Connors Rhetoric

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Greek Rhetoric and the Transition From OralityRobert j. Connors

There is another art which has to do with words, by virtue ofwhich it is possible to bewitch the young through their ears withwords while they are still standing at a distance from the realitiesof truth, by exhibiting to them spoken images of all things, so tomake it seem that they are true and that the speaker is the wisestof all men in all things.

- Plato, SophistThe last fifty years have witnessed a revolution in the way thatclassical scholars view Homeric poetry, and indeed all of theworks pre-dating the fifth century B.c. The writings of MilmanParry on the oral nature of the Iliad and the Odyssey and of RhysCarpenter on the nature of early Greek alphabetical literacy haveled later scholars to a sweeping reappraisal of the entire cultureof pre-Socratic Greece. During the past two decades, questionsof the effects of orality and literacy on the construction of aculture have been asked and answered anew. The theories of EricA. Havelock, first proposed in 1963, have been in the vanguardof this reappraisal, and Havelock's insights have been deepenedand extended by later scholars. This growing body of knowledgeabout ancient Greek culture and expression can, I believe, illuminate some of the curious questions that traditional scholarshiphas left us concerning rhetorical practice in fifth and fourthcentury Greece and give us insight into the fates and works ofmany of the figures, both major and minor, who shaped earlyHellenic discourse. This essay will attempt to trace some of theoutlines of such an application.

Havelock on Poetry and OralityEric Havelock posits a revolution in Greek thought and thinking processes that has three stages. 1 The first stage, that of an

absolutely oral culture, is pre-Homeric, dating to before 700 B.c.Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 19, No. I , 1986. Published by The PennsylvaniaState University Press, University Park and London. Editorial Office: Department of Philosophy, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322.

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GREEK RHETORIC AND ORALITY 39when the works we now call Homeric were first written down inthe newly invented alphabetical script. During this period, inwhich reading and writing of any sort were completely unknownto the vast majority of Greeks, all cultural tradition was passedon orally. The entirety of Hellenic culture, dating back to theBronze Age and beyond, could only be transmitted by constantrepetition and memorization by every citizen. Prose preservationof this tradition was not practicable: "The only possible verbaltechnology available to guarantee the preservation and fixity oftransmission was that of the rhythmic word organized cunninglyin verbal and metrical patterns which were unique enough toretain their shape. This is the historical genesis, the fons et origo,the moving cause of that phenomenon we still call ' poetry." '2Education in preliterate Greece involved nothing more or lessthan the memorization of the Greek cultural "book," enforcedby constant repetition and recital and by constantly hearingothers repeating the same rhythmically organized materials. Themost central of these materials were presumably among the firstto be written down when the Greek alphabet was devised: theworks of " Homer" and "Hesiod." Once this alphabet was invented and put into limited use somewhere between 800 and 700B.c ., Greece entered a transitional period in which oral and literate elements were mixed within the culture . This is the period,especially that part of it after about 450 B.c., with which most ofthis essay is concerned. This transitional era was a time, especially during its early phase, of what Havelock calls "craft literacy," a period during which the ability to read and write was aspecialized skill cultivated by only a few professionals. Not untilthe last few yearS of the fifth century B.c. is there evidence thatreading was a skill taught to schoolboys, and we can assume thatthroughout this transitional period most people's consciousnesswas still shaped by the older tradition of oral recitation.At some point during the fourth century B.c. Athenian culture

as a whole shifted from a primarily oral to a primarily literateidentity. At this time-and during the latter part of the transitional period, at least for some individuals-ur modern literatelyfixed high consciousness came to full control of high culture andthought. Most of Havelock's Preface to Plato is concerned withshowing how Plato announced and became the prime spokesmanfor the new, critical, individualistic, analytical form of humanconsciousness that replaced the older oral state of mind during


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40 ROBERT J. CONNORSthis time. It was not, of course, a time of full literacy even for allfranchised citizens, but after approximately 370 B.C. we see astate of affairs in Athens very different from that of even fortyyears earlier-a state of affairs in which analytical rationalismwas essentially in control of the arts, the state mechanisms, andthe means of information.As a precondition for the oral transmission of Greek tradition,Havelock claims, there must have been an "oral state of mind," amode of consciousness very different from that we take forgranted in today's literate culture. How, he asks, could such featsof memorization-the memorization of the entire Homeric corpus, for instance--be possible for the average person? "Only, wesuggest, by exploiting psychological resources latent and availablein the consciousness of every individual, but which today are nolonger necessary." These resources include "a state of total personal involvement and therefore of emotional identification withthe substance of the poetised statement." Such powers of memory "could be purchased only at the cost of total loss of objectivity," says Havelock, and as a result the artist in the poeticexperience that Plato calls mimesis had the power to "make hisaudience identify almost pathologically and certainly sympathetically with the content of what he is saying. "3The crux of Havelock's argument deals with Plato's oppositionto the passive, communally oriented, non-critical oral consciousness that ruled the society in which he was born. Thus Platorefused in the Republic to admit poets and poetry into his idealstate, and thus, I will argue, he opposed rhetoric, which beganto take technical form during this period of oral-literate transition. I believe that oral rhetoric attained its great power andpopularity among fifth and fourth-century Greek states by utilizing-in a quite conscious and "literate" fashion-the mechanisms of passive oral consciousness described by Havelock,mechanisms that still existed in most people and that made theAthenians of Socrates' and Plato's times peculiarly receptive tocertain sorts of carefully wrought oral persuasion. Plato, I willargue, at the same time that he was fighting the effects of thepoetic tradition, was also waging a battle against the power ofthe rhetorical movement which by nature attended on the decline of the old power of poetry. We can begin to explore thissituation by examining certain aspects of the nature of earlyGreek rhetoric.


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GREEK RHETORIC AND ORAliTY 41Poetry and Rhetoric

Prior to the first extant written speeches we have nothing butreportage and supposition . Thus our ideas about early rhetoricare automatically biased in a "literate" direction; we assume thatearly audiences heard discourse as we do, with critical detachment and rational analysis. But what is it that we in fac. knowabout rhetoric - in the sense of affective public discourse as it waspracticed and received-prior to 450 a.c., in a cultural milieu thatwas formed and controlled by the poetical educational process?First, pre iterate rhetoric was not "technical." The very factthat there is no mention of rhetoric as an art or teachable practicebefore Corax and Tisias in the mid-fifth century indicates that theability to speak persuasively was considered a gift rather than atechne. All the evidence points to the fact that such a gift wasclosely related to the memoric and poetic abilities so carefullycultivated in the oral culture and that use of the art of speechdepended on conscious or unconscious manipulation of the orallyconditioned mental states of the audience. It is impossible thatsuch powerful forms and stimuli as dithyrambs and epic hexameters should not have some effect on the way that all public discourse is constructed in a society defining itself orally.sWe would naturally expect non-poetic public diScourse in sucha society to attempt to succeed by using the formulas that madethe poetry successful, by using heavily rhythmic sentence patternswhich concentrate on such devices as balance and antithesis , fig-ures which would later be classified and called isocolon and ho-moeoteleuton. We would expect a heavy reliance upon commonformulas; as Walter Oog points out in Oraliry and Uleracy, oralthought is by oatwe formulaic, reliant upon set thoughts andexpressions that are known to the auditors.6 These formulas"wine-dark sea," "wily Odysseus," and countless others knownto all members of the c u l t u r e - - t ~ a v e pleasure upon repetition,and certain classes of formulas must have been the bases of earlyrhetoric, as they would grow into the topoi and figures of latertechnical rhetoric.This is not to say that the skills involved were the same or thatearly rhetoric was poetry. There must have been crucial differences, the most important having to do with the purposive intentof the speaker and with the amount of rhythm and meter allowed. The primary aims of the bard or reciter of poetry were to


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42 ROBERT J. CONNORSentertain and those of the poetic teacher were to enforce thememorization of the poem. Persuasion to action had little placein the general purposes to which poetry was put; one recited orlistened to poetry as both a pleasure and a duty, but affectivelythe acts were self-contained. Rhetorical acts were not, and that isthe great difference. Some of the devices of rhetoric might havebeen similar to those of poetry, but behind every rhetorical utterance there was an agenda, a persuasive purpose. The poet orrhapsode sought to produce, as Gorgias put it, "fearful shuddering and tearful pity and grievous longing" in his hearers-but fortheir own sake. The rhetor sought to produce them for othermotives-to press a point, gain adherence to a cause, win a case.The forms must have differed somewhat as well. When we lookat the available evidence concerning the poetically based rhetoricof the Greek oral and early transistional periods, however, onecharacteristic of it comes through very clearly: I t was a weaponfar more powerful than we can easily imagine now.

