By Erik Gunderson
Rhetoric completely infused the area and literature of Graeco-Roman antiquity. This spouse offers a complete evaluate of rhetorical idea and perform in that global, from Homer to early Christianity, available to scholars and non-specialists, no matter if inside of classics or from different sessions and disciplines. Its uncomplicated premise is that rhetoric is much less a discrete item to be grasped and mastered than a hotly contested set of practices that come with disputes over the very definition of rhetoric itself. regular remedies of historic oratory are likely to take it an excessive amount of in its personal phrases and to isolate it unduly from different social and cultural issues. This quantity presents an outline of the form and scope of the issues whereas additionally settling on center topics and propositions: for instance, persuasion, advantage, and public lifestyles are digital constants. yet they combine and mingle otherwise, and the contents specific by means of each one of those phrases may also shift.
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Additional info for The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rhetoric (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
Sample text
41 nancy worman gesture, like that of Odysseus, aims at the opponent’s silence and isolation. Recognizing the rigorously embodied agonism that achieves this isolation is essential to reconstructing a history of rhetorical practice. Suggestions for further reading There are not many good discussions of rhetorical strategies in preclassical settings, but see Cole 1991; Enos 1993; Kennedy 1994: chapter 1; and Worthington 1994. Martin 1989 is very perceptive about how speaking styles are shaped in Homer and in many ways more useful, as is Hesk’s work on flyting (Hesk 2006).
Second, Hesiod’s transition from the prefatory hymn to his main theme consists of imperatives addressed to the muses. It is possible but not obligatory to conceive of the remainder of the Theogony as the muses’ own words. But the reader of Parmenides is left in no doubt that, after the poem’s introduction, all the rest is the goddess in her own voice instructing Parmenides. The polemical thrust of this narrative device is unequivocal: Parmenidean philosophy has usurped the prestige of Hesiodic epic, or should do so, if we 2 The Greek ale¯theia is sometimes best translated “truth,” sometimes “reality”: here one hesitates to choose.
Indeed, Aeschines depicts a freer response in the Athenian assembly, when he presents Timarchus as such a reprobate that even his policy arguments evoke derision. ”57 In Aeschines’ portrayal, Timarchus’ very words reveal that he is unfit for public office. 40), which (by implication) threatens its safety and dominion. These tactics of pillory and exclusion from the right to speak in assembly form the core of classical oratory in practice, however much Aristotle might emphasize the importance of projecting beneficence or later theorists that of employing pleasant vocabulary and cadences.