember their most illustrious citizen. As prætor, he made his first big speech, 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 during 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 Patriæ [‘Father of the Fatherland’] from his ally Cato, but lived forever after in fear of reprisal for having put Roman citizens to death without trial.
In 62, Cicero added a large townhouse on the Palatine Hill to his portfolio of properties. The house, which he described as ‘in sight of nearly the whole city’ [inconspectu prope totius urbis], had belonged to Rome’s richest citizen, Crassus, and cost him 3.5 million sesterces. In 60, Cæsar pressed Cicero to join his alliance with Pompey and Crassus (later called the First Triumvirate), but he rejected the offer on the grounds that their arrangement undermined the Republic. He also refused Cæsar’s offer of a place on his staff in Gaul, leaving him exposed and vulnerable to the many enemies that his sharp tongue had left in its train.
Exile
When Publius Clodius Pulcher became tribune in 58, he passed a law, with retroactive effect, to exile any official who executed a citizen without trial. The law was squarely aimed at Cicero, who fled to Greece while Clodius’ supporters ransacked his house on the Palatine and his villas at Formiæ and Tusculum.
Cicero now fell into a deep depression, and wrote to his friend Atticus:
I say this deliberately—that no one was ever afflicted with so heavy a calamity, that no one had ever greater cause to wish for death; while I have let slip the time when I might have sought it most creditably. Henceforth death can never heal, it can only end my sorrow.
In the wise words of Plutarch,
He was become so poor-spirited, so humiliated and dejected by his misfortunes, as none could have expected in a man who had devoted so much of his life to study and learning… But the desire for glory has great power in washing the tinctures of philosophy out of the souls of men.
Cicero returned in 57 after being recalled by the Senate, with Clodius casting the single vote against the motion. He was met by a cheering crowd all the way from Brundisium [modern-day Brindisi] to the Capitol, and his properties, which had been destroyed, were rebuilt at public cost.
Governorship of Cilicia
He took to opposing Cæsar, but this only drove Cæsar closer to Pompey and Crassus. So he swallowed his principles and made a show of supporting them, before quietly withdrawing into his library. In 53, the year that Crassus died, he freed Marcus Tullius Tiro ‘to be our friend instead of our slave’, and it is Tiro who, after his death, collected his letters and speeches for publication. In 51, Tiro, himself a prolific writer, accompanied him to Cilicia (in modern-day Turkey) after he reluctantly accepted the governorship of the province. He restored calm and order to the entire region, repulsing Parthian incursions, suppressing brigands, and stemming corruption. He stopped in Rhodes and Athens on the return to Rome, where the Senate granted him a supplicatio, or period of public thanksgiving—instead of the full-blown triumph that he had been coveting.
Caesar’s demise
Only six days after Cicero’s return to Rome, Cæsar crossed the Rubicon into Italy, thereby declaring war on the Senate. Cicero hesitated in picking a side, reasoning that all outcomes led to a tyrant, but in the end crossed the Adriatic to join Pompey’s camp—where he had words with Cato, who thought that he would have done better to remain in Rome. After Pompey’s defeat to Cæsar at Pharsalus, Cato offered him the command of the Pompeian forces, but he preferred to return to the Eternal City to be pardoned by Cæsar.
He had divorced Terentia in 51, and in 46 or 45 wedded a wealthy girl called Publilia, who had been his ward, and who jealoused the great love that he bore for his daughter Tullia. The marriage did not withstand Tullia’s sudden death in 45, with Cicero writing to Atticus that he had ‘lost the one thing that bound me to life’. For solace, Cicero went to Atticus, and in his library mined the Greek philosophers, especially Crantor, to write his Consolatio. Sadly, the Consolatio has largely been lost, as has Crantor’s On Grief, which, according to the Stoic Panætius, deserved to be learnt by heart.
Cicero was not a party to Cæsar’s assassination in 44, although Brutus did call out his name upon raising his blood-soaked dagger, beseeching him to ‘restore the Republic’. He 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.’
Suite et fin
Mark Antony, as consul, leader of the Cæsarian faction, and unofficial executor of Cæsar’s public will, began throwing his weight around. Cicero, who had been hoping to restore the Republic, responded by playing the young Octavian, Cæsar’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 failed when Octavian and Antony reconciled and joined forces with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate.
Estimating that Cæsar 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. The proscription also served to fund the Triumvirate’s war, the so-called Liberators’ Civil War, against Brutus and Cassius, who were finally defeated at the Battle of Philippi in 42. When Antony put Cicero at the head of the proscription list, Octavian tried to have him removed, but did not insist or prevail. Also on the list were Cicero’s son, brother, and nephew. The Triumvirate, in the words of Plutarch, ‘let their anger and fury take from them the sense of humanity, and demonstrated that no beast is more savage than man, when possessed with power answerable to his rage.’
On 7 December 43, Cicero, betrayed by a freedman of his brother, was intercepted near his villa at Formiæ, travelling down to the coast in a bid to escape to 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 fashion of Marius and Sulla. According to the historian Cassius Dio, Antony’s wife Fulvia took up Cicero’s severed head, pulled out his tongue, and jabbed it repeatedly with her hairpin.
Cicero’s brother and nephew were also murdered, but his son, who was then in Greece, escaped unscathed.
Twelve years later, in 31, Cicero the Younger took part in the Battle of Actium, in which Octavian defeated Antony; and in 30, he had the satisfaction, as consul, of announcing Antony’s suicide to the Senate.
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.”
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.
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.
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