Over the course of my career, I have been privileged to review a number of single-volume surveys of the discipline of rhetoric, including Theresa Enos’s Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition in the 1990s and Thomas O. Sloane’s Encyclopedia of Rhetoric in the 2000s. Now, at the close of the 2010s, I am pleased to consider Michael MacDonald’s Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, which – although not an encyclopedia – offers an encyclopedic perspective on the discipline a decade and a half after Sloane’s volume appeared. Like its predecessors, MacDonald’s volume ably documents the breadth and advance of rhetorical scholarship.Comprising the editor’s introduction and 60 individual essays, the Handbook spans myriad topics through millennia, from the early theorizing and speechmaking of the ancient Mediterranean to the digital media distinguishing the twenty-first century. MacDonald divides the volume into six periods of rhetorical study and practice: Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Early Modern and Enlightenment, and Modern and Contemporary. As this distribution suggests, the collection privileges a chronological, historically centered approach to the discipline, which MacDonald refers to in his introduction as “the diachronic ‘journey’ ” (2). Nonetheless, he does not offer “a teleological narrative tracing the evolution – or devolution – of a fixed, unitary ‘classical’ rhetorical tradition over the arc of centuries,” nor does he posit rhetoric as a “monolithic cultural institution.” In his words, he wishes to portray “a protean, chameleonic art whose identity, purpose, and significance are contested in every period” (3).To highlight common concerns across historical periods, MacDonald commissioned multiple chapters on similar topics, forming what he refers to as “the synchronic ‘network.’ ” For example, chapters on rhetoric and politics appear in all six sections of the volume, while discussions of rhetoric and law are found in four. He describes the volume’s design as a “double structure”: “a chronological history with thematically interlocking chapters” that enables “the Handbook to be read serially, by historical period, as well as topically, by subject matter.” Touting the breadth of scholarship assembled in the volume, MacDonald notes that the scholarship assembled represents “30 academic disciplines and fields of social practice” (2).Ever the self-aware rhetorician, MacDonald explicitly identifies his intended audience: “readers approaching rhetoric for the first time” (2). More specifically, he describes four varieties of readers: “undergraduate and graduate students,” “university instructors,” “advanced scholars of rhetoric searching for historical context and new points of departure for research projects,” and “scholars in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences looking for points of entry into the field of rhetoric.” He also calls attention to nine features intended “to make the Handbook useful and accessible” (3), including translations of foreign language passages, a glossary of Greek and Latin rhetorical terms, suggestions for further reading, and cross-referencing of chapters. Furthermore, he thoughtfully reviews the history of definitions of his key term, rhetoric, before offering his own: “I shall define rhetoric (nebulously enough) as the art of effective composition and persuasion in speech, writing, and other media” (5).The 60 individual chapters comprising the Handbook are – with few exceptions – consistently well written, engaging, and easily accessible for the audiences MacDonald identifies without being simplistic, pedantic, or stale. This, in itself, is a praiseworthy editorial achievement. The high quality of writing that distinguishes this volume is not surprising, considering the impressive team of scholars MacDonald enlists, whom he describes as “leading rhetoric experts from 12 countries” (2).In addition to lauding the caliber of writing that distinguishes this volume, I call attention to the healthy variety of inventional approaches the Handbook’s contributors employ. Some provide strong, yet traditionally crafted surveys of the topic at hand – such as Heinrich Plett’s treatment of “Rhetoric and Humanism” – while others emphasize the scholarship concerning the topic, often reviewing the major controversies or points of difference within this body of work. Arthur Walzer’s “Origins of British Enlightenment Rhetoric” ably exemplifies the latter category. Several offer exhortations concerning the direction of future scholarship. For example, Cheryl Glenn and Andrea Lunsford in “Rhetoric and Feminism” call enthusiastically for further feminist rhetorical practice and scholarship. “Such feminist interventions into traditional rhetorical principles,” they conclude, “provide opportunities for new ways of being rhetorical, of showing respect, making commitments, sharing power, and distinguishing ourselves as human” (595). Likewise, in his chapter on Renaissance pedagogy, Peter Mack pleads for “many more local studies, which should be more thorough, thoughtful, and detailed than this selective survey” (409). Some contributors reflect on the rhetorical implications of producing rhetorical scholarship, such as Angela Ray, whose “Rhetoric and Feminism in the Nineteenth-Century United States” considers the rhetoric of activism and the highly rhetorical nature of scholarship about it. At least one scholar, John O. Ward, uses his chapter, “The Development of Medieval Rhetoric,” to introduce an important but previously unstudied manual or summa that “enables us to peer into that dark arena and throw a little light upon the rhetoric of the period” (321).Predictably, the most memorable chapters provide reliable introductory material for the nonexpert reader while delivering sophisticated insights for those more knowledgeable of the topic. My favorites include Jeffrey Walker’s account of ancient Greek “Rhetoric and Poetics,” in which he lucidly details the two primary critical positions toward poetry that distinguish ancient Greek culture; Laurent Pernot’s essay covering “Rhetoric and the Greco-Roman Second Sophistic,” which succinctly demonstrates the value of the progymnasmata and elegantly complicates the “decline of rhetoric” narrative fed many of us in graduate seminars in years gone by; and Jacqueline Jones Royster’s “Rhetoric and Race in the United States,” which frames future scholarship in this area and issues a memorable call for innovative research. Less successful chapters feature either highly specific explorations of specialized topics or relatively partisan discussions of winners and losers amongst the scholarship they review.MacDonald’s cross-referencing, which he identifies as one of the special features of the volume, deserves recognition. Clearly, he worked meticulously to demonstrate the links among the many diverse essays he commissioned, and both the novice and the expert will find this feature enlightening. As I sampled the essays featured in the volume, MacDonald’s cross- referencing facilitated a lively conversation among the contributors, both those I know personally and by reputation and those previously unfamiliar to me. This multivocal symposium, which informs the entire volume, is one of its unexpected gifts.As mentioned at the outset, MacDonald favors a historical approach. In fact, 75 percent of the Handbook’s chapters focus on pre-twentieth-century topics. This strong emphasis on rhetoric’s past aligns with his own scholarly inclinations and those of the readership of Advances in the History of Rhetoric. Rhetoric is an ancient art, after all, which treasures its roots, and historically rhetorical scholars have viewed their study through the lens of time. Nonetheless, this historical focus can be seen as a limitation, particularly considering the breadth suggested by the volume’s title and the readers he posits. MacDonald himself reveals his inability to cover all topics, particularly recent scholarship, noting, “Gaps and lacunae abound in every period, especially in the modern and contemporary section, which lacks contributions on postcolonial rhetoric, disability rhetoric, comparative rhetoric, queer rhetoric, and countless other burgeoning other areas of inquiry.” I also note that although the volume’s title suggests a treatment of the subject that expands beyond the rhetoric of the West, the Handbook, in MacDonald’s words, “is limited to the study of rhetoric in Europe and North America” (4). To be fair, as he states, “no book or series of books could hope to provide a speculum, or panoptic survey, of the realm of rhetoric” (3), but nonetheless I might respectfully suggest a slightly different balance between the historical and the contemporary, the West and other world traditions.Ultimately, of course, it is prudent to focus upon what such a volume delivers, rather than what it omits. MacDonald’s Handbook provides five dozen essays of strikingly good quality that are useful to students and scholars alike. Furthermore, the care with which he has arrayed and contextualized these essays significantly enhances their utility. The value of the Handbook quickly became apparent to me, for even before I began the review, I was already employing its chapters in my teaching and research. This, to me, is the best indication of such a volume’s ultimate worth.I began by suggesting that MacDonald’s Handbook demonstrates the recent progress of rhetorical scholarship, and the primary goal of this review has been to build this case. Yet while sampling the Handbook’s chapters, I am reminded of the elusive nature of “the state of the art.” For example, when Malcom Heath states in the “further reading” section of his chapter on “Rhetoric and Pedagogy” that “There is no satisfactory account of Greek rhetorical education in the classical period” (82), Jeffrey Walker’s The Genuine Teachers of This Art immediately comes to mind. Capturing any field of study in a single volume is a worthy goal vexed by page restrictions and the passage of time. Given these inevitable limitations, MacDonald has performed admirably, and I am grateful for his impressive contribution to our field.

This book draws in the reader with its scope, its humor, its brio, and its learning. In many ways, it is a collage, as the writer, Laurent Pernot, openly suggests when he says that he is classifying a fleeting domain (82) in this study of the “sous-entendu.” Not until the reader reaches the end of the text do many of the kaleidoscopic elements find even a temporary pattern. The opening chapter is filled primarily with modern and contemporary examples of what is understood from what is “not said” in political, social, literary, mediated, and everyday communication. But chapter two, “La Rhétorique du discours figuré,” turns out not to be simply a history of parallel classical examples, but at the core of the discussion. When the reader arrives at the “Catalogue Additionnel” with which the book ends, we have learned to appreciate the apparently random list of strategies that is listed in the context of this “discours figuré.”In Chapter 2, Pernot lays out the difficulty of placing the sous-entendu in a classical rhetorical system – although he finds many examples of it, and gives a foundation for its classical significance, in the works of Hermogenes and Quintilian. The discours figuré is a problem because rhetorical systems are intended to help clarify persuasion, while much language speaks to us through what is understood rather than explicitly said. For contemporary people studying the history of rhetoric, it is often taken as a given that rhetoric is a fluid and sociohistorically contextualized way of thinking about communication. Pernot reminds us that the discourse figuré was a slippery concept for classical rhetoricians. Its double meanings do not seem to have fit the concepts of either scheme or trope, and this discourse emerged in response to the need to talk about and comprehend how the unstated, or unsaid – yet understood – significance of words, the sous-entendu, was conveyed and received. He calls the discours figuré “un corps rhétorique flotant” (47). What this book does is remind us not so much that rhetoric attempts to make language “adequate” to reality, but that it never can be. Language is a material medium. We have to learn to work with it in our own particular socioverbal ecologies.The chapter titles are themselves a categorization of the sous-entendu, from the discours figuré, to (among others) herméneutiques du soupçon, faux-semblants, un boeuf sur la langue, and le franc-parler. Within each of them, Pernot gives a huge range of examples, each usually generating a strategy of double meaning appropriate to their sociohistorical context: from Verlaine, he derives the chanson gris, from Barthes the texte oeuf, and so on. One of this book’s own sous-entendus runs throughout these categories: it is clear that listeners to and readers of words develop their own strategies for engaging with the sous-entendu. This he explores through concepts of paratext (pacts with writers), context (interpretive communities), and textual criteria (internal elements particular to the audience member) – all of which create conditions for “devining” and “deducing” rather than “explaining,” such that the rhetor and the audience member cooperate over the “sense.” This allows one to distinguish the double meaning working through realization (connivance, or complicity), from that working by preventing realization (manipulation).The author, who is really quite funny and conversationally direct in an inviting and appealing manner, seems to come into his voice in chapters 5 to 8. Chapter 5 is a sustained study of Greek rhetoric/oratory/writing in the first two centuries CE during which the Roman Empire included “Greece.” The question here is: how to sustain Greek identity in the face of Roman power, and the chapter becomes a study of activism that insists on difference and alternatives in Greek culture, rather than change of the Roman. The study of faux-semblants in the work of Dion Chrisostome and Aelius Aristide is a textbook example of positive activism from which many could learn today, and is written by a scholar as familiar with the rhetoric of classical Rome and Greece, as with that of seventeenth, nineteenth, and twenty-first centuries.It is telling that the examples of Dion and Aristide as activists eschew irony, sarcasm, and satire, to develop other strategies. Each expects the particular community for whom they write, to understand the “other” meaning, and yet each is skillful enough to ensure that the dominant community will not be able to “prove” or even notice that “other” meaning is there. Pernot throws in Molière’s comment on satire not working as effective critique because it keeps you on the same grounds as the person/group/institution you are critiquing. Instead, we have a catalog of alternatives, including Aristide’s use of omission: for example, an entire eulogy about the Roman Empire that manages never to use the word “Rome.” What is significant is the way Pernot’s study continually segues from the classical to the modern, here to Valéry on Anatole France. It goes on to perform a political flip, as it moves to Genet’s critique of what is no longer an intentional silencing that speaks loudly, but a sociopolitical silencing that hides, evades, and manipulates – that of postcolonial institutions that erase the cultural reality of the invaded.Pernot also takes on the difficult terrain of France in World War II and the co-existence of the Resistance with the Nazi occupation. He circles around the work of Louis Aragon and the concept of “contrabande” – again with contextually important terms such as “mots croisés” and the field of “un boeuf sur la langue.” The writer’s focus on Aragon encompasses many other writers of the period and shifts into a commentary on censorship and on the “sur entendu” of manipulation in the silencing of peoples in, for example, India under British rule, or China under early Communist rule. The commentary is infused here, as with so many other places in the book, with some life history of the central orators/writers. A reader is drawn into the contextual field of these kinds of sous-entendu through an intimacy with the people being discussed. This particular chapter comes back to World War II through Lenin and then Brecht, listing Brecht’s “five ruses” for double meaning, before returning to France. The sous-entendu is a voluntary, skilled, silencing that speaks volumes to an informed listening audience and engages them in making significance. The “sur-entendu” is an imposed silencing that contains and limits.The study underlines the way the language of dissidence is too often linked to the power it critiques, leaving it weakened in the face of the propaganda that follows on from censorship. The terrain of totalitarian political rhetoric, and the strategies of sous-entendu developed by Klemperer, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, formulate distinct responses to the actualities of their sociohistorical time and place. Political correctness is introduced as a contemporary device that is both challenging the “sur-entendu” of normative language about, for example, sexuality, and generating a sous-entendu critique. It would perhaps have been interesting to listen to an analysis of the one becoming weighted into the other, but Pernot persists in a conversational style that insists on familiarity, creating contexts for its own sous-entendus. For example, in the book’s chapter on sexual “ellipsis,” the author leads us through a gallery of writers from Molière, Balzac, Stendhal, and Tolstoy, to Dante, Manzoni, and the film “Gone with the Wind.” Here, one of the book’s implications indicates that the readers’ responses to the ellipses in the sexual narratives tells us as much about their own social and sexual mores as those they interpret.Moving on to “plain-speaking” or franc parler, and an assessment of critical responses to the whole project of the sous-entendu, Pernot turns to a fascinating study of how “truth” can be weaponized. The book’s own sous-entendu of today’s “fake news” is set in the classical context of Quintilian’s concerns with the rhetorical figure of “sincerity” and then in the contemporary context of Foucault’s parrhesia. I found this commentary particularly helpful for its presentation of the cynic as “autosuffisant,” and the ethical dimension of the way the sous-entendu casts truth, power and subjectivity into mutability and out of anything “sufficient.” Truth, like the sous-entendu, is embedded in the ethics, contexts, and perspectives of the sociohistorical time.The introduction of Foucault allows Pernot to get to what, for this reader at least, is a highly significant sous-entendu for this book: that Foucault, as many another person today, takes rhetoric as manipulative to distinguish it from parrhesia – almost as if rhetoric is inevitably a “sur-entendu.” Yet rhetoric encompasses both sides of the coin – Dion Chrysostom is an example of the sous-entendu for Pernot, and of parrhesia for Foucault. At this point, the extensive discussion of classical discours figuré falls into place. In many ways this book is a justification of rhetoric as an important field for today, by looking at what the classical world did when treating it as fluid rather than narrowly systematic – speaking truth to power, producing generative activism, engaging people in particular social change.The “Mot à la Fin” re-states that the book is not trying to provide a “guide,” or a global vision for the concept of sous-entendu. This is a collage of different ways that European verbal cultures communicate through what they do not say, and a reminder that this is a long and vibrant tradition. To conclude, Pernot uses the image of a game of billiards. This attempt to talk about what is not-said, or not-yet-said, or not-able-to-be-said, or not-even-culturally-recognized is like a game of billiards in which the writer sends the examples bouncing off the sides of the table, perhaps into pockets for a short time, until another game in another place, at another time. It is thoroughly entertaining, and one of its more humorous sous-entendus is that it invites critical play.

I am grateful and honored to have served as editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric for four years (2016–2019). A valedictory is an occasion for expressing gratitude, here to all who have made my four-year stint as editor meaningful to me.First, I express gratitude to the American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) and its Board. During Katya Haskins tenure as editor, the ASHR board voted to devote one issue of the journal to the best papers presented at the ASHR symposium. This policy ensures that the journal represents the interests of ASHR members. In the absence of such a policy, the contents of journal would depend entirely on what came in willy-nilly through the Taylor and Francis portal. If the editor was one who, let us charitably say, was not famous for stretching the boundaries of the discipline, the journal might soon reflect only an editor’s narrow interests. During my tenure, the ASHR policy generated special issues “Rhetoric In Situ,” curated by Kassie Lamp, and “Diversity in and Among Rhetorical Traditions,” curated by Scott Stroud, thus ensuring that Advances documented current interests in visual and material rhetoric and in rhetoric outside of the Western tradition. This policy and Kassie and Scott’s good work helped me to meet my pledge on assuming the editorship to continue Katya Haskins effort to expand the journal’s purview. I should also thank the editors of the other special issues published during my tenure, one on Quintilian, edited by Jerry Murphy, on the occasion of the four-hundred-year anniversary of the discovery in St. Gall, Switzerland by Poggio Bracciolini of the first complete version of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria; and a most interesting special issue on Rhetoric and Economics edited by Mark Longaker.Under my tenure, Advances also inaugurated the policy of publishing book review forums – three – and book reviews – sixteen – over the four years. The forums enabled me to ensure that the journal continued, in a tradition begun by Robert Gaines in his tenure as editor, to be a place for debate and focused discussion. For the book review forums, I owe special thanks to Heather Hayes, who helped organize them. A forum on a critical edition of Jeannette Rankin’s 1917 Address at Carnegie Hall by Tiffany Lewis and the publication in this issue of a translation of work by Chaim Perelman by Michelle Bolduc and David Frank ensured that Advances remained a depository for primary material, as Robert Gaines hoped it would. For help with this focused issue on Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, I thank Andreea Ritivoi for work on the introduction and for her critical eye and good advice.From its beginning under the editorship of the journal’s founder Rich Enos, Advances has taken seriously its commitment to publishing the work of emerging scholars. Sometimes what that means in practical terms is issuing a “revise and re-submit” for manuscripts that the editor knows will require two, three, four revisions on its way to meeting the journal’s expectations. When I committed to such manuscripts I pledged not only my own time but the time of reviewers as well. Reviewing even the most polished of manuscripts requires critical intelligence and tact and takes hours of uncompensated time. We could not continue as a scholarly community without the commitment of talented, conscientious reviewers. I am most grateful to all who served as reviewers for manuscripts I sent them. I don’t feel I can thank all here (though I considered it) but I will single out Glen McClish, Dave Tell, James Fredal, Michele Kennerly, Brandon Inabinet, and James Kasterly for their help and, especially in Glen’s case, sage advice.I certainly would be remiss if I did not thank those who readied manuscripts for production: my three editorial assistants, Allison Prasch, Tara Wambach, and Brittany Knutson, and the Communication Studies Department at Minnesota, embodied in its Chair, Ron Greene, who paid for their help. I thank Taylor and Francis for supportive collegiality and the Press’s Megan Cimini, who, in response to queries, was always helpful, always professional, and always immediate.

The history of Chaim Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s “new rhetoric” and its arrival on American shores tells an interesting story even when in its most condensed and basic form. The product of a philosopher who had discovered rhetoric relatively late in his career working closely with a scholar who was well-versed in literature, the new rhetoric was brought to the United States by another philosopher turned rhetoric enthusiast (Henry Johnstone). The story is well known and its main point, no matter how obvious, deserves to he stressed: rhetoric and philosophy have a history of not only repudiation but also discovery and embracing. This relationship is significant for this special issue because the essays we feature appropriately focus on some of the deepest and, often, most difficult aspects of the new rhetoric, including, particularly, the sometimes easy to miss or underestimate philosophical assumptions behind some of its main concepts (such as the arbitrary from an epistemological perspective or the universal in the context of logic). Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca pursued a theory of, specifically, argumentation, as the main title in the French original of their book signaled, but one embedded in a theory of knowledge that was quite ahead of its time in certain aspects – one might say even post-structuralist avant la lettre in its emphasis on community, truthfulness, and the individual subject.Many scholars in our discipline have complained that the work of the two Belgians is insufficiently studied, even though their status is as high as that of thinkers who receive far more attention, such as Kenneth Burke. The reason for this relative neglect, comparatively speaking, might be in part connected to the simple fact that they were not American. We take this possibility seriously: we recognize the need for more translations from Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca’s rhetorical corpus that would make an expanded corpus more accessible and for more work situating their rhetoric in its historical context. Thus, this special issue consists of a translation; an essay that examines the role of translation in Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s own work, not just as transposition from one language into another but more broadly as a transfer of ideas across intellectual traditions; and two critical essays. This structure reflects, we hope, some of the general challenges scholars face when engaging with the work of the two Belgian thinkers, from the need to expand the corpus of their writings about rhetoric for English-speaking audiences, to the importance of thematizing translation as a conceptual focus that matters in their case, and finally to the continuing demand for analytic applications of their theoretical ideas.With the first contribution to this special issue Advances in the History of Rhetoric continues a long-standing commitment to publishing translations of important works in the history of rhetoric – in this issue a translation by Michelle Bolduc and David A. Frank of Perelman’s “l’arbitraire dans laconnaissance” (hereafter, l’arbitraire), a work first published in 1933. This work serves as a philosophical proemium to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric (NR). The burden Perelman accepts in l’arbitraire is to discredit the idea – dear to logical positivists and rigorous empiricists – that there are procedures – deductive, inductive, empirical – that can, if followed, produce conclusions that are logically necessary and therefore universally valid. This same argument Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s set forth in the Introduction and Framework to the New Rhetoric some twenty-five years later. All argument ultimately rests on an element that is arbitrary,1 Perelman argues in 1933, concluding that, in Frank and Bolduc’s translation, “tolerance between groups, all of which are established by means of value judgments”2 is the only basis for all reasonable truth claims. If we substitute NR’s “noncompulsive elements”3 (NR 1) for “arbitrary,” and NR’s “community of minds”4 and “preliminary conditions”5 (NR 14) for l’arbitraire’s “tolerance between groups”, we can readily see l’arbitraire as providing the philosophical underpinnings of NR. The work will be of interest to theorists studying Perelman’s philosophical development or attempting to place the New Rhetoric in its philosophical milieu.The second contribution to the issue is Michelle Bolduc’s “Translation and Translatio in the New Rhetoric Project’s Rediscovery of Rhetoric,” which is based on a section from her forthcoming Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric. We think the work is an important and fascinating contribution to our understanding of the origin and evolution of the “new” rhetoric. Bolduc traces how Perelman took inspiration from the Italian philosopher Brunetto Latini’s Tesoretto (translated into French as Li Livres dou Tresor), an encyclopedic work that included a section on rhetoric, heavily influenced by Cicero’s De Inventione. Perelman was led to the work by Jean Paulhan, an important literary theorist whom Perelman most likely discovered through Olbrechts-Tyteca. Thus, Bolduc documents Olbrechts-Tyteca’s role in the origin of the new rhetoric, a role that has been under-appreciated. Latini’s Ciceronian and therefore philosophical (as distinguished from literary) sense of rhetoric was most compatible with Perelman’s. As Bolduc also documents, Perelman’s philosophical orientation contrasted with the more literary and linguistic interests of his contemporaries Barthes, Genette, and Ricoeur, with whom Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca shared a complicated relationship. What is most interesting about Bolduc’s history is how differently Paulhan and Perelman understood the importance of Latini’s work on rhetoric. The intellectual genealogy Bolduc reconstructs points to potentially fertile further investigations into the differences in philosophical assumptions and method of study between Perelman and some of the most prominent French language theorists of the time. These differences make it tempting to wonder if perhaps Perelman had a very different vision, not only of rhetoric, but more broadly of language and discourse than, for example, Barthes and Genette. Put bluntly: was he, similar to Ricoeur, too much of a heretic by the standards of these diehards of structuralism? By tracing the historical trajectory of Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca road to rhetoric, Bolduc helps us understand how unique, or even idiosyncratic, they most likely were in the intellectual context of the time, dominated as it was by structuralism.Perhaps this unique, unorthodox intellectual position is partly the reason their contribution to rhetoric is in the paradoxical position of being simultaneously praised and criticized, often for the very same ideas. Praised for conceptual sophistication, but also charged with incoherence or internal contradictions, considered both very general in their applicability and accused of being too dependent on (often obscure) philosophical examples, these ideas have nonetheless exerted a deep influence on the field. Yet they continue to baffle scholars who wish to assess their analytic purchase and to apply them saliently. Two concepts are especially fraught: the universal audience and the dissociation of concepts. It is fitting, then, that our two analysis essays offer a provocative reading of the universal audience by Alan G. Gross, and, in Justin D. Hatch’s essay, an illustration of how the dissociation of concepts can function subversively, not only influencing our perception of reality but in fact transforming it. A senior scholar and a junior one show us both how relevant the New Rhetoric is for enduring rhetorical questions, and, at the same time, how difficult it can be to pin down the conceptual scope of its terms. Gross’s focus is on clarifying what Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca meant by “universal” in coining the term of art “universal audience,” and to this end he puts Perelman in dialog with himself, or rather with a (mis)-representation of himself. Parsing out carefully various readings of the concept of the universal audience, Gross builds upon his own work, done in collaboration with Ray Dearin, as well as expands it to address more recent (by his account) misunderstandings. Whereas Gross addresses fellow rhetorical critics rather reproachfully at times, Hatch finds himself in large agreement with other scholars who have engaged with the dissociation of concepts. The main task he sets for himself is to clarify the analytic significance of the term and to assert, more forcefully than previous scholars, the epistemic and political power of dissociations of concepts.We see these four contributions as advancing the study of the New Rhetoric in significant ways, getting us ever more closely to giving its authors a fully deserved comprehensive attention.

