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Cicero Denounces Catiline, by Cesare Maccari.

A Short History of Rhetoric in Rome

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.

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

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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. 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.

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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.

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

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Ebenezer Scrooge was visited by exactly three ghosts, not one, nor two, nor four. For all D’Artagnan’s heroism, Alexandre Dumas did not entitle his novel, The Four Musketeers. Trilogies and trinities are a lot more common, and popular, than tetralogies and quaternities (if that’s the word for them).

In rhetoric, three parallel words, clauses, or lines make up a tricolon, which is a particularly effective type of isocolon (or parallel construction).

  • I came, I saw, I conquered. —Julius Caesar upon crossing the Rubicon
  • Government of the people, by the people, for the people. —Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address
  • Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. —The United States Declaration of Independence

Similar to tricolon is hendriatris, which involves the juxtaposition of three words to express a single idea or total concept, for example, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité and ‘wine, women, and song’ (or, nowadays, ‘sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll’).

Winston’s Churchill’s first speech to the House of Commons as prime minister is remembered as Blood, Sweat, and Tears, even though he in fact said, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat’. As prime minister, Tony Blair did not make his top priority ‘education, education’ but ‘education, education, education’. When asked a question, Joe Biden often responded by making just two points (‘Number 1… Number 2…’), leaving everyone to expect a non-forthcoming third.

Why is three so much more engaging, satisfying, and memorable than one or two or four? ‘Here are my three reasons.’ ‘I’ll give you three examples.’ ‘These are the three lessons I learnt.’

One is a fluke. Two is a coincidence. Four is one too many—to the extent that if you must have four, it might be better to present them as two linked pairs, and maybe add a third pair.

Three, however, is the smallest number required to create a pattern and rhythm—indeed, the rhythm of life, past, present, and future.

Triple goddesses or deities in groups of three are common in world myth: the Holy Trinity, the Tridevi, Hecate, Artemis, the Fates, the Furies, the Graces, the Græae, the Morrígan, the Norns… and, I believe, originally symbolized fate and the passage of time.

As a result, three is deeply embedded in our psyche.

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

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Picture of the caldera, taken upon leaving the island.

Santorini, one of 18 islands in the Cyclades, lies some 70 miles north of Crete, and consists of the remnants of a massive volcanic eruption which, in around 1600 BCE, destroyed the Minoan civilisation on Crete. The centre of the former island collapsed into the volcanic caldera, forming a central ‘lagoon’ which is up to 400m deep (pictured). Older names for Santorini (‘Saint Irene’) include Kalliste (‘the Most Beautiful One’), Strongyle (‘the Circular One’), and Thera—which is still, in fact, its official name.

A kouloura, or basket vine.

To cope with the heat, drought, strong winds, and infertile soils, the vines are widely spaced and trained into an idiosyncratic basket shape [kouloura]. To make the basket, shoots are woven around the canes of previous years in such a way that the buds are on the inside of the basket; after about twenty years, the basket is cut off and another is started from the same plant and root system. The basket traps humidity and protects flowers and fruit from the sun, wind, and sandblasts. The baskets can sit on the ground because the young volcanic soils (consisting principally of black basalt, red basalt, and moisture-retaining tufa) are inhospitable to weeds and insects. There are other training systems on the island, such as Klada, with canes woven into small vertical bracelets. The nearby, and similarly windy, island of Paros has evolved a comparable training system called aplotaries, with the canes left to crawl on the ground. As the soils on Santorini do not contain any clay, they are immune to phylloxera: vines are propagated by layering and root systems can be centuries old. When I asked him the age of a vineyard, Paris Sigalas replied, ‘The vines here have no age, it is impossible to say.’

The vines here have no age, it is impossible to say. —Paris Sigalas

However, yields are diminutive, and all vineyard work must be carried out on hands and knees, making this a very expensive and potentially unsustainable form of viticulture—particularly with land prices under pressure from tourism.

When I visited Santorini in April 2025, the vines were severely stressed by two consecutive years of heat, drought, and even hail, which, until then, had been unknown on the island. Old vines were dying, and could not be replaced because canes were not long enough for layering.

