Ancient Greece and Rome

Since the time of Plato it has been conventional to posit a correlative if not causal relationship between rhetoric and democracy. Plato located the wellsprings of rhetoric in the founding of democracy at Syracuse in the 5th century BC. Exiles returning to Syracuse entered into litigation for the return of their lands from which they had been dispossessed by the overthrown despotic government. In the absence of written records, claims were settled in a newly founded democratic legal system. To help litigants improve their persuasiveness, certain teachers began to offer something like systematic instruction in rhetoric.

In this experience at Syracuse, certain identifiable characteristics become prototypal: the rhetor, or speaker, is a pleader; his discourse is argumentative; and members of his audience are participants in and judges of a controversy. Later, in Athens, these characteristics began to aggregate to themselves some serious intellectual issues.

In Athens early teachers of rhetoric were known as Sophists. These men did not simply teach methods of argumentation; rather, they offered rhetoric as a central educational discipline and, like modern rhetoricians, insisted upon its usefulness in both analysis and genesis. With the growth of Athenian democracy and higher systematized education, the Sophists became very powerful and influential. Today the word sophistic refers to a shabby display of learning or to specious reasoning; it refers, consequently, to an image of the Sophists that resulted from the attacks upon them led by such reformers as Plato. The ideal rhetoric proposed by Socrates in Plato's dialogue the Phaedrus, however, is itself not unlike the ideal sought by the Sophists in general, Isocrates in particular. Though the Platonic-Socratic ideal is more specialized in its focus on creating discourse, nonetheless, like the Sophistic ideal, it sought a union of verbal skills with learning and wisdom. Specifically, Platonic-Socratic rhetoric became a means of putting into practice the wisdom one acquires in philosophy. In this way Plato and Socrates resolved one of the most serious intellectual issues surrounding the subject: the relationship between truth and rhetorical effectiveness. The resolution, of course, presupposes and maintains a bifurcation between the two.

Aristotle, too, presupposed and maintained the same division between truth, which was knowable to varying degrees of certainty, and verbal skills, which for Aristotle were primarily useful in assisting truth to prevail in a controversy. But Aristotle lived in a world different from Plato's, one that was closer to the present in the premium it placed upon literacy and upon those patterns of thought that literacy encourages. The literate function of Aristotle's brilliance at recording and categorizing is well captured in Donne's phrase, “Nature's Secretary.” Aristotle's Rhetoric both recorded contemporary practice and sought its reform through fitting it into its proper category among the arts. One of the masterstrokes of Aristotle's thought on the subject is his teaching that rhetoric itself is not a productive art of making but is an art of doing, embodying a power which is employed in certain kinds of speaking. Further evidence of his brilliance on the subject is his division of speaking into the forensic, the deliberative, and the epideictic and of persuasive appeals into the ethical, the emotional, and the logical. His division of speaking into three kinds reflects his efforts to distinguish rhetoric and its counterpart, dialectics, from philosophy and science. Rhetoric and dialectics, he felt, are concerned with probable matters, in which there are several roads to truth; philosophy and science, on the other hand, are concerned with demonstrable matters, in which the roads are fewer but the truth more certain. In dividing persuasive appeals into three kinds, Aristotle indicated an unmistakable preference for the logical. This preference has been interpreted variously as a result of Aristotle's naïve assumption about the rationality of most audiences and as an attempt to reform the emotionally charged rhetoric of his contemporaries. In discussing elements of style, Aristotle treated metaphor, perhaps the major figure of speech, in a way that was to plague rhetoricians and poets for centuries. He describes it not as an instrument of thought but as an ornamentation, an adornment that at best serves the functions of clarity and vividness. The effect is further reflection of the principle noted earlier: for Aristotle the truth with which rhetoric is concerned is not demonstrable. It is, moreover, detachable from the forms of argument, and it can be tested by such analytical means as dialectics, which is the counterpart of rhetoric but which does not have what Aristotle viewed as rhetoric's cloying concerns with that beast of many heads, the heterogeneous audience composed of experts and laymen alike.

The Sophistic doctrine that rhetoric should be the central discipline in the educational scheme had a long history, rising to its fullest statement in the writings of Quintilian in Rome of the 1st century AD. By the age of Quintilian three intellectual issues had become firmly fixed within the orbit of rhetoric. Two of these were consciously faced: (1) the relationship between truth and verbal expression and (2) the difficulties of achieving intellectual or artistic integrity while communicating with a heterogeneous audience. In a sense, both of these issues were not faced at all but dodged, as they had been in the past, with the implicit assumption that wisdom and eloquence were not necessarily synonymous and that truth and integrity were ultimately dependent upon the character of the speaker. The orator, according to Cato the Elder, must be a good man skilled in speaking. Through the writings of Cicero, the ancient Roman orator of the 1st century BC whom later ages were to adulate both for his statesmanship and for his prose style, Cato's doctrine was spread in the Western world for centuries. Quintilian's tediously prescriptive Institutio oratoria is built on Cato's thesis: it offers an educational program for producing generations of Ciceronian statesmen. But for all its importance and influence, the work never found its time so far as being used as a text for political leaders to follow. Quintilian's program was impossible to achieve in the age of tyranny in which he lived, and it was impracticable in the Renaissance. Nevertheless, it was in the Renaissance that the Institutio oratoria began to be revered as the greatest educational treatise ever written.

A third issue arose in part as a consequence of literacy and in part as a consequence of social change: rhetoric became a productive art, but one whose role and status were unclear. The audience was no longer quite the full partner in the creative event that it had been in older days of freer public discussion; subsequently, from the classical period through the Middle Ages rhetoricians began to conceive of their art as a kind of methodical, solitary progress toward literary creation. Rhetoric was thought of less in terms of a power and more in terms of certain products of that power—orations; elaborate rules were given for distinguishing the kinds of orations and for arranging the material in them. Accompanying this shift, the entire creative process taught by the rhetoricians became linear and sequential in concept, with some activities located at further and further removes from the serious operations of the mind. A certain linearity, or step-by-step procedure, is evident in Aristotle's Rhetoric, but the attendant dangers of compartmentalization and fragmentation into increasingly trivial matters did not make themselves felt for centuries. By the time of Cicero, rhetoric was considered to be a discipline that encompassed five “offices”: invention, analyzing the speech topic and collecting the materials for it; disposition, arranging the material into an oration; elocution, fitting words to the topic, the speaker, the audience, and the occasion; pronunciation or action, delivering the speech orally; and memory, lodging ideas within the mind's storehouse. Not only orations but also poems, plays, and almost every kind of linguistic product except those belonging peculiarly to logic (or dialectics) fell within the rhetoricians' creative art. Thus, the function of rhetoric appeared to be the systematic production of certain kinds of discourse, but the significance of this now clearly productive art became increasingly dubious in ages when governments did not allow public deliberation on social or political issues or when the most significant speaking was done by church authorities whose training had been capped by logic and theology.

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