As with other areas of study, approaches to classical Greek rhetoric have typically followed larger interpretive trends, along with numerous smaller strands, traversing our times. Of these, two broadly-ranging trends guiding interpretation of classical rhetoric in our moment stand out most prominently: ideological critique and human agency. For the most part, the two approaches are closely intertwined and, indeed for many scholars, each is taken to be one leg of the same dialectic - the former exploring the various social, economic, and cultural forces shaping rhetorical texts and practices, the latter exploring possible ways in which rhetorical texts and practices themselves turn against the very forces that have shaped them. Naturally, there are exceptions, as some scholars have placed the emphasis on one of the two approaches without concerning themselves with the other.
Indeed, during the heyday of ideological critique, classical Greek rhetoric was approached as a site for exploring and discerning the operations of mystification that the ruling class needed in order to sustain its social and cultural norms and to legitimate its economic interests. Rhetorical treatises along with the education they promoted, previously celebrated for their competitive spirit and their potentially egalitarian effects, came to be interrogated for their collusion with aristocracy and their complicity with elitism; see M. I. Finley, The Use and Abuse of History (New York: 1975). Public speeches - long exalted as testaments of individual power, signs of open competition for excellence, and reliable indicators of a healthy public sphere - became fertile ground for an analysis and a critique of the subtle ways in which social structures of inequality and the powers sustaining them could be masked, maintained, and perpetuated (cf. N. Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City [Cambridge, MA: 1986]). The interpretive strategies of ideological critique were especially endorsed by scholars who, holding on to Plato’s distinction between the apparent and the real, understood rhetoric as deliberate manipulation of truth. Presuming to possess the necessary know-how in order to distinguish the objectively true from the ideologically constructed, these scholars posited themselves as knowing
Subjects, able to occupy an ideologically-free space, and approached rhetorical texts as ideological representations whose mystificatory character had to be exposed and whose falsehood needed to be brought to light. The most influential work exemplifying this approach to classical rhetoric is Loraux’s The Invention of Athens, a study in which fourth-century orators are presented as aristocracy’s mouthpieces and ‘specialists of half-truths’ (p. 138), deliberately seeking to create a false image of Athens and to ‘give Athenians an aristocratic image of themselves’ (pp. 150-151).
In time, it became evident that ideological critique had run its course. For the premises of ideological critique, urging judgments about the past on the basis of our valuations in the present, led scholars to reach the same conclusion time and again: that the values promoted by classical Greek rhetoric paled by comparison to our own values and that, as a vehicle for aristocratic, sexist, elitist, and racist valuations, classical Greek rhetoric had nothing of substance to offer to our own preoccupations at present. Following the same fate that the entire Greek culture suffered in the hands of an ideological critique that fervently challenged the long-standing tradition of ancient Greece as the origin of civilization, democracy, and liberal education, classical rhetoric and its ancient-long links with democratic practices in the public sphere were also ardently undermined. In effect, the notion that the tradition of rhetoric was a meaningful part of our intellectual tradition and, as such, held some important relevance to our present concerns, was vehemently dismissed.
The excessive contestations of ideological critique, and especially the failure to come to terms with our intellectual tradition in any way other than suggest its complete obliteration, prompted scholars to recast the premises of ideological critique as so many givens on the basis of which the relevance of classical rhetoric to our contemporary concerns could be pursued. Rather than conducting inquiries that ended at the point of exposing non-egalitarian valuations in the Greek culture, scholars approached these same valuations as formations of structures against which possible workings of human agency could be discerned and rendered visible. While taking for granted rhetoric’s collusion with non-egalitarian valuations, inquiries into human agency turned the spotlight onto terrains in which rhetoric could be shown to contest, challenge, or render questionable the very valuations that informed its uses and practices. In Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People (Princeton: 1989), J. Ober, for instance, found - in the same aristocratic valuations that Loraux had taken to fashion entirely the rhetoric of fourth-century orators - a space from within which the orators’ criticisms of the Athenian dlmos and the Athenian democracy could in fact be understood as so many gestures that wittingly or unwittingly contributed to the strengthening of democracy. Ober’s thesis, that by allowing its critics free speech the demos found ways to display its power and solidarity, and that by engaging in free speech the critics of the demos performed democratic practices in spite of themselves, points to critics of democracy in fourth-century Greece as occupying a subject position whose discursive effects are not reducible to the single function of serving the interests of aristocracy. Such a space - also explored by J. P. Euben in his Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy (Ithaca: 1994) - issues a number of challenges against assumptions made by ideological critique, namely, that political rhetoric must be addressed from a stable perspective, and that discourses on rhetorical education and their relation to civic norms can only ensue from a single angle.
