INtro to Ancient greek rhetorics

time period?

600 to 300 BCE (BCE = before common era)

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)

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.

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.

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 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."

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.

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.