Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens

Few things are more satisfying in scholarship than watching a fellow practitioner pose an elegant question that turns well-trod texts and familiar textual terrain into fresh perspectives and with promise of yet to be explored vistas. Whether the reader’s interest is in understanding the development of political theory or the function of ancient rhetorical thought, Yunis’s study is an instance of the very specie he seeks to describe: the practice of using language to “tame” what is too often an unruly relationship of finding a middle way between theory and practice.

At the core of this study is the assumption that the rhetoric of political discourse in the central texts of Athenian democracy was occasioned by the effort to find a basis for political unity rather than simply a means to settle questions of power among coflicting groups. Yunis contends that Athenian political “theorists” from Aristophanes to Demosthenes were vitally concerned with rhetoric in order to discover the kind of public discourse that could lead citizens who listen to deliberative speeches in the Assembly to make decisions that realize their own best interests. Traditional approaches to these texts (e.g., M. I. Finley’s “Politics,” in The Legacy of Greece, ed. M. I. Finley [Oxford: Clarendon P, 1981] 22–36; and F. G. Bailey’s Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988]) have tended to frame inquiry into ancient Athenian political thought as a proto-specie of contemporary democracy in which competing groups use discourse to advance their own interests while respecting the needs and rules of the community. But unlike modern democracies in which authority is delegated to elected representatives who make their decisions as a result of a bureaucratic process of compromise, the Athenians made decisions as a mass audience who listened to speeches. Stated baldly, in Athens, public address served as the primary political tool of democracy, and effective public speakers served as a class of highly influential citizens among the dêmos.

Understanding how Athenian political theorists responded to this heightened significance for rhetoric as a mode of discourse is what Yunis is interested in exploring. Where traditional approaches tend to view Athenian democracy according to an empirical criterion in which rhetoric is considered as the mechanism used to mediate political conflict, Yunis argues for an approach that takes seriously the “ideal criteria” political writers expressed for their models of political rhetoric. From this perspective, analysis of the role of rhetoric in the Athenian Assembly must account for more than how a speaker persuaded listeners. It must provide an account of how a speaker was able to facilitate a sense of political and communal identity that could eventuate in an exercise of political and communal unity rather than merely accounting for a process of compromise. Rhetors, when considered according to this ideal approach, viewed their task as constituting the citizenry as a community of mature, responsible people capable of being instructed in what choices were in the best interest of the polis. The role of a speaker, when viewed from this perspective, was to create a kind of communal consciousness of enlightened self-understanding, which, far from facilitating compromise, works to contain the potentially beast-like dêmos by summoning the polis into the actuality of a unified body. This ability to control the dêmos through the use of language is at the heart of what Yunis describes as the desire on the part of critics and practitioners to “tame democracy.” In his quest to explain how mass deliberation and decision making could possibly make sense and how rhetoric can be made useful for the polis, Yunis structures his inquiry concerning models of political rhetoric in the works of three post-sophistic political thinkers in classical Athens. In Thucydides, Plato, and Demosthenes, Yunis finds three writers who take as their point of engagement the criticism of democratic deliberation raised by earlier sources and then reflect on the abstract aims of rhetoric—especially its ability, in the hands of an effective rhetor, to tame the “beast-like” dêmos.

Yunis deftly locates what may be the rhetorical impetus of Thucydides’ History in the creation of the political speeches in which Thucydides presents “arguments that were never, indeed could never have been, uttered by the actual participants in the events. . . . [but were intended] to maintain the historical frame and therein set . . . [these] compositions that would serve his didactic task” (62). The narrative device of telling a history permits Thucydides to engage in a large-scale assessment of the role of political rhetoric in a democracy in which the dêmos is too often easily swayed by rhetors whose motives are less than pure. Pericles is offered as the great and wise leader, who authoritatively instructs the people, whose leadership and eloquence as a public “advisor” depict the rhetor as an instructive speaker and faithful servant to the welfare of the polis. Periclean instructive rhetoric “tames” the otherwise unstable mechanism of democratic deliberation by imposing on it a set of ideal standards of prudence instructively established as a rational plan of long-term policy. According to Yunis, Pericles’ speeches in Thucydides—or what Thucydides decided was “appropriate” for his own rhetorical purposes—became the “ideal” to which later writers would make their appeal and would base their arguments about what counts as a productive theory of deliberative rhetoric.

