STUDIES IN RHETORIC AND T PUBLIC SPEAKING PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON RHETORIC EVERETT LEE HUNT I HE art of rhetoric offered to the Athenian of the fifth century B.C. a method of higher education and, beyond that, a way of life. Plato attacked both. He gave rhetoric a conspicuous place in his dialogues because it represented in Athenian life that which he most disliked. His pictures of the rhetoricians are so broadly satirical that at times they become caricatures; but his literary power and philosophical originality have so impressed themselves upon succeeding ages that the sophists and rhetoricians of Athens have become symbolical of false pretense of knowledge, overweening conceit, fallacious argument, cultivation of style for its own sake, demagoguery, corruption of youth through a scepticism which professed complete indifference to truth, and, in general, a ready substitution of appearance for reality. We have the more readily accepted Plato's account because these faults have never been absent from civilization. If the sophists and rhetoricians of Plato's dialogues had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent them. The qualities they typify are so universal that certain collective names for them have become a necessity for thought. Even Grote, the great defender of the historical sophists, when he desires to point out the fallacies of the Platonic Socrates, finds it convenient to accuse Plato of "sophistry." These qualities are not only objectively ever present, but we attribute them readily to any persons or arguments when for any reason our approval has 1George Grote, Plato, London, 1888, III, 63. 3 not been won. An argument which we do not accept is sophistical, and the person who presents it a sophist. An appeal to the feelings of men which does not happen to warm our own hearts is rhetorical, and its author a rhetorician. It was so in Plato's time, and it was no more safe then than now to take the words "sophistry" and "rhetoric" at their face value. 3 When we ask, who were the sophists, what did they teach, and what is the connection between sophistry and rhetoric, we have asked questions involving great historical and philosophical dispute. Generations of historians of philosophy, accepting Plato's account, have made the sophists the scapegoats for all intellectual-and, at times, moral-delinquencies. It is to Hegel that the sophists owe their rehabilitation in modern times.1 G. H. Lewes, five years before Grote published his famous defense of the sophists, characterized them as professors of rhetoric,2 and pointed out the bias which had caused their unfair treatment at the hands of Plato. Grote's classic treatment of the sophists in his History of Greece was termed by Henry Sidgwick "a historical discovery of the highest order." "Before it was written," says Professor Sidgwick, "the facts were all there, but the learned world could not draw the right inference." In two vigorous essays he defends Grote and makes some significant contributions to the controversy. John Stuart Mill, in an extended review of Grote's Plato, defends his interpretation in almost all points, and furnishes many additional arguments in defense of the sophists. E. M. Cope, in his essays on the sophistic rhetoric, rejects many of Grote's conclusions." Zeller is not inclined to look upon the sophists with favor. Chaignet, in his history of rhetoric, accepts the conventional contrast between Plato and the sophists. 'G. W. Hegel, Lectures on Philosophy, 2d ed., 1840, tr. E. S. Haldane, London, 1892. 'G. H. Lewes, Biographical History of Philosophy, London, 1857, pp. 87 ff. Grote, History of Greece, London, 1851, VIII, 67. 8 H. Sidgwick, "The Sophists," Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant and other Philosophical Lectures and Essays, London, 1905. J. S. Mill, "Grote's Plato," Dissertations and Discussions, New York, 1874, IV. E. M. Cope, "The Sophistic Rhetoric," Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, II (1855), 129-69, III (1856), 34-80, 253-88. E. Zeller, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, tr. S. F. Alleyne, London, 1881, II, sect. iii. For still other points of view, see A. W. Benn, The Greek Philosophers, London, 1882, ch. 2. Also Sir A. Grant, The Ethics of Aristotle, London, 1874, I, 103-54. A. E. Chaignet, La Rhétorique et son Histoire, Paris, 1888, pp. 43, 44. Jowett, Plato's translator, accepts many of Grote's conclusions, but rejects others.1 Gomperz, in his Greek Thinkers, written fifty years after Grote's history was published, says of his own contemporaries among historians of philosophy: They still begin by handsomely acknowledging the ambiguity of the word "sophist," and the injustice done to the bearers of that name in the fifth century B.C. by the ugly sense in which the term came to be used, and they admit that restitution is due. But the debt is forgotten before it is paid; the debtor reverts to the old familiar usage, and speaks of the sophists once more as if they were really mere intellectual acrobats, unscrupulous tormentors of language, or the authors of pernicious teachings. The spirit may be willing, but the reason is helpless against the force of inveterate habits of thought. Verily the sophists were born under an evil star. Their one short hour of triumphant success was paid for by centuries of obloquy. Two invincible foes were banded against them—the caprice of language, and the genius of a great writer, if not the greatest writer of all times.' 