English 622: Classical Rhetoric

I found myself more interested in de Pizan and Scudery than in Wilson and Ramus. Though my interest was somewhat piqued by the new names for old concepts listed by Wilson.

As I was reading St. Augustine, I was thinking of associations I have that tie the ability to speak/write well and the Judeo-Christian tradition.

One story that comes to mind (and is mentioned in Kennedy) is that of Moses. God told him to go talk to Pharoah, and Moses begged off, saying that he couldn't speak well. The story goes that this didn't stop God from sending him anyway--he simply told him that his brother Aaron could fill in the gaps caused by his stutter (which I'm under the impression was one of the reasons why he was saying he couldn't speak well).

When we were reading Cicero, I kept thinking that I know very few people who would have the attention span or endurance to sit and listen all day to a lecture on rhetoric. I may, of course, have been projecting the attitude of freshman onto those listeners.

As I read Quintilian’s discussion of the orator as a teacher, I tried to envision what the students would be like.

I found myself getting annoyed with Crassus and wanting to tell him to just get to the point. Sometimes I felt as if members of his audience were speaking to nudge him in the right direction.

One of the major parts of his monologue on eloquence dealt with three types of words that can be used for adornment: old words, new words, and metaphors. The first item of this list seemed a bit unusual to me. I'm trying to think of an instance where a somewhat antiquated word might be of use.

I read books 2 and 3 over a few sittings, and each time I came to it, I was surprised to find Aristotle talking about what we'd now classify as several different fields of study. He seems much like a psychologist at times. At others, he seems to be more of a lawyer. When he starts talking about style, he seems to be the original Strunk and White.

As I was reading through the catalog of what constitutes such things as happiness--or constitute such things--I was thinking about the way modern textbooks are set up with bulleted lists, headings, and subheadings to make the relation of one topic to another easy to understand. I was thinking that all those devises could be useful in the case of Aristotle's text.

Isocrates appears to be very practical when he is comparing what he does to the work of the sophists. The sophists, or so I've gathered, saw oratory as something that left room for pleasure. Isocrates' perspective focuses on the usefulness of the message. To argue for the sake of arguing about some trivial absurdity isn't worth his time.

As I was reading the speech about the chariot and its two horses in _Phaedrus_, I noticed that there were a great many numbers being mentioned:

~ "no soul returns to the place from which it came for ten thousand years" (524).

~ The exception to this is the philosopher. "If, after the third cycle of one thousand years, the last-mentioned souls have chosen such a life three times in a row, they grow their wings back, and they depart in the three-thousandth year" (524).

~ There are four kinds of divinely given madness (522-3).

The selections from Plato for this week struck me as being a more natural form of dialogue. The reason is that _Gorgias_ is set up much like a play without stage directions. One person speaks and then the other. _Protagoras_ and _Symposium_ both have a more narrative structure--albeit a narrative that is driven still by dialogue. Rather than just what was said, we get a limited narrative of how people responded. We see the audience cheering. We see Socrates seemingly momentarily stumped.

In _Gorgias_, Plato's Socrates separates orators from medical professionals by saying that the former practices a knack and the latter practices a craft. The term knack is one that isn't often used other than in terms of being able to mean, "I'm getting the hang of this." It seems in my mind to be associated with a skill, so in my head it's not quite something that can be contrasted with craft but is something that seems very much integrally linked to it.