INtro to Ancient greek rhetorics
time period?
600 to 300 BCE (BCE = before common era)
Linear progression
Homer--writing down oral poem The Odyssey around 600
Socrates around 500 to 400
Plato around 400 to 300
Aristotle around 300
Socrates taught Plato taught Aristotle (SPA)
male-focused
largely focused on white property owning and free-men
some archeological and textual work has located the importance of women writers during this period. Aspasia, Saphos, Diatima.
but mostly male.
Background
rise in democracy leads to need for public speeches.
to paint with broad strokes, democracy led to the formation of rhetoric as field of study and object of use.
democracy and rhetoric are linked historically.
Socrates / plato
we don't have any writing by Socrates. Plato loved his teacher so much, he wrote as him.
read a Platonic dialogue and you see "Socrates" talking. Not Plato.
Well-known Platonic dialogues?
Gorgias / Phaedrus / Lysias
Named after real-people. Plato bashed people by writing about them
plato/aristotle
Plato hated rhetoric initially. he warmed to it later in his career.
Aristotle was all in. wrote a bunch of lecture notes which was eventually published as On Rhetoric.
gives key definition of rhetoric: "ability to see in any given case all available means of persuasion."
sophists
nomads, wrote and taught for pay, wealthy, relativism, believed in the magic of beautiful speech.
Gorgias / Lysias/Isocrates/Phaedrus
Loose affiliation. Not like a club or anything. Just shared similar ideas.
Ticked off Plato.
legacy
Greece was taken over by Rome.
Rome adopted much of Greek culture.
Absorbed Greek rhetoric.
Today, 90% of what we do in college writing classes in based in Aristotle.