Rhetoric often serves as a way to bridge important differences in the act of persuasion. As a field, rhetoric has worked to include more and more diverse voices. Much more is left to be written, however, on how this admittedly important concept of diversity affects the study and practice of rhetoric. This volume of Advances in the History of Rhetoric serves as a material trace of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric’s recent attempts to highlight diversity in and among rhetorical traditions. It collects essays from those presented at the 2018 symposium on the theme of “Diversity and Rhetorical Traditions.” All of these essays were subjected to additional review to fine-tune their arguments for this special journal issue. Each displays the perils and promises of engaging diversity as a topic within – and among – rhetorical traditions. Part of the challenge of coming to terms with difference is the confrontation with something, be it a tradition, a thinker, or a text, that challenges one’s own way of understanding the world, possible accounts of it, and our structures of reasoning and justification. Marking something as “different” is better than marking that person, text, or tradition as “wrong” or “misguided.” Coming to terms with – and even simply recognizing – difference is an accomplishment, especially when it’s not followed by dismissal or rejection. We too often default to the familiar – familiar texts and standards of judgment.These tensions over engaging differences in texts and people are the classical challenges facing comparative endeavors and the field that explores diversity among rhetorical traditions–known as comparative rhetoric – has made progress in navigating these demands. Early studies in the rhetorical practices of “non-western cultures” (a term that highlights the normative challenges of difference in naming objects of study) served as important, but imperfect, starting points. For instance, Robert T. Oliver’s 1971 book, Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China, represents one of the first sustained enquiries into the rhetoric of China and India, putatively on their own terms. It was a grand project, ambitious in its aims. Yet in his pursuit of respecting difference in these traditions from the familiar Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, some have argued that Oliver emphasized a “deficiency model” that emphasized Chinese or Indian rhetorics’ lack of some key characteristic (according to Western models of thought) such as logic or rational argument (Lu “Studies and Development” 112). George Kennedy’s ambitious book, Comparative Rhetoric, is a useful entry in bringing a global and systematic sense to the idea of comparative rhetoric, but it could also be faulted by its placement of the Greco-Roman tradition as a normative telos lying at the end of the rhetorical progression chartered over the course of its chapters.Building on the approach enshrined in these important endeavors, other scholars continued to interrogate difference among and between rhetorical traditions by focusing on similarities among different cultural practices. There is tension, however, over how much difference scholars attribute to different rhetorical traditions situated in radically different cultural contexts in the act of comparison. Are they commensurable? Do they both practice and theorize the same thing denoted by the term “rhetoric?” Another question arises as to the difference in epistemic access to these different traditions: who has the best access to unpack what a tradition means or implies about rhetoric? Some scholars give contemporary “natives” a special value as epistemically privileged resources in understanding long-rooted traditions of thought (Lu “Studies and Development” 113–114; Mao “Studying the Chinese”). Contrary to these positions which respect the rhetorical traditions of other cultures by walling them off (to some extent) from access by outsiders, other approaches deemphasize ideas of privileged access and focus on the method of appropriating resources and concepts from one tradition for the use in or by another tradition. Underlying all of these efforts and decision points are ontological assumptions about the objects of study (Is a tradition one thing or a diverse and conflicting set of texts, ideas, and authors?) and ethical entailments about the method of reconciling difference to one’s own tradition (How much creative rereading do we allow of another tradition?). Some have argued for – or at least asserted – that traditions can be “captured” in acts of scholarly inquiry more or less accurately, and we should thereby discount scholarship that fails some criterion of accuracy (Mao “Doing Comparative Rhetoric”; Hum and Lyon). Appealing to accuracy, even if it is possible to find a way to compare one’s attempts at descriptions to the “thing” that is being described, seems to overly limit how we might creatively engage, use, and understand diverse and different traditions (Stroud “Pragmatism,” “‘Useful Irresponsibility”). These debates about respect, accuracy, and appropriation intersect in complex ways with the previously mentioned tensions over whether “rhetoric” points to the same things and practices in diverse traditions. One point of agreement among many in these debates, however, remains: the reduction of traditions – or their “rhetoric” – to essential similarities or the reading of diverse traditions as absolutely (and incommensurately) different are less-than-useful orientations to engaging difference in rhetorical traditions. Both would paralyze us, perhaps in the service of cherished values (protecting or respecting the diverse Other), and they seem to preclude a full engagement with that which differs from our ordinary traditions, concepts, and practices. Beyond these extremes lies a middle path of creative and unique approaches to how we learn from, respect, and engage others. Difference is the problematic that drives the challenges to such an endeavor, as well as the ground for what we might construct in our contemporary accounts once we submit to listening to another tradition, speaker, or text outside of our habitual haunts.In their own ways, each of the studies collected here engage and respect difference within rhetorical traditions, even though there is a radical diversity in the traditions analyzed for this endeavor. This issue has a loose organizational pattern necessitated by this energetic but sometimes frenetic frame-shifting inherent in comparative rhetoric. The first two articles explore sources of diversity and difference within the Chinese tradition. Xing Lu’s keynote address extends her previous work on classical and contemporary Chinese rhetorical practices and highlights the ways that the Chinese tradition encompassed a radical diversity of thought, from Confucian views of benevolent rhetorical practice to the Daoists’ transcendental rhetoric. As she highlights, there was a remarkable amount of diversity within each “school” of Chinese rhetorical thought, and there was much conflict among and between these schools as they sought to come to terms with difference in accounts of moral cultivation, rhetorical practice, and the normative uses of language. The second article, authored by Rya Butterfield, also explores the differences in the Chinese tradition, albeit as viewed from a contemporary thinker who was pragmatically oriented toward making sense of conflicting classical schools of thought. Hu Shih, a student of John Dewey’s at Columbia University, sought in his recovery of the classical traditions of Chinese thought resources to solve pressing Chinese and international exigencies. As Butterfield discusses, Hu is modern in his engagement with Chinese classical sources, and he draws upon or uses resources from the west (including Greece) in how he rereads classical Chinese culture in light of China’s contemporary needs. In many ways, Hu’s rhetoric represents a pragmatist approach to striking (and constructing) a balance between modernization and preservation of China’s past schools of thought and habits of living.There are good reasons for diversifying our canon of rhetoric, as well as our methods and objects of study, by reaching out to other traditions around the globe, but there is also a value to recovering sources of differences in a tradition that our histories might overlook. The next three articles explore the problematic of difference within the Greco-Roman tradition, highlighting sources of overlooked diversity within a dominant tradition in western rhetorical studies. Kathleen S. Lamp’s keynote address engages various types of public epideictic artifacts in Augustan Rome and illustrates how they function as propagandistic and educational efforts to reconcile differences within the Roman populace. Lamp does an admirable job showing the needs of rhetoric in light of the diversity of the Roman public, as well as the rich functioning of public artworks and monuments that can also shed light on how American monuments might serve similar goals. In a related spirit, Robert E. Terrill’s article appropriates a vital concept for Greek and Roman rhetoricians, imitatio, and engages modern concerns with inclusion in rhetorical pedagogy and argument among a diverse public. Terrill’s piece shows that creative engagement with traditions and their resources can add nuance to our understanding, as well as amplify their relevance to contemporary concerns in our pluralistic communities. By reimagining mimetic pedagogy within a context of diversity, Terrill shows how Greco-Roman rhetorical sources allow room for inventive encounters with diverse publics. The third piece engaging diversity within the western tradition is authored by Janet M. Atwill and Josie Portz. Their study challenges contemporary extensions – and critiques – of the western tradition that assume its relative homogeneity. By exploring in more detail Aelius Aristides’ “Regarding Sarapis,” Atwill and Portz challenge simplistic readings of the western tradition by highlighting sources of difference, diversity, tension, and intercultural encounter within its supposedly straightforward history. By “unwriting” the narrative of Western civilization with an attention to tensions and differences within Aristides as received and as could be read, the authors illustrate how the thematic of difference can yield new insights into enduring traditions in the history of rhetoric.The final two articles in this issue emphasize rhetoric’s diverse history in traditions and genres that often escape our attention. Elif Guler and Iklim Goksel make important first steps in a project that should receive more attention in our field – that of explicating Turkish rhetoric. By focusing on two key rhetorical moments in the history of Turkish rhetoric, the Orkhon inscriptions (8th century) and Atatürk’s Nutuk (1927), they mark a valuable beginning to studying the rhetoric of this complex culture. These two texts are important, as the Orkhon inscriptions date from the pre-Islamic period and Atatürk is considered the founder and first president of modern Turkey. Guler and Goksel creatively show how these different texts from historically distinct times are made to speak to common and divergent interests in Turkish history, showing the promise of studying traditions different from the standard Greco-Roman one. The final article continues this engagement with long-standing traditions outside of those in many standard histories of rhetoric: that of the Hindu tradition. Elizabeth Thornton examines important hymns within the Rigveda, in light of concepts and tools taken from later sources in Indian traditions, and finds that there is a unique rhetorical use of form and voice in this foundational Hindu text. Thornton’s piece is also of interest to those attuned to the methodological challenges of engaging texts outside of the western tradition, since she offers an interesting discussion of how decolonializing rhetorical history will commit us to (sometimes) using native theoretical resources.What all of these pieces highlight is the promise of thinking of rhetoric’s history with an emphasis on divergences, tensions caused by differences, and spaces that lie between our accustomed answers and intellectual habits. Rhetoric has always been diverse and has always had to bridge over differences in the act of persuasion; our contemporary history of rhetoric and its traditions must mirror this diversity in scholarly practices. Many talk highly of inclusion and multiculturalism, but few of us read or speak of Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita, or Bhimrao Ambedkar as rhetorically interesting parts in our histories of rhetoric’s past. There is no principled reason for this oversight, and it may be rectified slowly as the world becomes more globalized and as Asian nations such as China and India gain in economic, military, and political importance. But valuing and emphasizing diversity could lead us to pay more attention to divergences both within the rhetorical tradition many of us were trained in, as well as between this tradition and the range of other grand traditions animating other regions of the globe for millennia, well in advance of such geopolitical and economic shifts. Through resisting the urge for simplistic stories and one-dimensional critiques of cultures and their values, diversifying our histories of rhetoric promises to yield new narratives and inventive readings of well-known sources that will invigorate rhetoric as a discipline.No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

In Permanence and Change, Kenneth Burke wrote that rhetorical style is nothing more than ingratiation—an attempt to gain approval by saying the right thing in the right context. Marie Lund’s commendable goal in An Argument on Rhetorical Style is to argue beyond this understanding and achieve a greater conceptual consensus on style for rhetorical scholars and critics. Lund does this by developing her own concept of “constitutive style,” making style valuable as an aesthetic aspect of rhetoric, a deliberate rhetorical strategy, and an analytical category comprising communicative actions, identity constructions, and social influence. She achieves this lofty goal by re-theorizing rhetorical style, exhibiting skillful stylistic analyses in selected popular and social contexts, examining the concept of style from historical eras including the postmodern, and analyzing style from several critical perspectives. This rich and important work provides a fresh, appropriate and comprehensive framework for scholars to analyze rhetorical style from textual, interactional, social and theoretical angles. Lund invokes and engages historically with accounts of style from the classical Greek and Roman periods to the present, and does not disappoint in synthesizing these traditions before creating her transcendent “constitutive style” contribution.Lund’s book is separated into two parts—“Rhetorical Style as a Critical Concept” and “Critical Perspectives.” Three chapters are dedicated to each part. The goal of these chapters is to make style “both powerful and useful in line with other concepts in the practical and critical disciplines of rhetoric” (11). Lund argues that style needs to be re-theorized in order to accomplish this goal and introduces an expansive dialogue between research traditions in order to do so. By separating the book into these sections, Lund illuminates previously fragmented analyses of rhetorical style and is able to bring a synthesized framework to focus for the critic. She begins by covering the range of definitions of style since antiquity and explores the Sophistic treatment of style as constitutively inventive, transformational, and performative. She then guides the reader through some of the earliest etymologies of style (stylus), as well as the modern conceptions of “Style as Dress” and “Style as Man.” She describes these historical and modern definitions of style in precise detail and explains how some of them have retained analytical utility while others fall short. For example, although she sees all three conceptions of style (“Style as Dress,” “Style as Man,” and her “Constitutive Style”) as viable formations in shaping our current perceptions of style, she doesn’t view them as equally effective. She draws on Gerard A. Hauser’s view that rhetoric is not only a strategic process but also a “social practice which constructs a reality” (49). Moreover, she argues that style constitutes our social relations, moral actions, identity constructions, and worldviews. She rejects the simplicity of the topos “Style as Dress,” which characterizes style as a rhetorical ornament that dresses thought. Although Lund recognizes the aestheticizing aspect of style as worthwhile and viable for criticism, she opposes the fundamental separation of style from thought inherent in rhetoric’s five classical canons: invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory. A “Style as Dress” reduction ignores the inventive nature of style and the notion that all five canons can operate constitutively. Moreover, she rejects the presently loose versions of “Style as Man,” which convey the identity of the speaker as purely constituted through language.Instead, Lund proposes a re-theorization of style as “rhetorical language that constructs a social practice and may be turned into particular rhetorical strategies,” depending upon “the particulars of the rhetorical situation, and also, to some extent, the frame and focus of the critic” (50). It is here where Lund argues for an official third topos—“Style as Constitutive”—exploring the inventive side of constitutive rhetoric and how invented styles are ultimately performed. She supports her overall argument by weaving relevant and robust rhetorical analyses throughout her theoretical elaborations across chapters. For example, after taking stock of the contemporary research of rhetorical figures in chapter two, she analyzes how rhetorical figures function in Danish hip-hop style. She does so to “present rhetorical figures and style as significant analytical concepts that are part of a comprehensive theoretical complex” (86). This analysis is a rich, detailed and cohesive foundation for her analysis of constitutive style as argument. She includes rhetorical devices such as figures of speech and metaphor and re-conceptualizes them beyond mere ornament, substitution or value-addition. These views range from the classical to the postmodern, and Lund is able to admirably rise above them and bring clarity to the conceptual ambiguity concerning style and rhetorical devices. By drawing upon the constitutive function of rhetorical figures, Lund shows that strategic devices can be examined, not only as effective means for persuasion, but also as contributing to the very idea, topic, or style created. This is conveyed in her analysis of the Danish hip-hop style, where rhetorical figures are used strategically as textual and argumentative devices within a systematized cultural style.Lund wraps up Part I by examining the development of style in recent rhetorical criticism, noting equivalence between her constitutive style and the constructions of style brought forth by Barry Brummett and Bradford Vivian. However, Lund invokes an analysis of Danish political style to separate and bolster her own constitutive conception. She examines Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s Opening Address on the First Assembly of the Danish Parliament in 2011 to illuminate the amalgamation of rhetorical strategy and rhetorical style. She concludes that Thorning-Schmidt’s style is constitutive of collaboration, creating “the qualities, ethics, and aesthetics of cooperation rhetorically, in its practice” (121). In this way, style is developed as constitutive of rhetorical strategies, essential qualities, and as orientations toward rhetorical situations.Part II of An Argument on Rhetorical Style is dedicated to an elaboration of three critical perspectives that may be adopted when analyzing rhetorical styles: feminine, provocative, and speechwriting. The chapters include critical analyses from the three perspectives. Lund argues for the significance of constitutive style as a theoretical and critical construct, designating provocative style as a critical concept comprising argumentative stylistic devices in an interpretive frame, feminine style as a flawed rhetorical strategy, and speechwriting as dependent on her constitutive framework in order to be analyzed as stylistically constructing meaning, identity and performance at the textual level. Ultimately, Lund is dedicated to enabling the critic with a constitutive topos that recognizes the “rhetorical effects of using style to argumentative and strategic ends” (203). Style is thus constitutive of “so-called substantial qualities such as meaning, ideas, argumentation, political action, cultural values, identity, and gender” (208).Marie Lund has synthesized the work on style in rhetoric and related fields and has added to the tradition her own construct, “constitutive style.” An Argument on Rhetorical Style covers the full range of what is known about rhetorical style and advances the scholarship in admirable, pragmatic and analytical fashion. Future scholars can now adopt this new framework to further engage rhetorical style beyond the feminine, provocative, and speechwriting—something Lund was unable to fully accomplish in this comprehensive work. The limited number of critical perspectives expounded upon in Part II warrants closer attention and further contribution. Overall, the theory and critical application of constitutive style provides scholars from different critical approaches with an important, comprehensive take on rhetorical style.

ABSTRACT In this essay, I examine two epideictic artifacts from the Roman Principate, The Res Gestae Divi Augusti and the summi viri, arguing Augustus used them to reshape the model of a good leader, in part, by emphasizing contributing to the built environment of the city. Additionally, the public and visual nature of these artifacts made them highly accessible to those outside of the Roman elite, who may have sought social mobility through the imperial bureaucracy allowing for more diverse participation in the Roman government. I close by considering the influence of classical exemplars on U.S. civic spaces.

O’Connell’s Rhetoric of Seeing joins a growing list of titles interested in restoring performance and visuality to our understanding of ancient Greek culture and, especially, political and legal culture. This work distinguishes itself through its limited focus on the rhetorical function of seeing and visuality in extant forensic speeches. Each chapter addresses a different kind of seeing, often beginning with an overview of the relevant secondary literature, then considering other ancient genres or fields—Plato and Aristotle, poetry or history, medical or rhetorical treatises, and finally examining two or three important or representative examples from legal speeches. O’Connell divides the work into three “kinds” of seeing.First, he looks at what the audience can literally see. Part 1, “Physical Sight,” considers examples of visual bias concerning the physical appearance of litigants or others. This includes familiar arguments from probability (eikos) based on appearance: one need only look at Antigenes to know that he could not have overpowered Pantainetos (Demosthenes 37, Against Pantainetos); a glance at the pensioner’s disability and we can see that the charge of hubris is ridiculous (Lysias 31, For the Disabled Man). It is surprising here that O’Connell does not do more with the visual aspect of eikos arguments, which are said to have begun with Hermes’ infantile appeal to his own youth in his defense speech against Apollo: “Do I look like a cattle driver to you, a burly fellow?” (Hymn to Hermes 265). This is a central and well-trod aspect of ancient rhetorical theory that seems to call out for inclusion and that could have been given a new layer of interpretation through O’Connell’s visual approach. Counter-probability is rare in legal arguments but equally important in the development of rhetorical theory and with similar implications for visual rhetoric. The strong (or young) man who asserts that he would not have assaulted the weak (or old) man because he would be the first suspected depends in part upon similarly visible features of his person (Antiphon 2.2.3; cf. Aristotle 2.24.10–11).The final chapter of Part 1 takes up issues of movement and gesture, with references to gesture in Plato and Aristotle, a brief review of physiognomy, and then a discussion of Aeschines’ widely studied Against Timarkhos. There is brief mention of the rhetorical cannon of delivery or hupokrisis and the recommendations of Cicero, Quintilian, and Dionysius and more recent work on categories of gesture by Karsouris and Hughes, but O’Connell does not take up the rhetorical canon of delivery (hupokrisis) in depth. His discussion of delivery faces the same problems that most scholars face: there simply is no good way to talk about it as a general category. Either atomize the body to talk about hands, then faces, then movement, or settle for vague gestural and expressive categories and recommendations: modest and appropriate or excessive and inappropriate. Attending to specific cases and speeches is often more successful. O’Connell’s discussion of Aeschines’ speech Against Timarkhos goes further toward demonstrating his overall thesis than do his general comments.Second, we can observe the language of visuality in the speech itself, when the speaker asks the audience to look at something literally and directly as visual evidence, or figuratively or indirectly through terms of demonstration, display, and witnessing. Part 2, “The Language of Demonstration and Visibility,” looks at terms of seeing in the orations: deiknumi (demonstrate or display) and its variants (apodeixis, epideixis, endeixis, etc.), phaneros and phainomai (visible) and their variants (kataphanēs, apophainō, etc.), and martus (witness) and its variants. Chapter3 considers the language of display and witnessing, where speakers seek to prove their case by describing what has been shown and seen by witnesses, or where they demand witnesses to prove what has been asserted. “How else,” says Antiphon in On the Chorus Boy, “can I make true things trustworthy” except through the consistent affirmation of witnesses who were present? (Antiphon 6.29). This section is valuable for bringing into focus the centrality of visibility and sight to notions of truth, a factor that can easily be lost in translations. Thus, the speaker of On the Chorus Boy emphasizes not only that he was appointed a counselor and entered the council-house as such, but that he was seen (horōntes) and was visible (phaneros) doing so. O’Connell does not claim, but he enables one to conclude, that the infamous dichotomy between truth and probability in rhetorical theory typically devolves into these two kinds of seeing: what has been witnessed (and is therefore true) and what the situation “looks like” to the audience (and must be probable).Included here is a section on medical and philosophical interest in the visible as an epistemological link to the invisible. O’Connell quotes Anaxoagoras’ maxim, “Visible things are the face of things which are unclear” (101). This could lead to a discussion of the complex and rhetorically important doctrine of signs as tools of rhetorical argument. Instead, O’Connell moves on in chapter four to discuss how speakers use the language of visibility and demonstration to describe arguments. This, argues O’Connell, places jurors into the position of virtual witnesses themselves of something publicly known, as it was known that some grain dealers had been changing their prices over the course of a day (Lysias 22, Against the Grain Dealers). Or they are witnesses of arguments as demonstrations (epideixō). Speakers contrast what the opponent simply says (legei) with what the speaker will “demonstrate in an evident manner” (110). The language of display is thus used to differentiate mere telling from showing. This reference to visual metaphors for the persuasive effects of argument suggests a larger connection with rhetorical argument generally and the role of vision therein.Third, we can attend to imagination as internal sight, or what O’Connell calls “shared spectatorship,” when speakers “try to make the jurors visualize their version of events and accept it as true” (123). This includes a discussion of techniques of vivid description like enargeia, hyptyposis, or ekphrasis via detailed description. O’Connell looks specifically at described scenes of civic suffering, as when Lycurgus describes the panic after the Athenian defeat at Chaeronea. Shared spectatorship can also occur through the construction of “internal audiences—characters in a narrative who witness what is being described and whose reaction can function as a prompt and model for the jury, as when, in the speech Against Diogeiton (Lysias 32), the speaker recounts Diogeiton’s daughter speaking to the family about her father’s embezzlement and lying (150). Visualization can also be heightened through deictic pointing to the persons in court whose actions or suffering is being described, fusing what is physically seen (demonstratio ad oculo) with what is imagined (deixis ad phantasma): “this man here they seized and tied to the pillar” (Lysias fr. 279, 155). This takes us back to the beginning, which addressed seeing in performance space itself. This last section was for me the most interesting and informative, and it seemed the most widely applicable to forensic, and indeed all genres of oratory. Here too, I saw connections to a basic category of rhetorical discourse: narrative and narrative theory, to notions of realism and verisimilitude, to the conjuring of story worlds and the work of narrative inference.Certainly, anyone interested in visual and spatial rhetorics, bodily rhetoric, performance, and related topics will want to be familiar with O’Connell’s work. I found much to admire in every chapter, and more so as the book advanced to later sections and chapters. At the same time, in each section I found myself thinking about some clear and relevant connections to fundamentals of rhetorical theory—theories of probability and signs, of argument and narrative—that the work brushed up against but did not explore. Of course, O’Connell writes as a classicist, not a rhetorician, and we cannot expect any work to follow up every thread that it pulls on, particularly those outside the author’s bailiwick. So, we might rather say that this work promises to amply repay the attention of scholars of rhetorical history and theory for its insights into the operation of sight and seeing—physical, lexical, and imaginary—in Attic forensic speeches.

