I.1. Introduction: The Practice of Oratory

The practice of oratory, in the heroic age, is exemplified in the Homeric poems. The elders of Troy are able orators, and on the side of the Greeks, the speech of the aged Nestor “flows sweeter than honey,” while from the lips of Odysseus “words fall like flakes of snow.” Along with beauty of physical form and soundness of intellectual sense, the Homeric triad of human excellences includes the god-given power of discourse. But the distinction of being a “speaker of words” as well as a “doer of deeds” was reserved for the kings and the nobles. The voice of the people found utterance only in the terse animadversions of an unnamed representative of the multitude. The first condition of civil eloquence, the right of the commoner to speak his mind on affairs of State, was still wanting.

In historic times, men of political power have the credit of being able speakers for the times in which they lived, but it was not until the expulsion of the tyrants and the establishment of democracy in the sixth century B.C. that civil eloquence could really flourish in Athens. Between this date and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war, the two foremost Athenian orators were Themistocles and Pericles, but the fame of their eloquence rests on tradition alone. In the case of Pericles, although Thucydides supplies us with the purport of three of his speeches, a few striking metaphors are almost all that has descended to posterity. His eloquence, like that of his political precursors, was apparently of a purely practical type, uninfluenced by the theoretical treatment of the art which was soon to reach Athens from another quarter.

While the home of eloquence was Athens, the native land of rhetoric was Sicily. It was there that, after the fall of the tyrants, the establishment of a democracy and the requirements of a new order of things—with its claims for the restitution of confiscated goods and its suits for succession to property—aroused a distinct demand for professional instruction in the art of speech. Among the clever and disputatious Sicilians this demand was supplied by one Corax, who reduced the practice of speaking to a formal shape by drawing up a rhetorical treatise, the first of its kind. Before this time, though many speakers had expressed themselves with care and precision, and had even written their speeches, no one had composed by rule of art.

To the school of Corax and his pupil Tisias is due the early definition of rhetoric as the “contriver of persuasion,” a definition which is at once immoral and inadequate. Immoral, because it makes persuasion at any price the object of rhetoric. Inadequate, because it is equally applicable to other things (for example, to bribery).

There is a story of a lawsuit between Corax and Tisias for the recovery of his fee, in which the pupil begins with an inquiry:

“Corax, what did you undertake to teach me?”

“To persuade anyone you please.”

“If so, I now persuade you to receive no fee. If not, you have failed to teach me to persuade you. In either case, I owe you nothing.”

“If you persuade me, I have taught you the art. If not, you have failed to persuade me to remit the fee. In either case, you are bound to pay.”

Whereupon the court dismissed the case with the contemptuous proverb: A bad egg from a bad crow (for Corax means “crow”).

The teaching of Corax was transmitted to the foremost representative of the Sicilian school, the link between the rhetoric of Sicily and that of Athens: Gorgias of Leontini. The frequent employment of metaphor gave a poetic colouring to the style of Gorgias, while his use of rare and foreign words imparted a novel and striking character to his speeches. The foremost man of his age in rhetorical skill, Gorgias appeared at Athens as the leading envoy of his native city, and as Diodorus says:

The clever Athenians, with their fondness for eloquence, were struck by the foreign air of his style, by the remarkable antitheses, the symmetrical clauses, the parallelisms of structure, the rhyming terminations, and the other similar figures of speech, which were then welcomed because of their novelty.

“Beauty of speech” and the cultivation of a semi-poetical type of prose was the main purpose of the Sicilian school represented by Gorgias and his pupils. Among these is the impetuous Polus, “colt by name and colt by nature,” familiar to us from the Gorgias of Plato. Another, Alcidamas, insisted on the importance of acquiring a capacity for extemporaneous speech. Aristotle quotes from his pages a considerable number of examples of faults of taste due to his fondness for strange words, poetic compounds, and the inordinate use of epithets and metaphors.

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