3 The itinerant sophists founded no schools, and most of their works have been lost. The evidence in the case is therefore of the kind which makes endless argument possible. A few conclusions may, however, be stated as generally agreed upon. The term sophist originally had no unfavorable connotation, and was applied to any man who was thought to be learned. Thus the seven sages of Greece, universally honored, were at times called sophists. In the time of Plato the word carried with it something of reproach, but it was not a definitely understood term. Rival teachers employed it against each other. Thus Isocrates regarded speculative thinkers (Plato among them) as sophists, because he thought their speculations fruitless. He also attacked as sophists other teachers of rhetoric whose instruction he regarded as unintelligent, and whose promises to their pupils he thought impossible of fulfilment. The general public used the term with almost no discrimination, and Aristophanes seized upon Socrates as the sophist who could be most effectively lampooned. As to what they taught, it has been established that such terms 'Introduction to his translation of Plato's Sophist. 'Theodore Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, tr. L. Magnus, New York, 1901, I, 422. For citations illustrating the various uses of the word "sophist" by Greek writers, see Gomperz, op. cit., I, 579. Isocrates, Antidosis, Against the Sophists. For translations of selected passages see Jebb, Attic Orators, London, 1893, II, 124-47. See also W. H. Thompson, "On the Philosophy of Isocrates and his Relation to the Socratic Schools," in his edition of Plato's Phædrus, London, 1868. as a sophistic mind, a sophistic morality, a sophistic scepticism, and others implying a common basis of doctrine, are quite without justification. Their common characteristics were that they were professional teachers, that they accepted fees, and that rhetoric was a large element in the teaching of virtually all of them. The general emphasis upon rhetoric does not mean that, as scholars, all the ✔ sophists found their intellectual interests centered in rhetoric. But rhetoric was the one subject with which they could be sure to make a living. The conditions which made rhetorical training a universal necessity in Athens have been frequently set forth. The sophist who was a master of rhetoric had a number of possibilities before him. He could win power and repute by the delivery of eulogistic orations at public funerals, or deliberative addresses at times of political crises. He could appear at games, or upon occasions of his own making, with what we sometimes call occasional, or literary, addresses, expounding Homer or other works of Greek literature. He could write speeches for clients who were to appear in court. He was not allowed to appear in person as an advocate unless he could show that he had a direct connection with the case, but the profession of logographer was profitable. Finally, he was more certain of pupils in rhetoric than in any other subject. It is not strange, then, that with a wide range of individual interests, the sophists, with varying emphasis, should unite upon rhetoric as the indispensable part of their stock in trade. The claim to impart virtue has at times been held to be the distinguishing mark of the sophist, and the attempt has been made to divide the sophists from the rhetoricians upon this basis. This cannot be done, for the two activities of making men virtuous and making them eloquent were inextricably intermingled. Hegel has pointed out what he regards as an essential difference between the sophists and modern professors.2 The professor makes no pretension to making men good or wise; he only presents to students his organized knowledge, realizing that knowledge comes but wisdom lingers. The sophists, on the other hand, laid claim to some actual effect from their teachings; they made men wise. This was at least in part due to the dominance of rhetoric. Aristotle might lecture 'See O. T. Navarre, Essai sur la Rhétorique Grecque avant Aristote, Paris, 1900. 'Hegel, op. cit., I, 352. upon the theoretical aspects of rhetoric-a procedure which seems to have been productive of little eloquence-but the prime purpose of the teaching of rhetoric was practical. Certain sophists made the payment of their fees dependent upon some proof that they had actually given to a pupil the ability to persuade an audience. With such a background, it is natural that the teaching of ethics as abstract knowledge would seem about as futile as the teaching of an abstract rhetoric. A man who taught ethics taught it practically, with injunctions and exhortations, and he expected practical consequences to follow. But one of the consequences always looked for was that the pupil should become such a person as to be persuasive when speaking in a public assembly. Ethics thus was often absorbed in rhetoric. The failures of many pupils to become either good or persuasive gave rise, then as now, to cynical reflections upon the futility of education, and there were many arguments as to whether virtue or rhetoric could be taught. In these arguments there were two extreme positions. Some inclined to believe that if you teach a man to be virtuous, he will naturally be eloquent, and rhetorical instruction is unnecessary. Other sophists believed it quite impossible to teach virtue, but by constant attention to becoming a persuasive speaker, virtue would be unconsciously acquired. The controversy over the relation of virtue to eloquence runs through the history of rhetoric, and may be viewed as a technical question in that field. The attitude of sophists toward the teaching of virtue, then, cannot distinguish the sophists from the rhetoricians, and for the purposes of our study the two terms may be used almost synonymously-the word sophist, perhaps, being somewhat more inclusive. II The way in which the sophists combined their own intellectual interests with the teaching of rhetoric may best be made clear by a brief study of the four principal figures: Prodicus, Hippias, Protagoras, and Gorgias. Since these are the men most often referred to by Plato, it is also desirable to have some historical knowledge of them with which to correct the impressions given by the Platonic pictures. Protagoras and Gorgias were older than Prodicus and Hippias, but they lived longer and matured later. They were therefore more affected by the movement away from the natural sciences, and as |