Peitho and Bia: The Force of Language

When the great Greek general Themistocles landed on the shores of Andros, he told the Andrians that he came escorting two gods: Peitho and Bia. Peitho was the divine personification of persuasion, seduction, and eloquent speech; Bia personified force, compulsion, and physical strength. Faced with these two magnificent divinities, Themistocles told the Andrians that they must surely hand over a tribute to the Athenians. But the clever Andrians replied that their island was inhabited by two irresistible gods of their own—Penia and Aporia, lack and impossibility—that prohibited them from giving in and paying up. "The power of Athens," they said, "can never be stronger than our inability" (Plutarch 1916, 21.1; Herodotus, 1944, 8.111.1). This story, recorded by Herodotus and later by Plutarch, sets out the paradoxical relation between bia and peitho, violence and rhetoric.

On the one hand, the story poses an antinomy between violence and rhetoric commonplace in both classical and contemporary rhetorical thought. As John T. Kirby explains, "Typically, this collocation of ideas is antithetical: I will try to persuade you, but failing that, I will force you. Such a disjunction is rooted in our most fundamental concepts of civilization" (1995, 5). For Kirby, as for Themistocles, violence erupts at the point where persuasion fails; strength conquers what seduction concedes. Bia steps in when Peitho gives way. Yet while this substitution of Peitho for Bia sets up a disjunctive antithesis between violence and rhetoric, it also establishes a conjunctive equivalence between them. The substitution renders Peitho and Bia interchangeable, and violence becomes rhetoric's double. Peitho and Bia appear as twin harbingers of political power in Themistocles' speech, even as Bia outstrips Peitho as the mightier mover of men. Peitho and Bia, Peitho or Bia? Can this disjunctive conjuncture between the persuasive force of language and the coercive force of violence be resolved?

Peitho against Bia, Peitho as Bia

Themistocles' speech epitomizes an anxious vacillation between peitho and bia, between the force of language and the force of violence, that we have inherited from classical Greek thought. Traditionally, peitho and bia, rhetoric and violence, persuasion and force, are treated as opposites. For example, Isocrates wrote that "because there has been implanted in us the power to persuade each other...not only have we escaped the life of the wild beasts, but we have come together and founded cities and made laws and invented arts" (1980, 15.293-4). Lysias, in his Funeral Oration, said the same: "Our ancestors were the first...to establish a democracy....For they deemed that it was the way of wild beasts to be held subject to one another by force [bia], but the duty of men to delimit justice by law [and] to convince through persuasion [peisai]" (1930, 2.18-9). Even Plato, who composed the most infamous refutation of the rhetorical arts, recognized a type of rhetoric that "persuades men to do justice and helps in guiding the helm of the state" (1921, 303e). And of course, let us not forget Aristotle, who famously defined the human citizen as a "zoon politikon," or political animal, because the human was a "zoon logon echon," a speaking animal (1944, 1.1253a). This speaking, political man was separated from all the speechless animals that can vocalize their pain but not speak for justice.

On the basis of all these and many more examples, Richard Buxton suggests that bia, or violence, may in fact proffer the primary polarity that figures peitho. Alongside peitho, we see citizenship, justice, law, democracy, art, and humanity; on the side of bia, we find barbarism, injustice, lawlessness, wilderness, brutality, and animality. Peitho and bia appear diametrically opposed. Peitho seems to be predicated on the exclusion of bia. And yet, Buxton also shows that a simple dichotomy between rhetoric and violence is not always so easy to draw. Consider, for example, Gorgias' Encomium of Helen, which compares "the influence of speech" to being "ravished by the force of the mighty" (1972, 52). Or think of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, where bia again appears to underwrite peitho: "Irresistible Peitho, bringer of wretchedness, overpowers" (1926, 385-6).

The...