The Greek government urgently needs to intervene to protect, delimit, and classify the vineyards of Santorini, which are a cultural heritage and economic asset on a par with anything in the National Archaeological Museum.

Ari Tselepos & star grower Nikos Pelekanos, who’s known these vines 60 years. But look how many have died in the drought, heat & (previously unheard of) hail of the last two years.

Wine styles

Santorini is renowned for its crisp, dry, and mineral Assyrtiko blends made from Assyrtiko (minimum 75%) completed by Athiri and Aidani. These age-worthy wines, with their notes of citrus and stone fruits, are high in acidity and extract with substantial alcohol and a long, salty finish. Finer examples peak at 5-7 years.

A richer, more exotic style called Nykteri is made from riper grapes, with some skin contact and barrel ageing—although I often prefer the purity of the more standard wines. Each producer on Santorini (and there are only about 20 commercial ones) has their own take on Nykteri.

Most famous, at least historically, is the sweet Vinsanto (‘wine from Santorini’, not to be confused with the Italian Vin Santo) made from Assyrtiko (minimum 50%) completed by Athiri and Aidani. Vinsanto must be aged for at least 24 months in oak. It can be made as a vin doux naturel, from later harvested grapes sun-dried for 12-14 days and fermented to a minimum of 9% alcohol, or as a vin doux (vin de liqueur) to a minimum of 15% alcohol. It is amber in colour with notes of dried citrus peel, apricots, raisins, figs, and sweet spice, together with high acidity and considerable minerality. A recent tasting note on a Santorini vinsanto reads: ‘A wine of contradictions that defies standard terminology… like an old sweet sherry on an acid trip.’

Some red wines are also made on Santorini, from Mandilaria and Mavrotragano—but, as on Lanzarote (that other very volcanic island), they struggle to match the world-class whites. Similarly, Athiri and Aidani can rarely, on their own, stand up to an Assyrtiko, which they serve to round and tame.

Assyrtiko is one of my favourite white grapes, right up there with Riesling. According to Leto Paraskevopoulou, the winemaker at Gaia, their Santorini Assyrtiko is around seven times saltier than their Nemea Assyrtiko. There is debate as to whether this saltiness is better accounted for by the volcanic soils or by the famous Santorini sea mists, which, according to some, owe to underwater volcanic activity. There is also debate about whether and to what extent these sea mists irrigate the vines, although no one doubts that they temper the harsh climate.

Sitting in the famous Santorini mist with a perfectly tamed bottle of Assyrtiko from star newcomer Vassaltis

Producers and vintages

In 2020, Paris Sigalas, ‘the magician of Assytriko’, sold Sigalas and founded Oeno P, which focuses on amphora micro-cuvées. Other leading producers include Argyros (notable, among others, for their library of vinsantos), Gaia (famous for ageing Assyrtiko reductively under seawater), Hatzidakis (their Aidani and Mavrotragano are the best I tasted on the island), Karamolegos (try their four single vineyard cuvées from the prime growing areas of Pyrgos, Fira, Megalochori, and Akrotiri), Tselepos (their Laoudia is extraordinary), Vassaltis, and the high-tech co-op Santo Wines. Many producers say that Assyrtiko needs to be tamed with, for example, lees and barrel ageing.

Tasting with Paris Sigalas. He was delighted to speak to me in French. With this tasting, we traced the evolution of his thought away from oak and towards clarity of expression.

Mikra Thira is the only winery on Thirasia, the largest island in the Santorini caldera, although Santo Wines also makes an excellent Thirasia cuvée called Thira Kori. The terroir on Thirasia is similar to that of the main island, with even greater exposure to the wind and sea.

Strongest recent vintages on Santorini are: 2022, 19, 18, and 14.

If you are ever on Santorini, make sure to visit Ancient Akrothiri, a Minoan-influenced Cycladic settlement preserved in volcanic ash in around 1600 BCE—reminiscent of Pompeii, but much older.

Neel Burton is author of the Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting, which you can purchase on this website.