ABSTRACT The Panathenaicus is often referred to as one of the weakest and most enigmatic of Isocrates’ orations. It has been criticized for lacking innovation, coherence, and rhetorical style. Furthermore, it concludes with a curious use of dialogue otherwise foreign to Isocrates. In this article, I read the dialogue alongside the apparently digressive proemium and argue not only for the speech’s internal unity, but for its creativity and intellectual complexity. I demonstrate how the Panthenaicus connects Isocrates’ Panhellenic project with his civic-minded paideia in a way that simultaneously identifies Academic philosophy and attempts to subordinate it to Isocratean philosophia.

The University of Oxford Press has recently published two books on rhetoric, Michel Meyer’s (Chaïm Perelman’s successor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles) What is Rhetoric and Martin Camper’s Arguing Over Texts. Meyer and Camper build from the writings of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and rhetoricians to develop the role of questions in rhetoric (Meyer) and stasis theory (Camper). That both books, published by one of the leading academic presses in the world, feature a recovery and a modern renovation of the rhetorical tradition marks a potentially exciting moment in the contemporary history of rhetoric. Camper’s book is but one of several illustrations of a renaissance in rhetorical history. Camper follows the line of argument set forth by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbechts-Tyteca in their New Rhetoric Project and Douglas Walton in his “new dialectic.” They chronicle the origins, development, and fall of an ancient rhetorical concept and then engage in its restoration. Similarly, Martin Camper tells the history of the origins, development, and fall of stasis theory, creating as a result a compelling exigence for a “systematically, theoretically grounded method for understanding and analyzing patterns of interpretative disputes and how those disputes are resolved” (3).Camper has developed a new interpretative stasis that complements the new rhetoric and dialectic. He has, with success, revived “ancient rhetorical theory to think about and solve modern problems” (3). Toward this end, he has offered scholars of rhetoric a gift: a modern method of “understanding and analyzing patterns of interpretative disputes” (3). Camper has read the ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians with care, calling on select passages from Aristotle, Cicero, Hermagoras, Quintilian, and other Greek and Roman rhetoricians to ground his new interpretive stases. Because the rhetorical problems humans face recur, as do rhetorical situations, the theoretical insights Camper draws from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Hermagoras of Temnos’s On Stases: A Manual for Declamation, Cicero’s De Inventione, the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, and Quintilian’s The Orator’s Education on stasis theory are strikingly relevant and helpful in the twenty-first century. Camper acknowledges the excellent work done by Fahnestock, Secor, and other modern scholars on stasis theory, building out of their contributions a truly novel system of six interpretative stases: AmbiguityDefinitionLetter versus spiritConflicting passagesAssimilationJurisdictionCamper’s illustrations of these interpretative stases are wide ranging, including a controversy involving climate-change scientists and the claim they had used deceitful practices; a truly insightful analysis of Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, which provoked significant controversy during Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency; the Supreme Court ruling on gun control in District of Columbia v. Heller; a consideration of Phillis Wheatley’s poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and others. His use of the interpretative stases introduced in Arguing Over Text to analyze critically passages from the Hebrew and Christian sacred texts stand out as exceptionally cogent. Camper’s new interpretative stases allow for sensitive and astute readings of these sacred texts, fulfilling his promise to provide a model of interpretative stases that effectively joins hermeneutics with rhetoric.Camper devotes chapters five and eight to an explanation of how his interpretative stases work using an extended illustration drawn from the Christian Bible. Passages from I Corinthians and II Timothy, Camper notes, are deployed by some within the Christian faith community to justify prohibitions against women preaching and speaking in church. Camper considers the outbreak of arguments between and among Christians about the meaning of these and other passages and explains how the stases of jurisdiction, ambiguity, definition, letter versus spirit, conflicting passages, and assimilation can be used to explain the interpretative disagreements. These interpretative stases “are ordered, with disagreements moving from jurisdiction, to ambiguity, and then definition, and finally to either letter versus spirit, conflicting passages, or assimilation” (165). The dispute within the Christian faith community over the role of women preaching and speaking in church is better understood as a result of Camper’s application of these ordered interpretative stases.Camper has a strong command of Christian theology and sacred texts, which allows him to trace with expertise the trajectories of the arguments. The arguments about women preaching and speaking in church he considers are those expressed by committed Christians who share a commitment to the authority of the Bible. Yet, because the passages in the Bible addressing the topic of women preaching and speaking elicit different interpretations in the Christian faith community, Camper’s stases constitute a taxonomy that describes and explains, but does not seek to judge, the disagreement. As Camper explains, the dispute takes place primarily within the “letter versus spirit,” “conflicting passages,” and “assimilation” interpretative stases.That members of the same faith tradition draw different interpretations from a shared sacred text underscores Camper’s wisdom in his claim that ambiguity “is the archetypal interpretative issue that readers face when they encounter a text: How does one decide between two or more competing readings of the same passage?” (16). The background, experience, and aspirations of those who interpret sacred scripture will significantly influence how the Christian Bible is understood, a point Camper develops. Humans will disagree about textual interpretations, even those with shared values and common texts, because they approach a communal text from different experiences and backgrounds to fetch out meaning of the same passage. There is, as a result, an essential and even a foundational ambiguity at the core of most sacred texts including the Bible and secular texts, like the US Constitution.Fortunately, Camper resist the temptation to view ambiguity as the ruling feature of textual interpretation. His interpretative stases can help those who must make judgments about conflicting interpretations of textual passages. Using the “letter versus spirit,” “conflicting passages,” and “assimilation” stases, the reader draws the conclusion from Camper’s neutral assessment of the arguments that the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians and II Timothy did not intend a full-scale prohibition of women preaching and speaking in church, that the spirit of Paul’s message on women is inconsistent with the particular passages cited by those who support a prohibition based on his words, and that there are passages in Paul’s letters that contradict and qualify the prohibitions found in I Corinthians and II Timothy.Camper stays true to his promise that he is “not interested in how one might arrive at a valid reading of a text … and does not offer a method for doing so” (11). The interpretative stases he offers are not “designed to offer a theory of proper reading practices,” and he provides “no normative judgments about the validity of any of the interpretations or supporting arguments offered in this book” (11). In Arguing Over Texts, Camper informs his reader that his book purposefully “sidesteps questions of valid interpretations” (11). While it is important to step back and sidestep questions of valid interpretations to understand how interpretative stases work, if Camper’s new interpretative stasis theory is to evolve beyond the goal of describing interpretative disagreements, it will need to step directly into questions of valid interpretations, normative standards, and issues of justice. To this end, the next step in the study of interpretative stases might be for Camper and other scholars of rhetoric to pair the wisdom of the ancients on stasis theory with contemporary research on argument and decision making. This might involve the research of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber on argumentation and reason, Daniel Kahneman and Paul Slovic on system-one and -two thinking, and Robin Gregory on structured decision making. This research provides insights on valid readings of texts, reaching normative judgments, and joining values to action. Regardless, Camper’s new interpretative stasis theory constitutes an important recovery and renovation of a key rhetorical concept.

The original research of Johnstone and Graff on the bouleuteria of ancient Greece and their physical and acoustic features will, I predict, have a significant impact on future work in the history of rhetoric. Of equal importance to me is their gathering together in one easy view the site plans and reconstructions—in some cases three-dimensional reconstructions and interior views—of Greek council houses. Though students of ancient Greek rhetoric will be familiar with the functions of the council house, this will be for most the first opportunity to view this collection of council-house plans and reconstructions in close proximity. This collection and arrangement of images constitute an argument for a deliberate and principled evolution in the architecture of council-houses, from the mid-sixth-century structures at Olympia (Johnstone and Graff, Figures 6–7c) and Athens (Johnstone and Graff, 1a and 1b) to the second-century curvilinear structures at Athens and Miletos (Johnstone and Graff, Figures 17a–21b). Their essay demonstrates nothing less than the invention of a specifically rhetorical space, parallel to the development of deliberative arenas like the Pnyx.We shouldn’t let the current ubiquity of the semicircular, banked theatral area obscure or diminish for us the significance of this invented spatial configuration and rhetorical technology. Today, this form is ubiquitous in lecture halls, movie theaters, playhouses, churches, and assembly halls around the world, but it was for the Greeks a significant achievement and a rhetorical one, as Johnstone and Graff’s essay makes clear. Its underlying purpose was the collection, arrangement, and display of a collectivity—the creation of a people—for mutual regard through political deliberation in service to the city. I mean here to invoke both constitutive rhetoric (Charland) and the social imaginary (Castoriadis). Rhetorical spaces like the council house were instrumental in constituting the polis as an imagined, known, and valued entity.The Greeks, of course, had a name for what Johnstone and Graff have brought together for us. They called something collected and arranged so that it could be easily or clearly seen in one view, eusynoptos. As a result of Johnstone and Graff’s essay, the historical development of the Greek council house as a distinctly rhetorical space becomes eusynoptos. I might then coin the term eusynoptic to name the effect of collecting and positioning objects so that they can be easily seen, and so that the principle underlying their orchestration can be clearly understood. A eusynoptic image, scene, or perspective features a collection of otherwise disparate items deliberately selected and gathered, and strategically arranged for complete visibility of all items within a 180 degree radius. A scene so configured generates in the spectator a clear and rapid comprehension of its implicit rationale. What is eusynoptos is not simply easy to see at a glance, it has been rendered so in a way that demonstrates and illustrates its controlling idea.Graff and Johnstone’s essay makes immediately clear to me that the underlying principle and implicit rationale governing the historical development of bouleuteria from the sixth century to the second century BC was itself eusynoptic. Greek cities and Greek architects crafted and refined their bouleutêria to highlight the ability of both speakers and audiences to easily attend to and comprehend at a glance the collective—the city as its citizenry—and the issue before them in deliberation, and they did so to highlight this very mutual co-presence, to make plain to the council the importance of seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard, by speaker and spoken to alike. I suspect that the rhetorical importance of eusynoptics has till now escaped our attention because its disparate applications have not been collected or arranged.Eusynoptic techniques are tools of arrangement and subordination, of hypotaxis out of parataxis, of bringing the many into one: one view, one principle of organization, one controlling idea or purpose. Such a goal might seem mundane to the modern world, where Aristotle’s rules of identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle go without saying, where hierarchical rules of composition are universally taught, and where Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself” remains an eccentric view. But ancient Greeks even into the Roman age regularly entertained incompatible or inconsistent ideas or images in close proximity, what Perry calls “the capacity to see things separately,” and what Veyne refers to as “the Balkanization of the mind” (92). Versnel notes the paratactic character of much Greek literature as “the linking of disparate and not seldom contradictory or incompatible parts and the (apparent?) lack of a uniting and binding central concept or theme” (214). In the same way, Greek city development has often seemed “unsystematic and irregular” (Wycherly 7). Eusynoptic bouleutêria and similar spaces catalyzed then and demonstrate now a Greek commitment to principles of organization, subordination, and comprehension. The elements of eusynoptics are worth reviewing here.Keeping or having something in view implies keeping it in mind and affording it some attention and regard, respect, or affection. And, by contrast, keeping it out of sight implies keeping it “out of mind.” When the ancient hero Diocles fled from Corinth to Thebes to escape his mother’s incestuous love, his lover Philolaus followed him to Thebes, but retained his love for his home city, Corinth. In death, their tombs reflected their allegiances: “Even now people still show the tombs (of Diocles and Philolaus), in full view of each other, and one of them fully open to view in the direction of the Corinthian country but the other one not” (Aristotle Politics, 168–169, 1274a35).Greek homes turned inward around a central courtyard, but kept external windows high and small, so that its members might be visible to each other, but not to outsiders (Phoca and Valavanis 26–29). And after it was partially destroyed by the Persians, the ruins of the old temple of Athena (archaios neos) were left visible on the Athenian Acropolis, to preserve a memory of Persian hubris and Athenian suffering, and a desire for revenge.1 Greeks expressed their values through the planned visibility provided by architectural spaces.Arranging social space to enable mutual visibility was also a goal of city planning. Aristotle limits the population of a city to the number that can be easily seen in one view: “The best limiting principle for a state is the largest expansion of the population with a view to self-sufficiency that can well be taken in in one view” (Aristotle Politics 558–559, 1326b23). In like manner, the city territory should also (from one privileged vantage point) “be well able to be taken in at one view” (558–559, 1327a). This implied not only the ability to see the physical city from one position, but the capacity for the citizens to gather as a collective, to see and be seen by each other.By contrast, a city or a citizenry too large or diffuse to be easily seen could not be comprehended, and thus could neither act wisely nor be managed well. Isocrates complains that “Athens is so large and the multitude of people living here is so great, that the city does not present to the mind an image easily grasped or sharply defined” (Antidosis 282–283 §172). It would be the task of structures like the Athenian council house to make such an image possible and useful.Through its visibility, a person, structure, or text could be grasped, regarded, remembered, observed, and managed. A space or place could be called to mind and taken to heart, including all the characters, actions, and events that it contained and made possible. For these reasons, the Greeks planned structures, precincts, and even whole towns mindful of how, and from where, they could be seen. In particular, Greek spatial planning often valued the full and contiguous visibility of structures within a sacred precinct or area, such that no structure obstructed another and no spatial gaps were left open, so as to maximize visibility of all structures in the smallest possible space (within a 180-degree field of vision), with the exception of the path of approach open to the surrounding countryside, called the “sacred way” (Doxiadis 5).For example, the Sanctuary of Athena at Pergamon was built so that each of its elements—the stoa, altar, temple, and column—was visible within the peripheral vision of a visitor at the entrance. From this perspective, every object filled in the gap left by the other objects, without any one element obstructing any other, presenting one contiguous scene. This principle applies to a wide range of sacred precincts and urban areas across the Greek world.The same principle applied to city planning. Pergamon was laid out so that all the important structures could be fully seen in one view from the theater stage. The elevation of the hillside made it possible to cluster public buildings so that all were visible without overlap. When the theater was in attendance, a speaker or performer would see the city (its citizenry) as well as the city (its important public structures) together at a glance (Wycherly 28–29). The indoor square and round bouleuteria utilized the same combination of elevation, contiguity, and positioning, albeit with a more uniform geometry, the more clearly to express an aesthetic and egalitarian ideal.An understanding of eusynoptics reveals that it would behoove anyone who sought to know (and control) his city—like a prospective tyrant—to keep its people (and their actions and associations) within clear view, and arranging “for the people in the city to always be visible and to hang about the palace gates, for thus there would be least concealment about what they are doing and they would get into the habit of being humble” (Aristotle, Politics 460–461, 1313b7).If Aristotle’s insight applies to Athens, then it is possible that Peisistratus worked to secure his tyranny at Athens by arranging to have the people “hang about” his palace gates (Johnstone and Graff, Figures 1a and 1b) so that they would “always be visible” to him and would “get in the habit of being humble.”The Peisistratids selected a flat area northwest of the Acropolis to build their new agora. At the southwest corner of this open space, a palace is built (Johnstone and Graff, Figure 2a). To the north, an altar to the twelve gods is set up. To the east is a fountain house where women could collect fresh water. The Panathenaic way ran past these two structures, toward the Acropolis. A large open space was available for political, sporting, and theatrical events and for market stalls, creating a eusynoptic gathering place (Camp 32–36).The resulting triangular shape embodied Aristotle’s principle of eusynoptic surveillance and provided a model for the shape of the democratic Pnyx. Like the agora, the Pnyx was an essentially triangular arena built for eusynoptic gathering of the city anchored by the bema rather than the palace complex.2 The logic of eusynoptic parataxis that shaped the bouleuteria, as Johnstone and Graff demonstrate, also shaped the agora, the Pnyx, and, as we’ll see, the polis.Isocrates’ complaint notwithstanding, Athens, too, was laid out so that the city was visible from at least one eusynoptic vantage point without any one important element obstructing any other. In its earliest form, a speaker at the Pnyx could see in one view all the citizens gathered together (Pnyx, from puknos, means “packed” or crowded) while, at the same time, the assembled citizens could see easily at a glance the whole city laid out before them (Pnyx I, see Thompson 134–138 and plate 18a; orientation, see Camp 4–5, images 1,3). From the Pnyx hillside, the late fifth-century spectator could see, from the far right (southeast): the (unfinished) temple of Olympian Zeus, the theater of Dionysus and Odeon, the Acropolis, and Parthenon. A citizen looking to the Parthenon from the Pnyx would see the temple of Athena Niké (just to the left of and jutting out in front of the Propylaia) nested inside of the larger Parthenon further back.Just to the left of the Acropolis, spectators could see the Areopagus and then, directly in front of them (on a line running through the center of the Pnyx), the western edge of the agora and its important structures, including the stoae, council house, temples and altar. Immediately to the west was the temple of Hephaestus, the Kerameikos, the Dipylon gate (along with the Sacred Gate and Sacred Way to Eleusis) and the Piraeus gate. This contiguous arc of structures asserted, like the curvilinear bouleuterion, albeit with less mathematical precision, that Athens as place and as idea belonged to the political participants who could see it.Visible beyond the city lay the country and many rural demes. In Aristophanes’ Acharnians (25), as Dicaeopolis sits in the Pnyx, he gazes upon his fields out in the rural deme of Acharnai, and longs for peace. In this way, an audience would see in one view the entire polis: all the landmarks of the urban center and the rural demes that made up Athens, even as the speaker saw the entire city in the form of the citizens themselves.Tellingly (but not surprisingly), when, with Spartan aid, the Thirty Tyrants overthrew the democracy, one of their first objectives was to reverse the direction of the Pnyx. The idea may have been to prevent the people from seeing (and keeping in mind) the city which they were voting to preserve and protect (Plutarch §19, 99).This principle of a visible array, selected, gathered, and arranged so that it could be seen “easily at a glance” as an organic whole, did not only guide the construction of bouleuteria and other structures, it also shaped the evolution of rhetorical artistry through the spatial metaphors applied to it. That is, the spatial logic of the bouleuteria also provided a fundamental principle of rhetoricStyle, says Aristotle, should be periodic, “and by period, I mean a sentence that has a beginning and an end in itself and a magnitude that can be easily grasped (eusunopton)” (Aristotle Rhetoric 386–387, 1409a–b). Aristotle and Demetrius alike explain with the image of runners on a circular running track: “For at the very beginning of their race the end of the course is already before their eyes, hence the name “periodos,” an image drawn from paths which go around and are in a circle” (On Style 354–355, §11, cf Rhetoric 386–7, 1409a).Plots (of dramatic and epic poems) too should have magnitude, with actions selected and arranged so that the arc of the whole can be seen in one view: “So just as with our bodies and with animals, beauty requires magnitude, but magnitude that allows coherent perception (eusunopton), likewise plots require length, but length that can be coherently remembered” (Aristotle Poetics 56–57, 1451a5, cf 118-119, 1459b; and contrast 116–117, 1459a30–35).Most importantly, speeches should convey an argument in a way that is easily comprehended at a glance. One function of enthymemes, says Aristotle, is to help a lay audience (untrained in dialectical reasoning) more easily see (sunoran; 22, 1357a) a long chain of reasoning in one view (Rhetoric 22–23, 1357a and 288–289, 1395b).3 A well-selected series of enthymemes can tie up even a sprawling narrative nicely and make clear its underlying rationale.Even at the outset of rhetoric, Corax, after gathering the people and his thoughts together, eusynoptically began “to advise the demos and to speak as though telling a story, and after these things to summarize the argument and to call to mind concisely what had gone before, and to bring before their eyes at a glance what had been said to the demos (Rabe 12–13, italics inserted).I am suggesting that the bouleuteria collected by Johnstone and Graff demonstrate eusynoptics to be central not only to civic structures and spaces, but to rhetorical artistry as a whole. In texts as much as in spaces, paratactic arrangement like that perfected in late bouleuteria proves crucial to persuasion.

The bouleutêrion (the council house or assembly hall) was the meeting place of the council of citizens in ancient Greece under democracy. The architecture of bouleutêria has been less studied than has the architecture of theaters and religious monuments. The standard study remains William McDonald’s The Political Meeting Places of the Greeks (Johns Hopkins University Press), published in 1943. The study by Christopher Lyle Johnstone and Richard J. Graff that follows here builds on McDonald’s work but analyzes bouleutêria from a distinctly rhetorical perspective: in “Situating Deliberative Rhetoric in Ancient Greece: The Bouleutêrion as a Venue for Oratorical Performance,” they study bouleutêria from the perspective of places of oratorical performance. Theirs is the first study of oratorical sites in ancient Greece that includes both computer-generated reconstructions of the sites, enabling scholars to evaluate sightlines, and technical acoustical analysis, permitting judgments of what was likely heard from particular locations in a particular bouleutêrion. The increased interest in the material conditions of oratorical performances among rhetoric scholars and the uniqueness of Johnstone and Graff’s approach led to the decision to devote virtually this entire issue to their study. The responses to Johnstone and Graff by two scholars, Peter O’Connell, Classics, University of Georgia and author of The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory (University of Texas Press, 2017), and James Fredel, English, Ohio State University and author of Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Performance from Solon to Demosthenes (Southern Illinois, 2006) complement Johnstone and Graff’s study.

