Auf dem Weg zur rhetorischen Theorie. Rhetorische Reflexion im ausgehenden fünften Jahrhundert v. Chr

The emergence of rhetoric as a self-conscious theoretical discipline in the course of the fifth century b.c. has received renewed scholarly attention in recent years. The traditional view of this development, which postulated that the Sophists of the fifth century began to formulate rhetorical theories and precepts, has been vigorously challenged, especially by Thomas Cole, who claims that before the fourth century the art of persuasion was but a protorhetoric, that it lacked “the analytical metalanguage characteristic of later rhetoric,” that it “[could] only illustrate—not explain or justify—the construction of discourses.” While he does not deny outright the possibility that “the analytical metalanguage characteristic of the fourth-century treatises may have had purely oral antecedents of which all reports have disappeared,” he points to the complete absence of such metalanguage in the surviving writings of the Sophists as strong support for his hypothesis that theoretical rhetoric became possible only with “the development of new forms of written communication” in the fourth century, that it was “inconceivable in the predominantly oral cultural context in which the model written discourse of the late fifth century had first arisen” (Cole 1991, 92–94; cf. Schiappa 1993).

Elizabeth Ann Gondos contributes to the debate surrounding the state of rhetorical reflection in the late fifth century with a detailed examination of the literature that did survive from that period, particularly the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides; Aristophanes’ comedies; forensic orations by Antiphon, Andocides, and Lysias; and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Her aim is to provide a systematic survey of the many explicit discussions, to be found in that literature, of possibilities for successfully producing persuasion (peitho). While it has been noted, for instance, that the earliest surviving Greek discussion of different styles can be found in Aristophanes’ Frogs (Kennedy 1994, 26), such observations have remained relatively isolated and scattered. Gondos readily acknowledges her indebtedness to others who have followed this approach, but proposes to give a more complete and cohesive account of the explicit discussions of requirements and means of peitho and peithein in Greek literature before 400 b.c., with special emphasis on the last third of the fifth century.

Gondos uses as the conceptual and structural framework for her survey the tripartite Aristotelian scheme of pisteis (means of persuasion; Rhetoric 1356a1ff., 1.2.3ff.), beginning with a discussion of the use of the person of the speaker (êthos), progressing to a consideration of audience psychology and emotional strategies (pathos), and concluding with the assessment of arguments and evidence (logos). She quite carefully avoids drawing any unwarranted conclusions based on the use of this frankly anachronistic framework for the presentation of her analysis; at the same time, she acknowledges that the awareness of subsequent intellectual developments cannot be totally excluded from our assessment of earlier texts.

The first chapter (“The Person of the Speaker,” pp. 7–23) surveys remarks on the significance of personal believability and trustworthiness for the persuasiveness of a speaker, the positive self-presentation of the speaker in the speech, and the negative depiction of an opponent. For example, the significance of personal believability and trustworthiness in Euripides’ Hecuba is estimated to be greater than that of the quality of the speech itself. The positive self-presentation of the speaker in the speech (the core of Aristotle’s conception of artistic êthos) is discussed as a conscious strategy that is sometimes critical, for instance, in Aristophanes’ Knights. Finally, the negative depiction of an opponent (diabolê) is a frequent cause for complaint by its victims and is thematized even more often than the positive presentation of the speaker. Gondos points out that at the end of the fifth century the term diabolê was already used in its technical meaning as a name of a strategy, while this was not yet the case for êthos. She notes that her findings confirm Aristotle’s (critical) remark that his predecessors were quite familiar with these means of persuasion (Rhetoric 1354a15ff., 1.1.4).

The second chapter (pp. 24–39) surveys discussions of audience psychology as a factor in persuasion, particularly instances in which the dispositions, not of individuals, but of groups of listeners, are addressed, which generally would also be the focus of later rhetorical theory. A frequent theme is the greater gullibility of the people at large (dêmos) compared to more limited audiences, a gullibility ascribed, for instance, to a lack of education and leisure to acquire more thorough knowledge and also to the use of extended continuous speech, which lends itself to manipulation more readily than dialectical exchange. Another theme is the adaptation of speakers to the views of their audiences, often in the form of attacks on an opponent’s strategy of flattering the audience and telling it what it wants to hear. There are clear indications that speakers were aware of the problems and opportunities presented by heterogeneous audiences and consciously reacted to these differential characteristics.

