Attic Old Comedy is particularly useful in reconstructing the early history of Greek rhetoric, since its formal agonistic structure features many debates that employ rhetorical topoi and catchwords, and moreover because more than any other category of evidence from the period, it gives us a vivid picture of contemporary oratory and oratorical education as they appeared to the general public. Some scholars have recently disputed whether anything that can truly be called ‘rhetoric’ existed in the late fifth-century, but the evidence of Comedy, as it bears on this question, has been either neglected or dismissed.1 A reexamination is therefore in order.
In the view of the sceptics, both the word and the concept of ‘rhetoric’ did not come into being until the time of Plato’s Gorgias in the 480s.2 Instead, the fifth century conceived discourse only in terms of logos: ‘the teaching and training associated with logos do not draw a sharp line between the goals of seeking success and seeking truth as is the case once Rhetoric and Philosophy were defined as distinct disciplines’.3 This ‘protorhetoric’ of the fifth century did not constitute an actual technl or analytic theory, but centered around demonstration speeches and model formulae.4 True ‘rhetoric’ is ‘a speaker’s or writer’s self-conscious manipulation of his medium with a view to ensuring his message as favorable a reception as possible on the part of the particular audience being addressed’.5 It chooses the kind of argument and premises the audience will find familiar and congenial to its prejudices; it will aim to move the audience on an emotional level rather than merely persuade it with rational, coherent, and accurate arguments.6 This technique differs from the unpremeditated eloquence affected by poetry or the verbal virtuosity and logical dexterity of Gorgias, Antiphon, or the speeches in Thucydides.7
Strongly influenced by the work of E. Havelock on the paradigm shift involved in the transition from an oral to a literate culture, the sceptics regard the theorization of logos, as opposed to its mere practice and refinement, as the product of widespread
Literacy, once a substantial body of written examples were available for study and analysis.8 They argue that no written treatise on the art of speaking existed in the fifth century, regarding Plato’s and Aristotle’s information about Tisias and Corax and other early rhetoricians as another artificial doxographical construct like Aristotle’s overly simplistic summary of pre-Socratic philosophy.9 It is of course possible that the early handbooks have not survived until our time because they were rapidly superseded by more sophisticated handbooks in the fourth century and thus fell out of circulation early.10 However, it is even more likely that the earliest sophist/rhetor-icians did not write technai for general distribution precisely because they wanted students to pay for the opportunity to learn their method through dialectical interaction; their exoteric works would only be exemplary orations for different occasions or types of cases, of sufficient virtuosity to impress a literate audience and entice pupils to pay for the real secrets of the trade. Even as Plato’s and Aristotle’s exoteric works were mainly protreptics to personal study with the master, the most essential truths were unwritten doctrines that could only be approached through years of philosophical commitment and dialectic.11 Theories did not need to be written down to be theories.
It will be the argument of this chapter that even under the sceptics’ definitions of ‘rhetoric’, it is well attested in the earliest comedies of Aristophanes from the 420s, both in the comic poet’s own verbal practice and in his satirical depiction of the social and intellectual currents of his time. Fifth-century rhetoric may not have yet developed the widely accepted technical vocabulary and analytic categories of the fourth century, but Comedy clearly shows speakers engaged in self-conscious linguistic and discursive strategies to succeed in persuading a specific target audience. We see and hear of speakers whose speeches appeal most on an emotional and intuitive level, rather than as rational arguments, and whose concerns are not with establishing factual truth, but with success over their opponent at all costs.
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