Shannon Walters’ Rhetorical Touch stretches the consideration of embodied rhetorics to embrace the sense of touch through both classical rhetoric and contemporary disability studies. Key to Walters’ project is a rereading of Aristotle’s pisteis—logos, pathos, and ethos—through the sense of touch. To examine the productions of a variety of disabled rhetors, she draws upon rhetoricians from Empedocles to Burke, on phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and on disability-studies scholars such as Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Brueggemann. This broad, disciplinary-crossing quality of her scholarship makes sense because she situates touch as “a sense that transcends bodily boundaries; it demands an approach that also transcends boundaries” (8). Though her project is solidly within the realm of disability studies, it can and should affect how we do scholarship in rhetoric.Through an understanding of Empedocles’ sense of logos, Walters argues that touch is the broadest means of persuasion, and, furthermore, that it is the sense that ties all humans together, those who are disabled as well as those who are temporarily able-bodied. In so doing, Walters calls for a radical repositioning of all rhetorical appeals as fundamentally rooted in the sense of touch. This is the most radical and fascinating claim of the book, and it holds up for both individual rhetors as well as amorphous rhetors who are harder to identify. Walters not only uses this understanding of rhetoric to guide examination of Helen Keller, Temple Grandin, and Nancy Mairs, but also in her examination of the birth of the Disability Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s through the 1977 demonstrations for the enforcement of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. At times, her broad historical and theoretical approach weaves together unevenly, but the overarching argument’s contribution to reimagining pisteis is solid and perhaps even groundbreaking.The first chapter examines the tactile experience of Helen Keller’s rhetorical productions through a careful consideration of her texts, the context in which they were produced, and the theoretical implications of her practice. A facet of this chapter that I found particularly relevant and insightful was Walter’s examination of the doubt of authenticity and individual authorship that accompanied all of Keller’s writings. Walters reads the accusations of plagiarism against Keller as stemming directly from Keller’s relationship to communication as tactile and inherently collaborative. Though Keller is an exceptional example of these facets of rhetorical production, we all draw on sources we have absorbed unknowingly, on collaboration with present and distant others, and on a tactile experience. Walters argues we thus must reshape rhetoric to account for this dynamic. To do so, she literally redraws the traditional rhetorical triangle into a doubled triangle, forming either a diamond with an entire side “touching,” representing both traditional ethos and her reinterpretation through mêtis, or an angular and precarious hourglass, intersecting at the point of two interpretations of logos—Aristotle’s and Empedocles’.Chapter two examines the demonstrations by disability activists demanding enforcement of Section 504, simultaneously continuing Walters’ theoretical underpinnings, which rest on an understanding of rhetorical identification largely dependent on Burke, but shaped through theories of touch by Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, and Deleuze. Walters identifies a key problem with rhetorical models of identification: they “do not accommodate the identities of people with disabilities or identifications made possible by the lived experience of disability” (62). Walters’ retheorization seeks to accommodate identification: “Specifically, identification via sensation and touch possesses the potential to reform and reshape the process of identification” (64). Walters suggests Deleuze’s concept of the “fold” as a model of Burkean identification that includes division. Though I find this chapter fascinating and ambitious, I’m left wondering why we must accommodate identification at all. This seems a retrofitting strategy and potentially less radical than an outright dismissal, or even a redefinition, as Walters does so well in her reimagining of pisteis.In the next three chapters, Walters molds the rhetorical triangle into something radically different from what our first-year composition textbooks taught us in order to be inclusive of touch and thus of disabled rhetors. Instead of Aristotle’s autonomous, rational logos, in chapter three, Walters puts forward Empedocles’ felt sense of logos, which is touch-based and enables a facilitated model of rhetoric. She finds this extralinguistic approach to logos more appropriate for rhetors with psychological disabilities and suggests that, “Empedocles’ sense of logos, felt in the heart as much as exhibited by one’s cognition, is physical, psychological, and embodied” (98). Walters then applies this reading of felt logos to online support forums for schizophrenia and depression, in which participants explicitly discuss touch and the lack of it in their lives. This reading is innovative, though perhaps limited in this online form.In the following chapter, Walters pushes her readers to reexamine how we presume an ethos that is neurotypical. She suggests, “Simply put, autistic people are seen as ethos-less when viewed through a narrowly medical or pathological lens” (113). This pathological lens casts autists as unable to identify and connect with others and therefore unable to construct ethos. In this chapter, Walters is doing her most expansive work to develop lines of thought already established in considerations of disability and of bodily knowing within our discipline, such as those developed by Debra Hawhee and Jay Dolmage, who both look to mêtis as an alternative knowledge production within rhetoric that is also based in bodily adaptation. Walters builds directly on this scholarship in order to suggest an approach to ethos that is neuro-diverse: “I redefine mêtis as a tactile relationship of embodied cognition between people and their environments that supports a method of character formation not based on traditional notions of ability and neurotypicality” (118). In this chapter, Walters makes a significant contribution to disability rhetoric as a field by showing how mêtis can accommodate those who use facilitated communication as well as those who are neuro-divergent and may use touch in nontypical ways to build trust and character.In the next chapter, Walters articulates how facility with kairos can make new forms of pathos possible: “I redefine kairos though special attention to the sense of touch, showing how kairos operates tactilely to create new emotional and physical connections among bodies in close proximity and contact” (145). Walters uses the term “redefine” in this chapter and the last in ways that may lead a reader to think she has no regard for rhetorical history. Quite to the contrary, Walters is changing perspective and illuminating a connection to touch that has always been related to the terms she is deploying. For instance, Walters notes that in the first uses of the term kairos, in Homer and Hesiod, the term is “nearly synonymous with ‘disability,’ indicating places of bodily vulnerability and impairment that are penetrable tactilely” (153). Here, Walters traces an etymology that classically may have worked to further disadvantage those who are impaired, but that in current rhetorical scholarship can call attention to the tactile and kairotic ways of employing pathos, which disabled rhetors, such as Nancy Mairs, Harriet McBryde Johnson, and John Hockenberry, have opened as rhetorical possibilities.Her final two chapters work to conclude her reexamination of rhetoric through the sense of touch. Chapter six explores the possibilities of teaching with haptic technologies. Far from an afterthought, this chapter remains deeply theoretical, engaged in historiography, and pulls together her shape-shifting pisteis within the classroom. Walters leads the reader as she leads her students through a critical investigation of haptic technologies, showing the ableist assumptions embedded within them. Not only is this investigation pertinent to disability studies, but it also models the kind of deep critical analysis we should all be guiding our students toward. Walters’ conclusion reminds us that we are all embedded in haptic technologies and the future of communication technology will only embed us further. As we critically engage technology, we need a lens through which to understand touch, which Walters has provided.Rhetorical Touch is an important contribution to the historiography of rhetoric, to rhetorical theory, to disability studies, and to composition rhetoric. I look forward to seeing how other scholars take up this reshaping of the traditional rhetorical triangle. The only disappointment I can manage to find in the book is the continued adherence to identification. However, Walters provides analytical insight and new perspectives on the tradition that are radical and inclusive of diverse bodies and minds. That is what this book offers to the world of rhetoric.

Johnstone and Graff’s contribution to what they term the “archaeology” of Greek rhetoric is original and significant. By describing the visual and acoustic characteristics of bouleutêrion interiors, they help us to imagine the experiences of both speaker and audience in these spaces. Speeches before boulai could have been performative tours de force. Orators could have taken advantage of the settings to enhance their words’ persuasive force, to present themselves in competition as confident, powerful men, and, perhaps, to generate particular aesthetic effects. Johnstone and Graff’s approach reflects the contemporary trend of trying to situate ancient performance texts within the physical locations for which they were composed. Probably the most successful example of this is Bissera Pentcheva’s work on Hagia Sophia. Pentcheva and her colleagues have demonstrated how the acoustic properties of Hagia Sophia, particularly its reverberation time, would have affected the experiences of hearing and performing hymns, psalms, and the sung sermons known as kontakia during the Justinianic liturgy of the sixth century CE. Hagia Sophia lends itself to this kind of research, since the complete building survives, as does a large and varied corpus of texts written about it or for performance within it. Johnstone and Graff’s project faces the opposite situation. None of the dozens of known bouleutêria survives as anything approaching a complete building, and we have limited specific evidence of what went on within them. This essay considers Johnstone and Graff’s analysis in light of these two challenges.All the bouleutêria Johnstone and Graff discuss are in more-or-less ruined condition. Sufficient remains of the foundations of the Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens survive for us to reconstruct the buildings’ dimensions and floor plans, but we have limited evidence about the heights and materials of the walls and roof and the materials of interior surfaces. It is not even clear whether there were wooden benches for the bouleutai to sit on. Other buildings are better preserved. For the bouleutêrion of Miletus, for instance, we know that the seats and walls were of marble and limestone, and we can reconstruct the exterior walls’ height with reasonable accuracy. Even for the best preserved bouleutêria, fundamental architectural details, including the presence of windows and the materials and pitch of the roof, are matters of speculation. The state of the buildings has important consequences for acoustic analysis, as the example of reverberation time will show.Reverberation time is a measure of how long it takes a sound to die away. Some materials, such as cloth, absorb sound and hasten its decay. Other materials, such as brick or solid wood, reflect sound and prolong its reverberation. To calculate the reverberation time of any room, therefore, we need to know the materials and surface area of every surface that sound could encounter within it, including the walls, floor, ceiling, and furniture. We also need to know the volume of the room. This poses a challenge for bouleutêria. The Old Bouleuterion in Athens is a representative example. Since we do not know the height of the Old Bouleuterion, we cannot calculate with certainty its volume or the surface area of its walls and roof. Chips of yellow poros suggest that the walls were of this material, but neither the walls themselves nor traces of any of the interior furniture survive (Thompson 129–132). Accordingly, Johnstone and Graff have to make inferences about the height and the material of interior surfaces in order to calculate reverberation time. They estimate a wall height of 6 m and a roof peak height of 9.3 m. Different heights would change both the volume and surface areas, and so would result in different reverberation times. In Appendix A, Table 1, Johnstone and Graff base their calculations on “absorption coefficients that most closely resemble the building materials used.” As with the height, if we posit different materials, the reverberation times would change. Other measures, including speech intelligibility, also depend on height and materials. The presence or absence of windows can affect acoustic conditions as well. Georgios Karadedos, Vasilios Zafranas, and Panagiotis Karampatzakis, who have calculated the reverberation times of some Greek bouleutêria and ôdeia, although with very different results from Johnstone and Graff, note that open windows in their reconstruction of the Odeion of Aphrodisias would reduce reverberation time by 20 percent. When Johnstone and Graff praise the acoustics of the Old Bouleuterion, therefore, their conclusion is a possibility rather than a certainty. They are referring to their reconstruction of the building rather than the building itself. The same holds for other bouleutêria. For the bouleutêrion at Messene, for instance, Johnstone and Graff’s calculations depend on a reconstructed wall height of 17 m and a roof peak height of 20.3 m. All of Johnstone and Graff’s assumptions are reasonable, but results based on information that we do not know must always be used with caution.Even though Johnstone and Graff’s results may be uncertain in particulars, they point to conclusions that are generally correct. Greek bouleutêria, especially those whose shapes resemble the Old or New Bouleuterion in Athens, were effective performance spaces for both visual and acoustic reasons. The Greeks themselves seem to have appreciated the functionality of the Old and New Bouleuteria, since, of all the monumental civic and religious buildings of fifth- and fourth-century Athens, their architecture was the most consistently imitated. This contrasts with another Athenian building that hosted oratorical performances, the Odeion of Pericles. Modeled after Xerxes’ tent, it did not become the model for later ôdeia (Camp 347), perhaps because its many columns and sloping, peaked roof impeded visibility and resulted in poor acoustics, especially compared to the simple box-like shapes of the Old and New Bouleuteria.Research on bouleutêria faces a second central challenge besides the scanty archaeological remains. While we know these buildings housed councils of various sorts throughout the Greek world from the archaic through late antique periods, we have little idea of how these councils actually conducted their business. This is particularly true of Hellenistic cities, but it is also true of Classical Athens. We know much about the Athenian boulê’s responsibilities and procedures, but we do not know what the bouleutai did in the buildings we call the Old and New Bouleuteria and what they did elsewhere. The boulê met almost every day. Its published agendas always included the location of the meeting (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 43.3), and that location may have changed often. As Johnstone and Graff note, inscriptions and literary references attest to the Athenian boulê meeting in various places. Similarly, according to Xenophon’s Hellenica 5.2.29, the Theban boulê would meet in a stoa when its usual meeting place on the hill known as the Cadmea was being used for another purpose, and Christopher P. Dickenson (115) infers from two accounts of the same event in Plutarch’s Life of Aratus 40.2–3 and Life of Cleomenes 19.1 that the Corinthian boulê could meet in the Temple of Apollo, even though there was a bouleutêrion in Corinth (Diodorus Siculus 16.65.6).We need to be cautious about references to bouleutêria in ancient sources, since bouleutêrion is both a general and specific term. In Athens, it can refer to the particular buildings that we call the Old and New Bouleuteria, but any other place that any boulê meets is also a bouleutêrion. Hence, there was a bouleutêrion on the Areopagus for the boulê of the Areopagus (Lalonde). Any building where a boulê was meeting could probably be designated a temporary bouleutêrion, just as a stoa could become a dikastêrion while it was being used for trials. Along the same lines, at least some of the buildings designated as bouleutêria would have hosted events besides meetings of the boulê, since, as a general rule, Greek buildings were designed for multiple purposes. As Johnstone and Graff point out, the Old Bouleuterion may have simultaneously housed both the boulê and Athens’ archives. This affects how we think of bouleutêria as venues for oratorical performances. While there can be no question that they did host oratory, we cannot be sure of what else they were used for or how often speeches took place within them, as opposed to alternative meeting places of boulai.By emphasizing oratorical performances in bouleutêria, Johnstone and Graff’s analysis leaves questions about boulê procedure and the buildings’ other purposes unanswered. How often would speakers who were capable of the kind of performances that Johnstone and Graff envision have had the opportunity to speak in bouleutêria? How would the architectural characteristics that made bouleutêria excellent spaces for oratory have affected the other activities that occurred within them, such as subcommittee meetings or debates like the one in Lysias 22, Against the Graindealers, that Johnstone and Graff mention? What was more central to bouleutêria’s roles, their acoustics or the unimpeded sight lines from almost anywhere inside them? In the rest of this essay, I consider Johnstone and Graff’s analysis from the broad perspective of these questions. I will not offer answers, which is probably impossible based on our evidence, but I will show that reconstructions of bouleutêria need to account for other activities just as prominently as for deliberative oratory. Even though Johnstone and Graff do not specifically address other activities, their study points to how bouleutêria would have been more than simply venues for speechmaking. I will focus particularly on Athens, since we know more about the Athenian boulê than the boulai of other cities.Plato’s Gorgias, who surely has Athens in mind, defines rhêtorikê as “the ability to persuade with words dikastai in a dikastêrion, bouleutai in a bouleutêrion, and ekklêsiastai in an ekklêsia, as well as in any other type of political meeting” (452e, my trans.). The Athenian boulê acted as a kind of gatekeeper for the ekklêsia, setting the agenda of topics for each meeting. An item placed on the ekklêsia’s agenda was called a “preliminary resolution,” or probouleuma. Speakers could influence Athenian policy by successfully persuading the bouleutai to pass probouleumata recommending their pet causes. Since the ekklêsia appears to have approved the boulê’s recommendations without changes about half the time (Rhodes 79), a politician who was skilled at manipulating the boulê could wield considerable influence over the policies of Athens. Debates over probouleumata probably attracted the kinds of trained orators that Johnstone and Graff envision taking advantage of the acoustic conditions of the Old and New Bouleuteria. In the Sausage Seller’s description of a chaotic meeting of the boulê in Aristophanes’ Knights, we hear that Paphlagon was “booming with words that struck like thunderbolts” and “hurling mountain crags” at the bouleutai (626–629, my trans.). Although exaggerated for comic effect, this gives us a taste of the kind of oratory that politicians such as Cleon would have practiced before the boulê in the 420s BCE.There were other opportunities for oratorical performance before the boulê besides debates over probouleumata. The boulê had the power to conduct certain types of judicial hearings, most importantly dokimasiai, or “examinations,” of magistrates who were about to take office, as well as of invalids seeking public support. Dokimasiai took the form of trials. The people objecting to the appointment spoke first, and then the prospective officials defended themselves. Of the five surviving speeches that were delivered before the Athenian boulê, four come from dokimasiai (Lys. 16, 24, 26, 31) and one from another type of judicial hearing (Dem. 51). Dokimasiai would have been ideal occasions for what Johnstone and Graff term the “performance of masculine virtue and virtuosity in a competitive culture that prized honor and reputation.” Prospective magistrates and bouleutai had to justify not only their qualifications but also their lifestyles and habits. For instance, in Lysias 16, For Mantitheus, Mantitheus defends his appearance and reputation as an orator and responds to the charge that he served in the cavalry under the Thirty Tyrants.We should not exaggerate the importance of oratory in dokimasiai. Most of the hundreds of hearings the boulê had to conduct each year must have been resolved with rapid approvals or rejections and minimal speechmaking. Furthermore, whenever the boulê acted as a court, we do not know whether it even met in the Old or New Bouleuterion. Pollux 8.86 says that the dokimasiai of archons took place in the Stoa Basileos (Rhodes 36), and the manuscripts of Lysias 31.1 refer to a dikastêrion rather than a bouleutêrion. While the Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens, therefore, seem to have served as venues for oratorical performances during discussions of probouleumata, the boulê seems to have been convened in other places on at least some occasions that may have featured competitive oratory.Even during political debates, prominent politicians could not address the boulê whenever they wished, since only the bouleutai themselves had an absolute right to speak (Rhodes 42–43). As a result, politicians sometimes pursued policy goals through behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Demosthenes (23.9,14), Aeschines (3.125), and the pseudo-Aristotelian Athênainôn Politeia (29.1–3) all describe politicians advancing policies through personal relationships (Rhodes 57). As Josiah Ober has argued, the boulê of the fifth and fourth centuries functioned through a series of interlocking social networks that recognized and relied on individuals’ connections and expertise (142–155). Ober calls this process “knowledge aggregation.” The aggregated knowledge of the boulê and its constituent social networks would have served as a check on the power of rhetoric. When bouleutai voted, their decisions were informed both by the speeches they had heard and by the informed opinions of their expert colleagues. Both the Old and New Bouleuteria, as Johnstone and Graff have reconstructed them, would have facilitated this kind of informed voting. By sitting, or perhaps standing, in what Ober (199–205) calls “inward facing circles,” the bouleutai could have observed each other as they listened to speeches and so reached judgments informed by the reactions of their colleagues. The open space that facilitated oratory would also have encouraged visual communication among listeners and so prevented orators from having too much power.The boulê oversaw many Athenian officials, especially those concerned with finances and the navy. One of the boulê’s most important roles was to supervise monetary transactions. For instance, in the fifth century the boulê observed the presentation of tribute from the allies (Meiggs and Lewis 46), and in the fourth century they watched in the bouleutêrion as the debts of individuals who had paid the money they owed to the state were formally erased from the written record (Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 48.1). Duties such as these required seeing as much as hearing, which again indicates that visibility would have been as important as audibility to the design of Athenian bouleutêria. The open space of the Old and New Bouleuteria probably encouraged small meetings of subcommittees as well as mass viewing, especially if there were movable wooden benches. By the fourth century, the boulê conducted much of its supervisory business through subcommittees (Rhodes 143).The Old and New Bouleuteria in Athens were multipurpose buildings whose design facilitated a range of activities besides oratory. We know much less about the business conducted in bouleutêria outside Athens, but they also seem to have hosted both political oratory and other events, some of which had nothing to do with speaking or governing.Inscriptions and literary references make clear that boulai throughout the Greek-speaking world played an active role in political decisions, sometimes through listening to speeches. Polybius, for instance, describes a debate that took place in 226 or 225 BCE in the koinon, here “shared” or “federal,” bouleutêrion of the Achaean League, which was probably in Aegium, on the Gulf of Corinth. At this meeting, envoys of the Megalopolitans read a letter from the Macedonian king Antigonus Doson and urged the representatives of the league to make an alliance with him, but the general Aratus responded “at length,” urging them to continue acting on their own for the time being. The “crowd applauded” Aratus’ speech and accepted his recommendation (2.50.10–51.1). Polybius also paraphrases a speech of the general Philopoemen given in what was probably the same bouleutêrion in 208 or 207 BCE (11.9.1–9), which criticizes the soldiers of the Achaean League for neglecting their armor and weaponry in favor of fancy dress.By the imperial period, bouleutêria hosted performances besides political oratory, including epideictic oratory and musical concerts. Libanius describes the enthusiastic reception that greeted him when he spoke in the bouleutêrion in his hometown of Antioch in 353 CE (Autobiography 87–89), and Dio of Prusa (19.2–3) describes the performance of a lyre player in the bouleutêrion in Cyzicus sometime between 85 and 95 CE. While Libanius and other epideictic speakers probably benefited from the same architectural conditions that Johnstone and Graff show favored deliberative speakers, a focus on oratory alone does not address whether bouleuêtria would also have been effective performance spaces for singers and instrumentalists. Did the buildings host concerts because their acoustics were good for music as well as speech or simply because they were available?Some bouleutêria accommodated events unrelated to government or to individual performances. To take one example, Josephus tells us that the same building in Tiberias was used both for formal political meetings of the Tiberian boulê, complete with oratory and debates, and as a proseukhê, “prayer-house” or “synagogue” (Life 276–298, Rocca 296–300). Other synagogues of the late Second Temple period seem to have been modeled after Hellenistic bouleutêria such as the ones at Priene and Miletus that Johnstone and Graff discuss (Ma‘oz 41, Rocca 305–310). This suggests that the architectural characteristics that Johnstone and Graff associate primarily with oratory would also have been appropriate for the non-oratorical activities in synagogues, the of the the of the and outside and, especially after public while Johnstone and Graff’s specific results need to be used with their analysis of the performance conditions of bouleutêria how skilled orators could have used these buildings to their in the that a At the same time, Johnstone and Graff’s focus on oratory the of their every speech before a boulê would have been delivered in a bouleutêrion, bouleutai had many responsibilities that did not call for and bouleutêria were used for besides boulê The physical characteristics of bouleutêria in Athens and throughout the Greek-speaking world that Johnstone and Graff would have accommodated a range of besides oratorical including visual small musical performances, and religious based on Johnstone and Graff’s may us how the architecture of bouleutêria would have facilitated or these at the of well late because they were multipurpose buildings to many of civic to and whose an of this essay, and to who my to ancient

ABSTRACT Our understanding of the origins and early development of Greek rhetoric can be enlarged and sharpened by attending to the specific historical, cultural, and material contexts in which it was embedded. We perceive the cultural meanings and physical challenges of Greek rhetorical practice only to the extent that we consider the actual places and spaces in which it unfolded. This study examines and assesses the bouleutêrion (council house) as a venue for oratorical performance in the ancient Greek world, surveying a range of such buildings and describing their historical contexts, physical settings and configurations, and suitability as oratorical venues.

