Notwithstanding the widespread assumption that Aristotle forges a better relationship among rhetoric, the emotions, and political morality than Cicero, I contend that Cicero, not Aristotle, offers a more relevant account of the relationship among these terms. I argue that, by grounding his account of emotional appeals in the art of rhetoric, Aristotle does not evade the moral problems originating in emotional manipulation. Moreover, Aristotle's approach to emotional appeals in politics is, compared to Cicero's, static, unable to adapt to new political circumstances. I suggest that Cicero's approach to the rhetorical emotions is more acceptable to a modern audience than Aristotle's because it is ethically based while also responsive to political realities. Cicero accommodates emotional appeals to circumstance based on his belief in decorum as a moral principle. Further, I show that emotional manipulation in Cicero is not as problematical as it initially appears.

Nessuna classificazione, sia antica sia moderna, porta alla luce in modo adeguato la varietà di domande che Demostene utilizza nelle sue Filippiche. Lo scopo di questo lavoro è di esaminare l'analisi dell'utilizzazione delle domande nell'eloquenza greca e di elaborare una nuova classificazione che si basa sul lavoro dei retori antichi e studiosi moderni, ma mette in evidenza la diversità della prassi di Demostene e chiara come i diversi tipi di domande che egli usa nei suoi discorsi spesso riflettono l'approccio di tutto il discorso.

Notwithstanding the widespread assumption that Aristotle forges a better relationship among rhetoric, the emotions, and political morality than Cicero, I contend that Cicero, not Aristotle, offers a more relevant account of the relationship among these terms. I argue that, by grounding his account of emotional appeals in the art of rhetoric, Aristotle does not evade the moral problems originating in emotional manipulation. Moreover, Aristotle’s approach to emotional appeals in politics is, compared to Cicero’s, static, unable to adapt to new political circumstances. I suggest that Cicero’s approach to the rhetorical emotions is more acceptable to a modern audience than Aristotle’s because it is ethically based while also responsive to political realities. Cicero accommodates emotional appeals to circumstance based on his belief in decorum as a moral principle. Further, I show that emotional manipulation in Cicero is not as problematical as it initially appears.

Nessuna classificazione, sia antica sia moderna, porta alla luce in modo adeguato la varietà di domande che Demostene utilizza nelle sue Filippiche. Lo scopo di questo lavoro è di esaminare l’analisi dell’utilizzazione delle domande nell’eloquenza greca e di elaborare una nuova classificazione che si basa sul lavoro dei retori antichi e studiosi moderni, ma mette in evidenza la diversità della p rassi di Demostene e chiara come i diversi tipi di domande che egli usa nei suoi discorsi spesso riflettono l’approccio di tutto il discorso.

Reviews Michael S. Kochin. Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Univer­ sity Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-291-03455-3 The selections in this hook are best read as a series of loosely connected essays, situated within political science, informed bv scholarship in the rhetoric of Greek and Roman antiquity They build, in a leisurely way, toward a theory of rhetoric as an art of persuasive speech especially suited to the task of the politician—the construction of political advice. In his introduction, Michael Kochin proposes to use the diffusion of ideas in scientific communities as a model of political persuasion: "the politician seeks an understanding of policy through his or her operations within political institutions, just as the scientist seeks understanding through his or her operation wdthin political institutions. Scientific knowledge is thus created and distributed throughout the netw'ork: it is not merely diffused through it from center to periphery. I appeal to this clear case to explain the unclear case of public life: because the social structure of science is well studied, the rhetorical concepts I want to explicate are more clearly visible in it" (11). That w'ould have been an interesting book, but it is not the one Kochin ended up writing. Five Chapters forgets all about scientific communication for chapters on end, and the ideas that it develops about political communication are a very mixed bag. It is, for all that, an engaging and stimulating book. Kochin offers fix e topics for the investigation of political persuasion: character (or ethos), action (or stasis), things (the creation of facts), nothing (communication that maintains relationships) and art (specifically rhetoric as a means of understanding artful speech). Issues of argument and affect are dismissed in the introduction: political persuasion, according to Kochin, depends on the credibility of the speaker and the telling power of facts, and emotion is "a junk category" (15). Both the topics that Kochin has chosen and those he has left aside offer a reader fair warning that the ride ahead will not be a trot through familiar territories. The chapters on character, action, things, and nothing approach issues of political persuasion from different directions. Character takes up the Aristotelean traits of knowledge, benevolence, and virtue, treated here under the topics of competence, identification, and empathy. The chapter also Khetorica, Vol. XXXI, issue 4, pp. 445-464, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . T2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.4.445. 446 RHETORICA discusses the ways in which political leaders "empty" their personalities of idiosyncracies, the better to reflect common values (40). He critiques theories of ethos that see it as artificial, connecting Aristotle's rhetorical ethos to his political ethos. And he introduces a theme that will connect these four chapters: any program that favors "measures, not men" as the focus of political discourse fails to take into account the public's need to judge measures by the men who advocate them. The chapter on action is an extended reading of Demosthenes' "On the Crown," taken as a model for political advocacy in its orientation to the future, and to the possible. Kochin insists that the Athenian audience's approval of the speech is an extension of its judgment of Demosthenes as a competent, benevolent counselor who represents the collective interests of the Athenians. Judgments based on motives or on the results of actions are necessarily flawed, incomplete, or irrelevant. Kochin illustrates this analysis with examples from American political discourse, including the first of many positive citations of Calvin Coolidge, a president I do not ordinarily associate with rhetorical skill. The chapter on things is one of the strongest in the book. Kochin de­ velops an account of enargeia in a discussion of political speeches that deploy facts, statistics, vivid narratives, and images. The range of examples, from Begin to Coolidge (again!) is impressive; Kochin connects the persuasive force of...

