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  • The Genuine Teachers of This Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiquity by Jeffrey Walker
  • David M. Timmerman
The Genuine Teachers of This Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiquity. By Jeffrey Walker. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011; pp. 356. $49.95 cloth.

In The Genuine Teachers of This Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiquity, Jeffrey Walker builds a persuasive case for rhetoric as a pedagogically centered discipline, that is, rhetoric as “the art of producing a rhetor” (2). Walker seeks to make “a contribution to the study of rhetoric as a pedagogical tradition” (3). While this is not a surprising orientation, given the history of the discipline, the manner in which Walker also argues for making this a present-day understanding of rhetoric deserves attention from contemporary scholars. The evidence and argument he brings to support this project is impressive and compelling. It includes an impressive and interesting mix of textual analysis, historical contextualization, and creative inference. The text develops by focusing on a selected list of rhetoricians and rhetorical pedagogies stretching from the fourth century BCE until the twelfth-century CE: Isocrates, Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, [End Page 216] Aristides, Michael Psellos, and Nicolaus Mesarites. He purposefully does not treat them in chronological order, but rather thematically.

One standard reading of Cicero’s dialogue De Oratore identifies Crassus as articulating the views of Cicero on the role of rhetoric and of the rhetor in society. More specifically, it argues for the necessity of the rhetor to be focused on the good of society and to have broad understanding of philosophy, law, and in effect all public matters. Walker’s reading identifies the other major figure in the dialogue, Antonius, as articulating a counterposition and a much reduced and inferior view of rhetoric and the rhetor, one focused on the narrow goal of persuasion. Walker makes the case that Antonius also speaks for Cicero and the result is a new understanding of the dialogue. Instead of arguing for a synthesis of the technical, sophistic (Isocratean) and philosophical (Aristotelian) schools of rhetoric, the traditional reading, Walker argues that Cicero, through both Crassus and Antonius, presents the Isocratean tradition as the ideal and in contrast to the Aristotelian philosophical school. On this point, when Antonius calls Isocrates “the teacher of all rhetoricians” Walker takes that statement to be Cicero’s true judgment on Isocrates.

In chapter 2 Walker moves backward from Cicero to Isocrates, giving an argument for the existence and against the existence of a techne by Isocrates. Both are well-articulated and documented. Walker concludes: “written or not, there certainly was an Isocratean techne” (75). Walker contends that the well-known statement against handbooks that Isocrates makes in Against the Sophists is not a position against all techne but rather just inferior ones. He describes what he believes the typical techne looked like, which was not a collection of speeches, but rather explanations of rhetorical principles or techniques followed by examples. The chapter also includes a treatment of how Walker imagines Isocrates’ school operated day to day. The morning included lectures, commentary, and discussion of texts, followed in the afternoons by one-on-one consultation with students and performances and speech displays by top students and Isocrates. Most interesting in this section and indicative of the creativity and thoughtful scholarship Walker brings to this project is a fantastic explication of a page of lecture notes by a student (third CE) listening to a lecture by a rhetorician (77, 78). Walker’s point is that techne were used both by teachers and students for review of the concepts taught. That is, they were a form of [End Page 217] lecture notes. So, an Isocratean techne likely did exist, composed by him or his students and disseminated by his students.

I found the third chapter in this book to be the most interesting. In it Walker engages in what he calls “an exercise in probabilistic conjecture” (91). He draws from Isocrates’ speeches and testimony from other authors to build a description of Isocrates’ techne. Following Pierre Chiron, Walker takes the Rhetoric to Alexander to be based on the now lost techne of Isocrates. By extension, Walker then argues that the Rhetoric to...

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