In the field of rhetorical studies, and more often than not in broader traditions of the humanities, nonhuman animals (NHAs) are remanded to epistemological margins in terms of both theory and case. Scholars of rhetoric tend to invoke animalism only when focusing on a human agent’s use of animal metaphors and parasitic tropes as a linguistic act or discursive tactic, or in movement studies, when constituting NHAs as objects of other-directed human activism. Sometimes, NHAs appear as negative foils, as in the illustration of Kenneth Burke’s distinction between human action and animalistic motion, or in the numerous examples of how logos punctuates humans’ rhetorical supremacy and singularity. Philosophically, scholars typically cipher NHAs as “cases in point” to discuss more expansive ethical dimensions of sentience in the service of arguing for the human condition. Technologically, in studies of media culture, NHAs perform as memes or serve as darling accoutrement in YouTube videos designed for human consumptive pleasure. In the end, what we find in the lion’s share (no pun) of humanities scholarship is the de-agentized NHA as a voiceless, silent, inactive, dispassionate, non-communicative, and ancillary object of humans’ rhetorical discourse and material action. (There are exceptions to this treatment in the field of communication studies [see Almiron, Cole, and Freeman, Critical Animal and Media Studies Communication; and the collected essays in Goodale and Black, Arguments about Animal Ethics].)Debra Hawhee’s book, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, responsibly cuts against the tradition of metonymically reducing NHAs to footnotes. Therein, she reanimates the positionality of NHAs as instructive actors in rhetorical theory and rhetorical education. Engaging in pan-historiographical methods, Hawhee brings a new perspective to the NHA-human relationship by centering the ways NHAs have circulated within and among ancient and modern texts not just as complements, but rather as charged inventional resources unto themselves. She explores rhetorical treatises ranging from those by Aristotle and Demetrius to Longinus, Erasmus, and new translations by Lucian and Psellos (among others) to locate how NHAs appear active as zoostylistic teachers.Hawhee does not make the argument that NHAs do rhetoric; instead, her larger claim is that NHAs’ influences outstrip verbal language and compel us to contemplate extra-lingual dimensions of rhetorical energy. In sum, she grounds sensation as a common point between humans and NHAs. The rhetorical history Hawhee traces does not presume, “as most histories of rhetoric do, the centrality of logos as both reason and speech” (11). Rather, her study “stresses energy, bodies, sensation, feeling, and imagination” (11).NHAs have been a part of human existence, and particularly human narratology, since time immemorial. Indeed, as Hawhee deftly points out, in the context of rhetorical theory and rhetorical education, many of us have likely encountered the ways that Aristotle’s dog in the Rhetoric (2.3.138oa.24–26) emblemizes how humans and NHAs assess each other’s dispositions and modulate their responses and how Herodotus’ and Libanius’ encomia on NHAs (crocodile in Histories; peacock in Progymnasmata, respectively) represent models for human epideictic genres. Perhaps we have wondered about the theriomorphic fashion in which Demetrius’s nightingale charms and delights, just as rhetorical handbooks suggest a rhetor ought to when considering the sensory touchstones of one’s discursive choices (On Style). Moreover, many of us may have contemplated Aesop’s fables and why animals stand as sentries over cautionary tales that become analogs for our public lives in the civis. Even Rhetorica from Giarda’s 1628 Bibliothecae Alexandrinae Icones Symbolicae holds at her left side a leashed, three-headed beast and in her right hand a snake-wound scepter. What does the presence of such NHAs mean for the study of rhetorical theory and the instructional ways it is actuated in the handbook tradition?Hawhee’s high water mark treatment of NHAs in some of Western culture’s most treasured rhetorical treatises adds to our field the importance of sensation. In fact, she argues that sensation “matters the most” and provides a vocabulary of logos and alogos to emphasize how the latter remains key to progymnasmata, or the system of exercises used to prepare one for rhetorical study. What began for Hawhee as a book about animals and rhetorical theory blossomed into a project that values and locates sensation and imagination in well-worn artifacts that have heretofore seemed locked into unidimensional interpretation. At a time in the humanities when affect is discussed and debated more and more, and when we are witnessing the return of pathos as a sine qua non rhetorical proof, Hawhee’s book gets us closer to the roots of aesthesis and pathe. Concomitantly, the project celebrates alogos, or those rhetorical movements not associated with traditional rationality. In the offing, the sensory emerges not as passive or attendant, but as central to rhetorical education. As Hawhee writes, “Sensation, feeling, and emotion, then, have emerged as the positive counterparts to rationality and reason—positive, that is, in comparison with the term nonrational” (7).Hawhee contends that NHAs keep sensation alive in rhetorical theory, whether by modeling sound, countenance, and efficiency in post-Aristotelian theory (chapter two) and providing deliberative rhetorical grounds through fables (chapter three), or by inculcating encomia and visual inquiry (chapter four), teaching memory in medieval rhetorical theory (chapter five), or considering accumulatio in Erasmus’s De Copia (chapter six). Every chapter, with its multiple case studies, enlivens this new interpretation of rhetorical history, scaffolding how NHAs intersect with our senses of sensation over time. Written convincingly and argued expertly, Hawhee’s book is a gem among new genealogical studies that help us reconsider the superstructures of rhetoric as art and craft.The audiences for Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw are plural, to say the least. Certainly, scholars interested in ancient and modern rhetorical theory will gain fresh insight into the way emotion and sensation unfolded in the rhetorical tradition vis-à-vis NHAs. Classicists and philosophers would also benefit from a study that centers alogos as both fundamental to the human communicative condition and endemically primeval to animal (human and NHA) sentience and ontology overall. One of the genuinely admirable qualities of Hawhee’s work is the way she merges rhetorical studies with animal studies. Animal studies largely claims roots in philosophy and animal sciences, mostly through the study of the ethical treatment of animals by way of human intervention into NHA lives and ethos (i.e., using animals for food, clothing, experimentation, and entertainment). Since the publication of Peter Singer’s watershed Animal Liberation (1975), animal studies has grown into its own discipline in many ways (made emblematic by programs such as Tufts University’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, and book series found at the University of Chicago Press [Animal Lives series] and Routledge [Human-Animal series]). Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw connects rhetorical studies (from classical approaches to critical-cultural spaces) to animal studies, what Richard Ryder calls the study of “the changing relationships between human and nonhuman animals over time” (Animal Revolution). Clearly, animal-studies scholars would be intensely attuned to Hawhee’s arguments about the sensory overlap present in NHA-human rhetorical connections.In the end, Hawhee is to be applauded for envisioning and presenting a volume that reenergizes the study of extra-lingual features in rhetorical theory (principally, sensation) and that advances the vivification of NHAs as voice-full, resonant, active, passionate, communicative, and primary subjects in their own right.

ABSTRACT In the late American nineteenth century, oratory was de rigueur. Institutionally, liberal arts colleges sought to distinguish themselves by teaching moral character. Such an ethotic education was sine qua non for any student of political oratory. This essay argues that such an emphasis on character and oratory, coupled with Illinois College’s rhetorical curriculum and extracurricular events, afforded a kairotic and didactic moment for William Jennings Bryan to learn and practice Isocrates’ brand of rhetorical paideia. Taught primarily through the use of paradigm cases and imitation, Isocrates emphasized the import of a speaker’s ethos over the art itself. Bryan shared this perspective. Drawing from both “Against the Sophists” and “Antidosis,” we conduct a comparative analysis by reading Isocrates’ ethotic-based rhetorical theory alongside of Bryan’s 1881 graduating oration entitled “Character.”

ABSTRACT This essay argues that enargeia, the “vivid” quality of language that encourages listeners or readers to develop mental images, was an integral element of rhetorical strategy in the courts of Classical Athens. It relies on ancient evidence and modern comparanda. Ancient rhetorical theorists demonstrate how enargeia would have contributed to a sense of presence and simulated in Athenian jurors an experience similar to that of actual eyewitnesses. Modern lawyers and authors of trial handbooks advise litigators to appeal to their jurors’ imaginations with language that recalls ancient descriptions of enargeia and the related concept phantasia, “imagination.” The results of modern psychology research into the “vividness effect,” especially the distinction between figural and ground vividness, show how enargeia may have increased the likelihood of Athenian jurors accepting an argument. Lysias deploys ground vividness in On the Death of Eratosthenes (1) to draw his jurors’ attention away from the question of entrapment and figural vividness in Against Eratosthenes (12) to focus their attention on the crimes of the Thirty Tyrants. Finally, Aeschines’ description of the Thebans’ sufferings in Against Ctesiphon (3) may have harmed his case by emphasizing a weak point through misplaced figural vividness.

ABSTRACT In Book III of the Rhetoric, Aristotle focuses at length on the effect of lexical energeia. Scholarship on energeia in this passage almost always associates it with with analysis of enargeia in later texts. However, it is not clear that these two are used as equivalents in Aristotle. Here I survey Aristotle’s conceptions of energeia across the corpus in order to understand Aristotle’s use of energeia in the Rhetoric more precisely. I argue that Aristotle’s model of energeia has a consistent fundamental meaning, even as it crosses many topoi, and that Aristotle’s rhetorical energeia cannot be conflated with enargeia.

ABSTRACT In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an unprecedented number of Gnostic manuscripts were unearthed at sites across Egypt. Discovered on the Cairo antiquities market, in ancient trash heaps, and in buried jars, these papyri have radically refigured the landscape of early Christian history. Rhetoric, however, has overlooked the Gnostics. Long denigrated as heretical, Gnostic texts invite historians of rhetoric to (re)consider the role of gender in the early Church, the interplay between gnōsis and contemporary rhetorical concepts, and the
development of early Christian rhetorical practice(s) within diverse historical contexts, including the Second Sophistic. In response to recent calls for rhetorical archaeology, this essay returns to Cairo, Oxyrhynchus, and Nag Hammadi. These three locations refigure early Christian rhetoric(s) in situ.

ABSTRACT Lysias is best known for his portrayal of character (ethopoiia), his believable narratives, his plain or “Attic” style, and for the role he plays as inferior foil to Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. But he was also an important figure in developing, refining, and employing types of argument, including the rhetorical technique that would later be called the enthymeme. In On the Death of Eratosthenes, Lysias not only uses enthymemes, he highlights their use, selects a term (enthymizing), and demonstrates how “enthymizing” could be central to rhetorical artistry, to narrative development, to legal reasoning, and to political activism. Examining Lysias 1 not only deepens our understanding of Lysias’ rhetorical abilities, but it suggests that the orators had an important role to play in the development of rhetorical theory.

The review of work on ancient Roman rhetoric that follows below is the first of what I hope will become a regular feature in Advances in the History of Rhetoric—comprehensive reviews of scholarship in a given area. Subjects for these reviews and author-reviewers can be proposed to the editor or invited by the editor. Proposals from senior scholars working in collaboration with graduate students are especially welcome.

ABSTRACT Limiting ourselves to scholarly books published in English from 2009–2016, we survey classics scholarship about rhetoric in ancient Rome from the late republic through the early empire. We seek traditional threads and growing trends across those works that advance our understanding of rhetoric’s practical, theoretical, and material manifestations during that time of tumult and transition. We begin broadly, using companion books to delineate three structural pillars in the scholarship: rhetoric as a formal cultural system, the republic as subject to ruptures and reinventions, and Cicero as a foremost statesman of the late republic. Then we move into scholarship that draws upon nontraditional rhetorical objects, such as art, and that moves into increasingly vibrant areas of interest in rhetoric, such as the senses. Overall, we find that classicists writing about ancient Roman rhetorical culture share with their counterparts in rhetoric an urge to test old verities and to add historical depth to larger scholarly turns within the humanities.

In a demanding engagement, James L. Kastely offers an exquisite reading, even revision, of the Republic, and through nuanced attention to form, absences, and tangents he begins to answer a methodological question that I have had for a while (Lyon). The Gorgias ends with a failed elenchus, when no one will continue, and then in a methodological shift after the Republic’s first chapter, Plato makes explicit his dissatisfaction with elenchus. Rather than ignore what seemingly stopped Plato twice, Professor Kastely explicates a new, more dialogical method by reading the Republic as rhetorical theory (x, xii). The new method and theory are performed in answering the question of whether it possible to have a political discourse that is not simply a displaced pursuit of private interest (3). Through meticulous reading, Kastely explicates Plato’s rhetorical method from the movement between the performative, mimetic Republic, which concedes the multitude, and the ideal, contemplative Kallipolis, which unifies everything, even gender.Between the two, Kastely locates Platonic persuasion: “Persuasion … can be extended and deepened to being understood as the opportunity and responsibility to shape one’s identity. Persuasion now can be understood as a practice of individual and political constitution” (220).Constituting persuasion does not manipulate the other, but works to change desire and the internal constitution of the individual. That is, this persuasion remakes desires, values, and identities (Frankenstein’s operation). Kastely considers reconstitution as dialogic and participatory and thus better than manipulative, orator-centric persuasion in that re-constitutive persuasion alters and expands “our understanding of what constitutes political discourse” to include foundational values (10–11). Intriguing as this is, I need further evidence for the dialogic nature of constituting persuasion, particularly because it is not achieved through deliberation, but through erasing alternative desires. Given Socrates’ discursive control, belief in Plato’s commitment to dialogue remains difficult, and when I consider the two states together, the Republic and Kallipolis, I instead find that the new method arises through doubleness, a double logos that destabilizes wisdom and sends a frustrated, skeptical reader questing. I offer two examples of Plato’s unresolvable doubleness.In addition to passive spectators, Kastely notes “the creators of discourse” and “the audiences who can listen to or read that discourse with a critical awareness” (xiii). He then develops a theory of cultural criticism for the non-philosopher, but the hierarchy of the philosopher and non-philosopher creates a doubleness, demanding critique from Plato’s critical readers. Even critical readers are not creators of discourse (rhetoricians?): readers do not represent their desires or create discourse, nor do they constitute their own identity or the state’s. Perhaps Kastely finds evidence for Plato’s constitution of “an audience who can rethink its cultural heritage” (80), but would truly critical readers accept the privilege of philosophers who deny their ability to create? The binary of reading and creating seemingly would frustrate truly critical readers. Would they not desire to create?Another doubleness: If mimesis is banned from the ideal state of Kallipolis, then what is its place in the performance of the state of Republic? Kastely writes mimesis into the state, reading The Republic as epic poetry, and hence he reads the dialogic state of Republic in relationship and preference to the monologic Kallipolis. Yet critical ironies abound in the tension between the imagined Kallipolis and the narrated, multifaceted state of Republic. Let me quickly, and perhaps fairly, trace Kastely’s argument for mimesis. He sees Plato’s difficulty with imitative poetry as an interpretive tension between mimetic entertainment and rhetorical, critical reading, writing “(t)o read the Republic rhetorically requires a reader to go beyond the surface and to understand the issues that the surface text both represents and distorts” (112). Ignoring the critique of poetry as counterfeit reality, Kastely argues that the right kind of reading leads to philosophical truth. Mimesis works pedagogically: in the Republic, “the rhetorical action of the dialogue” is “an enactment of persuasion that provides guidance on how to use poetry rhetorically to effect practical and individual change” (62). That is, the audience should read the Republic’s mimesis as an enactment of persuasive technique, not as drama, for Plato would “undo or minimize” cultural influences by acknowledging the rhetoricity of all discourse (79, 101). In Kastely’s epic Republic, readers engage the dialogue’s narrative, and it “educate(s) them on how to interrogate works of cultural rhetoric” (62). Readers thus become suspicious of the forces shaping their souls, moving away from shared culture toward self-cultivation. But do rhetorical reading and self-cultivation save mimesis? Do they respond to or change common culture? Can’t self-cultivation remove a citizen from common concerns and the polity? Is rhetorical reading the controlled action by which critical readers are separated from the creators of discourse? Doesn’t reception differ from production?Kastely appreciates Plato’s desire for a skeptical reader, and his rhetorical reader is a provocative concept, but he tends to interpret the Republic through dialogic resolution and logical consistency. Might I suggest that Plato is sometimes better read sophistically through contradiction, paradox, and bivalence? In doubleness, Plato violates his own dictates. For example, Socrates defends true philosophers through a tale of low, counterfeit reality. He tells the silly tale of a blind, deaf, and ignorant ship owner faced with sailors wrangling to be captain (488). Seeking the job, the argumentative sailors deny any need for knowledge of sailing. Consequently a false definition—captain as a windbag—emerges. Plato calls this analogy, compiled “out of lots of different elements, like the goat-stags and other compound creatures painters come up with” (488a). Analogy perhaps, but also narrative, full of bad behaviors (including murder), an extreme counterfeit reality: in offering such a tale, Plato assumes his audience is already able to critique mimesis, avoid categorical mistakes, and modulate their identifications with bad characters. He assumes that the dialogic pedagogy has worked or is unnecessary, and perhaps he tests our skeptical ability to read goat-stag extremes.Kastely’s systemic reading of the entire Republic brilliantly draws attention to Plato’s performative method, revitalizing and embodying Platonic rhetoric, but it understates Plato’s doubleness, playfulness, puzzlement, and skepticism. Plato, with his longing for total revolution and his fractured fairy tales, is the writerly critic of writing; the dramatic censor of plot, setting, and character; and the myth-teller who denounces mimesis. Given Plato’s denials and dissatisfactions, his doubleness, tensions, and contradictions, Kastely rightly reads him for performance and rhetoricity and wisely confronts the two states, Kallipolis and Republic. Without a doubt, this book begins another millennium of Platonic delight.

While finding material to admire in The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic, I present a trio of significant presuppositions within Professor Kastely’s text in order to show that they are wrong, or, at least, questionable. It’s difficult to imagine a reader of his book who could deny the author’s profound concern for justice, for example. However, the misguided, well-intentioned can, at times, be a greater danger than obvious opponents bent on our demise. It will become clear that Kastely and I work in the same state, but do not live in the same political neighborhood.What interests Kastely from the opening pages of his text is “the philosophical importance of rhetoric” (ix). Now, this runs smack into extensive evidence in Håkan Tell’s Plato’s Counterfeit Sophists. Tell’s homework reveals that the distinction between philosophers and Sophists did not exist in fifth-century texts. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle worked overtime to establish distinctions, to set boundaries, and to insist on a hierarchy of disciplines that persists with Kastely’s help.It’s an ugly story we get from Tell. The philosophers were here first—according to the philosophers. The lie about chronology is compounded by a charge that the Sophists are interlopers in Athens, interested in filthy lucre instead of the truth. The Athenian philosophers decide to stain the Sophists, for example, through defamatory stories that the foreigners “hunt” the young men of Athens, and, like prostitutes, charge money for interactions with the young men. The self-proclaimed philosophers’ counteroffer to the young, aristocratic men is a life that might be less than human. Gerald Bruns describes the philosophical life meant to function as a model for disciples of Athenian philosophy, what one can expect by renouncing sophistry: “Socrates, barefoot in the snow, standing for hours in meditation without the slightest bother, drinking the night through without getting drunk, spending the night in bed with the most beautiful man in Athens without getting an erection” (Bruns 14).The launching pad for Kastely’s text requires an acceptance of a several preconditions, such as that Socrates and Plato endorse dialogue and dialectic. My counterproposal, following Kojin Karatani, is that Plato’s dialogues, while looking for world-like conversations, are monologic (Karatani, 69). Many rhetoricians know that the dialogues turn out to be long stretches of Socrates speaking followed by an interlocutor’s response of panu ge, or something similar, phrases that are usually read as ongoing agreement, reluctant or otherwise.Kastely issues contradictory statements on the topic. At one point, Socrates exhibits “gentleness” (81, 113, 114), but in other contexts is said to shame interlocutors. At other points, Kastely offers evidence that Plato/Socrates hold audiences in contempt through various depictions that refer to the public as children, sheep, or worse (see Republic 488b, 590e–591a, 598c, and Kastely 42, 117, 180, and 189).Nancy Worman asserts: “The language that characterizes Socrates and his opponents shares more with the kind of parodic, insulting usage found in mimes, Attic comedy, and oratorical invective than it does with historical prose writing that depicts public speakers” (Worman 154). Platonic exchanges tend to denigrate and reconfigure interlocutors who do not accept the rules of the game set out by the philosophers (Karatani, 70).The philosopher Hans Blumenberg contends that the philosophical insult extends over the Republic: “The viewers of the ideal [thinking here of the figure who leaves the cave and then returns as representative of philosophy], the owners of the actual, have constantly found it easier to deride others who wanted to see with their own eyes than to show them what they could gain if they ceased to want only what is available physically” (Blumenberg 20).We have no shortage of scholars who want to read the Republic straight, adding in, where hermeneutical problems crop up, excuses about “Socratic irony.” Anyone working with Platonic texts ought to be aware of evidence pointing toward a deliberate Platonic agenda of esotericism described in the Seventh Letter. Plato: “We did not use such plain language as this—it was not safe to do so—but we succeeded by veiled allusions in maintaining the thesis that every man who would preserve himself and the people he rules must follow this course, and that any other will lead to utter destruction” (332d). In the same letter, Plato more than suggests a hermeneutical method that anticipates esotericism whenever a reader encounters a text by someone “serious,” and Plato fashioned himself “serious” (see 344 c & d in the letter).Arthur Melzer confirms Plato’s esoteric elitism (Melzer 21), using 341e as the proof text. I do not propose that Kastely has missed the boat on Plato’s esotericism, though some evidence points that way, such as the comment that Plato does not have a “fixed position he is trying to disguise” (35), or a line about those who “whisper in the ear of power” (17). Kastely then constricts options to an either/or: “This leads to a stark choice: either philosophy reconciles itself to being an esoteric form of discourse, persuasive only to a very limited number of practitioners and hence irrelevant to political life, or it discovers a way to speak to the multitude who are not philosophers.” Plato did not intend to make philosophy’s code “open source.” Kastely writes, “The philosopher becomes politically active in response to human need. If this seems like a convoluted understanding of philosophy, it is helpful to remember that it is an account of philosophy intended to explain to a non-philosophic audience the peculiar and privileged authority that should be granted to philosophy to rule” (155).Kastely: “The allegory of the cave establishes the legitimacy of philosophic rule—it is the tale of a humble and reluctant king who is moved by a sense of social responsibility to assume a burden of leadership for the benefit of a people” (141). Kastely feels that he cannot have his rhetoric without marrying rhetoric to philosophy, naming philosophy master of the household and asking rhetoric to sign a prenuptial agreement. “There’s a need for an unequal distribution of power in the city” (91), Kastely asserts. Kastely’s “heroes” are philosophers, in part because “philosophy, as Plato imagined it, is an arduous pursuit that requires a rare combination of intellectual ability and tremendous stamina of which few are capable” (xv). From Kastely’s perspective, you and I are here to obey the practitioners of esotericism. We are the “they” of this sentence: “They need to obey rulers, even if they do not fully understand them” (133).Thus, I conclude with a question that discloses my political neighborhood, one illegal in the United States since 1954. The question comes from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (15.4): “It must be stressed that it is precisely the first elements, the most elementary things, that are the first to be forgotten…. In the development of leaders, one premise is fundamental: is it the intention that there always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the conditions in which the necessity of the existence of this division disappears?”

