Aristophanes clearly conceived the new oratorical skills displayed by his generation as something taught: Birds 1699-1705 attack the morally corrupting influence of ‘Gorgiases and Philips’, implying that the famous rhetorician and his ‘son’ (cf. Wasps 421) replicated themselves into a whole school of clones. Clouds provides the clearest evidence, in that the plot of the play revolves around a father who plans to send his son to Socrates’ Thinkery to learn how to argue their way out of debt by defeating creditors’ prosecutions in court. Lines 467-475 identify the ultimate objective the Clouds offer Strepsiades through education not as mere relief from debts, but the opportunity to become a famous legal counselor whom throngs of clients will consult. The ‘Socrates’ of this play is of course a composite caricature mingling ideas from a variety of intellectual sources. One critic has argued that rhetoric is not among these since Strepsiades learns to address his creditors’ demands by thinking up clever excuses (cf. 694-783) rather than through formal speechmaking.30 But this exercise in inventio is preceded by lessons in metrics (639-654) and grammar (659-693); as the same scholar elsewhere observes, the discussion of words’ gender parodies Protagoras and the general sophistic interest in orthoepeia.31 What we would call the discipline of ‘philology’ is thus presented as the first step preliminary to studying rhetorical invention.32 Indeed, when Strepsiades actually confronts his creditors (1214-1302), he does so with a confused hash of Socrates’ philological lessons and the silly ideas he invented in Clouds 694-783. This close association of philology and invention does suggest that rhetorical training in this period was more than just a master’s demonstration and practical exercises for students, but had some basis in a more integrated and holistic theory of language and its structure.
We should draw the same conclusion from the repeated parody of newly created vocabulary in Aristophanes’ earlier allusions to the young orators. In creating a more precise new word to describe female fowl, alektruaina instead of the traditional gender-indifferent alektruon (850-852), Socrates engages in precisely the kind of word creation that the sophists commonly practiced and that Aristophanes illustrates in the young orators (see also A. Lbpez Eire, Chapter 22). The would-be rhltOr son who called his father a sorelle instead of the usual soros (the customary word for ‘coffin’) in fr. 205 PCG had learned a similar lesson in word formation.
Clouds is especially well-known to students of rhetoric for its debate between the Greater Discourse (KreittOn Logos) and Lesser Discourse (ElattOn Logos). We should note that one of the scholiastic introductions to the play (Hypothesis 1) identifies the agOn as one of the parts of the play that may be unique to the second version, probably datable to 417,33 but the play’s basic plot outline as we have it likely resembles the lost original of 423. The two Discourses are a theme throughout our version of the play, where Socrates is more than once said to be able to ‘make the lesser discourse greater’ and make the unjust cause triumph (99, 112-118, 244-245, 657, 882-885, 1336-1337, 1444-1451).34 It has been generally recognized that Aristophanes is here parodying an expression associated with the sophist Protagoras by Aristotle (Rhet. 1402a22-28), but we should note that Plato attributes a similar practice to Tisias and Gorgias, who ‘make small things appear great and great things small by the power of speech’ (ta smikra megala kai ta megala smikra phainesthai, Phaedrus 267a). Sceptics about fifth-century rhetoric must argue that Protagoras actually meant something far less provocative by this expression, to the effect that he was only replacing a dominant logos (= received opinion) with a new logos (= his own).35 While it is certainly conceivable that Aristophanes could have intentionally twisted the meaning of Protagoras’ phrase by identifying the lesser logos with the unjust or untrue, this same interpretation seems also to have been shared by both Plato (Apology 18b) and Aristotle (who in quoting the fragment equates it with making the improbable seem probable); the revisionist interpretation requires that all three authors are distorting the phrase’s original meaning. Surely Protagoras must have been aware what his words would suggest to most people and could have found a less ambiguous way of expressing such a banal idea as the revisionists attribute to him. Aristotle’s interpretation is certainly not inconsistent with the Dissoi Logoi or Gorgias’ reflections on the power of language, or with what Plato attributes to Tisias and Gorgias. It does suggest that Protagoras at least commented on the potential of rhetorical training to make weaker arguments stronger, even if Protagoras himself did not teach this skill.36 Like Aristophanes, Aristotle clearly embeds this phrase in a discussion of rhetorical persuasiveness. Aristophanes’ Clouds proves the idea was widely enough known that he could expect a significant part of his audience during the period 423-417 to have heard of it and understand it the same way he did.
To be sure, the Lesser Discourse never really delivers a ‘discourse’ like the formal speech of the Greater Discourse (961-1023), who praises the traditional pederastic education boys received in the wrestling school and at the music master’s. In contrast the Lesser Discourse clearly embodies modern education, built around a technique of elenchus, skilled questioning and clever use of examples; in this case, his elenchus is able to lead his opponent into self-contradiction. While we frequently associate this dialectic with the ‘Socratic method’ on display in Plato’s early dialogues, it is also a useful part of rhetorical training. We often forget that there was far more to Athenian legal procedure than delivering polished speeches at the trial: before a case could even be scheduled for presentation to a jury, a pre-trial hearing ( anakrisis) had to take place at which the magistrate would ask questions and the litigants could pose questions to each other.37 In the fifth - and early fourth-centuries this procedure was entirely oral and thus demanded an ability to succeed in extemporaneous dialectical interchange, as opposed to reciting a memorized speech. Arbitration procedures also involved this type of question-and-answer dialogue. These considerations make it more likely that the kind of dialectical training on offer from Socrates and the sophists was indeed oriented to making their students better orators as well as better thinkers. Clouds may very well be correct that such training was part of the reason for their popularity.
World History
