Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece

Chapter 7: The Visible Spoken: Rhetoric, Athletics, and the Circulation of Honor

Z 7 Z The Visible Spoken Rhetoric, Athletics, and the Circulation of Honor Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity. —Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1974a: 38) In many ways, the instances of bodily reading and production considered in the last chapter—Aeschines’ remark about the athlete’s recognizable body, Aristotle’s comment about knowing a healthy man’s walk by virtue of having seen it repeatedly, and the oft-repeated story of Demosthenes ’ development as an orator through observation—turn on a logic of the visible. The visible, in turn, depends on the knowable, an associative knowledge of bodies: Aristotle’s perceiver, for example, must recall instances of healthy men walking, and such recalling requires a prior articulation of walking style as healthy. Aeschines’ example invokes the cultural knowledge of what an athletic body looks like, and Demosthenes sees, observes, and tries to emulate orators. While Aristotle’s healthy man walking is a rather mundane example, a similar logic of visibility nonetheless drives the more remarkable, spectacular aspect of Greek culture—that of the festival. This chapter will be set against the backdrop of the Athenian festival, as the festival provided an important cultural context for linking athletics and rhetoric as bodily arts of honor production. Simply pointing out this cultural-historical link, however, doesn’t seem quite sufficient. As bodily arts, rhetoric and athletics are differ162 ently infused with the elements of what Nietzsche characterizes as ‘‘a whole Olympus of appearances.’’ Decipherable in Nietzsche’s bold (if nostalgic) description is a spectacular logic, an economy of appearances that depends on apparent bodily manifestations of the kind of training this book has thus far delineated. Noteworthy, though, is Nietzsche ’s description of appearance’s superficiality as a belief in ‘‘forms, tones, words’’: that which is seen, heard, and said. The economy of appearance is most strikingly present in ancient festivals and competitions , for it is these events that, for the Greeks, most explicitly foregrounded honor and glory through the sights, sounds, and words about which Nietzsche writes. Within the festival context, athletics and rhetoric inhabit distinctive modalities of appearance: athletics resides more in the realm of the visual, while rhetoric, of course, deals with words. But the curious moments are when the two come together; when what is seen enters into a relation with what is said. As distinct modalities of appearance, rhetoric and athletics help sketch out the complicated relations between ‘‘forms’’ and ‘‘words’’—the visible and the articulable. In his consideration of vision from antiquity to the present, Martin Jay argues that a Greek privilege of vision was not only responsible for the subordination of touch, smell, taste, and hearing, but that it also meant—indeed, was premised upon—the denigration of language (1993: 33). With this contention, Jay attributes to vision’s reign a corresponding disparaging of rhetoric as associated with the sophists. The ancient festival, though, yields a different story: here, the visible becomes partnered to the rhetorical in ways that complicate Jay’s claim considerably. As a modality of appearance, the rhetorical has its own distinct register of visibility, and further, through its ability to move, it supplements the axis of sight by reactualizing what was seen. Put simply, seeing and telling were more mutually constitutive for the Greeks than Jay’s account would have us believe. Instead of trumpeting vision’s triumph over language, as Jay would have it, ancient festivals featured a mingling of sights, tones, and words. In the festival context, rhetoric became sutured to athletics precisely through the broader relation between the visible and the articulable: that which is known through bodies, and that which is known through words about these bodies. Before returning to the question of the visible in relation to rhetoric, though, I want first to consider the spectacle of the festival itself. THE VISIBLE SPOKEN 163 Rhetoric, Athletics, Festivals Historians of classical rhetoric have on a number of occasions pointed out the importance of festivals as a context for rhetoric’s development in antiquity. Richard Leo Enos, for example, discusses festivals and their importance for the rhapsodic tradition, a precursor to rhetorical practices in Enos’ scheme (1993: 18). Along these same lines, W. K. C. Guthrie...