Rhetoric

I

Introduction

Rhetoric, in its broadest sense, theory and practice of eloquence, whether spoken or written. Spoken rhetoric is oratory. Rhetoric defines the rules that should govern all prose composition or speech designed to influence the judgement or the feelings of people and is thus a form of propaganda. It therefore treats of all matters relating to beauty or forcefulness of style (see Figure of Speech). In a narrower sense, rhetoric is concerned with a consideration of the fundamental principles according to which oratorical discourses are composed, these being invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. This article deals primarily with the theory of rhetoric.

II

Classical Rhetoric

The eloquence that Nestor, Odysseus, and Achilles display in Homer's Iliad led many Greeks to look upon Homer as the father of oratory. The establishment of democratic institutions in Athens in 510 bc imposed on all citizens the necessity of public service, making skill in oratory essential; hence a group of teachers arose known as Sophists, who endeavoured to make men better speakers by rules of art. Protagoras, the first of the Sophists, made a study of language and taught his pupils how to make the weaker cause appear the stronger. The actual founder of rhetoric as a science is said to be Corax of Syracuse, who defined rhetoric as the “artificer of persuasion” and composed the first handbook on the art of rhetoric. Later masters of rhetoric were Corax's pupil Tisias, also of Syracuse; Gorgias of Leontini, who went to Athens in 427 bc; and Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, who also taught at Athens. Antiphon, the first of the so-called Ten Attic Orators, was also the first to combine the theory and practice of rhetoric, and with Isocrates, the great teacher of oratory in the 4th century bc, the art of rhetoric was broadened to become a cultural study, a philosophy with a practical purpose.

Plato satirized the more technical approach to rhetoric, with its emphasis on persuasion rather than truth, in his Gorgias, and in the Phaedrus he discussed the principles constituting the essence of the rhetorical art. Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, defined the function of rhetoric as being, not that of persuasion, but rather that of “discovering all the available means of persuasion”, thereby emphasizing the winning of an argument by persuasive marshalling of truth, rather than the swaying of an audience by an appeal to their emotions. He regarded rhetoric as the counterpart, or sister art, of logic. The instructors in formal rhetoric in Rome were at first Greek, and the great masters of theoretical and practical rhetoric, Cicero and Quintilian, were both influenced by Greek models. Cicero wrote several treatises on the theory and practice of rhetoric, the most important being On the Orator; Quintilian's famous Institutio Oratoria still retains its value as a thorough treatment of the principles of rhetoric and the nature of ideal eloquence. Scholastic declamations of the early empire are found in the extant suasorioe and controversioe of the rhetorician Seneca, the former belonging to deliberative rhetoric, the latter dealing with legal issues and presenting forensic rhetoric. During the first four centuries of the Roman Empire, rhetoric continued to be taught by teachers who were called Sophists, the term by this time used as an academic title.

III

Medieval and Renaissance Rhetoric

Rhetoric constituted one of the subjects of the trivium, or three preliminary subjects of the seven liberal arts taught at the universities, the other two being grammar and logic. The chief medieval authorities on rhetoric were three Roman scholars of the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries: Martianus Capella, author of an encyclopedia of the seven liberal arts (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music, in conjunction with grammar, logic, and rhetoric); Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus, historian and founder of monasteries, famed especially for his Institutiones Divinarum et Humanarum Lectionum, the second book of which contains an account of the seven liberal arts; and Isidore of Seville, a Spanish archbishop who compiled an encyclopedic work setting forth the erudition of the ancient world.

During the Renaissance, the study of rhetoric was again based on the works of such writers of classical antiquity as Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. A number of contemporary dissertations were produced, among them the Art of Rhetorique (1553) by the English statesman and writer Thomas Wilson, the Art or Craft of Rhetoryke by the 16th-century English schoolmaster Leonard Cox, and treatises by Pierre de Courcelles and André de Tonquelin, both 16th-century French rhetoricians. Rhetoric was a prescribed subject in colleges and universities, public disputations and competitive exercises keeping the practice long alive.

IV

Modern Rhetoric

In the early 18th century, rhetoric declined in importance, although more on its theoretical than on its practical side, since the political arena and the debating platform continued to furnish numerous opportunities for effective oratory. For the succeeding half-century, the art of rhetoric had increasingly fewer exponents. The Lectures on Rhetoric (1783) by the Scottish clergyman Hugh Blair achieved considerable popularity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as did the Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) by the Scottish theologian George Campbell and the Elements of Rhetoric (1828) by the British logician Richard Whately. In the first half of the 20th century, a revival of the study of formal rhetoric, encouraged largely by the exponents of the linguistic science known as semantics, occurred throughout the English-speaking countries of the world. Among the modern educators and philosophers who made notable contributions to this study were the British literary critic I. A. Richards and the American literary critics Kenneth Duva Burke and John Crowe Ransom.