Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric

Introduction

From ancient times to the present, rhetoric has been recognized as essential to the discourses of politics, advertising, law, education, and interpersonal relations . Definitions of rhetoric from the ancient Greek and Roman world attest to its deep significance. According to Plato, rhetoric is “a way of directing the soul by means of speech”; to Aristotle, it is “an ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion”; to Quintilian, “the science of speaking well.”1 In modern-day parlance, by contrast, the term “rhetoric” tends to have one of three connotations: it may refer disparagingly to the polished, superficial appeal of the diction of set speeches (such as those of a politician or lecturer), implying that this appeal masks vacuous or deceitful content; it may refer to a narrow, ossified set of stylistic tropes found in literature, bearing little relevance beyond the high-school English or composition classroom; or it may be broadly applied, particularly in academic contexts, to the type of discourse peculiar to a subject or author—“the rhetoric of freedom,” “the rhetoric of Milton,” or “the rhetoric of corporate social responsibility,” for example. None of these connotations, however , reflects the robust and far-reaching presence of rhetoric in everyday modern life, if we understand the term as it has been understood and used for most of its history. As Brian Vickers has observed, modern usage “has reduced rhetoric not just from a primary to secondary role—from oral to written communication— but to elocutio alone, now detached from its expressive and persuasive functions, and brought down finally to a handful of tropes.”2 Although it may be impossible to posit a universal definition of rhetoric due to the numerous and context-dependent ways that it can be (and historically has Introduction 2 i n t r o d u c t i o n been) defined, it is safe to say that rhetoric in its earliest formulation in ancient Greece was credited with much broader significance and power than it carries today.3 Namely, it was conceived of as the power to achieve change in a listener’s actions or attitudes through words—particularly through persuasive techniques and argumentation. Rhetoric was thus a “technical” discipline in the ancient Greek world, a craft (technê) that was rule-governed, learned, and taught. This technical understanding of rhetoric can be traced back to the works of Plato and Aristotle, which provide the earliest formal explanations of rhetoric; Plato, indeed , is thought to have coined the term, which appears for the first time in his Gorgias (c. 385 BCE). But do such formal explanations constitute the origins of rhetoric as an identifiable, systematic practice? If not, where does a techniquedriven rhetoric first appear in literary and social history? The answer proposed by this book is that the Homeric epics are the locus for the origins of rhetoric. This claim has implications for the fields of Homeric poetry and the history of rhetoric. In the former field, it refines and extends previous scholarship on direct speech in Homer by identifying a new dimension within Homeric speech: namely, the consistent deployment of well-defined rhetorical arguments and techniques, including sensitivity to individual audiences. In the latter field, it challenges the traditional account of the development of rhetoric, probing the boundaries that currently demarcate its origins, history, and relationship to poetry. I do not aim to rewrite wholesale the history of rhetoric. I do aim, however, to suggest that there might be a different starting point than the ones generally identified by historians of rhetoric, and to examine the implications of that different starting point. I will therefore begin by summarizing both the traditional account of rhetoric’s beginnings and the more recent scholarly debate over the precise dating and definition of rhetoric within this traditional account. According to the traditional account, best articulated in modern rhetorical scholarship by George Kennedy (1963, 1994), the Syracusans Corax and Tisias invented the discipline of rhetoric in the mid-fifth century by identifying the parts of a speech and the argument from probability.4 These two shadowy figures (possibly one and the same person, according to both Kennedy and Thomas Cole) are known to us only through the references of other authors; Plato and Aristotle both speak of them as inventors of rhetoric.5 The craft of persuasive speaking through instruction and performance of set speeches was popularized by...