The third chapter (pp. 40–59) surveys emotional strategies. Here are collected passages in which the use of emotions is explicitly linked with strategies of persuasion. The emotions whose creation, reinforcement, and abatement receive particular attention in the literature of the late fifth century are appeals for pity (hiketeia, eleos), efforts to amuse the audience and make it well disposed (eunous), appeals to anger (orgê, thymos), and appeals to fear (deos, phobos). Again, these passages confirm that Aristotle’s critique of his predecessors for focusing excessively on the arousal of emotions (Rhetoric 1354a15ff., 1.1.4) refers to discussions of rhetorical strategies that were already being thematized explicitly in the literature of the late fifth century and even earlier. Gondos notes that those discussions were limited to individual emotions and that emotional strategies had not yet been identified as different aspects of a general technique of appealing to emotions; correspondingly, the term pathos was used to denote “suffering” or “misfortune,” and it occured with the more general meaning of “emotion” only in the fourth century.

The same observation applies to the rational means of persuasion, whose treatment is reviewed in the fourth chapter (pp. 60–90). The sources from the end of the fifth century do not use a general term (such as logos) to denote an overall category of rational arguments, even though they do differentiate between persuasive strategies that emphasize arguments and reason, on the one hand, and more emotional appeals, on the other, and they do discuss specific approaches to rational persuasion and their uses. Especially in Thucydides, there are discussions of arguments invoking legal considerations (dikaios logos) as distinguished from those emphasizing advantage or expediency (to sympheron). Gondos points out that, by assigning these two approaches as (primarily) appropriate to legal courts and political assemblies, respectively, some texts of the period anticipate Aristotle’s association of dikaion and adikon with forensic oratory and sympheron and blaberon with deliberative oratory (Rhetoric 1358b, 1.3.5) and that the authors of these texts not only used argumentative patterns described in the later rhetorical handbooks, but also began to formulate recommendations for their use.

In addition to arguments that are mainly aimed at persuading audiences to act, Gondos also discusses the use of different forms of evidence designed to make audiences believe certain factual assertions. She reviews passages from the late fifth century that address the persuasive use of witnesses (in the sense of both verbal accounts and physical reminders) (martyria), signs (semeia), examples (paradeigmata), and tekmeria, a notoriously difficult term referring to various indicators that allow speakers to suggest and audiences to infer conclusions about doubtful facts. Since that definition also covers the preceding terms, the precise demarcations between them remain unclear, and their use does not establish completely consistent patterns; furthermore, this use of tekmeria is not compatible with Aristotle’s definition of tekmerion as a necessary (compelling) sign (Rhetoric 1357b3f., 1.2.16f.). Gondos surveys explicit discussions of persuasive uses of the probable (eikos) and notes that, at least in the surviving sources of the late fifth century, this term does not appear to be specifically identified as a programmatic term for the teachings and practices of the Sophists, an association that is quite common in the literature of the next century.

Overall, Gondos makes a well-documented and quite convincing case for her contention that we first encounter explicit evidence of detailed rhetorical reflections, which relate choices of specific categories of verbal strategies to particular types of speech settings and audiences, in the literature of the final third of the fifth century; thus, we can definitely say for this period that persuading (peithein) had come to be recognized as a process that can be analyzed and influenced. The value of Gondos’s study is enhanced by the incorporation of numerous quotations (in Greek) from the primary texts, a substantial bibliography, and an index of passages cited from ancient sources.

Two small caveats may be in order. Although Gondos covers the literature of the later fifth century quite comprehensively, the survey of relevant passages may not be absolutely complete, both because of the vagaries of word-search based research strategies and because of possible disagreements about what should count as a clear instance of metarhetorical reflection. As an example, I would like to point to a part of Antiphon’s On the Choreutes (Antiphon 6.28ff.) that is not discussed by Gondos, a passage in which the speaker highlights, by way of criticizing his opponents, the strategy of emphasizing the importance and trustworthiness of witnesses favorable to one’s side and dismissing as unimportant and untrustworthy the testimony of unfavorable witnesses. The speaker reviews four different possible constellations of arguments and evidence: (1) the one he claims is actually given in the present case, a situation in which a speaker offers a reasonable account of the events that is supported by eyewitnesses who consistently confirm the speaker’s account, so that the opposition must resort to efforts to discredit the witnesses. This he contrasts with (2) a situation in which a speaker offers a reasonable account that is supported by witnesses who were not eyewitnesses, either because there were none or because they were others than those present in court, so that, in the speaker’s view, the opposition would have more legitimate arguments for doubting the witnesses, even if their testimonies are consistent with the speaker’s story. Two situations may be less desirable: (3) If a speaker offers an account without witness support, the opponent could attack this absence of support, and (4) if witnesses are offered, but their testimonies contradict suggestions made on the basis of other evidence submitted by a speaker (tekmeria), the opponent could criticize the contradictions in the overall argument. Thus, we have here a discussion of different evidence strategies that comes rather close to the in utramque partem mode of presentation typical of rhetorical handbooks: the approaches available to one side in the dispute are reviewed and ranked in order of persuasiveness and desirability (the ranking is here only implied, but rather clearly), and for each in turn the responses available to the opposing side are sketched. Such added examples of rhetorical reflection, more of which might be found by examining the available texts line by line, would, of course, further strengthen Gondos’s basic thesis.

