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2. Rhetoric
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CHAPTER TWO Rhetoric A great deal of the Phaedrus is devoted to the discussion of rhetoric. At the beginning, Phaedrus reads to Socrates a speech written by Lysias that is supposedly the ne plus ultra of contemporary oratory. Then he challenges Socrates to compete with Lysias by offering a speech of his own on the same topic: love. Later, Socrates is compelled to offer a further speech, a palinode as it is called, and the rest of the dialogue will be devoted to an analysis of the three speeches and a discussion of rhetoric as a whole. Socrates, speaking as a philosopher, will express his criticisms of rhetoric. And yet there is the earlier dialogue, the Gorgias, where Socrates encounters the most famous of all champions of rhetoric , Gorgias of Sicily, and two of his followers, and launches an attack upon them that is about as savage as anything we find in Plato. This is not repeated in the Phaedrus, certainly not with the same force. In addition to that, this palinode, beginning at 244b, outlines some of Plato's most cherished teachings, but does so in the format of rhetoric! This great speech is rivaled only by Socrates' speech in the Symposium for its impact on the reader: it is a compendium of Platonic philosophy, in rhetorical form. We must examine, then, to what extent and in what way Plato has made peace with rhetoric. There is no doubt that powerful and effective speech had been highly valued by the Greeks since very ancient times.1 The epics of 1. On this point, and on a number of other points in this chapter, see George A. Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963). Kennedy mentions the speeches in Homer on pp.4-5. I 35 36 I CHAPTER Two Homer offer numerous cases in which a leader such as Agamemnon or Achilles made an impressive oration, and we hear such speeches from the mouths of divinities like Zeus and Athena too. But we find around the middle of the fifth century, and especially in Sicily, the beginnings of a conscious art of speech construction, the effort to elaborate rules for diction and for the choice of persuasive arguments. Tisias and Corax in Sicily are the figures usually mentioned as the progenitors of the art of rhetoric. The important point is that the term rhetorike does not just mean the practice of making speeches-we saw speech-making in Homer, for instance, and of course we know that people made speeches in the assemblies and courts-but rather the art, the techne, of fashioning speeches consciously according to norms. Likewise, the rhetor, the practitioner of the art, is not merely someone who happens to be able to speak well, but one who has the mastery of a conscious art, who can explain what constitutes eloquence, and who can teach the art to others.2 Given the political and legal terrain in which rhetoric operated, and given the promises that it held out to the public, we have to see that it actually amounted to even more than an art. It was really the engine of a whole social movement-it carried with it a certain set of ideas and it bore a promise for the remaking of society. Gorgias found an eager clientele in Athens when he arrived in 427 and introduced himself as a rhetor. The reader can see from the opening of Plato's dialogue, the Gorgias, 447a-449a, how Gorgias presented himself to the Athenians. His claims for his art were indeed extravagant, so much so that, if they could be sustained, the art would have a truly revolutionary force, displacing virtually every other form of discourse and virtually all the other arts of the city. 2. Tisias and Corax were famous in later times for their success in litigation . There is some debate over whether they had a consciousness of practicing a special art called rhetoric. Thomas Cole, in The Origins ofRhetoric in Ancient Greece (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 2, makes the claim that there was no formal conception of the art of rhetoric prior to the time of Plato; the earliest documented occurrence of the word rhetorike seems to be in Plato's Gorgias, 449a5. Other scholars, however, in addition to Kennedy (The Art of Persuasion in Greece), sustain the traditional view that the Sicilian Gorgias did come to Athens shortly after 430 as a...