The Power of Rhetoric in an Oral CultureThe accomplished rhetorician in a Greek polis before 450 B.c.was a figure to whom wealth and power came as a matter ofcourse, a figure to be feared, admired-obeyed. One importantreason why we get no word of rhetoricians as a class before 450

B.c . is that we know the great rhetoricians of this earlier period asthe kings, nobles, leaders, and generals. A leader in such a culture bad to be able to fight, but just as importantly, he had to beable to persuade others to fight . The abilities of the early Greekkings and leaders to shape actions through words attained andretained for them their power.The earliest references we have to popular attitudes towardeffective rhetoric illustrate this power of the logos. The Iliadrefers to Nestor's "argument sweeter than honey," and it is he,the "orator" of the Iliad, whose speech convinces Patroclus tofight Hector-thus moving Achilles finally to go against Hector.The Odyssey contains a very telling passage describing how orators were viewed by their communities:

One man is rather insignificant in look.;But a god crowns his speech with grace , and men behold himAnd are pleased. And he speaks without faltering,With soothing deference, and he stands out in the gathering.


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GREEK RHETORIC AND ORALITY

And they look upon him like a god as he goes through thecity.7

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This is rather a different picture of the reception of the rhetorician from that we see in a fully literate or even a later transitionalculture. What Homer seems to be describing here is a noncritical, non-abstract , communally based, and essentially emotional response to the rhetorical discourse of Odysseus. It is akind of response that gives the power of logos a depth and credibility we simply do not find in literate cultures, and there is muchevidence that this passive, emotional, credential reception of rhetorical discourse was the rule down through the time of Socrates,Plato, and even Aristotle.We only begin to catch direct glimpses of this orally based rhetorical power, of course, when written records begin to appear insome numbers during the mid-fifth century B.c. The first historiesand extant orations support the idea of rhetorical power describedby Homer. It seems clear, for instance, that the leaders of Athensduring most of the fifth century were men relying on their powersof discourse at least as much as on their abilities. As such menarose, the practical danger was that the Athenian polity kept passing from the spell of one demagogue to that of another.8 Themidcentury tyrant Peisistratus, who convinced the Athenians toprovide him with a bodyguard (actually a private army) which hethen used to oppress them, is probably paradigmatic; in an oralora transitional culture, any orator who had mastered the poeticallybased conventions that induced the passive, credulous oral mindstate could attain to great popular influence.Modern commentators have been at a loss to explain why thispattern held, why the ancient Greeks, who have always been thewestern models for rationalism, so easily gave up their freedomsto so many glib-tongued demagogues. The pattern seems lessmysterious, of course when seen as one inevitable manifestationof the orality-literacy transition. The literate "modern" mindstate of rational calculation championed by Plato would of courseappear in many forms other than those characterizing Platonicphilosophy, and demagogy was no doubt one of them. In Plato'smyth of the cave (which now appears much less fanciful thanbefore-indeed, it is almost a straight analogy for the oral mindstate Plato considered the enemy), the philosophers were thosewho had broken their chains, gone to the cave mouth, and tried


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44 ROBERT J. CONNORS

to report the truth of what they had seen back to those stillenchained. To use the same analogy, the demagogues were menwho had broken their chains, gone to the cave mouth, and thenreturned to try to manipulate the shadows that still constitutedeveryone else's reality.Demagogic oratory was the rule in Athenian politics (and to alesser degree in Athenian law) so long as the majority of thepopulation was unable or unwilling to subject oratory to the sortof critical analysis that is the natural literate response to persua-sion. This seems not to have occurred until sometime in thefourth century s .c.9 Even the great Pericles was almost certainlya demagogic orator.10 The story of Pericles' political career is thestory of a man mastering tremendously difficult situations by thepower of his speech, and though impressive and even glorious itis by no means unique. Masterful speech quite simply had agenuine power in early Greece that our critical sensibilities todayhave a hard time understanding. These early Greeks seem ex-tremely credulous in many ways to us today-and indeed, theyoften seemed too credulous to each other. 11

The Earliest Written Rhetorical DiscoursesAt the end of the fifth century B.c., we come to the earlyhistory of the "art" of rhetoric, which seems to develop concur-rently with the widening of the literate mentality-at least to acertain point. The transitional rhetoricians appeared during theseyears, men who have left the first written speeches and who werealso obvious masters of oral manipulation. These first writtenspeeches have been problematical to scholars. It has been verydifficult to understand how the extant fragments we have of thediscourses of the early orators could possibly have been effectiveas persuasion, so rife are they with devices that today leave uscold. Indeed, their devices left critics cold a mere century afterthey were first delivered-and the reason for this, I would argue,

is that after 330 B.c . all Greek writers (and remember that wehear no voices among the ancients but those of writers) existedwithin a paradigm of literate consciousness that could no longerunderstand the orally derived style of the earlier speakers.The case of Antiphon of Rhamnus clearly illustrates this pat-tern, Antiphon whom Jebb calls the last of the "old orators." Wehave only a few of his works, but they all seem similar, and a


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GREEK RHETORIC AND ORALITY 45modern reader of Antiphon's speeches would tend to agree withthe judgment made by Dionysius in 60 A. D. that "Antiphon hasnothing but his antique and stem dignity; a fighter of causes he isnot."u Antiphon's oratory seems stiff, stuffy, vague, repetitive,larded with obvious general statements about the nature of life,containing very little evidence or factuality.And yet, this is the same orator whose speeches brought theFour Hundred to power in the aristocratic coup of 411 B.c. This isthe same Antiphon whose contemporary, Thucydides, describedhim as the ablest speaker in the Athenian legal system: "Therewas no man who could do more for any who consulted him,whether their business lay in the courts of justice or in theassembly ..u Can this man, whose "great abilities" are so praisedby his contemporaries, of whom Thucydides repons that his defense of himself was the best he (Thucydides) had ever heard,who quickly became a leader of his pany and state, be the sameorator condemned by Diooysius as possessing nothing more than"antique dignity"?Yes. There is only one explanation for these differing views ofAntiphon's rhetoric: the criteria ofeffective speaking had changedradically between Antiphon's time and Diooysius's. The son ofspeech-an practiced by Antiphon seems strange to us, as it did toDionysius, because it was formed so early-Antiphon is assumedto have been born around 480 B.c., and be was put to death in 411B.c.-and formed to the needs of an orally attuned audience. Themeasured, cadenced dignity of Antiphon's style, "slow and majestic," as Jebb describes it, must have been one of the styles-itwould be a mistake to think that there was only one--that couldinduce some version of the receptive, passive oral audience-statedescribed by Havelock.14 In fact, we can see in Antiphon's styleand methods clear reflections of most of the characteristics thatOng ascribes to orally based expression: Antiphon is aggregative,not analytic; he relies on commonplaces, formulas, topics, sententious maxims; his speeches are repetitive and amplificatory; benarrates much of his position as an agonistic "story." An entireessay could easily be devoted to exploring the orality inherent inAntiphon's presentations, but I think the point is made: Jebb'sjudgment that Antiphon is the last of the "old" orators and Lysiasthe first of the "new" is essentially correct; all it lacks is insightinto why . Antiphon's basic orality and Lysias's basic literacy (Lysias was the first great logographos) tell us why.