ABSTRACT This essay discusses the philosophical grounding of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria in order to appreciate the rationale for his view that rhetoric is central to education. This appreciation for Quintilian’s orientation is intended not only to garner a deeper understanding of the principles behind his view of education but also to offer insights to the issues that we share today with respect to teaching oral and written expression. One of the central topics of this essay is how Quintilian reconceptualized the concept of declamation away from its sophistic forms to a problem-solving system of casuistry that provided a ratio for developing proficiency in adjudicating issues of value and preference.

ABSTRACT Quintilian’s notion of imitation is often acclaimed for its focus on invention and appropriateness and for highlighting attunement to individual talent. Yet these aspects tend to be somewhat neglected in the practice of imitation as shaped by the classical rhetorical tradition, which primarily focuses on imitation exercises for beginners. This essay accentuates Quintilian’s chapter on imitation, which, as stressed by Murphy, is aimed at the mature student, in order to propel these precepts into today’s teaching. Specifically, this article advances a pedagogy of student-driven imitation constituted of five dimensions and characterized by the student’s own choice of text, valuing reflexive process over mirroring, and strengthening rhetorical agency. The exposition of student-driven imitation is supplemented with questions that students might address and excerpts from a student’s work.

ABSTRACT This essay discusses the relationship between Quintilian’s vision of the ideal orator and his emphasis on declamation. I argue that, for Quintilian, declamation was much more than a useful exercise. Rather, it was a method for training orators to experience the world from a variety of perspectives, something Quintilian considered to be both an essential rhetorical skill and an important quality of the “good man speaking well.” I further argue—taking an exercise from my own first-year writing classes as an example—that contemporary adaptations of ancient rhetorical pedagogy often fail to fully engage with the ethical dimensions of exercises such as declamation. I conclude by calling for a greater consideration of the ethical dimension of ancient rhetorical exercises in our contemporary adaptations of them so that we can truly meet Quintilian on his own ground.

In the latest Oxford World Classic edition of Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2015), a painting of the beautiful adorns the cover. The slope of the neck, the curve of the back, it focuses on the form of the beautiful in performance. Seven years earlier, in 2008, the same book, in the same series, imaged the sublime on its cover. Snow falls on pines, the rocks of mountaintops loom in the background; it is meant to evoke the power of the dynamic sublime. Nathan Crick’s challenging new book, Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece, completes a similar transition in classical scholarship by moving aesthetic theories of historiography from the rupture of the sublime, like the history of Victor Vitanza, to the forms of the beautiful, like those that support the history of John Poulakos. Crick does aesthetic through a series of close readings of archaic and classical Greek literary, philosophic, and traditionally rhetorical texts ranging from works by Homer to Aristotle. In these readings, he looks not to philology but rather constructs a history of how these texts key to contemporary definitions of power, rhetoric, and politics. It is thus a conceptual history that, in the end, seeks to persuade us that “the faith of rhetoric is that through the power of speech we can recognize our interdependence in a contingent world and seek, together, to constitute a form of power supported by the truth, directed toward the good, and exhibiting the qualities of the beautiful” (226).As with most modernist conceptions of the beautiful, like those in Schiller, Crick’s is one that founds itself on the essentialism of both the text and the properties of humanity. Rhetoric and Power begins its first chapter with a reading of Homer that demonstrates how an oral culture creates a virtue that is always bound with divinity. The wandering minstrel has power; he alone gets to stand before the people and remind them how heroes act. In chapter two, Crick considers how the rise of a literate culture influences history. He focuses especially on Heraclitus’s we “can’t stop in the same river twice,” which he reads as containing within it, because of the form of the aphorism, the power to “wake up” individuals to the wisdom of a contingent, as distinguished from a divine, world. Tragedy in Aeschylus, because of the nature of hubris, converges the oral virtue of the Homeric world with the aphoristic insistence that reason cannot rest on divinity. It is in this convergence that rhetoric is first manifest “as a medium by which power is challenged, destroyed, created, and transformed” (60). Protagoras, in chapter four, snatches the scales of justice and the right of retribution from the gods and delivers them to humans, for Protagoras’s words were able to “articulate a political framework … that gave rational justification for putting … multiple perspectives into meaningful communication with each other in order to collectively measure the affairs of the polis” (65). Gorgias’s logical structure takes up chapter five, where his demonstration of all possible causes contains within itself the possibility to break and create anew different orders in symbolic chains of meaning. The history of Thucydides shows justice as “a consequence of power relationships” (155, emphasis in the original), which requires us to contemplate the good action of the present as part of the drama of history. In chapter seven, Aristophanes’s Old Comedy essentializes humans as fallible; Crick concludes, “We are comic creatures precisely because we are always striving to be something greater than what we are” (140); in so doing, Aristophanes allows humans to forgive the error of leaders who incorrectly judge the drama of history. Plato’s dialectic performs “tragicomedy” within his Protagoras, in Crick’s chapter eight, which introduced a “new relationship between rhetoric and power” (168), as the form that allows individuals to turn to the masses and question whether their actions truly conform to “the beautiful state” (162). In chapter nine, Crick credits Isocrates and writing with embedding rhetoric through the human world. Aristotle, then, in the last close reading of the book, contains within his canon the “means by which the competing ends of power and of truth are reconciled through the progressive constitution of the good life” (214).Because it is a history that emphasizes the beautiful, Crick’s history predictably excises violence from power and therefore from rhetoric. This pacification of right communication begins in the introduction, where Crick uses Prometheus Bound to justify an Arendtian separation of violence and power. Violence is an instrument for manipulating material toward an end; power is the capacity for humans to act in concert and “witness a beginning” (91). Rhetoric, then, is the “facilitator” and “medium” of this beneficent power. Rhetoric is, on Crick’s reading, “the artistry of power” and can either be a force for social collectivity or the means for division and conflict. Crick supports this claim with a quotation from the “Chorus to Prometheus” in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound: “So why lavish all your gifts on humans when you can’t take prudent care of yourself? Once you’ve shucked off these bonds I think you’ll be no less powerful than overweening Zeus” (5). As Prometheus is chained to the Caucuses at this time, Crick notes that the only power the chorus could speak of at this moment is the power of speech. This interpretation ignores the fact that Prometheus would first need to “shuck off” the chains. In his discussion of Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen, Crick rejects readings that see Gorgias as criticizing those who would take Helen by force; on Crick’s reading, Gorgias’s targets are “Homeric poets” and their “barbaric violence” (83). In Aristophanes’s Birds, the violence of Pisthetairos’ consuming the “jailbirds” is not power or rhetoric, but force, as the eating is an instrument to preserve continued rule. In fact, for Crick, the scene demonstrates the impossibility of rhetoric to act as a preservation of rule in an oral culture.Crick’s interpretive devotion to the split between power and violence leads to a rather odd moment in his discussion of Isocrates. Because Nicocles was penned rather than spoken, it can perform the function of “power maintenance”; the oral rule of Pisthetairos could not because it can institute a “social contract.” Unlike under Hobbes’s contract, the ruled receive not a freedom from violence, but rather the identification of their place in the hierarchy of virtue. In contradistinction to democracy, which allows the “best to pass unnoticed,” monarchy raises to higher levels those “whose habits and accomplishments can act as exemplars for the rest of the people” (189) because it allows the hegemon to keep detailed written records of all of the ruled. In this way, the ruler is able to prevent revolutions and arrange the people based on their adherence to codified law. In Evagoras, “the goal remains the establishment of a system of perfect surveillance” (188). This surveillance, though, is not violent, as it is in Hobbes. Instead, it “becomes a means of collective regulation in order to form a stable society in harmony with the hegemonic Logos” (190). This contract, however, is not without the threat of violence. Even Crick notes, “Nicocles would have inherited the proto-police system of which the people would have been all too familiar, making [Isocrates’s] suggestion that his thoughts (and eyes) would be present in their deliberations quite literal” (180). How this is not violent is lost on the reader, particularly when Crick quotes again from Nicocles a passage that is a statement of at least symbolic violence, “[d]o not keep silent if you see any who are disloyal to my rule, but expose them; and believe that those who aid in concealing crime deserve the same punishment as those who commit it” (190). Yet, Crick still maintains that there is a split between violence and power here. It is because of this split that Crick is able, in an offhand comment, to dismiss the claim of Victor Vitanza that Isocrates’s system of rhetoric, power, and politics is inherently fascist.Because Isocrates’s system is not violence perpetrated by the state, but instead merely a ranking of citizens from most to least virtuous, the surveillance system of Isocrates can be used by both the ruled and the ruler. We see this again in the conclusion, when Crick, echoing the call from Kalbfleisch’s 2013 article in Advances, claims that historians of rhetoric need to “fully comprehend how the development of print, radio, photography, the telegraph, the press, the telephone, the movie, the computer, and the revolution in communication technologies” (224) changes how the “universal” forms of rhetoric manifest. This is requisite for Crick because without it we will not be able to adequately conceptualize the ways new contingent articulations of people acting in concert can articulate themselves closer to the Platonic three: the true, the good, and the beautiful. Trying to look for a rhetoric that is not one of the “universal” is, according to Crick, exchanging history for propaganda. Some might object to this claim, valuable as it is in its appropriate context, given that often in the Arendtian conception of power, “people acting in concert” includes only those whom the state would qualify as people. It was certainly a political reality at the time, as Crick notes in his introduction, that not everyone counted as human and there was nothing they could do to gain more worth in the hierarchy of the state.Despite my reservations, as an aesthetic reading of rhetoric’s history and the role rhetoric played in human emancipation from the divine, Rhetoric and Power is imaginative and original. If I were to adopt it for teaching, I would put this work with Poulakos and Haskins, juxtaposed against Grimaldi, Gross, Schiappa and Graff. Certainly the work contributes well to the ongoing debate in the field about the nature of history, historiography, and the tradition.

ABSTRACT Quintilian does not offer an explicit mechanism that connects eloquence and ethics. This essay suggests that this omission is a consequence of the significant role that imitation plays in Quintilian’s pedagogy. This essay further suggests that the particular habits of mind that are cultivated through imitation are those that are associated with civic virtue, and it offers some ways that civic virtue might be cultivated in contemporary classrooms through a pedagogy that relies on imitation.

It is important to begin this essay with a note about language. The international scope of Quintilian studies is evidenced by the number of European languages used to discuss him—German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, as well as English. Two major recent collections of studies about Quintilian are written mainly in continental languages. The larger is the three-volume Quintiliano: Historia y Actualidad de la Retórica edited by Tomás Albaladejo, Emilio del Río, and José Antonio Caballero López; it includes 123 essays mostly in Spanish but with some French and English. The work stems from an international conference held in Madrid and in Calahorra, Spain (Quintilian’s birthplace) to commemorate the 1900th anniversary of the publication of the Institutio Oratoria. Another collection is Quintilien: ancien et moderne (2012), edited by Perrine-Ferdinand Galand, Carlos Lévy and Wim Verbaal, with thirty-one essays in French. These are largely inaccessible to monophone English speakers, as are some important individual studies such as Gualtiero Calboli, Quintiliano y su Escuela; Otto Seel, Quintilian: oder, die kunst des Redners und Schweigens; or Jean Cousin, Récherches sur Quintilien.The reader of this essay, then, should be aware that the English works discussed here are but a small part of a wider international undertaking. The numbers, too, are worth noting. For example, the online Quintilian bibliography by Thorsten Burkard of Kiel University in Germany lists 847 items arranged in fourteen subject sections, while the World Catalog displays 5,179 records (of which 1,896 are in English) and the Melvyl search engine for University of California libraries finds 1,125 Quintilian entries in that system alone. The first (and only) bibliography of Quintilian published in America, in 1981, was that of Keith V. Erickson in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, listing nearly 800 books and articles alphabetized by author. Thus what we discuss here is in a sense only the tip of a scholarly iceberg.The best single short introduction to Quintilian is an essay by Jorge Fernández López, “Quintilian as Rhetorician and Teacher,” in A Companion to Roman Rhetoric. Fernández López presents a balanced view of what Quintilian has in mind in his Institutio Oratoria, with sections on biography, the meaning and structure of the Institutio, early education, the system of rhetoric, style, the orator in action, and the author’s approach to rhetoric and morals.One of the most important recent contributions to making Quintilian text accessible was the publication in 2001 of Donald A. Russell’s edition and translation of his Institutio Oratoria in a five-volume Loeb Classical Library set. The previous Loeb translation was by H. E. Butler in 1921–22 in four volumes. Russell’s smooth translation and more extensive notes make his work superior to that of Butler. Russell makes adroit use of sentence variety and punctuation to make his translation more readable than Butler’s, which tends to follow more literally Quintilian’s often periodic style with its long multi-clausal sentences. Also, Butler had provided only two short indices of “Names and Words” in the Institutio, with comparatively few notes to the text itself, while Russell supplies copious notes to virtually every page of the text; in addition he completes the whole set at the end of Volume Five with an “Index of Proper Names,” and Indexes to Books 1–12 which include a 33-page “General Index.” an “Index to Rhetorical and Grammatical Terms,” and an “Index of Authors and Passages Quoted.” Moreover, Russell provides an introduction to each of the twelve books that includes a summary of that book’s contents—a valuable resource for the reader struggling to cope with the sheer magnitude of the Institutio. It is the addition of these new notes and the 100 pages of indexes at the end that make the Russell longer than the Butler, but the value to the reader makes it worthwhile.Also new is the appearance of the first one-volume translation of the Institutio, a print version of the translation by John Selby Watson (1856) as revised and edited online by Lee Honeycutt (2007) and edited for print by Honeycutt and Curtis Dozier in 2015. The 686-page paperback is available for purchase under the title Quintilian: Institutes of Oratory, or, Education of an Orator, and is also available online. The volume includes Watson’s own “Preface” and “Life of Quintilian,” together with a twenty-five page summary of the Institutio, by book and chapter, keyed to the page numbers of the translation. (These chapter headings are then repeated throughout the volume.) There are none of Watson’s notes to the translation, Honeycutt explains, because they were omitted to save space for fitting it into the one volume; he recommends that the reader consult Russell’s notes. Despite that problem, this one-volume translation may be useful to readers for its portability and low cost compared to the five-volume Loeb Library translation of Russell.Tobias Reinhardt and Michael Winterbottom have edited Quintilian Institutio Oratoria Book 2. This volume includes not only the Latin text of Book 2 (1–34) but also an informative 50-page “Introduction” which examines Quintilian’s teaching methods, his concept of rhetoric, and his strategies in presenting his ideas. But the vast majority of the volume (35–394) offers meticulous commentaries on the 21 chapters of Book Two. A short prose summary introduces each chapter; then the editors painstakingly examine key Latin words and phrases in the text. Many of these observations are highly technical and demand some knowledge of Latin or Greek. On the other hand, many others may be illuminating to a general reader, as in the opening of chapter 11 (175–176), where the editors discuss Quintilian’s response to those who think rhetorical precepts are not necessary. Book 2 is an important one in the Institutio, for in it Quintilian ends his formal exposition of early education and begins his discussion of rhetoric.Another recent reprinting, of Book 10 of the Institutio, may seem at first glance to be of interest only to skilled classical scholars. This is William Peterson, Quintilian: Institutionis Oratoriae; Liber Decimus, originally published 1891, but now edited by Giles Lauren with a “Foreword” by James J. Murphy. It includes the Latin text of Book 10 with extensive notes mostly in English, with a full summary of the book (1–12), a useful short chapter on Quintilian’s literary criticism, and a longer one on his use of language with numerous examples in both English and Latin. Even the non-Latinate reader may find things to learn in this volume. Peterson was a child prodigy—he wrote this 290-page book at age 24—who later went on to become Principal of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.The most recent addition to the availability of Quintilian’s work is Quintilian on the Teaching of Speaking and Writing: Translations from Books One, Two and Ten of the Institutio Oratoria, second edition, edited by James J. Murphy and Cleve Weise. Part One of the introduction discusses Quintilian’s teaching methods, including verification from modern cognitive science of his views on habit (hexis), together with some possibilities for modern applications of his principles; also Part Two presents four sets of Quintilian-based exercises designed to encourage close reading of the three translations which follow.The best single book on Quintilian, George A. Kennedy’s Quintilian, was published in 1969 by Twayne Publishers as part of their World Author series but has long been out of print. It has now reappeared in a revised edition as Kennedy, Quintilian: A Roman Educator and His Quest for the Perfect Orator. This slim (117 pages) volume is divided into eight chapters, each of which begins with the identification of “important sources and special studies at the beginning of each chapter rather than combining all bibliography in a single alphabetical list at the end of the book. This avoids the use of footnotes …” (1). While the book is ostensibly divided into sections representing Quintilian’s background, educational plan, rhetoric, and the “good man” concept in Book 12, what Kennedy actually presents is a thorough summary of the Institutio coupled with a far-ranging personal critique not only of the Institutio but of the man himself. He treats both Quintilian’s aspirations and what he views as his faults, and concludes the book with a discussion of Cornelius Tacitus (55?–117 CE) and the view that the Institutio had changed nothing in Rome. But Kennedy, author of so many books on classical rhetoric and its history, is so steeped in Roman culture that he writes easily about complex events; for example his portrayal of Quintilian’s possible reasons for retirement and the composition of the Institutio (22–28) reads almost like a novel. Anyone, expert or beginner, can profit from Kennedy’s observations.(Editor’s note: the following survey does not attempt to list every recent reference to Quintilian, or every entry for him in handbooks or encyclopedias. Nor does it follow every use in textbooks where his doctrines are mingled with others, as for example in the successive editions of works like Corbett and Connors, Classical Rhetoric and the Modern Student, and Crowley and Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. The emphasis here instead is on books and articles which elucidate his text or lay out directions for future research.)A useful place to start is with three collections of essays, two of which contain a mixture of languages but do offer some valuable English contributions. The first one, already mentioned, is the massive three-volume Quintiliano (1998) edited by Tomás Albaladejo et al. Eleven of its 131 essays are in English, with contributions by Adams, Albaladejo, Cockcroft, Hallsall, Harsting, Hatch, Kennedy, Murphy, Willbanks, Winterbottom, and Woods. Its 1561 pages are continuously paginated.Another, smaller gathering presents twelve essays in two special issues of Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric in 1995, under the title “The Institutio Oratoria after 1900 years.” Six of the essays are in English, by Cranz, Fantham, France, Kraus, Sussman, and Ward.The volume Quintilian and the Law: The Art of Persuasion in Law and Politics (2003), edited by Olga Tellegen-Couperus, offers 25 essays, all of them in English, covering a wider range of subjects than the title might indicate. The book stems from a conference held at Tilburg in The Netherlands in 2001 convened by the Willem Witteveen and the editor “to try and assess [sic] Quintilian’s significance for students and practitioners of the art of persuasion in antiquity and in modern times” (Preface). The authors of six chapters do cover law and jurisprudence: Lewis, Robinson, Rossi, Tellegen, Tellegen-Couperus, and Witteveen. Another five focus on the courtroom and persuasion of judges: Henket, Katula, Martín, Mastrorosa, and Tellegen-Couperus in a second essay. Two deal with reading and writing in Book 10: Murphy and Taekema. The remainder discuss a variety of topics, including emotion, language, argument, and figures. In sum, this collection should prove valuable even to readers not primarily interested in law.The first observation to be made about current research is that, with the possible exception of Kennedy’s Quintilian, there is no book-length analytic study of Quintilian in English. But while Kennedy’s charming introduction to Quintilian does provide biographical information together with a running summary of the Institutio Oratoria, it is not intended as a thorough exploration of the many issues in this complex work. It is of course not surprising that we lack such a book, given the knowledges required—rhetoricians and students of education often lack sophisticated knowledge of ancient Roman culture, while classicists sometimes fail to appreciate the nuances of Quintilian’s rhetoric and pedagogy.Understandably, then, the overwhelming majority of articles and book chapters published since 1990 deal with particular, comparatively small segments of the Quintilian corpus. They present such a kaleidoscopic array that it seems best to group them by subject areas.The largest number of these (seventeen to be exact) discuss the later history of the Institutio Oratoria, its “reception” or “influence” in various times and places. They cover a wide range of topics: Renaissance learning (Classen); Saint Jerome (Davis “Culture”); Rousseau (France); Hugh Blair (Halloran; Hatch); the nineteenth century (Johnson); women in the Renaissance (Klink); Czech thought (Kraus); Milton and Ramus (Lares); Italian Renaissance (Monfasani); the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Murphy “Quintilian’s Influence”); Obadiah Walker (O’Rourke); eloquence in Quintilian’s time (Osgood); early modern role models (Rossi); and the Middle Ages (Ward; Woods).Teaching and its psychology interest another seventeen of the authors: Bloomer (“Schooling,” “Quintilian”); Brand et al.; Briggs; Connelly; Corbeill; Fantham (“The Concept of Nature”); Furse; Ker; Montefusco; Morgan (Literate Education); Murphy (“The Key Role of Habit,” “Quintilian’s Advice,” “Roman Writing Instruction”); Richlin; Too; Van Elst and Woners; Woods.Some of Quintilian’s specific teaching methods are treated: declamation (Breij; Friend; Kasper; Kennedy “Roman Declamation”; Mendelson “Declamation”; Sussman; Wiese); Progymnasmata (Fleming; Henderson; Kennedy, Progymnasmata; Webb); and imitation (Harsting; Taoka; Terrill).The application of Quintilian’s principles to modern education is the subject for six authors: Bourelle; Corbett and Connors; Crowley and Hawhee; Kasper.Another five works discuss the Institutio Oratoria itself: Adams; Celentano; López “The Concept”); and Murphy, Katula and Hoppman.Law attracts another five: Lewis; Martín; Robinson, Tellegen; Tellegen-Couperus (Quintilian and the Law).Emotion is the subject of three essays: Cockcoft; Katula (“Emotion”; Leigh.Language, writing, and style attract another eight authors: Chico-Rico; Craig; Davis (“Quintilian on Writing”); d’Esperey; Lausberg; Murphy (“Roman Writing Instruction”); Tellegen-Couperus (“Style and Law”); Wooten.Not surprisingly, there is interest in the subject of rhetoric in eight works: Albaladejo, Gunderson (“The Rhetoric”); Heath; Kennedy, (“Rhetoric,” A New History, “Peripatetic Rhetoric”); Roochnik; Wulfing.Quintilian as a person, including his vir bonus concept, draws the attention of Cranz; Halsall; Kennedy (Quintilian); Lanham; Logie; Walzer (Quintilian’s).One final note is to remark on the appearance of four Ph.D. dissertations in this array of studies (Furse; Ker; Klink; Wiese) together with two M.A. theses (Francoz; O’Rourke). Doctoral dissertations can be located fairly easily through normal bibliographic channels, but the identification of master’s theses is much more difficult. In any case, it is hoped that their appearance marks faculty interest in Quintilian in their respective institutions.

ABSTRACTThis essay makes the case that the account of delivery featured in the Institutio Oratoria remains germane to contemporary speech pedagogy. Quintilian emphasizes that (1) powerful delivery is central to eloquent public speaking; (2) delivery functions in concert with the other canons of rhetoric; and (3) delivery is governed by general rhetorical concepts such as decorum and ethos. Furthermore, scrutiny of Quintilian’s perspectives on gender and power can lead to fruitful rethinking of current pedagogy’s traditionalist tendencies.