Book Review| August 01 2013 Review: Eric MacPhail, The Sophistic Renaissance by Eric MacPhail Eric MacPhail, The Sophistic Renaissance (Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance 485), Geneva: Droz, 2011, 155 pp. ISBN: 978-2-600-01467-0 55 Rhetorica (2013) 31 (3): 337–339. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2013.31.3.337 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Eric MacPhail, The Sophistic Renaissance by Eric MacPhail. Rhetorica 1 August 2013; 31 (3): 337–339. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2013.31.3.337 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews 337 The final chapter examines later developments in the air, which the author views as resulting in a general decline in quality, although it may also be the result of a changing aesthetic which valued the simple and natural over the relative complexity of the earlier style. In part this change may have been the result of the popularization resulting from the printed annual anthologies of Ballard, the Airs de different autheiirs (1658-94). In spite of push-back from religious authorities, who decried the pursuit of pleasurable distractions associated with the air, it proliferated in the eighteenth century, albeit in a somewhat simpler, more rustic style. The book is extremely well documented and provides a through bibli­ ography of relevant research. It furnishes extensiv e and accurate translations of all the texts under discussion. Robert A. Green Bloomington Eric MacPhail, The Sophistic Renaissance (Travaux ¿'Humanisme et Renaissance 485), Geneva: Droz, 2011,155 pp. ISBN: 978-2-600-014670 55 This ingenious small book combines a careful but sprightly appraisal of the sophistic sources av ailable to Humanist scholars and a persuasive analysis of the influence of these sources on the writings of major literary figures of the Renaissance. Eric MacPhail manages adroitly the double focus of his study. Scholars of early modern history and literature will doubtless find his appreciation of the linkage between the two an inspiration for further studies. Divided into two parts, the book begins with an engaging bibliographi­ cal account of the "fragmentary fortunes" of the sophists from their notoriety in the literature of late fifth century Athens to their resurgence in the writ­ ings of renaissance humanists. The aim of the author is to uncover who the sophists were. Much scholarship has been devoted to the sophists already, but MacPhail's aim is to engender a new appreciation of the effect of their oratorical methods and their relativist philosophy on renaissance literature. He selects from among the sophists mentioned in classical texts, seven who appear to have made the greatest impression on both ancient and renaissance commentators—Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, Hippias, An­ tiphon, and Critias. Seen as relishing arguments on both sides of an issue and delighting in exhibitions of their inventive powers, few commentators spoke in their favor. And as teachers for hire, they provoked disdain, not only from fifth century critics, but from one of their arch imitators, Montaigne, as well. Yet he was indebted to them for the subversive energy of his essays, MacPhail claims, dubbing him "the champion of sophistic reasoning" (92)." Erasmus, too, owed the satirical character of his Praise ofFolly to the sophists. 338 RHETORICA McPhail places the blame for the disrepute of the sophists on Plato's di­ alogues. The philosopher excoriated their argumentative strategies as being based solely on opinion, on what appears to be true. Protagoras exemplified their stance in his claim that all opinions are true and that man is the measure of all things. Aristotle, MacPhail remarks, although less pejorative than Plato in the Art of Rhetoric, distinguished sophists from rhetors by their focus on dynamis (prowess), rather than proairesis (moral purpose). One drawback, however, of the compact nature of this study is the omission of any discus­ sion of the emergence of the art of rhetoric in the same period and its relation to sophistry. Although MacPhail references Aristotle's Rhetoric and treats the "second sophistic" period briefly, noting the writings of Cicero and Quin­ tilian, he does not address the nature of argumentative strategies in terms of subject matter, contingences, or audiences. Sophists, after all, were not the only sages to realize that contingencies required multiple probable answers. The battle of the sophists for recognition of their contributions to knowl­ edge versus the claims of philosophers to own truth continues to surface throughout the work. Paradoxically (and fittingly), the bad reputation of the sophists seems to have ensured their survival. They shocked and fascinated humanists by their skill in demonstrating the truth of opposites. They could, indeed, make the weaker case the stronger. In part two, devoted to what he calls "the antagonism of speech," MacPhail's erudition coupled with a detective's acumen enables him to un­ cover...

Reviews 345 moindre éloge que l'on puisse décerner à ce volume que d'avoir contribué à rendre au sophiste la profondeui, 1 humanité et 1 actualité de son éloquence. Anne-Marie Favreau-Linder Clermont Ferrand Benjamin Kelly, Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt. (Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents), Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xix, 427. ISBN 9780199599615. $150.00. Benjamin Kelly's Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt (hereafter PLSCR) is an erudite, original, systematic, and clearly written study of how petitions functioned as instruments of social control in GraecoRoman Egypt from 30 BC to 284 AD. It is unique in surveying, and categoriz­ ing in appendices, the complete published corpus of 568 petitions and 227 proceedings reports from the period. As it is the best and most comprehen­ sive analysis of Graeco-Egyptian papyrus petitions and a landmark in juristic papyrology, as well as providing in-depth analysis of numerous individual petitions, it belongs in the personal libraries of rhetoricians researching late antiquity, and should be consulted by scholars interested in petitioning or forensic rhetoric in other periods. Although the hardcover price of $150 is somewhat daunting for scholars not working in the specific subfield, PLSCR is available via Oxford University Scholarship Online. PLSCR consists of nine chapters (333 pages), a glossary, maps, three appendices, a bibliography and indices. "Chapter 1: Introduction" (pp. 137 ) begins by discussing a small group of petitions concerning an ongoing feud between Satabous and Nestnephis, two Egyptian priests in a village in the Fayoum region. Close analysis of the specific petitions concerning this feud leads to more general discussion of what can legitimately be deduced from extant petitions and the limitations of petitions specifically, and papyri generally, as evidence. In a sense, PLSCR starts as a corpus of evidence in search of a theory. After discussing limitations of methodological frames such as criminality and dispute resolution, Kelly focuses on the theme of social control as a lens through which to analyze his corpus of petitions. Although primarily intended as background information, the lucid treatment of diachronic changes in administrative structure and terminology relevant to petitioning will be particularly valuable to non-papyrologists investigating Graeco-Egyptian rhetoric. The second chapter, "Petitions and Social Elistory" (pp. 38-74), analyzes the nature of petitions as evidence for social history. The treatment of peti­ tions as evidence is sensible and meticulous, addressing patterns of survival, the actual processes and contexts within which petitions were created, pre­ sented, archived, and answered, and the relationship of petitioning to the 346 RHETORICA court system. The description of the interplay of orality and literacy and petition and trial will be of particular interest to rhetoricians. In order to investigate social history through the medium of petition, Kelly, in essence, is trying to read through the petitions to the underlying realities. When he analyzes rhetorical formulae, it is to dismiss formulaic elements as irrele­ vant to determining the "innermost thoughts" of the petitioners and actual events. Thus the elements of petitioning which are of greatest interest to rhetoricians serve, as it were, as obstacles to social history, while the facts of the social historian would be the minimally relevant "atechnai pisteis" for the rhetorician, outside the art of rhetoric proper. "Chapter 3: Legal Control in Roman Egypt" (pp. 75-122) examines the efficacy of the petitioning system as a mechanism of social control. Kelly argues convincingly that Roman administrators' ethos of efficiency and justice was grounded in reality, but that the complexity of the system, with unclear jurisdictions, multiple levels of hierarchy, and limited staffing, made petitioning of limited effectiveness as a formal method of social control, albeit more useful as an informal one. For rhetoricians, the most useful material will be the comprehensive treatment of administrative process, application of multiple simultaneous (i.e. Egyptian, Roman, Jewish, and Greek) systems of law, and the way that petitioners could manipulate the system. Although Kelly's focus is not rhetorical history, this material provides fertile ground for a revaluation of the importance of the translative or jurisdictional stasis, which is normally treated as somewhat of a trivial afterthought, but which appears far more substantial and useful in light...

