Any account of Plato’s contribution to rhetoric must overcome the traditional view of Plato as the unyielding partisan of philosophy and inveterate opponent of rhetoric in the foundational dispute between the two domains. Plato himself is viewed as the author of that dispute, which he is thought to have ignited in response to philosophy’s illegitimate exclusion, as he saw it, from its rightful place of political supremacy. The common view is a distortion, however much responsibility for it may be ascribed to Plato. Indeed, Plato criticized sophistic rhetoric and the rhetorical practices of Athenian democracy vehemently and uncompromisingly; and he argued that mankind had no hope of political progress until and unless politics came under the guidance of philosophy { Republic 473c-d). But rhetoric should not be identified just with sophistic or democratic rhetoric, which are particular kinds or styles of rhetoric. And rhetoric is not opposed to philosophy, at least not for Plato, who built a concern with rhetoric into the very conception of his philosophy.1
Rhetoric entails the conscious distinction between form and content in the transmission of a message, and the manipulation of form for effect in a conscious or artistic manner. Plato condemns sophistic rhetoric not because it is rhetorical but because in his view it is destructive: like flattery, it caters to irrational desires. Plato considered rhetoric, criticized it, and sought to perfect it precisely because philosophy needs rhetoric if philosophy is to have any chance of achieving its political and educational mission. And Plato’s legacy of philosophical dialogues, unprecedented in Greece and decisive for the development of rhetoric as a literary phenomenon {to say nothing of the development of philosophy), constitutes a display of rhetorical art that was also unprecedented in its creativity and imagination.
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