ABSTRACTThere has been a surge of scholarly interest lately in the progymnasmata, those ordered exercises in composition that played such an important role in rhetorical education from antiquity to the Renaissance. Comprising an integrated program in literary, civic, and moral effectiveness, they offer a compelling alternative to language arts pedagogy today, which seems too often driven by the goal of “college and career readiness.” But to be truly useful as a pedagogical model, the progymnasmata need to be embedded in something like the comprehensive educational philosophy of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.

This year 2016 marks an important six hundredth anniversary in the history of rhetoric and education.In September, 1416, the Italian humanist and book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini visited a Benedictine monastery in St. Gall, Switzerland. There he found—not in a library but in a dungeon which he declared was not fit for a condemned man—the first complete copy of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (Orator’s Education, 95 CE) that any scholar had seen for nearly six centuries. Suddenly aware that it was a valuable book, the German monks refused to let Poggio take it away, so he was forced to sit down and copy it by hand over the next 54 days.The reaction to the discovery among humanists, especially in Italy, was swift and fervent. Leonardo Aretino wrote, “I entreat you, my dear Poggio, send me the manuscript as soon as possible, that I may see it before I die” (Shepherd 105). Lorenzo Valla’s first book (1428) was a comparison of Quintilian and Cicero. Later Quintilian was to influence Guarino da Verona, Erasmus, Martin Luther, and Philip Melanchthon, the major Lutheran educator. Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria was one of the first rhetorical texts printed (1470, twice), and an even hundred editions appeared in print during the next 75 years. The work immediately ranked in popularity with the rhetorical works of Cicero and Aristotle, its precepts soon becoming a key segment of the “General Rhetoric” (rhetorica generalis) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ultimately the work permeated English rhetoric texts and eventually came to North America through Harvard and the parallel influence of writers like Hugh Blair.Why did Poggio’s discovery find such a ready response, and why did it lead to centuries of influence? One reason was that fragments of Quintilian’s work had been known throughout the Middle Ages, a tantalizing sample (textus mutilatus) which was obviously incomplete but which at the same time gave great promise. So the author’s name was known to scholars. Humanists like Gasparino Barzizza and Petrarch so admired Quintilian that earlier they had tried to fill in the missing sections themselves. Moreover, the discovery came at a time of humanistic debates about public life, literature, philosophy, the place of rhetoric, and the role of education. Thus the complete text of Quintilian’s Institutio suddenly provided a thorough and balanced account of rhetoric embedded in an educational system offering to prepare young men for public life; it defined the perfect orator as “a good man speaking well,” combining morality with efficiency.What was nature of this text that so inspired readers over so many centuries? It was the longest and most ambitious treatment of rhetorical education in the ancient world. Its audacious aim is stated simply: “I am proposing to educate the perfect orator.” The Institutio was composed in Rome about 95 CE by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, a retired legal pleader and teacher. Quintilian was one of the most famous teachers in Rome, flourishing under three emperors, and under Emperor Vespasian was one of the first teachers to receive public moneys for his teaching.Quintilian declares in his General Preface that he had taught for twenty years and then spent two years in his retirement researching and writing the Institutio. It has been described as four major works blended into one: a treatise on education, a manual of rhetoric, a reader’s guide to the best authors, and a handbook on the moral duties of the perfect orator (Little 2:9). But the fact is that every segment of the work is a teaching tool. The lengthy section on rhetoric, for example, is provided for the use of students, not for its own sake; Quintilian is not a rhetorical theorist like Cicero, but a teacher using anything (including rhetoric) that can help make his students better and more efficient citizens.The Institutio Oratoria is a large work of about 700,000 words, divided into twelve Books (libri)—a size which could make some readers reluctant to take it up. But Quintilian himself offers a helpful summary of the work to guide the reader: Book One will deal with what comes before the rhetor begins his duties. In Book Two, I shall handle the first elements taught by the rhetor, and problems connected with the nature of rhetoric itself. The next five books will be given over to Invention (Disposition forms an appendix to this), and the following four to Elocution, with which are related Memory and Delivery. There will be one further book, in which the orator himself is to be portrayed: I shall there discuss (as well as my poor powers allow) his character, the principles of undertaking, preparing, and pleading cases, his style, the end of his active career, and the studies he may undertake thereafter. (Institutio, Prooemium 22–23)A little later he adds that this is not an ordinary dry textbook, but that instead he has “gathered together in these twelve books everything that I think useful for the orator’s education” (Institutio, Prooemium 25). He begins in the cradle—the very first sentence in Book 1 says that “As soon as his son is born, the father should form the highest expectations of him” (1.1.1). He ends in Book 12 with a discussion of when to retire and what to do after retirement.Quintilian’s educational objective is to prepare the perfect orator—a good man speaking well—through a systematic program described in Books 1 and 2 (early education) and Book 10 (continuing adult self-education). His specific goal is the inculcation of what he calls habit (Greek hexis), an ingrained disposition in the writer/speaker to be able to use the right language in any situation. This is not the modern sense of “habit” as a blind repetitive tendency beyond the individual’s control. It is closer to Aristotle’s concept of “facility” (dynamis) in his Rhetoric (1.2; see Murphy; Murphy and Wiese). His aim, in other words, is to change the psyche of the student, to make him “rhetorical,” not merely by having him learn a set of rules, but also by having him exercise a wide variety of language uses so that ultimately he has familiarity with a large number of options. So Quintilian does include an extensive survey of the five “parts” of rhetoric—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—but illustrates them with profuse examples to demonstrate that a great variety of possible language uses can occur in every situation. “Rhetoric,” he says, “would be a very easy and trivial affair if it could be comprised in a single short set of precepts” (2.13.2).In the classroom he employs systematic exercises in four categories: reading, listening, speaking, and writing. In the process called imitation (imitatio), model texts of various genres are read, analyzed, and imitated to familiarize the student with a variety of styles. A set of twelve specific graded exercises called progymnasmata, each more difficult than its predecessor, draws the student through increasingly complex thought and wording tests. As the student becomes more proficient, he is introduced to an exercise called declamation, in which a problem is set out and the student is charged to prepare and deliver an oration to solve the problem. Declamation becomes the main teaching method for older students, since it includes every feature of the whole preceding instructional program. (It also became so popular later as an ornamental display outside the classroom that for centuries onward it became a form of public entertainment by adult performers).Can the educational principles and methods of this famous author be applied in today’s world as they have been for almost two thousand years? We, the authors of the essays in this special issue on Quintilian, believe they can. So do others (Knoblauch; Kasper). We appreciate that this brief survey cannot do justice to the humane wisdom Quintilian applies to student psychology in his search for ways to enable the development of the autonomous language-user, nor to his appreciation of the almost infinite variations possible in the human interactions faced by speakers and writers. But readers are encouraged to pick up any part of his book and read two or three pages to get a sense of the intensely personal attention he devotes to every subject he looks into. Readers, on the other hand, are also encouraged to look to his general principles, not merely to details that might seem remote to a modern observer.The essays offered in this current issue of Advances in the History of Rhetoric, then, are offered as possible answers to the question posed in the preceding paragraph.

ABSTRACT Quintilian makes writing one of the four interrelating elements (with reading, speaking, and listening) to be used in producing in his “perfect orator” what he calls “habit” (hexis), or the facility of being able to write or speak well on any subject. It requires constant study over time, requires organization, and is reinforced by constant practice. His practical observations on writing may well have value for us in modern times.

Over twenty years ago in William Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gary Copeland’s edited volume, Critical Questions, Thomas W. Benson likened his research to doing “part of society’s homework” (185). The ends of scholarship, he suggested, were to encourage others to reflect critically upon social practices and the institutions that invite them. In Posters for Peace, Benson performs this homework by analyzing posters he collected and saved in May 1970 at the University of California, Berkeley. These posters protested President Richard Nixon’s decision to bomb Cambodia, despite earlier assurances that he would deescalate U.S. military action in Vietnam. Benson situates these artifacts in a longer rhetorical tradition of poster use and compares them with another instance of ephemeral war protest: the graffiti he observed in Rome during a 2004 protest of the Iraq War. Throughout his analysis, Benson also weaves an account of disciplinary shifts during the early 1970s, which made analyses of visual rhetoric possible in the first place. Thus, Benson offers both a rhetorical history and history of rhetoric in Posters for Peace.As the author of a rhetorical history, Benson begins by describing the context in which these posters were produced. He identifies a few antecedents that may have influenced the use of posters at Berkeley. Most immediately, the Berkeley artists were likely inspired by the 1968 Paris protestors’ posters, as well as the psychedelic posters circulating in the San Francisco Bay Area. Benson also notes the U.S. government’s substantial use of posters during the 1930s and 40s to promote President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and national unity during World War II. The extent to which the Berkeley protests were inspired directly by these government posters is unclear, though Benson ably demonstrates a preexisting tradition of political poster use in the U.S. Significantly, his inclusion of a White House photograph of Nixon delivering his Cambodia address underscores the political importance of posters during the 1970s. In this photograph, the president points to a map of Cambodia while justifying military action. In a way, then, the Berkeley protesters countered Nixon’s visual rhetoric with some of their own.Following Benson’s extended essay, Posters for Peace contains full-page color reproductions of the 66 posters he saved. The Berkeley posters are mostly original art on silk-screen, though some are based on photographs or employ photo offset printing. Many of these are visually stunning. One does not get the sense that they were produced for posterity, however. Most of them were printed on the backside of used tractor-feed printer paper or whatever cardstock was handy. They were distributed freely and ended up on fences, dorm room walls, picket signs, and so forth. Some of them were preserved in Benson’s own private collection until 2008, when he donated them to the Penn State University Libraries on the condition that they were “freely available for nonprofit educational uses” (4).Most of the posters in Benson’s collection are antiwar. Some, however, advocate for civil rights in the U.S. Although Benson arranges the color reproductions of these posters in a roughly thematic fashion, he does not adhere strictly to this sequence in his analysis. Instead, he often skips around, thereby knitting them together as a cohesive unit. For instance, on pages 41–42 he references plates 2, 6, 7, 8, 30, 33, 13, and 27—in that order. His analysis identifies inventional similarities between them. Moreover, this approach has the additional benefit of tacitly promoting a disruptive reading of the posters by encouraging readers to view them in no fixed order.In his analysis, Benson attempts to recover the meanings that a passersby would have understood in 1970. He finds much to praise in these posters. Although posters are often classified as tools of propaganda, Benson observes that, “many of the Berkeley posters invoke a reflexivity about their own persuasion and call for discussion beyond the poster—asking not merely for belief or action, but for speech, participation, deliberation” (48). To a modern eye, the posters’ emphasis on civic deliberation may be easily taken for granted. At the time, however, prominent politicians such as President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew sought to curtail criticisms of the war in Vietnam by associating the antiwar movement as unpatriotic and unrepresentative of U.S. public opinion. In Nixon’s “Silent Majority” speech, for instance, he described the antiwar protesters as a fervent “vocal minority” and juxtaposed them with a patriotic “silent majority,” who, he claimed, supported his own strategy in Vietnam. The best citizen, Nixon suggested, was a silent one. Benson’s analysis both demonstrates and celebrates the students’ determination to speak out and legitimize their opposition to the war.Similarly to the tumultuous political climate that birthed the Berkeley protest posters, the speech-communication discipline underwent substantial change in the early 1970s. According to Benson, The discipline, while not abandoning its interest in Aristotle’s foundational Rhetoric, was already moving rapidly in other directions, seeking to understand rhetoric from the point of view of the citizen whose judgment was being solicited, recovering marginal voices, asking questions about the ethics of persuasion, investigating the rhetorical action of non-oratorical forms, pressing forward on the close reading of rhetorical texts, and inquiring about empirical matters such as the preparation, circulation, and reception of rhetoric. (54)To demonstrate this shift, Benson identifies Robert P. Newman’s, Hermann Stelzner’s, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s, and Forbes I. Hill’s rhetorical analyses of the “Silent Majority” speech. Benson also highlights the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conferences, which met in 1970 to discuss the scope of rhetoric and the appropriate means for studying it. More precisely, these meetings helped legitimize scholarship that examined non-oratorical forms. Benson’s analysis of the Berkeley posters is particularly fitting in that he collected them the same month that he attended Pheasant Run. In so doing, Benson returns readers to a historic intersection of war protests, visual rhetoric, and rhetorical theory.Despite Benson’s presence at Berkeley and Pheasant Run, his analysis abstains from auto-ethnography. Indeed, Benson does not mention until the last two pages of Posters for Peace that he attended Pheasant Run. Glimmers of this project’s personal significance shine throughout, nonetheless. For instance, Benson incorporates nearly thirty photographs he took of visual rhetoric protesting the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. These photographs are helpful for illustrating his argument. Their layout could have been stronger in his section on the Roman graffiti, however. Although Benson concludes his discussion of the graffiti on page 83, photographs from Rome appear on each subsequent page until page 95. One suspects that these photographs of graffiti could have been condensed into one section. Moreover, two photographs of the Roman Pasquino statue (figures 34 and 35) appear redundant. These are minor issues, however, in an otherwise well-structured book.Posters for Peace gives readers pause to consider the role of archives in rhetorical scholarship. In recent years, the term archive has expanded within the humanities to encompass not simply institutional collections, such as those found at presidential libraries, but also those created by scholars in the course of their research. What makes Benson’s book exceptional is that he illustrates both senses of the word archive. Insofar as these posters and photographs are freely available in the Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection at the Penn State University Libraries, other scholars may make recourse to these historically significant artifacts. Additionally, Posters for Peace may serve as a model for scholars who are interested in preserving the ephemeral texts they study.Several years ago, in Lester Olson, Cara Finnegan, and Diane Hope’s edited collection on visual rhetoric, Visual Rhetoric Communication and American Culture, Benson invited students and scholars alike to note the significance of visual texts—exclaiming, “Look, Rhetoric!” In Posters for Peace, Benson demonstrates first-hand the value of this exhortation—both in his analysis and in creation of an archive of ephemeral visual texts. Scholars interested in visual rhetoric, protest rhetoric, or rhetorical history will profit greatly from reading Benson’s book. It is well written and offers a unique retrospective of the academic and political discussions in the early 1970s. Inasmuch as Benson offers a glimpse into the theoretical changes then afoot in speech communication, I suspect that this volume will be of special importance to young scholars as they navigate disciplinary narratives. In short, Posters for Peace is sure to inspire scholars and inform their own work as they complete part of society’s homework, too.

This useful, clearly written, and highly satisfying book is Laurent Pernot’s second major English-language contribution to rhetorical scholarship, after his 2005 Rhetoric in Antiquity (originally La rhétorique dans l’antiquité in 2000). Here Pernot builds on work from his earlier career, in particular his 1993 La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain.The point of departure, in Chapter One, is the striking proliferation of epideictic genres in later antiquity—or, at least, the number of genres recognized as “epideictic” by rhetoricians, rhetors, and their audiences. Whereas Aristotle has a limited notion of the epideictic “genus,” by Menander Rhetor’s time, roughly the late third century, the category has evolved to include a wide range of genres, each with its own distinct (if overlapping) inventional topoi. The list includes the traditional funeral speech (epitaphios logos) and the festival speech (panēgyrikos logos) as well as various kinds of encomia in praise of individuals, cities, harbors, aqueducts, and so on. There is also the imperial oration, the birthday speech, the nuptial speech delivered outside the bedroom door, the welcome-speech to an arriving official as he stepped ashore, and the farewell speech when he left. There were also forms of speech that took the functions of ancient poetry, such as the victory-speech (the epinikios logos), a prose equivalent to Pindar’s odes for victorious athletes, or Aelius Aristides’ “hymns” and “monodies” in prose (see Regarding Sarapis). At the same time a number of ancient, poetic forms persisted, such as hymns to the gods and mythic narratives (e.g., the Dionysiaca, a 48-book epic poem about the god’s conquest of India), and these were called “epideictic” too.And so on again. I have not yet even mentioned Hermogenes of Tarsus’ classification of all poetry, history, and philosophy as “pure panegyric,” i.e., as epideictic rhetoric (On Types of Style 2.12). Further, as Pernot suggests in Chapter Three (97–99), encomiastic or parainetic praise might function as an important element in practical deliberative and judicial discourse, and even as a kind of deliberative discourse in itself. (Parainesis praises ethical virtues and exhorts the listener to observe them, as in Isocrates’ To Nicocles.) While Pernot may not be willing to go that far, we do find confirmation in Byzantine lists of model texts for imitation, in which Plutarch’s Moralia (Ta Ēthika) stand as examples of the “deliberative” genre.Pernot’s basic point in Chapter One is that the “rise of epideictic” to ascendency in later antiquity was an “irresistible” and “unstoppable” phenomenon (27) that the usual histories of rhetoric have mostly failed to understand. But if we set aside the usual assumption that epideictic is “mere” display, epideictic proves itself more creative and more vital—and more pragmatically consequential—than we tend to think.Pernot addresses this challenge in two main ways. The first is to define epideictic more precisely—to specify what is not epideictic. If, for example, we follow Aristotle’s audience-subject-time definition of the three (why three?) “genres” of rhetoric, it appears that there are two fairly specific kinds of practical civic speech addressed to judges in a well-defined civic space (a court of law, a council-hall, a public assembly), and besides these a third and vaguer kind, epideictic, which is not addressed to judges but to theōroi, “observers/spectators.” The audiences of the two practical genres (jurymen, councilors) are empowered to issue legally binding decrees (Socrates is guilty; send reinforcements to the expedition in Sicily). The theōros of epideictic, in contrast, is not empowered to issue binding judgments, but is concerned with observing a display (epideixis) of praise or blame in the present moment. Epideictic is defined in terms of lack.The argument would take too long to work out here, but the ultimate effect of that definition is to assign all speech not specifically addressed to judges in some sort of court or council-hall to epideictic. All speech, after all, implicitly blames and praises in some way. If you refute my argument you “blame” its defective reasoning; if you defend and confirm it, you “praise” the quality of its undeniable proofs. Even at the level of word choice, to state the obvious, every choice implies some evaluative attitude toward what is named, and thus implicitly blames or praises it. So we have a three-part classification of rhetorical genres consisting of two specific kinds of speeches (judicial and deliberative) and all other human language use (epideictic).Pernot’s basic remedy is to limit the notion of epideictic to encomiastic discourse: a more or less determinate genre (as codified, for example, in ancient progymnasmata manuals) whose evolution can be traced from a handful of early exemplars to the profusion we see later. This move has the virtue of keeping epideictic within the category of civic discourse. The encomium, the panegyric, and their derivatives are normally performed in some sort of sanctioned civic space or event, such as a state funeral, a religious festival, a celebratory homecoming for a victorious athlete, and so on, by a person specially commissioned for the job and considered worthy of it. The speech then worked to forge or refresh a communion of shared belief by eliciting approval for the praise bestowed on the honoree—a rhetorical effect that often was more important than the honoree’s real character (see Leslie Kurke’s The Traffic in Praise).The second approach to the “unstoppable” rise of epideictic in later antiquity is mostly an extension of the first. We need to consider the socio-political structure of the Greco-Roman world, and the occasions and spaces it provided for public speech, in order to understand the proliferation of encomiastic genres. As I have argued elsewhere, we cannot explain the rise of epideictic merely by invoking the supposed “decay” of judicial and symbouleutic rhetoric. In fact, in every major town and city in the Roman Empire there were courts of law and council-halls, and these continued to be busy (if confined to local matters and restrained by procedural regulations and written law). To understand the rise of epideictic/encomiastic rhetoric, we must understand the role it played in sustaining the sense of a common culture shared by the far-flung, multiethnic elites that ran the Roman Empire (which one could argue was more like a multinational corporation than a modern state). From this perspective, the encomiastic culture of epideictic very effectively performed the role attributed in Cicero’s De Oratore to the “perfect orator.”Two quick remarks. One: identifying epideictic with civic encomia has many virtues, as noted above, but I wonder what happens to, for example, Hermogenes’ treatment of poetry, history, and philosophy as “pure” epideictic (panegyric)—as opposed to “practical” (civic) epideictic. These “pure” (meaning unmixed) types can be seen as also participating in praise and blame, and as forging or undermining different kinds of cultural communion. Two: the notion of sustaining a common culture among the Roman Empire’s administrative class—some of whom were Syrians, Greeks, North Africans, and so on—is very appealing, but I suspect that some readers will want to hear more about the less-irenic tensions in Greco-Roman culture and what role Hermogenes’ “pure epideictic” genres played in ideological insurgencies.From here I will be very brief. My water-clock has just about run out.Chapter Two, “The Grammar of Praise,” details the lists of topoi specified for different types of epideictic, offers a brief typology of speeches, and makes a list of characteristic figures (apostrophe, hyperbole, and comparative metaphor). Much of this will not be news for anyone familiar with Menander Rhetor, but it will be an excellent introduction for those who are not. The core argument, regarding epideictic as an instrument of communion, will be interesting to all.Chapter Three, “Why Epideictic Rhetoric?” takes on the traditional suspicion of epideictic as empty flattery and/or inconsequential display. Most of the arguments of this chapter are reflected in the paragraphs above: epideictic rhetoric has persuasory functions that are socially and politically consequential. Perhaps what is most interesting in this chapter is Pernot’s account of the circumstances of epideictic performance in antiquity and, especially, his estimates of the length of epideictic speeches (82): for example, Aelius Aristide’s Regarding Rome takes about one hour to deliver; imperial panegyrics took 30 minutes. (The addressees, after all, were busy people.) This chapter is worth the whole book.Chapter Four, “New Approaches in Epideictic,” suggests directions for future research. These include an “anthropological” application of speech-act theory to the performative and ceremonial aspects of epideictic discourse, and the uses of silence and “veiled” discourse to communicate what might be dangerous to say, or to promote subversive “dissent and denunciation” instead of “communion.” This will, I suspect, be the preferred direction of many readers. Pernot, however, both acknowledges that preference and calls for “a little more patience” with epideictic as an irenic and utopian instrument of communion (99–100). It may not be a bad idea to consider it that way first.

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the tenth-century pedagogical text Ælfrīc’s Colloquy as an instance of Anglo-Saxon rhetorical instruction in the spirit of the Greco-Roman progymnasmata. Through a comparison of the text with classical sources such as Priscian’s adaptations of Hermogenes and Isidore’s Etymologies, this essay concludes that Ælfrīc knew of the progymnasmata and that these exercises served as the basis for rhetorical instruction that emphasized Benedictine ideals of communal concord through trained speaking and writing. Drawing on the commonplace of the three estates, the Colloquy demonstrated the ideal role of rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon society while modeling traditional progymnasmata exercises such as fable composition, impersonations, and comparisons.

ABSTRACT The emplacements of rhetoric are manifold and the inquiries into the topologies of rhetoric are ways of understanding developments in rhetorical theory. To these ends, I contrast in this article the invocations of place in rhetorical theory old and new. In this long view, the spatiality of rhetoric appears to be multifaceted. I show that in Greco-Roman rhetorical theory, spatiality is topical, figured metaphorically and literally, and functions as a precedent condition for rhetoric. I argue that modern/postmodern theories differ from traditional theories of rhetoric not because they rely more or less on the materiality or immateriality of place, but because of their orientations to place as heterotopic, that is, as fluid and contingent. I then offer an account of how heterotopic rhetoric challenges orders of knowledge allowing for ever-new articulations through a close reading of Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father. The heterotopology of rhetoric proposed here expands understandings of the heuristic function of place. The essay considers the implications heterotopic place holds for identity and subjectivity.