Reviews 339 He shows the omnipresence of the antilogic of Protagoras in the essays— instability, uncertainty, relativity yield a multiplicity of possibilities. Fortune, or Kairos, dictates the answers. MacPhail deserves great praise for the strength and originality of his arguments, but perhaps some blame as well for a few weaknesses in his study. The book is far too short. In addition to the neglect of the discipline of rhetoric mentioned above, treatment of the relation of antilogic—the hallmark of sophistry—to the practice of classical dialectic is missing, a subject Aristotle treated at length in the Topics. Such a discussion in the first part of the book would have enriched treatment of the principle of non-contradiction and that of the decay of dialectic in the second half. Finally, translations should have been routinely provided for non English quotations. The practice varies. Greek quotations are never translated; Latin often, but not always. Since the author at times points out the centrality of a quotation to his argument, consistently expressing it in English would have secured the point for a wider audience. Despite these caveats, MacPhail has made a significant contribution to classical, neo-Latin and Renaissance studies. Whether he has also shown that the sophists did ultimately effect a relativist revolution among renaissance humanists, as he has argued, may be a subject worthy of future debate, dialogue, or irresolution. Jean Dietz Moss The Catholic University ofAmerica Dino Piovan, Memoria e ohlio della guerra civile: strategie giudiziarie e racconto del passato in Lisia. Studi e testi di storia antica, 19. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2011. Pp. 356. ISBN 9788846728258. 22.00 (pb). A partiré dalle parole chiave del titolo, il libro di D.P. illustra attraverso l'oratoria di Lisia le tensioni tra memoria collettiva e coinvolgimento degli individui nelle vicende drammatiche dell'Atene del biennio 405-03, dalla sconfitta finale di Egospotami, alia resa e alTinstaurazione del regime dei Trenta e poi alia sua caduta: anni di sventure, symphorai che divengono pa­ radigma per Timmaginario collettivo e che nel tempo della restaurazione democrática sono da superare attraverso una complessa elaborazione della memoria e deli'oblio: in particolare a confronto col principio del me mnesikakein in funzione della convivenza civile nella ricostituita unitá della polis ateniese, con tutte le difficoltá che ció necessariamente dovette comportare da una parte e dalTaltra tra democratici e oligarchici. Se gli eventi furono problematici, cosí fu il loro peso nella coscienza collettiva. D.P. analizza in dettaglio fatti e memoria cívica attraverso una acuta indagine delle orazioni lisiane che richiamano gli eventi di questo periodo negli anni immediatamente successivi (in particolare le orazioni 12,13, 25, alie quali sono dedicati 340 RHETORICA i primi tre capitoli, ma anche Lys. 31, 16, 26, 30, 18 e 2, che sono discusse più sintéticamente nel quarto capitolo). Ampio è il confronto delle diverse fonti a disposizione, in particolare Senofonte, la Athenaion politeia, Isocrate, Diodoro, le testimonianze epigrafiche, etc., e approfondita è la discussione sulla vasta bibliografía, dai problemi di datazione alie questioni testuali che hanno rilevanza per le questioni trattate (vd. pp. 313-43): il volume si avvale della nuova edizione lisiana di Ch. Carey e del nuovo commento di S. Todd (Oxford 2007). Dell'analisi di D.P. si possono fare qui due esempi relativi alla ricostruzione lisiana, per certi versi contraddittoria, tratti dalle orazioni forensi, e un terzo esempio dalEEpitafio, per il diverso contesto e la sua funzione pubblica. L'orazione Contro Eratostene (Lys. 12), discussa nel cap. 1, è costruita dal punto di vista ideológico come un diretto atto di accusa contro il governo dei Trenta (e in particolare contro uno dei suoi rappresentanti), con una prospettiva certo più ampia rispetto all'uccisione del fratello Polemarco: Li­ sia vi formula la tesi della 'cospirazione oligarchica' che ha condotto Atene alla rovina e ai lutti della guerra civile, un vero e proprio tradimento nei confront! della polis. Una demonizzazione utile, o meglio necessaria per il contesto e per gli obiettivi. Particolare rilievo per il problema della memoria riveste Pinsistenza di Lisia sulla kakia di Teramene e sul suo trasformismo. Le fonti successive muteranno orientamento, ma in Lisia, quando gli eventi sono ancora vicini, non v...

Zasaninienfassinig: Beweise aus den scholia vetera und scholia recentiora bezeugen, daB rhetorische Ausbildung in den Handen der Grammatiker in Byzanz schon frith begann. Sie explizierten die klassischen Texte anhand von Begriffen aus den Progymnasmata und fiihrten rhetorischen Analysen der Texte durch. Die Terminologie in den scholia ist nicht ganz in Einklang mit der die man in ‘mainstream’, auf Hermogenes gegründete Rhetoriklehrbücher findet, und kann aus alteren, vielleicht peripatetischen, Quellen entlehnt sein. Doch der Konflikt der Begriffe war nicht eine Quelle des Unbehagens fur den byzantinischen Lehrer, sondern ein Instrument zum flexiblen Denken.