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Gorgias of Leontini bas left for us more compelling mysteriesthan has Antiphon. Modern assessments of Gorgias's extantworks, the Encomium on Helen and the Palamedes, have beenJess than kind. What, after all, are we to make of a style that basalmost no parallels in modern prose?15 Down through historyruns the almost unanimous critical verdict that Gorgias's rhetoricis terrible stuff. Van Hook calls Gorgias's style "inartistic in theextreme . . . florid and frigid." Jebb is genuinely confused byGorgias, calling him "an inventor whose originality it is bard forus to realize, but an artist whose faults are to us particularlyglaring."16Neither are the ancient critics much kinder to him. Dionysiusin the first century A.D. excludes Gorgias from his list of greatorators because be "exceeds the bounds of moderation, and frequently lapses into puerility. " 17 Cicero in the first century B.c.accuses Gorgias of "immoderately abusing" devices of rhythmand figure. 18 Around the same time, Diodorus Siculus describesthe Gorgianic style as once popular because it was exotic, "but,"he reports, "i t is now looked upon as labored and to be ridiculedwhen employed too frequently and tediously" 19 And even Aristotle, writing not more than forty-five years after Gorgias's death,condemns his style throughout Book III of the Rhetoric.lO TheSicilian comes off poorly.The long tradition of disparaging Gorgias's style seems to havebegun with Aristotle, for we certainly see no such response toGorgianic rhetoric before 350 B.c. or so. On the contrary, the fewbits of evidence and testimony which have survived seem to indicate that Gorgias's rhetoric was effective and persuasive, that hewas widely admired, that his popularity never waned during hislife, and that he was wealthy and famous beyond all the othersophists. 1 Gorgias visited Athens on numerous occasions andwas invited to speak at the Olympic and Pythian games, a rarehonor for a foreigner. He seems to have been in great demandthroughout the Greek-speaking world as a teacher and a speaker,and he made a fortune during the last half of his life givinglessons and orations.22 Even his enemies respected his skill;Plato's attitude toward him in the dialogue that bears his name iscritical, but not of Gorgias's style. Plato's whole presentation ofthe Sicilian shows that he is famous, well-liked, and a performerwhose orations were eagerly sought treats. Plato's Gorgias maybe wrongheaded, but he is not a fool or a buffoon.


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GREEK RHETORIC AND ORALITY 47How, once again, can we reconcile the marked wealth, success, and status of this orator with the obloquy heaped upon hisworks Jess than a century after his death? Traditional scholarshave blamed "changing tastes," as if Gorgias's fall from popularity was similar to the Romantic poets' dismissal of the classical couplet form. But the change goes deeper than that, I think.I believe that Gorgias was the most successful manipulator oforal consciousness whose works the ancient world has left us,and that the condemnations of his style I have noted are all the

works of men whose consciousnesses, like ours, were essentiallyshaped by alphabetical literacy and not by communal oral performance. Gorgias was the most popular speaker and most successful sophist of his time because he recognized more clearlythan any other rhetor how to exploit the power of the logos inan oral culture.23Gorgias himself was not backward about describing the powerof the logos; he seems, in fact, to revel in it. In the Helen, whichwas probably his trademark oration and central advertisement forhimself, he ascribes to the logos a sort of power which soundsfantastic to the modem rhetorician. Traditional scholarship hasassumed that Gorgias is being hyperbolic in these passages, inflating the power of speech, but I think we must consider thepossibility that Gorgias is here offering a straight description ofthe effect that a master-speaker could have on an orally conditioned audience:

Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and mostinvisible body effects the divinest works; it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity ... through the agency ofwords, the soul is wont to experience a suffering of its own....Sacred incantations sung with words are bearers of pleasure andbanishers of pain, for, merging with opinion (doxa) in the soul, thepower of the incantation is wont to beguile it and persuade it andalter it by witchcraft.... The effect of speech upon the conditionof the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature ofbodies. For just as different drugs dispel different secretions fromthe body, and some bring an end to disease and others to life, soalso in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, somecause fear, others make the hearers bold, and some drug andbewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion.24

This is not the only time we hear this analogy between speechand philrmakein, drugs; Plato uses it as well.


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48 ROBERT J. CONNORSIn the Helen, Gorgias's main argument is an attempt to clearHelen of blame for the Trojan War by claiming that if she wereeither forced or persuaded to go to Troy she is faultless; at theheart of his case is the claim that persuasion equals force, thatunder the spell of the logos one loses the will to resist the capablespeaker. This sort of power goes far beyond what we think of asnormal rhetorical suasion. What Gorgias is describing here is notthe critical, analytical response of a literate audience, but ratherwhat Havelock calls "submission to the paideutic spell," whichinvolved the whole unconscious mind and probably the centralnervous system, a total loss of objectivity as the audience givesitself up to identification with the speaker and his goals. Havelock, of course, was discussing the effects of epic and tragic poetry, not of rhetoric. But rhetoric for Gorgias was extremelypoetical, as every commentator has noted; Gorgias's style hasbeen so criticized because of its abundant use of every poeticdevice-antithesis, isocolon, parison, homoeoteleuton--exceptmeter. These devices were not in Gorgias's work for mere show.His style is the result of his discovery of a techne by which hecould most effectually tap the response of orally conditioned

minds and provoke that poetic response through rhetoric.Charles P. Segal, in what is probably the best essay on Gorgias's rhetoric that we have, recognizes this point. Segal wrotebefore Havelock's theories were widely known, but he clearlyanticipates Havelock's ideas about the power of oral discourse inearly Greece. Gorgias's equation of logoi and phamwkein, saysSegal, means that "the force of the /ogoi thus works directly uponthe psyche; they have an immediate, almo&t physical impact onit.... Gorgias regarded his rhetoric as having more than a superficial effect on the ear, as actually reaching and 'impressing'the psyche of the hearer."25 Segal duly notes and brilliantly dis-courses on the psychology of Gorgianic rhetoric, but ultimatelyhe reaches no conclusions about whether Gorgias's claims for thepower of the logos were true. His unwillingness is understandable, for either Gorgias is talking through his hat or some tremendous change in human response has intervened between Gorgias and us. Jacqueline de Romilly has the same problem in herintriguing lectures on Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece: shetraces the power of rhetorical magic, but she cannot herself quitebelieve in it.26


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GREEK RHETORIC AND ORALITY 49My belief is that the magic, the references to epadon and goe-teia that de Romilly finds in so many fourth and fifth-centurysources, did exist, and that it is closely related to the effect ofpoetry and poetically based rhetorical techne on an oral culture.The persuasive powers of an accomplished orator during thosetransitional years must indeed have seemed magical to the majority of orally conditioned people. The power of poetry, related asit was to the sacred and to cultural continuity, had always beenconsidered magical, but it was Gorgias, Thrasymacbus, Anti

'phon, and others who learned to extend that "witchcraft," thosePoetic "spells" (philtron) into the realm of decision and nonpoetic entertainment.Plato's Struggle with Orally Based Rhetoric

As de Romilly notes, Gorgias's magic is technical. "He wants,"she says, "to emulate the power of the magician by a scientificanalysis of language and its influence. He is the theoretician ofthe magic spell of words."27 In the Helen and the Palamedes,Gorgias explores the ways in which the lcgos "can effect thedivinest works.'' For our purposes here, the important aspects ofGorgias's thought involve his belief in the extremely powerful-magical-seeming-influence that the rhetor's discourse has onthe souls of his hearers and the claim that this manipulation ofmen's souls could be taught as a techne. It was on these twogrounds that Gorgias encountered Plato, and while Plato clearlyfought the Sicilian on the second point, he seems to have bad nodisagreement at all about the first. For Plato, rhetorical discourse was extremely powerful, even magical, and it is this rhetorical magic that Plato opposes as he opposes the poetic magicthat spawned it. Against the epadon of poetic and rhetoric, which"charmed" and "enslaved" men, Plato opposed the rational, analytical power of dialectic, which was meant to break the spell,interrupt the charm, subvert the magic by questioning everything.A great deal of worthy scholarship has, of course, been doneon the Platonic response to rhetoric, but most of it has tended toconcentrate on the content of Plato's writings. Most scholarshiphas also assumed a continuity in rhetorical practice that I am heredeeply questioning.28 In this section I want to examine a fewissues that have been given less attention.


