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.
The talk of the pastry maker--who has a knack, not a craft, just like the orator--makes me think in terms of the witch with the house made of sweets to lure children in. There's a Far Side cartoon with a witch in a brussel sprouts house looking out her window at her neighbor who has a house covered in gumdrops and the like. That particular witch is rethinking her strategy for looping in unsuspecting children as she sees yet another pair of children getting caught by the sugar trap.
It is implied throughout the dialogue that there is a sugar coating or gilding that goes into oratory. The story of a final judgement makes this clear--and ties a lot of threads together. A person's physical appearance can be pleasing and, therefore, deceptive, to people trying to determine a person's guilt. Likewise, a person's position in society can be misleading. But the myth of the final judgement strips away those things people can hide behind, revealing a naked soul that shows whether the person is good or bad. The implication is that oration that is taught for the sake of a person being able to defend himself is just there as yet another cloak that further distorts the true state of the soul. It sounds very idealistic. To say simply that a person who wrongly accuses a good person is bad is to sidestep the fact that innocent people can be wrongly accused. But I also think that that doesn't matter so much to the Socrates of Plato's work. And I get he impression that a lot of this points to the real Socrates' experience before accusers.
My thoughts about Socrates calling rhetoric a tribe were the same as yours, Laurie, until I started perusing the internet for our vocabulary word definitions. I found that ‘knack’ is a rather bad translation of tribe. Originally, tribe meant “a rubbing,” and its roots can be traced to the name of a tribe [trahyb], the tribudes, whose women were purportedly homosexuals. The ‘rubbing’ in the etymology refers to their sexual practices that did not produce children. When Socrates calls rhetoric a tribe, he is at once putting a heterosexual lens on his metaphor and making a snide jab at the Sophists. He considers their work inferior because it doesn’t produce any offspring, whereas philosophy makes babies.
The etymology of tribe illuminates a few of Plato’s moves in this week’s readings. At the beginning of the Protagoras, Socrates and Hippocrates are initially turned away from Callias’ door by a eunuch. Eunuch comes from the Greek words ‘eune’ (bed) and ‘ekhein’ (to keep), and if you crunch the two together, you get a description of the eunuch’s occupation: they guarded a ruler’s harem from other suitors. (Of course, a eunuch doesn’t have genitals, so he’s no threat at all.) In Protagoras, the eunuch is protecting the emasculated Sophists who, like the tribudes, spend their days rubbing for gratification and not procreation. When the philosopher enters, dialectic ensues, which Plato considers productive. Socrates, the manly man, proceeds to ‘impregnate’ the Sophists with ‘real ideas.’
Plato puts a penthouse (oh, I couldn't resist) on this hierarchy in the Symposium. Diotima clearly considers physical procreation a lower thing than intellectual procreation. Her speech, recounted through Socrates (and Plato), proposes a program of education where youth are shown the beauty of a body, many bodies, the form of beauty, and finally the Good. Those who have a pregnant soul are rendered productive when beauty is introduced to them via a philosophic teacher. They produce 'children' of virtue and excellence. According to Plato, “Everyone would rather have such children than human ones.”
For those in Dr. Bay’s Gender Rhetoric class, there’s a good essay by Michelle Ballif in the Fall 2004 issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly about gender rhetoric and Plato, from which I stole most of the ideas in this post: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4142/is_200410/ai_n9464001/pg_10