The strong connection between rhythm and number is one of the most significant features of Aristotle's theory of rhythm. It equally underlies Cicero's rhetoric; and hence he translated the Greek notion of ῥυθμός into numerus. However, this terminology gives cause for concern; since numerus, like ῥυθμός may be relevant not only to rhythm in oratory, but also to musical rhythm. This is why Cicero was suspected by some Atticists of confounding music and discourse, although in fact the distinction between song and speech is prominent in his treatises. Quintilian addressed this problem and proposed a new terminology: for him, numerus referred only to rhythm in oratory, whereas rhythmos evoked the idea of musical rhythm.

This paper deals with the interest in the progymnasmata by Theon in Spain during the sixteenth century. Although this rhetorical work was not printed there either in Greek or in translation, it is possible to gather some information about the subject from the following four sources: themanuscript transmission of the text, the bibliographic information about the lost material, the references to Theon in the printed production about Aphthonius and, finally, the presence of the work by Theon in the inventories of books of the time.

Reviews Carruthers, Mary, ed., Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in theArts oftheMiddleAges. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, ed. Alastair Minnis). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xii + 316 pp. ISBN 9780521515306. Carruthers' edited collection shows how rhetorical theory informs and is informed by the visual, mechanical, and performative arts of the Mid­ dle Ages, with origins in the classical rhetorical tradition. This collection is groundbreaking in several ways: 1) by demonstrating the interconnected­ ness of medieval genres of rhetoric, 2) by expanding the canon of rhetorical texts, from classical origins to later adaptations, and 3) by suggesting av­ enues for further research across disciplinary lines. Thus, it transforms our understanding of rhetoric and expands it to new areas, especially oral and written performance in the Middle Ages. This collection will also appeal to those interested in medieval cultural studies through the study of verbal, visual, and performative arts as rhetoric. Paul Binski's essay, "'Working by words alone': the architect, scholas­ ticism and rhetoric in thirteenth-century France," opens the collection by relating thirteenth-century scholastic and rhetorical discourse and architec­ ture as influential on High Gothic architecture. Not only were architectural terms imported into rhetorical treatises, but also the architect as auctor, cre­ ator, master of a craft, was elevated to a new plane of authority. Central to this authority is that of planning, envisioning in the mind, foreknowing the work to be constructed, a skill required of both rhetor and architect. In "Grammar and rhetoric in late medieval polyphony: modern meta­ phor or old simile," Margaret Bent takes cross-disciplinary applications of rhetoric into the realm of performance by exploring intersections among terms employed in medieval music and grammar and rhetoric. Shared terminology, such as definitions, metaphors, and similes parallel musical structures. Other correspondences between rhetoric and music include the parts of an oration in arrangement and punctuation in notation, rhetoric in and as performance art. "Nature's forge and mechanical production: writing, reading and per­ forming song" continues this theme. Elizabeth Eva Leach develops the metaphor of the forge through collaborative invention in song, challenging Rhetorica, Vol. XXXI, Issue 2, pp. 220-237, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.2.220. Reviews 221 a common assumption that pieces were written first by a solitary composer or lyricist and then rehearsed by singers. Instead, she argues for "viewing the musical trace as a series of more or less precise memorial notae from which singers invent a collaborative (simultaneous) performance" (72). Her findings corroborate research on early modern theatre, as she explains in the latter half of her essay, thus broadening and transcending genre lines through a concept of composing process with parallels in two performance arts. Lucy Freeman Sandler's essay, "Rhetorical strategies in the pictorial im­ agery of fourteenth-century manuscripts: the case of the Bohun psalters," in­ troduces rare evidence of a rhetorical appeal from artists to patrons, through illuminations of psalters commissioned by the Bohun earls of Essex in the fourteenth century. Two artists, both Augustinian friars, employ images that relate biblical scenes to social and political matters relevant to their pa­ trons, thereby providing moral and theological counsel in devotional prac­ tice. Thus, the rhetoric of the art mirrors that of the drama, in which reader becomes actor: "For the Bohuns, reading and recitation of the psalms or the Hours of the Virgin, a devotional exercise that was repeated over and over, was associated with study of the fundamental narratives of human and sacred history in the Old and New Testaments in pictorial form" (117). This parallel opens pathways for research on intersections among private devotion, art and drama. Similarly, in "Do actions speak louder than words? The scope and role of pronuntiatio in the Latin rhetorical tradition, with special reference to the Cistercians," Jan M. Ziolkowski takes up the theme of performance in the Latin rhetorical tradition through actio (gesture) and pronuntiatio (elocution...

