Lessons from Aristotle: Protecting democracy from demagogues.
Both Plato and Cicero argued that the best orator is a philosopher, or, at least, a good person or person of virtue. If you were not a philosopher or a good person, you were not an orator but merely a sophist or demagogue.
Against this, we have to contend with the fact that even a wretch like Hitler was able to move crowds—and quite powerfully and world-historically at that. Everything about Hitler was warped, his character (ethos), the arguments he used (logos), and the emotions that he sought to instil (pathos), but, still, people followed him in their droves because they themselves were wretched and warped.
A lesson from Aristotle
Plato’s long-time student Aristotle, who lived some twenty-four centuries ago, was perhaps the first to understand that the bedrock of democracy is an affluent, educated middle class.
In the Politics, Aristotle says that, compared to states with a large middle class, states of the rich and poor tend to strict oligarchy (“rule by a few”) or rampant democracy, and, ultimately, to tyranny.
Unfortunately, few states have a large middle class, so that the middle, balanced form of government is rare. According to Aristotle, a democracy becomes preferable when the quantity of the poor exceeds the quality of the rich. Otherwise, an oligarchy is preferable.
The form of the democracy or oligarchy depends on the precise composition of the state. But in every case, the middle classes ought to be included in government, because only they are able to successfully mediate and arbitrate between the rich and the poor.
What we can do right now to protect against demagogues
If today’s democratically elected governments wish to preserve and perpetuate the system that elected them, and ensured an unprecedented eighty years of peace, they need to introduce better, stronger safeguards and balance an excess of democracy with oligarchy, or, to be more precise, aristocracy (“government by the best”) or repositories thereof—such as tighter rules and more stringent criteria for selecting political party leaders and a more independent or autonomous judiciary.
But for the longer term, they need to look to the economy, social justice, culture, and education. Because rhetoric, or oratory, is not carried out in a vacuum. What is ethos, what is pathos, even what is logos alter according to the dispositions and inclinations of the audience or public—although I do believe that, overall, and over time, with the lessons having been learnt, the good, the true, and the just are naturally more persuasive.
No tyrant lives forever. Now war rages on forever. Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees, and every second or third generation must learn the lessons anew.
19th century cartoon of Cicero denouncing Catiline
When and how to use them, and how to defend against them.
In rhetoric, an ad hominem (“to the man”) is an attack, not on the argument itself, but on the person making it. It is, in simpler words, an attempt to shoot the messenger.
When Winston Churchill called Mahatma Gandhi “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer now posing as a fakir,” he was attempting to undermine Gandhi’s character, or ethos.
Ad hominem, which is essentially an attack on a speaker’s ethos, is older than the books. It was not beneath Churchill, or even the Roman orator Cicero, who used it often, and went so far as to call Piso, Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, a “most foul and inhuman monster” (inhumanissimum ac foedissimum monstrum).
The first and most famous line of the most famous speech in all of Latin literature, Cicero’s First Catilinarian, is no more than an extended ad hominem:
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?
When and how to use ad hominem
In academic circles, the ad hominem is regarded as a logical fallacy and frowned upon. It is uncivil, it stifles debate, and it is a tacit admission that you are losing the argument. It is forbidden in formal debates, and there has been a petition to ban it from the U.K.’s House of Commons.
But in rhetoric, anything goes, and an ad hominem can be legitimate if it serves to undermine the ethos, or pro hominem claims, of your opponents.
Even so, when attacking an opponent, it is better to put one’s words into the mouth of some third person, or to use paralipsis (mentioning something by saying that you will not mention it), as Cicero did in his speech Pro Caelio:
Clodia, I am not thinking now of the wrongs you have done me. I am putting to one side the memory of my humiliation. I pass over your cruel treatment of my family when I was away. Consider that nothing I have said has been said against you.
While debating Ron DeSantis, former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum succeeded in doing both at the same time, to great effect:
I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist; I’m simply saying the racists believe he is a racist.
Such is the power of rhetoric that, had it not been for this single sentence, I may never have heard of Andrew Gillum. Often, when all is said and done, all that remains of a life is one or two sententiae, if even that.
How to defend against ad hominem
If you find yourself on the receiving end of an ad hominem, you can respond in one of four ways:
Ignore it.
Call it out as an ad hominem, e.g. “Instead of attacking me, could you please return to the argument, which you seem afraid of losing.”
Own it.
Bite back with an ad hominem of your own.
Which strategy to use depends on the context and the available material (so always do your research). But in the absence of a killer riposte, it is best and easiest to ignore the insult while looking slightly dismayed.
Finally, if returning an ad hominem, consider accompanying or accenting it with some gesture—the rhetorical device known as mycterismus. If the audience laughs, which it probably will, your opponent will not recover from it.
Why speakers shouldn’t always pander to their audience.
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.
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.
When to break decorum
The rhetorician Quintilian (d. c. 100 CE), author of the Institutes of Oratory, points out that what might de decorous in the eyes of an audience might be repugnant under the aspect of eternity, that is, in the eyes of God.
In example, Quintilian cites the trial of Socrates: how would this paragon of virtue be remembered today if, instead of standing up to them and rebuking them, he had sought to meet the expectations of the jurors by shedding tears, resorting to prayers and supplications, and bringing forth his young children?
Today in America, many politicians are grappling with just this problem in addressing their base. It is much easier to be decorous before an audience that is itself decorous.
How to break decorum
So how to go about telling an audience something that it doesn’t want to hear?
One strategy is to appear to have reached your conclusion reluctantly, driven only by the overwhelming force of the argument. You might even use a technique known as the dubitatio, which involves expressing doubt or uncertainty about what to say.
Another approach is to make your conclusion seem like a concession in the face of an even greater evil, such as inflation or recession.
And the third thing is to make your stance seem in line with the orthodoxy, as when Elon Musk (himself a South African) defended the skilled immigrant visa as “American”.
These techniques work for politicians and public figures, and they will also work for you.
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…
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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