The first challenge was taken up by H. Yunis In Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens (Ithaca: 1996), who examines the discourse of political deliberation in Thucydides, Plato, and Demosthenes. Yunis recasts the familiar attacks against rhetoric for flattering and pandering to mass audiences as cultural givens alongside which a deeper vision of political deliberation thrives which, tying together a historian, a philosopher, and an orator, aims not only to mediate political conflicts and unify the various factions of the city but also to educate the citizenry into the kind of political deliberation that promises to turn the polis into a community.
The second challenge was taken up by a number of scholars seeking to rethink classical rhetorical education in relation to modern civic and pedagogical practices characterizing our democratic commitments today. Without attempting to make orators and rhetoricians appear less dismal on issues of gender, class, and race than they were shown to be, the following works comprise so many efforts to discern in classical rhetoric and rhetorical education openings and possibilities that would enable us to fashion areas of compatibility with and relevance to our own civic and educational activities. These include S. Jarratt’s Rereading the Sophists (Carbondale, Ill: 1991), C. Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold (Carbondale, Ill: 1997), J. Atwill’s Rhetoric Reclaimed (Ithaca: 1998), J. Kastely’s Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven: 1997), V. Vitanza’s Writing Histories of Rhetoric (Carbondale, Ill: 1994), and my Rethinking the History of Rhetoric (Boulder, CO: 1993). Some of these efforts were carried out by means of rhetoric’s function to persuade: its philosophical alliance with principles of relativity, its communicative proclivity to reach multiple (and therefore diverse) audiences, and its aesthetic propensity to move auditors toward alternative directions if possible. Others were carried out by means of the constitutive function of rhetoric: its productive capacity to create social bonds and unify audiences through identification.
While the studies above found new ways to reconnect classical rhetoric with our times and to extend in multiple directions the range of its relevance to our contemporary concerns, they nevertheless failed to disassociate themselves from the set of assumptions that plagued the logic of ideological critique: that rhetorical texts and practices in classical Greece are to be appropriated for present purposes and current stakes. Like their ideological counterparts, studies in human agency treated rhetoric as a symptom of something else. Even as both approaches illuminated profoundly classical rhetoric’s connections to our present viewpoints, they did not also elucidate ways in which rhetoric could differ from ideological discourses or discourses of empowerment. Nor did they reveal any additional ways in which rhetoric could manifest itself other than as a symptom of power structures or as a source of investing individuals with human agency. In short, both approaches shed less light on classical rhetoric than on the scholarly agendas circulating in and being endorsed by the academy today.
The scholarly appropriation of classical rhetoric for present purposes raised an issue for several scholars as to the responsibility interpreters had to explore classical rhetoric in itself rather than to appropriate it for contemporary concerns. The issue became especially heated in the case of the sophists whose fragmentary texts and incomplete character of their rhetoric could hardly offer any material resistance to the degree of interpretive freedom scholars could exert. At stake were such works as B. McComiskey’s
Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric (Carbondale, 111: 2002), Jarratt’s Rereading the Sophists, and J. Neel’s Plato, Derrida, and Writing (Carbondale, 1ll: 1988), which were seen as having created too great a disjuncture between, on the one hand, understanding sophistical rhetoric on its own terms and, on the other hand, appropriating sophistical rhetoric for contemporary concerns. The ensuing debate, mostly captured in S. Con-signy’s Gorgias, Sophist and Artist (Columbia, SC: 2001), V. Vitanza’s Negation, Subjectivity and the History of Rhetoric (Albany, NY: 1997), E. Schiappa’s ‘Neo-Sophistic Rhetorical Criticism or the Historical Reconstruction of Sophistic Doctrines?’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 23 (1990), pp. 92-217, and J. Poulakos’ ‘Interpreting Sophistical Rhetoric: A Response to Schiappa,’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 23 (1990), pp. 218-228, raised methodological issues about processes of reconstructing fragmentary texts and of recovering their function within past contexts. But other than advancing the tacit agreement that sophistical rhetoric ought to be examined in its own cultural milieu, the debate did very little to advance an understanding of classical rhetoric on its own terms. Perhaps not surprisingly, the debate focused instead on ways of understanding contemporary approaches and ofcoming to terms with the types ofassumptions interpreters deployed in their reading of the sophists. In Consigny’s Gorgias, Sophist and Artist, the debate has been arranged into methodologically compatible groupings of scholars whose perspectives on the sophists are organized under such labels as objectivist, subjectivist, rhapsodic, empiricist, and anti-foundationalist. Consigny’s own approach to sophistical discourse, an expressed blending of a pragmatist and conventionalist or communitarian strategies, attests to a widely accepted notion in the academy today - that the key to reading past works and practices on their own terms lies in the interpreter’s selection of the ‘right’ theoretical lens or combination of lenses among the repertoire of current theories available at present.