226 RHETORICA Matthew Lauzon, Signs ofLight: French and British Theories ofLinguistic Communication, 1648-1789, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.256 pp. ISBN 9780801448478. Matthew Lauzon's Signs ofLight: French and British Theories ofLinguistic Communication, 1648-1789 explores a broad array of Enlightenment perspec­ tives on discourse, from seventeenth-century discussions of Native Amer­ ican eloquence and animal communication to the longstanding debate over the relative merits of English and French that continued up to the French Revolution. Arguing that historians of the period, who overemphasize the impact of Locke's view of language, "have therefore tended to ignore both the period's tremendous engagement with the broader social implications of different languages that prevailed across the European republic of let­ ters and the ways in which such an engagement involved much more than issues of semantic and logical clarity" (p. 4), he surveys a wide range of treatises, literary works, reports, and studies to demonstrate the diversity of Enlightenment views concerning language and human community. The book is divided into three primary sections, each comprising a pair of chapters. Part I, "Animal Communication," seeks to fill the gap left by historians who have neglected "the suggestion by some in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that animals might communicate more clearly and therefore more effectively" than humans (p. 9). The first chapter in this section, "Bestial Banter," takes up Enlightenment claims of the potential su­ periority of animal communication developed by relatively obscure figures such as Marin Cureau de la Chambre and John Webster, as well as more well-known theorists such as John Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The second chapter, "Homo Risus: Making Light of Animal Language," features Enlightenment critiques of animal languages, both real and imaginary, that elucidate the complexity of human discourse and attempt to destabilize the virtue of clarity developed in the previous chapter. Lauzon provides analyses of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable ofthe Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, part 4 Four of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant's Amusement philosophique sur le langage des betes. Part II, "Savage Eloquence," explores "how late-seventeenth-century missionary concerns about the sincerity of American Indian conversions gen­ erated a particularly positive representation of savage speech" (p. 6). Chap­ ter 3, entitled "Warming Savage Hearts and Heating Eloquent Tongues," emphasizes the seventeenth-century Puritans' and Jesuits' praise of the elo­ quence of Native American converts to Christianity. Featuring a series of works produced by John Eliot and his missionary colleagues, Lauzon ar­ gues that the Puritans were impressed by the pathos of Native American Christians, whose words reflected the "Christian grand style" originally identified by Augustine. Through analyses of texts from the Jesuit Relations, which recorded seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit activities in the New World, Lauzon demonstrates that Jesuit missionaries also praised what amounted to that style in the emotional appeals of Native American converts, Reviews 227 who communicated far more movingly than conventional touchstones of Jesuit rhetoric like Cicero" (p. 90). Chapter 4, "From Savage Orators to Sav­ age Languages/' marshals subsequent Enlightenment treatments of the per­ ceived energetic quality of Native American languages as further critique of Locke's rather single-minded emphasis on clarity. The final section of Szy/zs ofLight, "Civilized Tongues," features "discus­ sions about how the French and English languages reflected and reinforced distinct national practices of enlightened communication" (p. 7). Chapter 5, "French Levity," treats the spirited argument for the superiority the French language set forth bv advocates such as François Charpentier, Nicholas Beuzée, Antoine de Rivarol, Denis Diderot, and Dominique de Bouhours, based on criteria such as clarity, the sweetness of its soft sounds, the "light­ ness" of its lexicon (p. 146), the wit of the bel esprit, and its universality. The final chapter, "English Energy," provides the corresponding arguments in praise of the English tongue, which emphasized its phonotactic qualities, its syntax, its gravity, and its ability to express natural passions. Lauzon's Coda, "French Levity and English Energy in the Revolutionary Wake," extends the issues raised in chapters 5 and 6 through and beyond the French Revolution. The particular strengths of Signs ofLight are the extensive range of works and...

Reviews 223 original ceremony nt Sancta Maria ad Martyres from language that reflects the architecture of the building, the movements of the presiding Pope (Boni­ face IV), the clergy, and the dramatization of God s voice in the words of the chant. Mary Carruthers and the contributors to this volume have produced an extraordinary collection of essays, rich and complex with thematic intercon­ nections and many avenues for further exploration. The overall arrangement illustrates ductus in invention, arrangement, and figurative motifs in the art of rhetoric across disciplinary lines, including composition, oratory, art, archi­ tecture, music, and liturgical performance. Many of the essays also include excellent visual illustrations. The editing is careful, though one system for translations, provided in the text of some essays and in the endnotes of others, would aid consistency. Nevertheless, readers will find Carruthers7 collection a remarkable resource not only for historical and textual studies, but also for insights into medieval culture, worship, and performance through the art of rhetoric. Elza C. Tiner Lynchburg College Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Text and Context 2), Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. xlii + 367 pp. ISBN 9780814211090. Making a well-timed appearance close to the publications of both Copeland and Sluiter's Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Peter Mack's A History of Renaissance Rhetoric (Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2011), Marjorie Curry Woods' new book helps us to imagine what took place in medieval and renaissance classes on the trivium. As her title suggests, Woods concentrates on commentaries written from the thir­ teenth through the seventeenth centuries on Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova, a popular Latin poem extant in over two hundred manuscripts that taught students how to write poetry and prose. By "commentaries," Woods means an assortment of instructive materials from interlinear and marginal manuscript glosses to freestanding explanations, from anonymous interpre­ tations, such as the Early Commentary that Woods previously edited and translated (New York: Garland, 1985), to the works of well-known intellec­ tuals teaching in documentable circumstances. Woods inquires insightfully into what these commentaries meant for teaching grammar and rhetoric in western as well as central Europe, in elementary courses as well as in universities. The scope of this book is therefore daunting, but Woods deftly chooses particular commentaries and teachers that best exemplify the Poetria nova s 224 RHETORICA use. For instance, chapter 3 details Pace of Ferrara's humanist elaboration placing the Poetria nova amidst classical authorities and literatures, while chapter 4 emphasizes Dybinus of Prague's Aristotelian rhetorical interpreta­ tion. As Woods elucidates, such differing constructions show how variously the Poetria nova might function within European curricula: for Pace as an aid to intermediate students in construing literature, for Dybinus as a text for university students analyzing various models of rhetoric, and for others as a guide to dictamen or sermon composition. A reader can learn a substantial amount about intellectual history and educational scenarios from Woods. Such learning is possible because Woods writes in lucid, well-organized prose that appeals to both specialists and those interested more generally in the history of rhetoric and education. For the latter audience, her Preface clearly defines terms such as "accessus" and "lemmata" that will recur in describing the commentaries (xxxviii-xxxix). Further, she opens the book with fifteen plates illustrating the diversity of the commentaries and pro­ viding exempla for later chapters. Nine of these plates include the famous opening phrase of the Poetria nova ("Papa stupor mundi," or in English trans­ lation, "Holy Father, wonder of the world") that becomes the subject of so many speculations about Geoffrey's audience and purpose. Along with the manuscript illustrations, Woods provides copious translations of transcrip­ tions from commentaries. Sometimes the interjection of these visual aids can overwhelm Woods' discussion, for instance in the layout of versions of the Dybinus commentary (190- 208), but Woods' intention is to be generous with manuscript materials over which she has labored long, and indeed many readers would be challenged to assess the divergent points in the commentaries without these explicit side-by-side comparisons. Woods' presentation of manuscript transcriptions also offers doctoral students...

