The doubts that Aristotle raised in the first chapter of his Rhetoric concerning whether appeals to the emotions were a legitimate technique of persuasion proved to be enduring, and subsequent philosophers and orators took opposite sides on the issue. Cicero ( On the Orator 2.52.211-16) puts into the mouth of Antonius a defense of the orator’s practice of inciting his hearers to passion. Quintilian (6.1.7) reports that the Athenians tried to forbid emotional appeals in the courts, but insists himself that the orator must know how to manipulate the emotions of his audience; so too, Diodorus Siculus (1.75.6-1.76.2) relates that the Egyptians sought to have all legal cases filed in writing rather than presented orally in order to avoid playing on the emotions of the jurors.
But it was the Stoics in particular who took a hard line against appeals to the emotions; indeed, they believed that a sage, and hence an ideal, judge was wholly free of the ordinary emotions or pathe, including anger and pity as well as envy, indignation, and fear, and that it was wrong for a speaker to arouse such passions in a jury. True, the Stoic definitions of the passions often hewed close to those provided by Aristotle; for example, Chrysippus, considered the second founder ofthe Stoic school (third century), defined orge as ‘the desire to take vengeance against one who is believed to have committed a wrong contrary to one’s deserts’.18 At the same time, however, Chrysippus wrote that ‘anger is blind; it often prevents our seeing things that are obvious and it often gets in the way of things which are being comprehended . . . For the passions, once they have started, drive out reasoning and contrary evidence, and push forward violently towards actions contrary to reason’.19 The Roman Stoic Seneca, in turn, replying to Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus, explains (On Anger 1.12.2-5):
‘Good men are angry for injuries done to their dear ones.’ When you say this, Theophrastus, you look to cast scorn on more powerful principles and turn away from the judge in order to play to the crowd. Since everyone gets angry when a misfortune of this kind befalls their own, you imagine that people will judge that what they do should be done, since all people pretty much judge that an emotion they recognize is justified. But they act the same if hot water is not adequately supplied, if a glass is broken, if their shoe is splashed with mud. It is not filial piety but weakness that inspires such anger, just like children who weep equally whether they lose their parents or their toys. To be angry in behalf of dear ones is the mark not of a dutiful soul but a weak one.
It is true that the Stoics allowed the wise certain good sentiments or eupatheiai, but it is not clear that they envisaged upright orators playing to, or attempting to induce, such feelings in their audience.20
The Stoics, then, would seem to have taken an opposite position to that of Aristotle, at least in his most mature reflections on the emotions. And yet, this is not the simple contrast that it might seem. For the Stoics went even further than Aristotle in defending a strictly cognitivist or intellectualist view of the emotions, eliminating Aristotle’s reference to pleasure and pain as constituent elements and describing emotions simply as assents to certain presentations or impressions. In their view, then, the emotions were all the more susceptible to amelioration (or the reverse) by means of rational argument.
Since the subject of this chapter is the emotions in relation to rhetoric, and not the ancient Greek conception of the emotions as such, I shall not enter further into the complex Stoic theory of the passions, save to mention one point that has a bearing, I believe, on subsequent accounts of the emotions in rhetorical treatises. The Stoics identified four broad classes of emotions, which they subsumed under the master headings of appetite or desire, fear or avoidance, pleasure, and pain or distress. The last two items correspond to Aristotle’s mention of pleasure and pain, save that the Stoics clearly consider separate these sensations and make them characteristic of distinct emotions, whereas for Aristotle they might well be mixed in a single passion. Appetite and fear, in turn, are understood as the anticipation of pleasure and pain, respectively. Now, Cicero, in his essay On the Orator (2.206), observes that the most important emotions that an orator must aspire to arouse are ‘love, hate, anger, envy, pity, hope, joy, fear, and distress’ ( amor, odium, iracundia, invidia, misericordia, spes, laetitia, timor, molestia). This list closely resembles that of Aristotle in the Rhetoric, with the addition of hope, joy, and grief - indeed, the four final members of the series include fear, and taken together would seem to represent the four general Stoic categories of desire and pleasure, fear and pain. In the Brutus (188), moreover, Cicero says that a crowd listening to a good speaker ‘feels pleasure and pain, laughs and cries, hates, scorns, envies, is moved to pity, shame, and disgust, grows angry, calms down, hopes, and fears’ (gaudet, dolet, ridet, plorat, favet, odit, contemnit, invidet, ad misericordiam inducitur, ad pudendum, ad pigendum; irascitur, mitiga-tur, sperat, timet). Again, Cicero would seem to have added to Aristotle’s typical emotions the four-fold Stoic generic passions of pleasure and pain (first in the list) and desire or anticipation and fear (the last two items).21 Despite their opposition to the arousal of passions by the orator, as recorded by Cicero in his On the Orator and elsewhere, it would appear that rhetorical treatises had no trouble in accommodating additional passions, drawn from the Stoic classification, to those derived principally from the Peripatetic tradition.
Today, the cognitive interpretation of emotions is a well-established approach among psychologists and philosophers, and the idea that the emotions are simply irrational has been outmoded in most disciplines for several decades. Aristotle’s understanding of the emotions, and that of the Stoics as well, have, as we have seen, become newly relevant, and are seen as forerunners of modern theories.22 But the classical conception of the emotions did not emerge in a vacuum; on the contrary, it responded, at least in part, to the intensely dialogic environment of the classical city-state, and above all Athens, where a person’s public esteem was continually being negotiated and challenged, and the emotions played an essential role in this intense verbal sparring, whether in the courts or the Assembly, on the stage or in the Agora. When thinkers came to investigate and define the emotions systematically, it was natural for them to orient their studies to the role of emotion in debate and persuasion. It is thus perfectly understandable that the intellectual domain in which the study of the emotions chiefly took place was rhetoric, and this in turn helped to determine how the object of study itself was perceived over the better part of classical antiquity.
World History
