With few exceptions, such as a generous patron on occasion, education in rhetoric was the responsibility of families, who paid teachers directly. Consequently, a teacher’s livelihood often depended on the number of students he could attract, and competition for students developed as a result. One way for a rhetorician to attract more students was to have a better reputation than other teachers. This could be achieved in a number of ways. The first is perhaps rather obvious: teachers in major centres tended to develop better reputations; indeed, their establishment in these centres was usually a consequence of their quality. A second way was for a teacher to be an accomplished orator himself, in his oratory and in his successes, as an ambassador or in another forum where his oratory had been instrumental or particularly effective; not unnaturally, parents felt that such men were better able to teach their sons to be effective orators. Thirdly, though the approach to rhetorical training was everywhere the same, a teacher could develop techniques that were more effective than those of his contemporaries or his predecessors. For example, a teacher might find a method to instill in his pupils a quicker understanding of the principles by defining them in a manner that resonated better with his young students. He could find examples in the literature and speeches of the past that illustrated his theoretical points more effectively or simply caught the attention of his pupils more readily, thus generating a stronger likelihood that his students would be able to compose higher quality orations after fewer months of training, allowing study at a more advanced level in the remaining years in the classroom. At the same time, his pupils might well remember his precepts for a longer period of time after their studies had been completed; their subsequent successes naturally reflected positively on their teachers, whose reputations would thereby assure a steady supply of new students.
Extant writers on rhetoric or references elsewhere name many individuals who wrote works that do not survive. Most often, they are mere names to us, with very little information about the authors themselves, including their dates. Frequently, a writer is cited by only one later author for a single point of interpretation (with which the citing author may agree or disagree), or for a single example used to illustrate a particular figure, or for a specific sentence in a speech, or other such things. The important point here is not the individual examples handed down by other authors, however interesting and instructive they might be, but the proliferation of individuals who wrote about rhetoric. For the most part, we may assume, they did not develop rhetorical theory, for more would then likely have survived of their writings in agreement or disputation. That being so, a large percentage of known, but not extant, works were most likely handbooks prepared by the teachers of rhetoric to assist them in their educational activities, often, no doubt, copied by or for their pupils as reference manuals to be consulted while they were still students but also afterwards, perhaps when they were called upon to compose and deliver a type of speech whose precise requirements had slipped their active memory. In other words, many writings on rhetoric were little more than shortcuts to success, in the classroom and afterwards, and might contribute during his career to a teacher’s reputation and his ability to attract students.
We do not know the details of most of these writings, but some features must generally have been present. Their authors must surely have defined the three basic types of speeches; sometimes, perhaps most often, different sub-types were included as well, as they are, for example, in the third-century AD treatises ascribed to Menander.15 Similarly, Theophrastus’ four elements of style were important enough for inclusion and discussion, for, as noted, they were widely accepted. Treatment of technical matters, such as sentence structure, word choice, and prose rhythm, would also have been necessary. Inevitably, they included sections on the different figures of thought or speech an orator might employ to make his speeches interesting and effective; examples include prosopopoeia, irony, anaphora and synonymy.16 Certainly in these latter sections, and probably in the earlier, writers included examples from earlier authors to illustrate the discussions, examples that would be emulated or employed with little modification. For the most part, these handbooks did not offer extensive discussions of rhetorical theory; instead, they concentrated on classification and practical techniques that would train the average elite youth to deliver effective orations in his adulthood in the public life of his city or town. Many pupils and their families were satisfied with this; they were not interested in, perhaps not capable of, understanding the field of rhetoric in all its complexities. Except for those few who desired to embark upon careers as rhetores, training in rhetoric was primarily a matter of imbibing the shared paideia sufficiently well to be successful in later life and to be regarded as educated. For that reason, handbooks were not treatises extending to the combined length of Theophrastus’ writings on rhetoric, but were rather one or two books summarizing the main points for the practical orator: essentially, they were ‘Operator’s Manuals’.17
If what we might call the social circumstances of the Hellenistic age best explains the proliferation of writings on rhetoric, then the period also saw the refinement of rhetorical theory and its application to oratory. Like the handbooks, the work in this area is largely not extant either; like the handbooks, we know of its existence mainly from references by later authors. To a large extent, we only know what developed because we can see how scholarship after the Hellenistic period differs from earlier scholarship. Quite regularly, it is impossible to supply dates, but despite this pessimistic preamble, the remainder of this section will outline a few of the more important developments and treat a couple of the main writers and their contributions to rhetorical scholarship.