The strong connection between rhythm and number is one of the most significant features of Aristotle’s theory of rhythm. It equally underlies Cicero’s rhetoric; and hence he translated the Greek notion of ῤυθμός into uumerus. However, this terminology gives cause for concern; since numerus, like ῤυθμός, may be relevant not only to rhythm in oratory, but also to musical rhythm. This is why Cicero was suspected by some Atticists of confounding music and discourse, although in fact the distinction between song and speech is prominent in his treatises. Quintilian addressed this problem and proposed a new terminology: for him, numerus referred only to rhythm in oratory, whereas rhythmos evoked the idea of musical rhythm.

This paper deals with the interest in the progymnasmata by Theon in Spain during the sixteenth century. Although this rhetorical work was not printed there either in Greek or in translation, it is possible to gather some information about the subject from the following four sources: the manuscript transmission of the text, the bibliographic information about the lost material, the references to Theon in the printed production about Aphthonius and, finally, the presence of the work by Theon in the inventories of books of the time.

Recurring features of Miltonic rhetoric during the 1640s include the structural patterns of the oration and the animadversion, widespread deployment of the classical high, low, and middle styles, and an epideictic mode of praise and blame. Equally noteworthy is the close relationship of rhetoric and poetic. These features can be used as a template to characterize Milton's work in 1659–60, his final period as a political controversialist. Five texts make up this period: Civil Power (1659), Likeliest Means (1659), two editions of The Readie Way (1660), and Brief Notes (1660). In 1659–60 the oration remains Milton's preferred form of public, inaugural address, yet traces of the Puritan sermon can also be found. As he had done in the 1640s, Milton later relied on the classical low style for argument, documentation, and narration. The poetic qualities of Miltonic polemic are as evident in 1659–60 as they had been in the 1640s. The well-developed mimetic identity of the second edition of The Readie Way represents a sophistication of the localized mimesis of the 1640s.

It has long been stated that, in Isocrates' Helen, there seems to be an open contradiction between the author's harsh criticism of logoi paradoxoi and the simple fact that his own encomia of Helen and Busiris appear to be specimens of that very genre. Traditionally, this contradiction has been explained by Isocrates' need to distanciate his own work from that of his predecessors. This paper undertakes a different approach. Isocrates' criticism of paradoxographic literature is based upon observations about what is and what is not allowed in moral epideictic discourse. Isocrates' specific instructions about proper and improper moral argumentation can function as hermeneutical tool to analyze Helen and Busiris. Only in Helen does he observe the rules of argumentation formulated in that very discourse. In Busiris, however, Isocrates adopts the typical modes of argumentation in paradoxographic literature as represented in the works of Gorgias or Polycrates. In consequence, his arguments in Busiris prove to be unconvincing when measured by his own standards formulated in the proemium of both Helen and Busiris. Consequently, the discourse ends in an apology of these arguments which is, once again, defective. In his corresponding discourses Helen and Busiris, Isocrates implictly demonstrates the moral and technical defects inherent in paradoxical discourse. He explicitly reflects these defects in the proemia and epilogues of both speeches. Helen and Busiris should, therefore, be understood as Isocrates' manifesto for moral discourse as opposed to paradoxographic showpieces.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how Cicero in his in Vatinium employs the iconic power of the body of the accused, Vatinius, and its repulsive strumae as a logical tool to support his persuasion strategy, thereby creating an enthymeme based upon the premises provided by the features of the body. This way of reasoning rests upon a strongly oriented and often distorting reading of the physical characteristics of the body in accordance with the physiognomic and pathognomonic doctrines. As a result, the de-formities of Vatinius's body, instead of being used to commend Vatinius, become important elements in Cicero's strategy of belittling his opponent's authority.

Recurring features of Miltonic rhetoric during the 1640s include the structural patterns of the oration and the animadversion, widespread deployment of the classical high, low, and middle styles, and an epideictic mode of praise and blame. Equally noteworthy is the close relationship of rhetoric and poetic. These features can be used as a template to characterize Milton’s work in 1659–60, his final period as a political controversialist. Five texts make up this period: Civil Power (1659), Likeliest Means (1659), two editions of The Readie Way (1660), and Brief Notes (1660). In 1659–60 the oration remains Milton’s preferred form of public, inaugural address, yet traces of the Puritan sermon can also be found. As he had done in the 1640s, Milton later relied on the classical low style for argument, documentation, and narration. The poetic qualities of Miltonic polemic are as evident in 1659–60 as they had been in the 1640s. The well-developed mimetic identity of the second edition of The Readie Way represents a sophistication of the localized mimesis of the 1640s.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how Cicero in his in Vatinium employs the iconic power of the body of the accused, Vatinius, and its repulsive strumae as a logical tool to support his persuasion strategy, thereby creating an enthymeme based upon the premises provided by the features of the body This way of reasoning rests upon a strongly oriented and often distorting reading of the physical characteristics of the body in accordance with the physiognomic and pathognomonic doctrines. As a result, the deformities of Vatinius’s body, instead of being used to commend Vatinius, become important elements in Cicero’s strategy of belittling his opponent’s authority.