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First of all, what sort of power does Plato consider the rhetori-cal logos to have? We are not here directly concerned with hisjudgment of the worthiness of that power, merely with its scope.And it is clear that Plato never underestimates the power ofrhetoric . His famous definition of rhetoric as "an art which leadsthe soul by means of words"29 echoes Gorgias's contention aboutthe effect of the logos on the psyche, and Socrates admits in theMenexenus that the orators "bewitch our souls." "Every time Ilisten fascinated," says Socrates, "I am exalted and imagine my-self to have become at once taller and nobler and more hand-some . . . and this majestic feeling remains with me for overthree days.n:lO

Some idea of Plato's picture of the common response to oratorycan be found in Socrates' joking around with Phaedrus when thelatter reads him Lysias's speech in the Phaedrus. Humorously jab-bing at Phaedrus's poor delivery, Socrates says that the readingproduced in him a "divine frenzy," and later, when delivering hisown oration, Socrates again jokes, "Do not be surprised if I seemto be in a frenzy as my discourse progresses, for I am alreadyalmost uttering dithyrambics," and later, "Do you not notice , myfriend, that I am already speaking in hexameters [epic verse], notmere dithyrambics? ... I f I continue, what kind of hymn do yousuppose I shall raise? I shall surely be possessed by the nymphs towhom you purposely exposed me."31 What Socrates is jokinglydescribing here is the rhetorician's gradual approach to more andmore powerful, "inspired" poetic techniques. From prose to dithy-rambs to hexameter is a clear map of the journey to poetry, to thattapping of the poetic response mechanism that must have seemedmagical. Thus, later in the same dialogue , Socrates may sneer atGorgias and Tisias for elevating probabilities over truth, but he isalso forced to agree that their techniques "have a very powerfulforce, especially in large assemblies. "32

Plato presents the art of rhetorical witchery as a specialty of thesophists, Socrates' constant opponents in the dialogues. Protago-ras, in the dialogue of the same name, was the first sophist, andPlato introduces him as a powerful rhetorical spellbinder withmany followers and admirers, Protagoras "enchanting them withhis voice like Orpheus, while they follow where his voice sounds,enchanted. "33 Socrates himself falls under Protagoras's influenceafter the old sophist is given a chance to make a long oration.


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GREEK RHETORIC AND ORALITY 51

"For a while" after the speech, says Socrates, "I was still underhis spell and kept on looking at him as though he were going tosay more, such was my eagerness to hear, but when I perceivedthat he had really come to a stop, I pulled myself together, as itwere, with an effort. "34 This is Socrates speaking, the great rationalist. Throughout the dialogues Socrates admits that he is notimmune "o the blandishments of poetry and rhetoric; even as hecondemns them, he is in danger of seduction by them. Thisdanger raises the question: what sort of protective device mightbe found, what pharmakon or antidote could safeguard the mindfrom the corruptive rhetorical spell? For Socrates and Plato, thiswas a central question.Let us not underestimate what they were up against. The spellof rhetoric, like the spell of poetry, was a powerful one, and thestate of pleasurable receptive passivity that we have been describing was not only accepted, but eagerly sought after. Alcibiades'description of the common reaction to oratory in which the heartleaps, the tears gush forth, a whole audience shares a communalekplexis and a spiritual tumult,3l does not describe our responseto oratory today. There seems to have been something intenselypleasurable in this oral reactivity that we completely miss.36 Arhetorical performance by such an accomplished speaker as Gorgias was an occasion to be sought after, and Plato constantlyrefers to the pleasures involved in listening to rhetoric as analogous to the pleasure of eating or of makeup.37This surrender to pleasure, to the hypnotic spell of the logos asit drew hearers into a state of non-analytic, compliant communality (and the analogy with hypnosis may be by no means misleading), is what Socrates in the dialogues had to contend with.Along with the natural attraction of others to the rhetorical phil-Iron, Socrates also knew his own weakness: he, too, was likely tofall under the spell if a rhetorician was given the room to stretchout a speech, weave the spell. How to react to this, how to fightfor the rational, analytical, individualistic thought that Socratesand Plato called philosophy, was the problem. Pan of the solution is found, of course, in the contents of the dialogues, in thoseelements of the Ion and the Republic and the Gorgills and thePhaedrus that have been so well discussed by scholars. Just asimportant to the Socratic/Platonic case, however, is the form ofthe dialogues.


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Socratic Subversion of the Rhetorical SpellSimply put, Socrates' answer to the danger of the rhetoricalspell is to prevent it from being woven. Throughout all of theearly dialogues, Socrates struggles hard to control the form thatdiscourse will take. What he constantly tries to do is subvertrhetorical magic by interrupting it with questions. The very formof the dialectic method was the younger Plato's direct antidote tothe spell of rhetoric as it was his indirect challenge to the powerof poetic cultural transmission. 38 As Havelock says, dialectic in itssimplest form merely asks a speaker to stop, repeat himself, explain what he meant. It was interruptive, disruptive:

But to say, "What do you mean? Say that again," abruptly disturbed the pleasurable complacency felt in the poetic formula orthe image. I t meant using different words and these equivalentwords would fail to be poetic; they would be prosaic. As thequestion was asked, and the alternative prosaic formula was attempted, the imaginations of speaker and teacher were offended,and the dream so to speak was disrupted, and some unpleasanteffort of calculative reflection was substituted. In short, the dialectic . . . was a weapon for arousing the consciousness from itsdream language and stimulating it to think abstractly.39

Havelock here characterizes dialectic as an offensive weapon, butclearly Socrates used it as a defensive tool as well.

This technique of interruptive question-and-answer, used as asubverter of one-way rhetorical address, runs through nearly all ofthe Socratic dialogues and most of the Platonic corpus; it is especially obvious in the earlier dialogues.40 A great deal of the strugglein the Protagoras, for instance, is between Protagoras's desire todeliver his opinions in long speeches and Socrates' obdurate refusalto allow him to do it. Though Socrates treats Protagoras withrespect, he continually works to head him off from speechmakingunderstandably, given Socrates' report of the hypnotic effect thatProtagoras's long speeches have on him. The old sophist, however,is determined not to be robbed of his most potent weapon, andSocrates finally has to get up and threaten to leave if Protagoraswon't submit to questions. Protagoras is forced to back down.