ABSTRACT A theoretical bias pervades enthymeme. Most studies of the enthymeme are thoroughly Aristotelian and syllogistic, while the study of enthymemes in ancient oratory is virtually nonexistent. Yet the Attic orators used enthymemes commonly and consistently, and as practitioners, they have something to teach us about enthymemes that theorists can’t. In this article, I begin an examination of oratorical enthymemes and the variety of their use and offer a preliminary understanding of the “oratorical enthymeme” as a rhetorical technique. I conclude by briefly touching on the connections between oratorical enthymemes and ancient theory.

Looking back at my four years as editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric, I am thankful to all the authors, reviewers, and special issue editors whose hard work we see represented in volumes 15 through 18. I am also proud of the diversity and high quality of scholarship included in these volumes. I think that the journal’s contents prove that the history of rhetoric as a field has evolved beyond its original preoccupation with ancient and medieval rhetoric into a robust scholarly enterprise that illuminates rhetorical theory, practice, and pedagogy in all historical periods. What binds this diverse set of studies together is the historical lens, a perspective that is sensitive to discontinuities and disruptions, to power struggles, and to the performative complexity of rhetoric as an embodied practice.This is not to say that we all abide by a fixed methodology. On the contrary, historians of rhetoric do not take their approach for granted but instead continue to debate how their scholarly habituation and lived experiences influence their theories and methods of historical research. Witness, for example, Practicing Histories: On the Doing of History and the Making of Historians in Rhetoric, a special issue guest edited by Christa J. Olson (volume 15, number 1, 2012). As Olson remarks in her introduction, “historiographers take aim at points of disconnection” (3) and stitch together places and moments that may not appear related.That this sort of opportune stitching together can generate powerful insights is apparent in the journal’s special issues, most of which began as American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) symposia. Rhetoric and Its Masses (guest edited by Dave Tell) and Rhetoric and Freedom (guest edited by Susan C. Jarratt) offer not only broad-ranging explorations of their respective topics but also demonstrate the value of historical inquiry into some of the most abiding issues in rhetorical studies. ASHR symposia and special issues that grow out of them allow us to bring together the work of established and young scholars alike, and as such they illustrate the value of ASHR and its journal as sites of scholarly training of historians of rhetoric.In addition to themed special issues, I would like to highlight some of the exciting trends that I believe are gaining prominence in the history of rhetoric. One such trend is the exploration of spatial and visual practices in different historical periods. For example, Diana Eidson’s study of the Celsus Library at Ephesus probes the power of spatial rhetoric to address its historical audiences, both elite and nonelite. Or take Julia Marie Smith’s article on The Book of Margery Kempe, in which she examines the contributions of multiple hands to this medieval manuscript’s central narrative. Not incidentally, both authors use images to support their arguments. Although Advances can accommodate only black-and-white illustrations in print, the journal’s online version allows one to view their color versions.Another trend is the investigation of the relationship between rhetoric and religion in diverse historical and cultural contexts. In the past three years, the journal published studies of theological influences on rhetorical theories and pedagogical doctrines of such figures as Augustine, Austin Phelps, and William Enfield; analyses of the argumentative strategies used by medieval rabbis and Jaina mystics; and essays on the use of religious appeals deployed by nineteenth-century African American speakers. Besides being “sermonic” to begin with (Johannesen, Strickland, and Eubanks 1970), rhetoric often derives much of its poignancy from a connection to religious rituals and imaginaries. Examples of this connection are ubiquitous in contemporary culture; consider President Barack Obama’s spontaneous singing of “Amazing Grace” during his eulogy for the slain parishioners of a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, or Pope Francis’s recent encyclical on climate change. Historians of rhetoric are particularly well positioned to shine the light on such interventions.I do not mean to suggest, of course, that classical and medieval rhetoric have been exhausted as areas of inquiry; quite the opposite. If recent publications are any indication, we still have much to learn from reinterpreting Plato and Aristotle as well as from revisiting the Middle Ages. As someone who is personally invested in regarding afresh rhetoric’s ancient heritage, I wholeheartedly agree with Olson’s (2012) claim: “we look again at old ideas and find ourselves with new questions” (7).This is why I am thrilled to welcome Art Walzer, a renowned scholar of Greek and Roman rhetoric and a beloved mentor to many historians of rhetoric, as the journal’s incoming editor in chief. I am confident that under Art’s guidance the journal will continue to deepen our understanding of traditional sites of historical inquiry as well as grow in promising new directions.Ekaterina V. HaskinsRensselaer Polytechnic Institute

ABSTRACT Under the Roman Empire, the Greek elites expressed the greatest respect for the emperors and celebrated the advantages of Roman domination. But behind the brilliant façade, certain factors of complexity were at work. This article uses the notion of “figured speech” to detect covert advice or reservation in the works of Dio of Prusa, known as Dio Chrysostom, and Aelius Aristides, two important representatives of Greek literature and the so-called Second Sophistic (first to second century CE). By “figured speech” ancient rhetoricians meant the cases in which orators resorted to ruses to disguise their intentions, by using indirect language to get to the points they wanted to make. Our method consists of linking certain texts by Aristides and Dio and passages from theoretical treatises together to make clear the precise procedure of figured speech that is used in each case: eloquent silence, “the hidden key,” blame behind praise, generalization, and speaking through a mask. Figured speech is an avenue of research that is opening up to interpret Greek rhetoric and literature better. The Greek case is particularly rich, and it could help analyze the return of the same phenomenon in other epochs and other cultures.

ABSTRACT This study examines ancient Roman ideas about humor’s boundaries in public culture. In particular, I analyze book 6, chapter 3 of the Institutio Oratoria, which covers Quintilian’s reflections on the subject. Following Cicero, Quintilian engages the tensions between humor and decorum in his political context, using urbanitas to refine the former and to loosen the latter’s strictures. In this process, the use of urbanitas implicitly points readers toward factors that can make humor rhetorical. Quintilian thus answers Cicero’s question about the degree to which humor should be used and furthers inquiry into how much rhetorical humor can or should be taught.

ABSTRACT Among Aristotle’s arts of argumentation, two are directly linked to archai, or first principles. Analytic deduces from them and dialectic tests their veracity. This article situates rhetoric as likewise useful for philosophical investigation in Aristotle’s own system by demonstrating how the Rhetoric assigns to rhetorical practice attributes that are uniquely related to the archai—without which investigations into and based on them would be impossible. That is, given the primary nature of the first principles as described by Aristotle, the strategic use of metaphor is the only intellectual machinery he has for articulating, disseminating, and gaining acquiescence for them.

ABSTRACT Petronius’s Satyricon, long recognized as a commentary on rhetorical education, particularly declamation, forms a broad critique of (rhetorical) educational practices in the first century rooted in imitation—declamation, Greek Atticism, imperial rhetoric—and the types of citizens produced by such practices. Problematically, Petronius’s critique, which seeks to redefine class based on a certain cultivated taste or judgment as opposed to material wealth, assumes an elite perspective and falls into the long dismissed “decline narrative” of Roman rhetoric once prevalent in the history of rhetoric. This article seeks to move beyond “Trimalchio vision,” a term used by art historian Lauren Hackworth Peterson to classify derogatory attitudes toward freedmen, to suggest that rhetorical education in the first century reached its intended audience, producing upwardly socially mobile administrators and city patrons in the empire. In other words, rhetorical education was reaching a mass audience in first-century Rome.

ABSTRACT In several recent essays, Brad McAdon has argued that Aristotle's Rhetoric is such a fractured, inconsistent text that it is reasonable to conclude it is not the work of a single author, “Aristotle,” but the work of an editor who combined sections of treatises by several authors. This article challenges McAdon's thesis by reexamining the historical transmission of the Rhetoric and analyzing a central passage in the work—namely Rhetoric 1.4–14 (on the idia or special topics)—that McAdon believes Aristotle could not have written.

ABSTRACT In addition to rhetorical theorists, historians of rhetoric mistakenly believe that Aristotle carefully articulated how the use of rhetoric may be thought of as being human. Here, insofar as I believe he left this work undone, I offer an ontological framework to conceive of rhetoric as intrinsic to human nature, using the essentialist paradigm espoused by Aristotle and expanded upon by St. Thomas Aquinas as a theoretical foundation. A prefatory theory is proposed that rhetoric might be thought of as being natural for its teleological orientation toward action.

ABSTRACT This article culls a theory of rhetorical vision from Aristotle's Rhetoric by examining the cluster of terms that bears on his theory of visual style. Rhetorical vision stands apart from but complements visual rhetoric in that it attends to the rhetorical and linguistic conjuring of visual images—what contemporary neuroscientists call visual imagery—and can even affect direct perception. The article concludes by examining rhetorical vision in Demosthenes' Epitaphios. At stake in this investigation is the visible and visual liveliness of rhetoric and its ability to alter sense perception.

ABSTRACTThis reading of De Oratore uses Stoic philosophy and rhetoric to trace out a complex Ciceronian theory of rhetoric. Cicero rejected Stoic style, labeling it as meager and unpersuasive. However, he coalesced Stoic philosophy with Greek rhetoric to produce his ideal orator. Cicero described eloquentia as natural public speech that was distinctive to every person, yet he also explained how eloquence, like wisdom, unified aspects of the entire universe. Through these connections, Stoic influences enabled Cicero to negotiate major questions concerning rhetoric, such as the emotional control of the orator, the virtue of eloquence, and the status of rhetoric as an art. Cicero's negotiation is productive of a theory of rhetoric that is useful today, especially as it holds speech and public action as important and fundamental acts of human individuality.

The influences of Stoicism on the historical development of rhetorical theory are deeply interwoven into the history of rhetoric, from Cicero to the Enlightenment.1 In recent years, interest in the Stoics has enjoyed a revival in conjunction with discussions of cosmopolitanism, most notably the lively debate surrounding Martha Nussbaum's (2002) proposal for a cosmopolitan education, and some of the articles presented in this issue remind us of the connection between the Stoics and certain conceptions of cosmopolitanism. My interest in the convergence of these conversations stems from my own work on the possibilities and necessity of a cosmopolitan rhetoric for our time, a time characterized by massive displacements: the movement of people through geographical and social space, the homogenization of space, and the technological abolition of space (Darsey 2003).Nussbaum's inquiry into cosmopolitanism is occasioned by an urgent sense of movement across boundaries. Our time has been described as one in which “rootlessness, movement, homelessness and nomadism are the motifs of the day” (Skribs, Kendall, and Woodward 2004, 115). bell hooks begins her recent book, Belonging: A Culture of Place, with this poignant observation: “As I travel around I am stunned by how many citizens in our nation feel lost, feel bereft of a sense of direction, feel as though they cannot see where our journeys lead, that they cannot know where they are going. Many folks feel no sense of place” (2009, 1). As Pico Iyer puts it: For more and more people … the world is coming to resemble a diaspora, filled with new kinds of beings—Gastarbeiters and boat people and marielitos—as well as new kinds of realities: Rwandans in Auckland and Moroccans in Iceland. One reason why Melbourne looks ever more like Houston is that both of them are filling up with Vietnamese pho cafés; and computer technology further encourages us to believe that the furthest point is just a click away. (2001, 10–11)So Nussbaum, drawing from Stoic sources, feels the imperative to move beyond the borders of the nation state (2002, 3).In the world described by hooks, Iyer, and Nussbaum, the question for rhetoric is this: What is the proper rhetorical response to an increasingly globalized and cosmopolitan world? In a world in which place is rapidly disappearing, from where do arguments come? How can an audience be addressed? About this aspect of radical displacement, Iyer writes: “The Global Soul may see so many sides of every question that he never settles on a firm conviction.” The answer to the question “Where do you stand?” is, for Iyer, “treacherous” (2001, 25). Place has historically been inextricably connected to meaning-making and has, at least prior to very recent time, been the most convenient site of “culture.” As evidence of this relationship, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson point to world maps on which the world is represented as a collection of countries, “inherently fragmented space, divided by different colors into diverse national societies, each ‘rooted’ in its proper place… . It is so taken for granted that each country embodies its own distinctive culture and society that the terms ‘society’ and ‘culture’ are routinely appended to the names of nation-states” (1997, 34). The mapping described by Gupta and Ferguson suggests two things: (1) a deep desire for definition, the dual and simultaneous operation of inclusion and exclusion; and (2) the conceit that the borders marked by the colored patches are as stable and constant as the mountains, rivers, and other geographical features that populate the map.The fiction of stability presented by the cartography exposed, where, then, do we find grounds for argument in a world in which stable ground has disappeared? What are the bases for argument? Where are the places we search for arguments in a world of flux? Are there any more commonplaces? One temptation, evidenced in the summer 2010 “Restore America” rally in Washington, DC, is to retreat into provincialism. Any cursory survey of recent news stories provides a disheartening number of examples of attempts to reconcile conflicting ethical claims too often retreating to a reassertion of the local. At the time of this writing, those stories include the passing of legislation in the Slovak Republic making that country the only European country to require that its national anthem be played daily in schools, at each town council meeting, and on all public radio and television programs. This, along with the requirement that all state business be conducted in the Slovak language has created concern among the Hungarian minority that these laws are part of a movement to ostracize ethnic Hungarians. In March 2010, a group of Latin American nations joined in a new bloc that excludes the United States and Canada, and in April, investigators found evidence of the revival of human sacrifice among Kali worshippers in Bolpur, India. Throughout the spring of 2010, the revival of Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq threatened the U.S. hope of establishing a stable government there, and a conflict between Google and the government of the People's Republic of China over access to information assumed the dimensions of an international crisis.In the United States in the spring of 2010, Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigration became the focus of a nationwide debate, revealing a concern with the movement of people across boundaries. At the same time, a new battle in the ongoing war over sex education revealed concern with the movement of ideas across boundaries. Ross Douthat, in the New York Times, described the latest battle as “at heart … a battle over community standards. Berkeley liberals don't want their kids taught that premarital sex is wrong. Alabama churchgoers don't want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation” (2010, 16). Finally, in a case that went before the U.S. Supreme Court in April, 2010 the justices were asked to consider whether a Christian organization of law students at the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco could be allowed to discriminate against students unable or unwilling to affirm the group's statement of faith, which includes the promise to refrain from sexual conduct outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. That is, the court asked to what degree should those sharing a public space and resources be required to adhere to the same values?The examples of retreats into parochial sureties can be multiplied almost indefinitely: burkas in schools in France; the continuing controversy over how to handle Eritrean families living in the United States who insist on subjecting their daughters to what, for them, is a religious ritual, but which we call female genital mutilation; states such as Oklahoma and Wyoming drawing up bans on Sharia law. And so on.On October 16, 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made international news when, in a speech to young members of the Christian Democratic Union, she declared multiculturalism to be an utter failure in Germany (Weaver 2010). The following week, William Falk, in his editorial in The Week, wrote: The boundaries between cultures are eroding, due to widespread immigration, economic interdependence, and the Internet, forcing modern societies into an uncomfortable paradox. We believe that every cultural group, religion, and nation has the right to self-determination. But we also hold as a bedrock principle that every human being is born with inalienable rights—including the 50 percent of us who are women. Is it our business to free Muslim women from their shrouds and subservience, to bring a halt to female genital mutilation in Africa and the Middle East? Do we have the right to object to China's insistence that democracy and human rights do not apply there? Genteel tolerance alone will not resolve these questions. The collision of values has begun. How that conflict plays out will determine the shape of the next half-century. (2010, 7)As Falk's editorial suggests, each of the conflicts referred to here is the symptom of a contested boundary: in some cases a boundary that has been transgressed, in other cases a rampart being built against the barbarians who are perceived to be at the gate. These fragile walls and fences have failed to maintain what Gupta and Ferguson call the “play of differences” necessary to meaning-making. “The structures of feeling that enable meaningful relationships with particular locales, constituted and experienced in a particular manner, necessarily include the marking of ‘self’ and ‘other’ through identification with larger collectivities,” they write. “To be a part of a community is to be positioned as a particular kind of subject, similar to others within the community and different from those who are excluded from it” (1997, 19). Rhetorically, these examples represent instances in which enthymemes have failed to cross borders, geographical propinquity without community; those with no shared grounds for agreement find themselves having to share the same social space.The alternative to provincialism as a response to an increasingly complex and integrated world is cosmopolitanism. In 1998, Ulrich Beck published in The New Statesman a “Cosmopolitan Manifesto,” declaring that, just as 150 years prior the moment had been ripe for The Communist Manifesto, the moment was ripe, at the dawn of a new millennium, for a cosmopolitan manifesto: The Cosmopolitan Manifesto is about transnational-national conflict and dialogue which has to be opened up and organised. What is this global dialogue to be about? About the goals, values and structures of a cosmopolitan society. About whether democracy will be possible in a global age… . The key idea for a Cosmopolitan Manifesto is that there is a new dialectic of global and local questions which do not fit into national politics… .These questions are already part of the political agenda—in the localities and regions, in governments and public spheres both national and international. But only in a transnational framework can they be properly posed, debated and resolved. For this there has to be a reinvention of politics, a founding and grounding of the new political subject: that is—cosmopolitan parties. These represent transnational interests transnationally, but also work within the arenas of national politics. (1998, 28)Beck's call repeatedly draws our attention to place and to the necessity of transcending place. Beck is concerned with the issues of a world in which our fates are bound together but our focus too often remains stubbornly local. Consider the recent climate talks in Copenhagen and the ongoing debates over global warming, what to do about it, and who ought to do it.But Beck's manifesto is notable more for its representativeness than for its originality. Seventy-one years before Beck published his manifesto, Hugh Harris, writing in the wake of “the great war” and two years after the First International Conference on Child Welfare, surveyed the calls for cosmopolitanism among his contemporaries. Harris noted that, while the events of the early years of the twentieth century had done much to give the ideal of cosmopolitanism its “present intellectual currency,” the ideal itself “is not merely ephemeral doctrine, but one that has been transmitted to us through the ages” (1927, 1). Harris notes the “prevalent opinion” that cosmopolitanism in the Western world begins with the Stoics (2). Though Harris sets out to correct what he identified as the “prevalent opinion … that prior to the Alexandrian age and to the foundation of the Stoic school, Greek thought had not advanced beyond the conceptions of a narrow city-state patriotism and of an irreconcilable barrier between Hellenes and barbarians” (2). Harris locates the Greek origins of the cosmopolitan ideal much more broadly—in poetry, science, philosophy, and religion.The prevalent opinion, fueled by the proclamation of Diogenes of Sinope that he was a “citizen of the world,” is tenacious, and it was given a major infusion of new energy when Martha Nussbaum published her article “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” in 1994 in the Boston Review. There were 29 responses to Nussbaum's article published along with the article itself, and two years later the article was republished in book form along with eleven of the original responses and five new ones (Nussbaum 2002, 3). For all of the various responses the article has provoked, it is notable that almost no one takes issue with Nussbaum's claim that the intellectual lineage of cosmopolitanism in the West runs from Diogenes the Cynic through the Stoics to the Immanuel Kant of Perpetual Peace. I want to suggest that, as students of rhetoric, perhaps we should.From a rhetorical perspective, Nussbaum's proposal for a cosmopolitan education presents at least four problems. First, Nussbaum celebrates the Stoics as champions of a universalizing and antiprovincial rationality, but the emphasis on rationality, necessarily if paradoxically, is exclusionary. As Peter Euben has noted in his cross-examination of Nussbaum's proposal, Stoicism sponsored “a new exclusiveness based on differential commitment to and practice of rationality… . Very few exceptional humans could be full members in the community of reason,” Euben goes on to argue (2001, 266, 268–270). Rhetoric has long been identified with democracy and inclusiveness, and contemporary work—beginning with Stephen Toulmin and extending through Walter Fisher's work on narrative and Michael Billig's work on argument—has made great strides toward maintaining and even extending that tradition through the articulation and legitimation of mundane forms of argument that are not necessarily logical. Work by Sally Planalp and others has extended our understanding of the role of the emotions in persuasion.Second, Nussbaum's proposal neglects the praxis of real political contention. As Fred Dallmayr has put it: “[I]t is insufficient—on moral and practical grounds—to throw a mantle of universal rules over humankind without paying simultaneous attention to public debate and the role of political will formation” (2003, 434). Dallmayr goes on to remind us that Diogenes the Cynic, whose example was followed by most of the Roman Stoics (Cicero being the exception), “was described as an ‘exile’ from his city who paid little heed to ‘political thought’ and adopted a ‘strikingly apolitical stance’” (435). Gertrude Himmelfarb notes that Nussbaum “quotes the Stoics at some length as proponents of the idea of a universal ‘moral community’ and ‘world citizenship.’ But she quotes Aristotle not at all. Yet Aristotle's dictum, ‘Man is by nature a political animal,’ has proved to be far more prescient than the Stoic doctrine” (2002, 74). While the question of nature in the human political character has been contested ground at least since Hobbes, we have, whether by nature or by necessity, historically found our existence as part of a polis, and there can be little contesting of Aristotle's asseveration that “politics is the master art,” and rhetoric its ethical branch. A rhetorical theory that neglects politics be no rhetorical theory at and a cosmopolitan that neglects politics be of many of the issues our world within itself a toward the very that the call for a cosmopolitan to to the one the to all human as of their shared for against based on or the other of is by extending to only in the in which they are with (2003, and Nussbaum's proposal for a cosmopolitanism based on universal reason is to our in the degree that it is itself in it is the of our that the grounds of reason itself have been reason has no from which to if we to the claims of against the of the the universal As puts it, of and the cultural of the universal work against its claim to a (2002, as Gertrude Himmelfarb of the universal values and of are not only in practice by a part of they are not in all of in perhaps even Western (2002, response to the of the universal is to it as an of of and … an alternative to Nussbaum's I am to a as the for a theory of rhetoric, a theory of rhetoric that can the world of and and among The of were early in a they were citizens of the and though they were notably by for their as they the of and it was their from that allowed them to put moral questions at the of public Harris includes the in his survey of the of cosmopolitanism in them with the and the and in particular to the of While most of the the of among them only a few of those an between the of the and their Harris Yet it is that is in a of and their to the Western intellectual tradition may be a rhetorical practice with this cosmopolitan following the of that the while they may be and are for a cosmopolitan rhetoric their multiculturalism into or a kind of that the were of the point of or that their were based on is not by the and contemporary find evidence of ethical in the of the the of concern with in interest in the social of proper the in which the to rhetoric bring about for the and us that there is evidence for all of the that they were in politics, often at very necessarily then, making ethical and that or four of the as a of the political they represented beyond the the evidence even more if we include who for the of over war and for a who to his what in to as of It is not that the any idea of but that they it as “the of of in to the Stoics who to and that the case can be a cosmopolitan rhetoric based on the have these over Nussbaum's First, it be a deeply or not the were of rhetoric, they were inextricably with the rhetorical and political of their The were of a rhetoric, being in displacement, ought to the of a world with the of The were and as as as the were also as and is not to the movement of but as Kendall, and Woodward is about of and just as much as it is about of is not only but also and As a rhetoric in displacement, a rhetoric should the of a rhetoric, not bound by a universal ought to be to forms of argument and the possibilities for argument and in that a Stoic rhetoric is not and as and others have us out of the of a alternative for in the between the two world and in that to our own moment in Hugh Harris the poignant for a cosmopolitan understanding that he found in the intellectual of There is, on the one a to see our historical as in of there is, on the other a to historical for our as that we have this before and that our will see us through In a rhetoric represent a with the of but one that has never enjoyed widespread this is its perhaps this time we can it