Reviews Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in the Age of Eloquence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 349 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-4138-9 From Longinus to Cicero, Quintilian to Dryden, Susenbrotus to Priestley, vehement emotion was embodied in murmuring and mumbling, fits and starts, paroxysms of the inarticulate: aposiopesis, for example, denoted "some affection" that "breaks off... speech before it be all ended" (John Smith, The Mysterie ofRhetorique Unvail'd [1656], 148); it signified shame, fear, or anger, a "sodaine occasion" rupturing or impugning a speech or a story. An “auricular figure of defect," a "figure of silence, or of interruption," according to George Puttenham, aposiopesis was "fit for phantasticall heads" (The Arte of English Poesy [1589], 139). Should "phantasticall heads" prevail, figures flourish: as Dryden observed, "interrogations, exclamations, hyperbata, or a disordered connection of discourse" naturally convey fervid, enthusiastic, rancorous speech. "By me," the character 'Aposiopesis' says in Samuel Shaw's Words Made Visible (1679), "wise men stop themselves in the very career of their passion," and "do not tell you half of what they'l make you feel" (168). A taut ensemble of figures embody vehemence or incoherence, fre­ quently asyndeton (acervatio dissoluta), hyperbaton, and aposiopesis, but all staccato, inflamed, or interrupted speech—devoted to 'feeling' rather than 'telling'—has a robust somatic component. Passion is expressed by voice (pronuciatio) and gesture (actio), the fifth, and perhaps most important, canon of rhetorical invention, as some, following Demosthenes, have argued. Deliv­ ery is a "sort of language of the body" (Cicero, Orator, 17.55), and where but in the theatre might such a language have more power? Orators might learn from actors (see Quintilian, 11.3 ff.): making an effective speech, whether to the pit or in the court, enjoins eloquence of the head and arms, hands and eyes as well as invention, disposition, bold figures (as Joseph R. Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science ofActing [Cranburgh, New Jersey: Asso­ ciated University Presses, 1984], has argued). The inarticulate is a species of performance, to which the 'age of eloquence' devotes significant resources. Carla Mazzio's erudite and stimulating The Inarticulate Renaissance does not explore actio or pronunciatio (she cites neither Roach nor Noel Malcolm's The Origins of English Nonsense [London: Fontana, 1998], which treats early Rhetorica, Vol. XXXI, Issue 1, pp. 111-133, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.1.111. 112 RHETORICA modern poetic nonsense). While she briefly engages Thomas Wilson s Ci­ ceronian Arte of Rhetorique and Abraham Fraunce's Ramist Lawiers Logike (unaware that Fraunce paraphrases rather than 'cites' Ramus [121]), Mazzio s sense of the rich and variegated history of rhetoric in the period is akin to her uneven treatment of humanism—partial or monolithic, jejune or stultifying, depending on her argument. She is rarely sensitive to the revisions underway in rhetorical inquiry in the period, where former vices (aenigma, for example) are redescribed as virtues, by playwrights schooled in humanist rhetorical canons, eager to ignite their increasingly sophisticated audiences. Instead, her focus is "alternative foims of perception, expression, and agency that were occasioned by departures from verbal coherence and efficacy" (216 n. 2). In six parts, The Inarticulate Renaissance deftly and subtly examines an eclectic ensemble of 'departures': Reformation polemic and emergent na­ tionalism, Ralph Roister Doister and Hamlet, the haptic in Thomas Tomkis' play Lingua (1607) and the politics and poetics of revenge in Thomas Kyd. Her notes and bibliography (more than one third of the text) gather an im­ pressive array of contemporary scholarship, and her readings of various texts are sophisticated, even virtuoso. Her chapter on Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (1592), for example, suggests that the play "fails to fully synthesize classical and contemporary materials" (95); the resultant "confusion" speaks to the ways in which Kyd exposes the "less than articulate underside of imperial ambition and Protestant proto­ nationalism" (96) as well as...

124 RHETORICA Díaz Marroquin's most original contribution appears in the study's final chapters: Is it possible to move the current public's affects and passions, living in a society so far apart from the early-modern one, both conceptually and psychologically? As an answer, she chooses late 20i,z century artists who, using different means, achieve similar goals as those attained by the classical masters of rhetoric, by the authors of the baroque plays and by the early composers and librettists of the proto-operatic dramas. Some of these are the videoartists B. Viola and Nam June Paik, the stage director P. Sellars and the group La Fura dels Baus. The study's last section operates as a foreword for the present economic crisis. In view of the economic difficulties many theatres -including opera theatres- are currently encountering, Diaz Marroquin wonders whether the practice of performing repertoires created centuries ago may still achieve coherence on the 21st century stage. She concludes that the key lies in the controversial field of memory. This concept may be understood in the classical sense, as one of the cannons of rhetoric, but also in the mnemonic, in the historical one and, over all, as the affective memory described in treatises on dramatic technique such as Garcia's or, later on, Stanislavski's. As she affirms, "[La] memoria estetiza la experiencia personal y, superadas las fases de dolor en el acceso a determinadas zonas, se la ofrece, fertilizada, a la interpretación dramática" (p. 297). Human beings, no matter whether we live within the limits characterizing the pre-Romantic subjectivity or beyond them, seem to experience similar patterns of thought and emotion, although our circumstances may be different according to the diverse power schemes we live in. Analyzing the pre-Romantic emotion, therefore, implies identifying these circumstances and translating them to codes intelligible to the 21st century reader and performer. Diaz Marroquin's La retórica de los afectos operates as this kind of translation: A lucid, lively and critical travel across the at times tortuous, but always fascinating territories of reason and emotion. Aurelia Pessarrodona Universitd di Bologna, Fundación Española para la Ciencia i/ la Tecnología. Christopher Lyle Johnstone, Listening to the Logos: Speech and the Coming of Wisdom in Ancient Greece. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 300 pp. ISBN 978-1-57003-854-9 Christopher Lyle Johnstone's Listening to the Logos: Speech and the Com­ ing of Wisdom in Ancient Greece revisits rhetoric's relationship to philoso­ phy; Johnstone's contribution is to examine this relationship in light of an­ cient notions of wisdom. The book demonstrates that speech will not align neatly with rhetoric nor wisdom with philosophy. Rather Johnstone main­ tains that both rhetoric and philosophy use language to develop different Reviews 125 kinds of wisdom: philosophy leans toward metaphysical or natural wisdom, while rhetoric is inclined toward practical wisdom. Listening to the Logos traces Greek conceptions of wisdom from Homer to Aristotle, emphasizing throughout that wisdom has always relied on logos. Though Johnstone concludes his history of wisdom with Aristotle's tax­ onomy of knowledge, his challenge is to trace sophia and phronesis backwards. Early on Johnstone confronts the problems that attend reading ancient texts. Much of the book, for example, focuses on pre-Socratic nn/thos and logos for which we have only fragmentary sources. However, Johnstone's interpreta­ tions are buttressed by commentaries and secondary sources. He recovers very early notions of sophia, which, he argues, is "a kind of active knowledge or competence that is linked specifically with the practice of a techne, an art or craft" and phronesis is linked to the body, especially the heart (p. 29). Since in these mythopoetic texts sophia and phronesis do not yet suggest their Aristotelian meanings, Johnstone searches for other analogues. Based on his interpretation of narratives, Johnstone concludes that in a mythopoetic worldview "[h]uman wisdom is derivative" and "comes from the gods, who alone can apprehend true justice, who alone can know what the Fates have ordained" (p. 31). People are wise, then, when they understand the gods through history and myth (p. 31); knowledge of the...