The association of rhetoric with gustatory pleasure-with gluttonous entertainment-is found more notably in the Gorgias,where Socrates again refuses to hear a noted speaker declaim,though his companions consider Gorgias's oratory a treat, and in


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OREEK RHETORIC AND ORALITY 53which he demands again that no "lengthy speeches" be used byhis opponents. Socrates equates rhetoric with flattery in this dialogue because it consists of "giving people what they want . . . itaims at the pleasant and ignores the best," as does cookery. 2Socrates' method throughout, of course, is to subven Gorgias'sand Polus's wishes to harangue the assembled people and thuscontrol them, and he accomplishes this subversion by questioningthe rhetors and forcing them to think abstractly and express prosaically (a process which Polus hates especially; see 475- 76).Aware of where the rhetors' strengths lie, Polus tries to tum tothe judgment of the (probably disappointed and frustrated) assembly for suppon , but Socrates slaps down this ploy: "Themany I dismiss," he says firmly, acting ou t his conviction that oneman's truth arrived at dialectically is more va luable than theopinions of any number of people swayed by the "dream language" of rhetoric.43

Socrates' questioning, his constant interruptions of his associates' desire to build a flow of discourse, must have been veryannoying at times. Xenophon, in his "Memoirs of Socrates," tellsthat when Charicles , one of the Thirty Tyrants, commanded Socrates not to speak to the youth of Athens and met with question-ing from him, he snapped, "It is so much your custom to askquestions when you are not ignorant of the matter in hand, that Ido not wonder at your doing so now. Let us, however, have donefor the present with your trilling interrogatories. >44 Xenophondescribes Socrates ' method thus: "His custom was to carry backthe argument to the very first proposition; and from thence, setout in the search of truth."' 5What all this evidence suggests is that Socrates and the youngerPlato are retailing a method as well as a philosophy. Socrates hasmany truths to test , but finally what is most imponant to him ishis form of investigating issues. The search for truth throughanalytical, rational, individualistic dialectical interchange is morecentral to Socrates' quest than any one doctrine. As he himselfsays in the Lesser Hippills, "I go astray, up and down, and neverhold the same opinion" (346c). Presumably this is because thedegree to which truth could be approximated in words wa s unknown. Rather than as the builder or progenitor of a unified,authoritarian , "Platonic" system of "idealistic" philosophy, Ithink it is more accurate to see Socrates as a radical iconoclast ,constantly questioning those about him and trying to "awaken"


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54 ROBERT J . CONNORS

tbem from what Havelock calls "the dream-language of the unconscious." This view is supponed by Xenophon's testimony thatSocrates eventually lost most of his followers because he gavetbem the impression that theyknew nothing real.46Given these facts, it seems likely that Plato's arguments againstrhetoric, his charges that it was not an an and that it did not havebasis in the search for truth, were related to his argument againstpoetry. The danger that he saw from poetry-that it would j>erpetuate the older, non-rational oral consciousness-was differentfrom the danger presented by rhetoric-that technical manipulation of oral consciousness by men unconcerned with truth couldgive some too great a power over others-but the younger Platofought them both, as Socrates had, with the weapon of dialectic.47The enemy, for both Socrates and the younger Plato, was theauthoritarianism of one-way discourse, whether poetic or rhetorical. The philosophical reaction to such one-way spellbindingcould only be to try to destroy the spell by interrupting, disrupting, subvening it with questions.

The Problem of Writing in PlatoThe perspective I have been discussing can begin to explain, Ithink, one aspect of Plato's thought that Havelock seems deliberately to ignore: his open hostility toward writing. If, as Havelockclaims, Plato "announced and became the prophet" of the literate revolution, it seems curious that in both the Phoedrus and theSeventh Epistle Plato dismisses writing as unimponant at best ,harmful at worst. Does this not undercut Havelock's (and my)

position?I think not, at least not if we try to imagine how writing mighthave looked to a philosopher whose entire commitment was tothe give-and-take of small-group dialectic. To such a thinker,written documents-those closed-system, one-way discourses-could not be much better than poetic recitations or rhetoricalharangues. Like recitations and speeches, written documentsmean only to expose a passive audience to a product. They arethe antithesis of dialectical process, which finds truth only inmovement. Plato realized, of course, that written documents donot have the seductive, hypnotic, spellbinding qualities that liverhapsodes and speakers had , and thus his arguments against writing are tinged more with contempt than with passion-but the


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GREEK RHETORIC AND ORAUTY 55

arguments are the same: the truth cannot come from any oneway communication, for it is found in a shared process and nowhere else. "You might think that [written words) spoke as ifthey had intelligence," says Plato, "but if you question them,wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only oneand the same thing. >48 Opposed to the dumb assertion of booksis "the word which is written with intelligence in the psyche ofthe learner, which is able to defend itself . . . "49Plato makes this same complaint again and again about poetry,writing, and rhetoric: they cannot be questioned. Even the greatorators and statesmen-Pericles in particular-come up short.Socrates denigrates them in the Protagoras as no better than thecontemptible written word:

But suppose you put a question to one of them-they are just likebooks, incapable of either answering you or putting a question oftheir own. I f you question even a small point in what has beensaid, just as brazen vessels ring a long time after they have beenstruck and prolong the note unless you put your hand on them,these orators too, on being asked a little question, extend theirspeech over a full-length course.lO

All such one-way communications are related, and all are to berepudiated by a seeker of truth. 1In sum, Plato's attitude toward written discourse is negativebecause he saw his struggle very differently from the way we donow. From our perspective, Plato is the revolutionary prophet of atransforming literacy, and it is the orality-literacy division to whichwe pay most attention. To Plato, however, the revolution wasdialectical, not literary; he fought for the process of analyticalquestioning, not for books. Books and writing were to him, ifanything, part of the problem, as was any discourse that would notrespond to questioning. In this, Plato was wrong, of course; thenumber of analytical rationalists made by dialectical conversionfrom orality-the "leaping spark"-was dwarfed by the numbersof young children being taught to read and write in the novelelementary schools of the late fifth and early fourth centuries B.c.It was this ever-larger number of literate souls and not the fewtrained thinkers produced by the Academy which transformedGreek culture during the fourth century. Plato may have been theprophet of this revolution, but he was never its strategist.


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56 ROBERT J. CONNORSThe Decline of Orally Based RhetoricAt some point during Plato's life , at least so far ~ w e can tell,

the balance between orality and literacy shifted. A growing num-ber of citizens of the polis were being trained in literate skills at anearly age, and habits of individualistic thought and philosophicaldistancing were gnawing away at the old communality. Between400 and 350 a.c., the Athenian polity ceased being an oral societywhich was manipulated by rhetors and "subverted" by dialecti-cians, and began to reorganize itself as a critical, disputatious,analytical community which applied more rational criteria to deci-sions. By 320 B.C. , the execution of Socrates eighty years earlierseemed inexplicable folly to Athenians; for them, Socrates was nolonger a dangerous subverter of Athenian values but Plato's noblementor as we see him today-through the medium of writing.

The modern technical development of rhetoric, from Aristotleonward, had been a product of this essentially literate post-Socratic culture. Aristotle's students were literate, though theirpotential audiences may not always have been, and thus his Rheto-ric is a mixture of clearly modern techniques based on logicalanalysis and critical rationalism and of older terms of art thatmust have been more meaningful during the late transitionalphase of Athens during which Aristotle wrote. Maxims, enthy-memes, examples-the amount of scholarly wrangling over themeaning of these terms should tip us off that there is some essen-tial key missing to our understanding of them. It is no coinci-dence that all three of these terms (and they are by no means theonly unclear terms in the Rhetoric) have to do with the rhetor'srelation with his audience, with what he can count on his hearersto know, believe, and feel in response to his cues. Aristotle mayhave been chagrined by "the uneducated" in his audience and bytheir uncritical responses, but he was too practical not to includerhetorical advice on how such an audience might be approached.The logical, analytical rhetoric he wished to recommend in a pureform (following Plato) simply did not serve every occasion. Casesshould, he believed, "be fought on the strength of the factsalone, so that all besides demonstration of fact is superfluous.Nevertheless, as we have said, external matters do count formuch, because of the sorry nature of an audience. This is thevo1ce, more common in Aristotle than one might expect, of adisappointed idealist.