One way some scholars sought to understand classical rhetoric in its original setting was to consider its disciplinary status in classical Greece. T. Cole’s The Origin of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Baltimore: 1991) and E. Schiappa’s The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: 1999) approached classical rhetoric by stressing the boundaries Plato and Aristotle had placed around it as they attempted to distinguish it from other areas of study. According to Cole, who regards rhetoric as a fourth-century phenomenon, it was Plato and Aristotle who first recognized rhetoric and gave it the kind of self-conscious awareness it needed in order to develop as an art. The two ‘had to invent rhetoric’ because the ‘assumption of an essentially transparent medium that neither impedes nor facilitates the transmission of information, emotions, and ideas’ was suddenly contested by ‘a body of prose texts which might be read or delivered verbatim and still suggest the excitement, atmosphere, and commitment of a spontaneous oral performance or debate’ (p. 29). Schiappa similarly argues that rhetoric became a discipline when Plato coined the word rhltorikl in order to differentiate rhetorical practices from philosophy and to define the latter through a negative description of the former.
By associating classical rhetoric with the disciplinary identity it was granted by Plato and Aristotle, Cole and Schiappa privilege the kind of rational self-consciousness and literacy characteristic of fourth-century disciplines at the expense of rhetoric’s association with orality and myth characteristic of rhetorical practices in previous centuries. Partly shaped by needs created by contemporary disciplinary formations, Cole’s and Schiappa’s project was also prepared by several lines of inquiry that, situating rhetoric’s beginnings in an oral, poetic, and mythic culture, traced the development of rhetoric along the transition from poetry to prose, myth to reason, and orality to literacy. These lines of inquiry include Eric Havelock’s The Muse Learns to Write (New Haven: 1986), J. de Romilly’s Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: 1975), M. Detienne’s The Masters of Truth in Ancient Greece (New York: 1996) and A. Lentz’s Orality and Literacy in Hellenic Greece (Carbondale, 111: 1989). By assuming a development model, according to which rhetoric was initially a sub-genre of poetry, be it poetic eloquence or protorhetoric, on its way to a more fully developed phase, the logic characterizing these studies paved the way for Cole and Schiappa to argue that rhetoric could only be considered fully developed at the point when it was first self-consciously recognized as a discipline.
While the disciplinary status of rhetoric illuminates aspects of the cultural context within which rhetoric first came to be thought as a unique area of study, it also poses severe limits on the kinds of investigations that can be conducted about rhetoric's relation to the Greek culture. What cultural practices fostered rhetoric and shaped it, how rhetoric provided different responses to different historical developments, or what rhetorical practices shaped intellectual currents and social activities in Greece are questions that require both an open-ended understanding of rhetoric and an unrestricted view of the range of meaningful contacts made between rhetorical and cultural practices. These are also questions that interdisciplinary approaches to classical rhetoric raise. Works like J. Walker’s Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford: 2000), Yunis’ Taming Democracy, Ian Worthington’s edited Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action (London: 1994), E. Haskins’ Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle (Columbia, SC: 2004), and T. Poulakos’ and D. Depew’s edited Isocrates and Civic Education (Austin: 2004) explore classical rhetoric in its various rapprochements with other disciplines in order to discern cultural saliency and identify that which emerges as significant for the Greek culture in particular moments. Approaching rhetoric as a form of signification that draws its energy from and simultaneously gives meaning to cultural practices, authors of the works and collections above refuse to circumscribe rhetoric around the logic of a discipline. In raising questions about rhetoric’s relation to culture, in other words, these scholars do not frame questions in accordance to a disciplinary understanding of rhetoric: they do not say, ‘now, let’s reframe the question posed in a manner that would eliminate its philosophical components, purge its poetic features, remove its historical dimensions, so that the question could only be addressed by a genuinely disciplinary understanding of rhetoric'. By allowing the questions themselves to determine the scope and the terrain of the inquiry, the works above identify rhetoric with so many ways of being and performing in the world.
World History