My second note of caution concerns the interpretation of the rather sharp line that Gondos draws between explicit rhetorical reflection in the literature of the fifth century and the older texts, in which the influence of certain circumstances or perceptions on the persuasiveness of a speaker are pointed out, but their use in speeches is not specifically analyzed or recommended. Gondos recognizes that, for instance in the Iliad, factors such as youth, social status, or prior positive or negative actions of the speaker are mentioned as influencing the actual or potential persuasiveness of a speaker (10); when we now look at the speech by Phoinix in the course of the embassy to Achilles (Iliad 9.443ff.), we find that, in addressing Achilles, Phoinix emphasizes his (Phoinix’s) age, his position as a member of the nobility and as Achilles’ tutor, and what he has done for Achilles in the past. When we thus encounter in a literary work a recognition of the efficacy of certain factors in persuasion, as well as a highlighting of such factors in a speech, can we not conclude that the speech was composed with an awareness that oratorical strategies can be derived from the initial recognition of factors affecting persuasion? In the context of Odysseus’s use of flattery toward noblemen and threats toward commoners in his efforts to prevent the Greeks from returning home after Agamemnon has suggested such a course in a speech designed to test their resolve (2.188ff.), Gondos suggests that such adaptations are “intuitive,” that they are due to “speech norms shaped by the social hierarchy” of which Odysseus is a part and to which he conforms automatically (31). But the poet who makes Phoinix and Odysseus speak is not these characters, and he cannot intuitively respond to an actual situation in which he finds himself; instead, he has to imagine that situation and construct what a person of a certain character would say in a situation of this type to an audience of this kind. This would seem to require a certain degree of conscious awareness and reflection, and this may help to explain why we find so many explicit observations on the process of persuasion in the plays of the fifth century. In this respect, the playwright is in a position similar to that of the logographer, who in writing speeches for others must assess what someone else should say, in circumstances not actually lived by the writer, to an audience not present. And this is also the situation of a historian, in which Thucydides found himself when, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, he had to determine how “to make the speakers say what, in [his] opinion, was required by each situation” (Thucydides 1.22).

It is still true and important to note (as Gondos does) that only among the authors of the fifth century do we find such reflections thematized in their writings, but we should be careful not to conclude on that basis (as Gondos does not, but could be read to suggest) that such conscious consideration of what makes for appropriate and effective speaking was absent among earlier authors who faced similar tasks of devising proper speeches for their characters, just as we would not, to modify Aristotle’s example (Sophistical Refutations 183b29ff., 34), conclude from the lack of written instructions for shoemaking from antiquity that ancient shoemakers made their well-made shoes merely intuitively. It is certainly wrong to assume anachronistically that ancient people went about their tasks “just like us,” but we should surely also resist the opposite danger, what David Daube has called “the inclination to primitivize the sources” (1969, 168). In a setting in which public speaking would be required of only a small number of members of a ruling elite, who would be taught in a kind of apprenticeship setting, much could indeed be learned by first-hand observation, accompanied by relatively minimal explicit oral instruction, whose reduction to written form would be regarded as neither necessary nor desirable. What Bismarck said about the secrets of law making—that they, just like those of sausage making, would better remain hidden—might from a similar political standpoint just as well be applied to the arcana imperii of speechmaking. What was remarkable about the Sophists was not merely that they proceeded to intensify discourse about discourse, but that they did so in public, thereby making instruction in the art of speaking available beyond the confines of traditional political elites. ¹

In conclusion, I would like to address briefly the implications of Gondos’s illuminating findings for the controversy surrounding the state of rhetorical instruction in the fifth century. Since there is such a broad range of explicit metarhetorical reflections in this period, even among authors who do not concern themselves professionally with such instruction, those accounts that postulate the currency of similar preceptive considerations among the teachers of the art of persuasion during the same period gain additional plausibility. As George Kennedy has pointed out, the absence of surviving handbooks can be explained by Cicero’s observation (De inventione 2.2.6) that, after the appearance of Aristotle’s compendium of such works, the Synagôgê technôn, everyone consulted that work rather than its sources (Kennedy 1994, 3). Later rhetorical handbooks could be perceived as replacing earlier writings on the subject in a way that later epics, plays, or histories would not be seen to supersede earlier ones. At any rate, there is no reason to believe that the theoretical sophistication prevalent in teaching the art of public speaking in the late fifth century was inferior to the level of rhetorical reflection so impressively documented in Gondos’s analysis of, not only the products of this art, but also contemporary tragedy, comedy, and history.