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GREEK RHETORIC AND ORALITY 57Though the Rhetoric is a transitional work, it does contain thefirst clear rhetorical techne, explanations of techniques based onanalysis, division, abstract thought. Such were rhetorical works tobe ever after. There are oral residues in Demosthenes and in thelater (socrates (and it must be remembered that we have nothingof (socrates except his later works, those written after he wassixty), but after around 350 B.c. rhetoric belonged more andmore to the heirs of Lysias the logographer, not to those ofGorgias. With (socrates' death in 338 B.c. , the last man ever to

have successfully practiced the old purely oral rhetoric was gone.The deaths of Aristotle and Demosthenes mark the latter edge ofwhat I have been calling the period of transition ; after 320 B.c. itseems likely that every educated Greek could read and writefrom youth. The older oral culture, with its unique modes ofconsciousness and response, was fast disappearing. Jebb dates thedecline of Greek oratory from 320 B.c. and we can only wonderabout the possible connections.As I have tried to show, the close relationship of early rhetoricand poetic, when considered in the light of Havelock's theory ofthe "literate revolution" against poetic oral consciousness, maymean that we should reconsider our views of the nature of earlyAttic oratory. It may well be that Pericles and Gorgias were"spellbinders" in a far more literal sense than we had supposed,and Socrates' and Plato's struggle against rhetoric may have beena far more dangerous fight than it bad first appeared. Aristotle'sRhetoric, which we think of as signalling the beginning of modernrhetorical history, may also signal the downfall of an older rhetoric-darker , more artistic, and far more coercive-that has survived only in fragments. More work needs to be done before wecan understand all of the ramifications of the breakdown of oralconsciousness and its meaning for rhetorical theory and practice.This essay bas meant only to suggest some of the paths of investigation that may prove fruitful.Department of EnglishUniversity of New Hampshire

NotesAll translalioos , except where noted, have been taken from the editions publislledby the Loeb aassical Library.


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58 ROBERT J. CONNORSI. This discussK>n is adapted from Eric A. Havelock, Preface 10 PlaJo (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), and from a later collection of Havelock'sessays, The Literate Revolution in Grtece and its Cultural Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).2. Havelock, Prtface to Plato, 43-44.3. Havelock, Prtface, 44-45. The center of Havelock's argument is capturedin this passage:Our business here is not with literary criticism but with the origins of thatabstract intellectualism styled by the Greeks' "philosophy." We must realise that works of genius, composed within the semi-oral tradition ...constituted or represented a total state of mind which is not our mind andwhich was not Plato's mind; and that just as poetry itself, as long as itreigned supreme, constituted the chief obstacle to the achievement of effective prose, so there was a state of mind which we shall convenientlylabel the "poetic" or "Homeric" or "oral" state of mind, which constitutedthe chief obstacle to scientific rationalism, to the use of analysis, to theclassification of experience, to its rearrangment in sequence of cause andeffect. That is why the poetic state of mind is for Plato the arch-enemy,and it is easy to see why he considered this enemy so formidable. He isentering the lists against centuries of habituation in rhythmic memorisedexperience. He asks of men that they should examine this experience andrearrange it, that they should think about what they say, instead of justsaying it. (46- 47)4. See Julian Jaynes' intriguing discussion of a possible physiological basis forthis phenomenon in The Origin ofConsciousness in the Breakdown o f he Bicam-eral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 365-70. Jaynes' theory offers a clearanswer to the question of why modem oral cultures differ in some imponant waysfrom the oral culture of ancient Greece, but I am not -prepared to take a ftnalposition on Jaynes' work at this time.5. As George Kennedy points out, the earliest oratory must necessarily haveshared many characteristics with the poetry that provided everyone's common cultural "book" (George Kennedy, The Arto fPersiUISion in Greece [Princeton: Princeton University Press 1963), S). Hesiod in the Theogony proclaims poetry and oratory to be sister-gifts from the Muses, (Theogony, trans. Richmond Lattimore [AnnArbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), vv. 90-99.) and Gorgias, the e


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GREEK RHETORIC AND ORAUTY 597. Odyssey, trans. Alben Cook (New York: Norton, 1967), VIII, 169-73.Hesiod in the Theogony also speaks of the Muses' gift of rhetoric as that whichcreates almost effonless mastery. The Muses bestow their gifts upon one of tbe"respected barons," says Hesiod,and from his mouth the words run blandishing, and his peopleall look in his direction as he judges their caseswith straight decisions, and, by an unfaltering declarationcan put a quick and expen end even to a great quarrel:and that is why there are temperate barons, because for their peoplewho have gone astray in assembly these lightly tum back their actionsto the right direction, talking them over with gentle arguments.As such a one walks through an assembly, the people adore himlike a god, with gentle respect .. . (Theogony, 84-92).Scholars have noted tbe similarity between this and the previously quoted passage, theorizing that one is an interpolation of a pan of the other.8. Jebb remarks on this phenomenon- the seeming inability of the Golden-Age Greeks to resist the blandishments of tyrants-with sotne chagrin:What is so strikingly characteristic of Greek Democracy in the periodbefore an artistic oratory is this-that the power of public speaking nowexists, indeed , as a political weapon, but instead of being the great organby which the people wield the commonwealth, it is employed as a lever forchanging the democracy into a tyranny. Such names as Aristagoras, Evagoras, Protagoras, Peisistratus, frequent especially in the Ionian colonies,indicate, not the growth of a popular oratory, but the ascendency whichespeciallr gifted speakers were able to acquire . . . (R . C. Jebb, The AtticOralors (London: Macmillan , 1876J, cix.)9. Certainly there is ample evidenoe that politics were still shaped by demagogic oratory through the end of the Peloponnesian War and beyond. All thetestimony we have shows how great the power was that could be exercised bythose expert in rhetorical techniques; Polus in the GorgiJJs says that orators "actlike tyrants and put to death anyone they please and con6scate propeny andbanish anyone they've a mind to '' (Gorgias, ~ ) a n d the plays of Aristophanesare filled with dear portraits of the misuse of the power of speech. In TheAcharnians, the veterans of Marathon complain of being "harassed with law-suits,delivered over to the scorn of s t r i p ~ n g orators.... While standing before ajudge, we can scarcely stammer fonh the fewest words ... whereas the accuser,desirous of conciliating the younger men, overwhelms us with his ready rhetoric"(The Acharnians, 118). Aristophanes develops this idea of unjust oratory being ayoung man's game-practiced by younger, more literately conscious minds againstolder more orally conditioned minds-in The Clouds, where he characterizes therhetorical education given by the sophists by saying, "They'll teach (only they'llwant some money) how one may speak and conquer, right or wrong" (ThtClouds, 115). (Aristophanes is a strange transitional figure, a literate mind yearning for the unity and simplicity of the old dispensation, when young men learnedpoetry at the knee of the Harper and no schools of disputation existed to complicate life. (See Clouds 960-84J. But the unity be wished for was slipping away evenas this first nostalgiast for the Good Old Days was satirizing the transitionalexoesses be saw about him. Aristophanes probably did not realize that sopbisticated satire of bis son would have been impossible-r at best meaningless - tothe purely oral culture for whose restoration he pined.)10. Because Pericles left no writings, we cannot gather much about the devioeshe used in speaking (Thucydides' reportage of Pericles' speeches is probablysubstantially correct in terms of their content , but Thucydides was guided by

literate constraints and thus could not repon effectively on Pericles' style ormethods, which presumably were developed to appeal to orally conditioned mentalities), but all the reports of his success indicate that he was a master at manipulation of the mass mind of bis auditors. Plutarch describes the extraordinarypersuasive powers of Pericles; he was called "Olympian" for his diction, and