Plato’s voice is added to the discussion by way of his contribution to the subject in the Gorgias, the Phaedrus, and the Laws. With the addition of a significant evaluation of the role of the Apology, Yunis’s analysis of these texts spans Plato’s career as a writer and philosopher, thereby providing a coherent account for its vicissitudes in light of the question posed by Thucydides and the prior sources. According to Yunis, Plato initially rejected Thucydides’ “scheme” to solve the dilemma of democratic discourse by praising Pericles’ “instructive rhetoric” and blaming the successors for the Athenian catastrophe (143). Plato simply blamed rhetoric itself. Yet how political power is to be related to political education and what role if any rhetoric has in the task is a question of enormous importance in Plato. Yunis devotes four chapters to his analysis of Plato. The complexity of his analysis cannot be justly summarized other than to say that he ably tackles the trajectory of the original rejection of rhetoric in the Apology and the Gorgias through its growing rehabilitation in the Phaedrus and final qualified appropriation in the Laws. Yunis argues that Plato abandons his original objections to rhetoric and admits in one of his most mature works, the Laws, that education (and therefore the polis itself) requires rhetoric as an essential aspect of its constitution—but only as a means to “tame” democracy. For rhetoricians and political theorists who have heard the refrain that one must read “across Plato” before speaking about Plato, Yunis serves as an expert guide. His most original contribution is obviously in his reading of the Laws and the adoption of preaching as the genre most appropriate to creating the kind of communal consciousness relevant to a Platonic rhetoric for mass education. Perhaps the greater part of the enjoyment here is watching Yunis track Plato’s vacillating drift toward the position originally espoused by Thucydides for the role of an “instructive rhetoric.”

Through a careful analysis of the demagogic preambles in Demosthenes’ speeches—preambles that seem awkward and self-serving to modern ears—Yunis establishes that the politician consistently sought to shape a mature, responsible, and attentive audience by “arguing that democracy’s interests are served when the Assembly employs a conscientious mode of deliberation, by explaining what such deliberation consists in, and by identifying himself as the rhêtôr who can lead such deliberation” (257). In effect, he sought to “tame” democracy by presenting preambles concerning the role of the dêmos in the Assembly that were wholly shaped by the idiom of the literate Periclean model of speech found in Thucyidides’ account. By appropriating the “Plato-tinged vision” (i.e., “preached”) of the Periclean model of instructive rhetoric, originally devised by Thucydides to tame the dangers of rhetoric run rampant, Demosthenes’ practice represents the flowering of the dialectical effort to find a middle way through the dilemma of how to make rhetoric useful for the polis. In the process of appropriating this model, Demosthenes transformed the live speech of political rhetoric into a literate discourse style that, having once heard it, would leave audiences forever dissatisfied with the old pre-literate speaking styles.

One caveat. Yunis masterfully situates the rhetorical dimensions of the argument concerning Thucydides’ purpose in creating the ideal of a Periclean rhetoric as distinct from Thucydides’ depiction of the demagoguery of Pericles’ successors. Similarly, he provides an excellent case for the rhetorical situation in the Assembly that would call forth the kind of presumptive preambles one encounters in Demosthenes’ deliberative speeches. But the same rhetorical sensitivity to the situation that called forth these texts is absent when Yunis takes up Plato’s dialogues. Yunis always treats the main voice we encounter as that of Plato. But Plato never speaks in any of the dialogues in properia persona, and arguments can readily be marshaled as to whether we can rightly infer, with any absolute consistency, Plato’s philosophy from a single character in the dialogues. Yunis even assumes the narrative voice in the Apology to be wholly that of Plato rather than that of the character, Socrates. Though one might argue this is well-trod turf that need not be re-tilled, it is actually Yunis’s fine attention to locating the voice we hear in each of the texts of his other witnesses that makes this lacuna so apparent. Caveat noted, it is an omission made visible only because of the clarity and insightfulness of this important study.