One feature of Hellenistic scholarship on rhetoric was continual refinement and more precise definition, a process inherent in scholarship itself. Though this began with the earliest works of theory, including those by Aristotle and Theophrastus, over time the treatments of figures of speech define these in greater detail. Sometimes figures are divided into sub-types, generating a longer list of figures for students to understand (and no doubt part of the reason for the continual production of handbooks). In many ways, this process goes hand in hand with developments in literary criticism during the period. To take just a single example, poetry as a literary form was divided and sub-divided into an increasingly large number of genres and sub-genres. This is especially so for lyric poetry, where different metres, dialects, and places of origin became the bases of a large number of genres and sub-genres; poems and poets were classified accordingly.18 As noted earlier, Aristotle had divided speeches into the three basic types of epideictic, deliberative and judicial. Though we do not know whether Theophrastus developed this further, by the end of the Hellenistic period epideictic orations in particular had been subdivided into a large number of sub-types: the epitaphios (funeral speech), the basilikos logos (imperial oration), epithalamios (marriage oration),genethliakos (birthday speech), presbeutikos (embassy oration), among many others.
Hermagoras of Temnos, dating to the second century but otherwise very little known, is regularly credited by subsequent authors for the development of a theory of the stasis.19 While scholars are divided and uncertain about the choice of the term itself, which means ‘revolution’, the concept is straightforward: it relates to the essential and central point at issue, applied initially to cases in the legal environment. In other words, on what key point does a case turn? By learning how to identify that point, an orator was better able to understand the most important elements of his brief in the effort to prosecute or defend successfully. Soon, the concept was extended to other oratory where the ability to focus on a key point was beneficial. In the political arena, for example, an orator who identified the stasis of a political issue and focused on arguments relevant to that point was more likely to persuade or dissuade a political audience, whether that be a city council meeting or an assembly of citizens.
Not surprisingly, given its utility, teachers gave their students much practice in identifying the stasis in a variety of situations. Once students had been trained in some preparatory exercises (called progymnasmata), their instructors would put before them a circumstance, drawn from history, mythology, or social practices, with no overriding concern for plausibility. Students were to examine the situation, discover the stasis and compose speeches arguing a point of view, often from both sides of an issue in turn. These speeches are usually called ‘declamations’, with a further division, in Latin terms, into those reflecting the judicial environment, called controversiae, and those in the political arena, called suasoriae, where students attempted to persuade or dissuade a political gathering. The practice of delivering orations on imaginary or fictive themes continued beyond students’ years in school, partly to maintain competence, but largely, in the case of professional orators, for rhetorical display and the development of reputation. The best extant ancient treatment of declamation is the work of the Elder Seneca in Latin early in the first century AD. He provides numerous examples of the types of situations set before students and orators, and discusses how different orators treated the same ‘case’ set before them. Since many of his examples reflect Greek persons and situations, it is clear that these had become standard in the Hellenistic period and that students and orators in the Greek-speaking world engaged in the same practices; indeed, some of Seneca’s orators are of Greek origin.22
Two examples of the types of circumstances that could be set as topics will need to suffice.21 First, a situation with judicial implications: after a man and his daughter are captured by pirates, he promises his daughter’s hand to anyone who will ransom them. A young man agrees, but finds the father dead and ransoms only the girl. When they return home, her kinsman claims her, stating that the father’s offer was invalid. Here, orators could, for example, present speeches for or against the young man’s claim to the girl, and for and against the kinsman’s right to the girl and her inheritance. The following situation falls in the deliberative category: though resident foreigners were not permitted on a city’s walls, one man nevertheless appears there and distinguishes himself in fighting off besiegers. Should he be held to account for transgressing the law or be rewarded for his heroism? Again, orators could present a series of different angles on the issues involved.
Another writer of the Hellenistic period is Demetrius, author of an extant work On Style. His further identity is unknown, but he is not the philosopher Demetrius of Phalerum, as was once thought. Rather, general agreement now holds that he lived in the first century. Much of his work centres on what we would call literary criticism, but it is nevertheless important for the study of rhetoric for the simple reason that the techniques of both literary and rhetorical styles are similar or even the same. The use of literary figures to generate specific effects appears in both speeches and other prose, even poetry. As a consequence, Demetrius’ On Style provides the modern student of ancient rhetoric with one of the very few surviving discursive treatments of stylistic issues, even though it is impossible to determine with complete accuracy to what extent the treatise reflects the standard points of view on these matters in the late Hellenistic period or how innovative it may be.
World History