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Aristophanes spoke of him as "wielding a dread thunderbolt in his tongue."When asked if Pericles was a better wrestler than be, Pericles' political rivalThucydldes complained that "Whenever I throw him in wrestling, be disputes thefall, and carries his point, and persuades the very men who saw him fall" (Pericles, 8.3, 8.4).I I . Thucydides reports a debate on how Athens should deal with the rebellious city of Mitylene conducted in 427 B.c. by Oeon and Diodalll$-who wasknown as a persuasive speaker. Cleon begins his speech with a plaint against thecredulity of his audience:You estimate the possibility of future enterprises from the eloquence of anorator, but as to accomplished facts, instead of believing your eyes, youbelieve only what ingenious critics tell you. No men are better dupes ...In a word, you are at the mercy of your ears, and sit like spectatorsattending a performance of sophists, bu t very unlike counsellors of state(Thucydides, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Oarendon Press, 1881),1ll,38).This is the voice of a man who wishes his audience to wake from their orallyconditioned trance state but does not see how the awakening can be accomplishedexcept by sneering. Cleon lost the debate, and the inhabitants of Mitylene werespared.12. Dionysius, Dt lsaeo, 20 (trans. in Jebb).13. Thucydides, 8.6.14. From Tbucydides ' reports, it seems possible that Pericles' style may havebeen similar to Antiphon's.15. LaRue Van Hook is Gorgias's only English translator to try to capture theman's style as weU as his content, and his version of the Htltn begins to give us afeel for the Sicilian:But if by violence she was defeated and unlawfully she was treated and toher injustice was meted, clearly her violator as a terrifier was importunate,while she, translated and violated, was unfortunate. Therefore, the barbarian who verbaUy,legaUy, actually attempted the barbarous attempt, shouldmeet with verbal accusation, legal reprobation, and actual condemnation.For Helen wbo was violated and from her fatherland separated and fromher friends segregated should justly meet with commiseration rather than)>lith defamation. Fo r he was the victor and she was the victim. It is justtherefore to sympathize with the latter and anathematize the former(Helen, 7).We should remember that Van Hook has not been able to capture the full flavorof the Gorgianic style even here.16. Auk Orators, cxxi. Jebb tries gamely to explain away Gorgias's success in

his Athenian embassy of 427 a.c. and his general popularity, given his "incrediblytasteless" style, but after a weak defense be finally sigbs, "Allowing, however, allthat bas been advanced above, it migbt still seem strange that Gorgias shouldhave had this reception from the Assembly which, within three years, had beenlistening to Pericles" (Jebb assumes, of course, that Pericles spoke just as Tbucydides wrote). E. R. Dodds calls Gorgias's oratory "affected and boring; thewell-drilled words execute ad nauseum the same repetitive manoeuvres with themechanical precision of a platoon on a barrack square" (E . R. Dodds, "lntroduction" to Plato's Gorgias (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 9). And George Kennedy claims that Gorgias's success in Athens was due only to the novehy of hisstyle, not its construction: "The jingles, the obsession with technique were whatwas remarkable ... (Kennedy, Art of Persuasion in Greece, 47). (This seems toleave out of account the fact that Gorgias's Athenian popularity covered the lastfony-eight years of his life, 427- 379 a.c.)17. Dt lsaeo, 19.18. Orator, 176.19. Historical Library, 12. 53.20. Aristotle comes close to sneering at Gorgias at times: ''Since the poets


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GREEK RHETORIC AND ORALITY 61were thought to have won their fame by their fine language, when their thoushtswere not profound, so the language of prose first took on a poetical cast-forexample, that of Gorgias. Even now the uneducated mostly think such diseoursesvery iine . But it is not so" (RhtJoric, trans. Lane Cooper [New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1931) 1


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62 ROBERT J. CONNORSwere all linked and how terms of magic came to be linked fint to poetic uses andthen at last to rhetoric, de Romilly stops dead. She i:annot believe in the magjcshe bas so carefully traced; the best she can offer is a weak admission tllat theremay be "a sort of spell attached to this artful arrangement of words" (20). Because the magic of the /ogru is gone now, de Romilly, rationalist that she is, mustdeny that it ever existed.

'1:1. de Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric, 16.28. AlliOilg the best of the available scholarly essay collections is Plato's Trueand Soplrisric RhetOric, ed . Keith V. Erickson (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi,1979).29. Pluudnu, 261a.30. MtnaeiWS, 235a-b. Although the rhetor's audience may not be as demonstrative as the audience of the rhapsode, wbom Ion describes as "crying andturning awestJuck eyes to me and yielding the amazement of my tale" (/on,535e), Plato describes it as very powerfully affected nonetheless. (Note that ion's"tale," the 1/U.d, was certainly not new to any of his bearers; their extremelyemotional response to it was pan and parcel of the non-analytical, passive, communal response of oral people experiencing discourse together. "Purging pity andfear" was for the ancient Greeks no term out of a literary handbook; it was whatthey felt. But not, alas, what we feel.) Socrates illustrates the power of discoursein the hands of a master speaker in a number of tbe dialogue&-and it is clear thatbe himself was not immune to it and tended to see it as witchery. In the Eulhy.U-nuu, Socrates describes the power of rhetoric in very Gorgianic tenn.s again: "ForDOl only do these speech-writers themselves, when I am in their company, impressme as prodigiously clever , Oeinias, but their art il$elf seems so eulted as to beal_most inspired. However, this is not surprising, for it is a part of the sorcerer'sart, and only siJ&btly inferior to that. The sorcerer's ar t is the charming of snakesand taranrulas and scorpions and other beasts and diseases, while the other is justthe charming and soothing of juries, assemblies, crowds, and so forth" (Euthydtnuu, 289-90). Socrates does not evince a very high opinion of community sensehere or elsewhere; 8S$Cmblies that can be charmed like snakes are little betterthan unthinking brutes themselves.31. Pluudrus, 238-41.32. Pluudrus, 26&.33. PTOl4gortJS, 315a-b. Plato's conception of Prolagoras must have come tohim through Socrates, since Plato was only seven years old when Protagoras died.34 . PrOIIlgortJS, 328d.35. Sympoium, 215e.36. The connection between this pleasurable response to rhetoric and the epideictic genre of discourse needs to be looked at more closely. It may be thatepideictic discourse is the vermiform appendix of rhetoric, an atrophy preservedby Aristotle from a time when oral discourse of praise or blame was an entertainment rather than a duty. For an excellent introduction to this genre. see TheodoreC. Burgess, "Epideictic Literatwe," Chicago Suulies in CU..sica/ Philolcgy 3(1902): 89-254.37. Indeed, the whole argument of the Gorgias is that rhetoric is "ministry tothe pleasure of body or soul without regard for the better and the worse ... bentupon pleasure and the gratification of the spectators" (501-2).38. In his fascinating essay, "The Culrural Role of Rhetoric," Richard Weavermakes the same case for dialectic as subversive, albeit from a different perspective. Weaver equates Socratic dialectic witb pure rationalism and claims thatrationalism in the social realm subverts true community. I see Socratic dialectic assubvenive in the sense that it broke tbe paideutic spell of uninterrupted artspeech. The content of Socrates's questions supports Weaver's position, and theirform supports mine. Weaver's essay is found in the collection Language is Ser-monic: Riclwrd Wtavo on th t Nature of RMtoric, ed. Richard L. Jollanneson,Rennard Strickland, and Ralph T. Eubanks (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 163-70.


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GREEK RHETORIC AND ORALITY 6339. Havelock, Prefoce, 209.40. My unprovable opinion is that many of the Platonic dialogues starringSocrates are indeed accurate reflections ofSocrates' beliefs and methods, and thatthey were written by the younger Plato at least partly as a tribute to his deadmentor. The dialogue form evolved by Plato re8ects Socrates' central belief thattruth could not be pinned down or transmitted through any sort of one-waycommunication, that it must be attained through dialectical give-and-take. Only inlater works, when Socrates is replaced as the main character. does the form ofdialectic falter and finally all but disappear; in its place, we hear a droning lecturefrom a non-Socratic character- the voice, I would argue, of the older Plato himself. In the Sophist, for instance, a middle-late transitional work, Socrates appearsbut surrenders center stage to "the Eleatic Stranger," who replies to Socrates'usual request for dialectical questioning: "The method of dialogue, Socrates, is

easier with an interlocutor who is tractable and gives no trouble, but otherwise Iprefer the continuous speech by one person" (217a). The Stranger finally agreesto question" Theaetetus (a classic Platonic "yes, certainly" machine), but mostof the spirit of dialectical give-and-take is gone. By the time of tbe Laws, Plato'slast work, Socrates bas vanished entirely and we are forced to listen to cardboardcharacters recite a series of leaden lectures on Platonic legal theory. The Laws is aterrible bore, far removed from the liveliness and thrust/parry of the Socraticdialogues. It may well be that the emphasis on dialectic that I discuss here wasmore Socratic than Platonic, or that Plato's interest in the Socratic dialecticalform lessened as be grew older and saw the decay of the poetic/rhetorical spellthat the dialectic form had been evolved to combat. In his letters, Plato alwaysrefers to his earlier works as "the Socratic dialogues," and in tbe Second Epistlehe says, "It is impossible for what is written not to be disclosed. That is the reasonwhy I have never written anything about these things, and why there is not andwill not be any written work of Plato's own. What are now called his are the workof a Socrates grown young and beautiful" (314b-c).41. Protagoras, 3361>-c. "I bad thought," says Socrates with some scorn, "thatto bold a joint discussion and to make a long harangue were two distinct things."Prodicus, Protagoras's sophistic rival, sides with Socrates, saying that if Protagoras submits to dialectic, "we listeners would thus be most comforted, not pleased;for he is comforted who learns something ... whereas he is pleased who eatssomething or has some pleasant sensation only in his body."42. Gorgias, 465a.43. Dialectic as subversion is abo on clear display in the two Hippias dialogues. in which Socrates leads the poor sophist Hippias a merry dialectical chasewhile forbidding him use of his own favorite weapon. "Now if you choose todeliver a long speech," says Socrates in the usser HippiM, "l tell you now thatyou would not cure me [of ignorance}-for I could not follow you-but if you arewilling to answer me, as you did just now. you will do me a great deal of good."

( L ~ s s t r Hippias, 373a) Craftily, Socrates often pled his own thickheadednom as areason to let him press questions. In the Greater Hippias, after Socrates hasdriven him hither and thither with dialectical questioning, Hippias finally protests:... Socrates, you do not consider the entirety of things . . . but you testthe beautiful and each individual entity by taking them separately andcutting them to pieces.... But now, Socrates, what do you think all thisamounts to? It is mere scrapings and shavings of discourse, as I said a whileago, divided into bits, but that other ability is beautiful and a great worth,the ability to produce a discourse well and beautifully in a coun of law or acouncilhouse . . . to convince the audience and to carry off, not thesmallest, but the greatest of prizes, the salvation of one's self, one's property, and one's friends. For these things, therefore, one must strive, renouncing these petty arguments ... (Greater HippiM, 301-4).

To this Socrates replies that to speak thus is to be ignorant of the beautiful, inwhich case, he asks Hippias, "do you think it is better for you to be alive thandead?"


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64 ROBERT J. CONNORS44. "Memoirs of Socrates: trans. Sarah Fielding, in Whole Works of Xenophon (London: Jones and Co . 1832), 526.45 . "Memoirs of Socrates." 596. It also seems clear that whi le Socrates didhave tremendous rhetorical power himself-see the Meno and the Symposium-he considered that its use for any but the highest ends was unworthy. His unwillingness to unlimber a rhetorical defense at his trial probably cost him his life.but he recognized that to have done so would have been a betrayal of all hebelieved in. To use rhetorical methods of emotional arousal. histrionics, "pcrsuasion and supplication , . would have been an admission of the worth and necessityof these techniques-and lhis Socrates would not do. H is accusers had him caughtin a truly exquisite vise. One of the most potent indications of a true "ehange ofmind" in the fourth century a .c. is found in the Athenian crowd's reaction toSocrates' defense: they respond with outcries of anger and dissatisfaction to aspeech that seems to us very moving and persuasive. The crowd was angry withhim both because he would not recant his subversive rationalism aJUI because hisdiscourse was not pleasurable to them. Socrates knows this. of course, and after heis found guilty he makes a quiet admission that his refusal to play the counroom"game" was deliberate:Perhaps you think. gentlemen. that I have been convicted through lack ofsuch words as would have moved you to acquit me, if l had thought it rightto do and say everything to gain an acquittal. Far from it. And yet it isthrough a lack that I have been convicted, not however a lack of words,but of impudence and shamelessness. and of willingness to say to you suchthings as you would have liked best to hear. You would have liked to hearme wailing and lamenting, and doing and saying many things which are, asI maintain, unworthy of m ~ u c h things as you are accustomed to hearfrom others . . . nor do I now repent of having made my defense as I did,but I much prefer to die after such a defense than to live after a defense ofthe other son (38- 39).Addressed to a disgruntled crowd that had come out for entertainment and instead gotten abstract instruction. this flat statement could only have made thingsworse. The jury proceeded to condemn Socrates to the death he seemed to want.46. "Memoirs," 587.47 . It may here be objected that Plato does propose a system of rhetoric in thePhaedrus and can therefore not have been completely opposed to it. That heseems to propose a system is true, but the rhetorical system proposed in thePhaedrus is an ideal, identical to dialectic in most of its methods-proceeding byanalysis and classification, eschewing probability, undontonding the true natures

of both souls ansi speeches. Socrates even admits that such a rhetoric may be apractical impossibility. but says that "it is noble to strive after noble objects"(274b). I f such a rhetoric could be attained it would be a true rechnt, but in theAthenian world of unscrupulous sophists and powerful demagogues, rhetoric as itreally existed was a force to be resisted.48. Phaedrus, 275d.49 . Written words can really serve us "only as a reminder of what we know,"says Plato; they cannot teach us anything new, because real knowledge can onlybe had in interchange with a teacher. At the heart of knowledge lies a quality thatcannot possibly be transmitted in writing, an almost mystical illumination thatPlato discusses in his Seventh Epistle: "I certainly have composed no work inregard to it, nor shall I ever do so in future; for there is no way of putting it inwords like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a longperiod of attendance on instruction in the subject itself and of close companionship, when , suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark , it is generated inthe soul and at once becomes self-sustaining" (Seventh Epistle, in Thirteen Epi.s ties, trans. L. A. Post [Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1925). 34lc-d). Plato may herebe describing the effect of continued practice in dialectic on a student used tothinking in concrete poetic commonplaces; the first realization of the power andscope of abstraction might have been illumination of a very powerful kind. No


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GREEK RHETORIC AND ORALITY 65

wrinen logos can acoomplish this illumination, and therefore, says Plato, "nowrillen discourse, whether in meter or in prose, deserves to be treated veryseriously (and this applies also to the recitations of the rhapsodes, delivered tosway people's minds, without opportunity for questioning and teaching . . . "(PirMdrus, me) .SO . Protagoras, 275d.51. See Phtxdrus, 278 for a list of these related activities.52. Rlutoric, 1404b. This is the voice of an Aristotle who wished to create arbetoric that could live up to Plato's near-impossible Phtxdrus definition.

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