It has long been stated that, in Isocrates’ Helen, there seems to be an open contradiction between the author’s harsh criticism of logoi paradoxoi and the simple fact that his own encomia of Helen and Busiris appear to be specimens of that very genre. Traditionally, this contradiction has been explained by Isocrates’ need to distanciate his own work from that of his predecessors.

Many modern scholars have studied in detail the phenomenon of vividness (gr. ἐνάργεıα; lat. evidentia) in ancient rhetorical texts; however, they have neglected to examine two important testimonies included in an Ars rhetorica ascribed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, but in fact to be ascribed to an anonymous rhetorician who probably lived in the third century AD. In these two passages the anonymous rhetorician faces some issues concerning the stylistic evidence that have not been previously studied. He analyzes the relationship between the vividness of the text and the use of everyday language, aimed to enhance realistic effects of discourse. This paper aims to present a detailed analysis of the comments offered by the anonymous rhetorician, that will help to define some peculiar aspects of stylistic vividness of the language in discourse.

Book Review| November 01 2012 Review: Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse, by David M. Timmerman and Edward Schiappa David M. Timmerman and Edward Schiappa. Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 192 pp. ISBN 9780521195188 Rhetorica (2012) 30 (4): 457–460. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2012.30.4.457 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse, by David M. Timmerman and Edward Schiappa. Rhetorica 1 November 2012; 30 (4): 457–460. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2012.30.4.457 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews 457 Disagreements are often treated as differing appearances or perspectives on a singular reality (after Perelman and Obrechts-Tyteka, for example) or as prompts for the invention of an agreement or unity to come. However, building on Canpanton's example, Dolgopolski's work develops a sustained and insightful construction of what might be termed Talmudic rationalism where the ontological entailments of expressions are drawn from the careful and charitable articulation of disagreements. As such, What is Talmud? is an important new contribution to the study of rhetoric. In addition, What is Talmud? is a necessary reorientation and elaboration on current studies of Rabbinic discourse and textuality, which has been dominated by praise for Rabbinic tolerance and appreciation of polysemy. What is Talmud? puts on the table the possibility that in accepting the Talmud as the historical anchor (if not the core symbol) for an appreciation of polysemy and multiple truths, we have done so at the expense of Talmudic understandings of disagreement. David Metzger Old Dominion University (Norfolk, Virginia) David M. Timmerman and Edward Schiappa. Classical Greek Rhetor­ ical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 192 pp. ISBN 9780521195188 Traditional accounts of rhetoric's emergence in fifth-century Greece have encountered many recent challenges and revisions. Among these challenges, Edward Schiappa's prolific scholarship on classical rhetoric has always been exceptional. In this vein, Schiappa has long argued for the importance of a later origin of rhetoric as a distinct discipline than has been presumed. It arose as a discipline, that is - something that could be studied - he says, in the fourth-century in the wake of Plato's invention of the term rhetorike. This latest volume, coauthored with David Timmerman, continues to provoke the reader to question accepted rhetorical histories and is located well within the scholarly trajectory of Schiappa's earlier work, in particular, the Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). However, by emphasizing the role of "terms of art," Classical Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse adds a refined focus on discourse in the formation of rhetoric as a discipline. Timmerman and Schiappa explain "terms of art as bits and pieces of disciplinary jargon that have "specialized denotative functions" (p.l) for those within a distinct knowledge community. Their introductory chapter provides a nuanced theoretical and historical explanation of such terms in the context of the history of rhetoric. The authors contend that the emergence of this kind of technical vocabulary is evidence of the expansion of the available "semantic field" and of corresponding "conceptual possibilities" (p. 6) available to rhetorical practitioners. Terms of art, in this way, are a 458 RHETORICA fundamental marker of discrete knowledge communities (i.e. disciplines). Consequently, they shape "the pedagogical, political and intellectual goals of rhetorical theory" (p. 2). Rather than simply revealing the historical importance of terms of art, however, Timmerman and Schiappa endeavor also to make a "methodological intervention" in the field of history of rhetoric (p. 171). They contend that the use of terms of art as an analytic framework has the advantage of shifting "our focus to the relevant pedagogical and theoretical texts to examine how the relevant terms ... are employed in those texts" (p. 172). The origin of rhetorike as a term in the fourth century (rather than fifth) has even further implication, for the authors, when understood in this light. In this context, Rhetorike is not merely Platonic shorthand, but an essential component in the technical development of the entire rhetorical knowledge community. The book takes up a variety of case studies that are united by their focus on terms of art. The first of these studies concerns dialegesthai (dialogue or dialectic) and its assorted meanings. In considering these variations, Timmerman and Schiappa demonstrate the ways in which words can be contested in technical contexts as terms of art. By synthesizing and analyzing the philological evidence, the authors contend a sophistic conception of dialegesthai was an established term of art for the Athenian intelligentsia. Thus, Plato's refinement of the term into what we understand as dialectic challenges this earlier technical usage. Parsing the similarities and differences that emerge in...

Many modern scholars have studied in detail the phenomenon of vividness (gr. ἐνάργεια; lat. evidentia) in ancient rhetorical texts; however, they have neglected to examine two important testimonies included in an Ars rhetorica ascribed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, but in fact to be ascribed to an anonymous rhetorician who probably lived in the third century AD.

Reviews Matthew Bevis, The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 302 pp. ISBN: 9780199593224 Heirs of the post-Enlightenment separation of ''literature" from "rhetor­ ic are likely to find the colon of Matthew Bevis's title paradoxical. Professors of "The Art of Eloquence" will not anticipate the list of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poets and novelists that follow the colon. Professors of literature will recognize the list of writers but wonder how these literary authors have become identified with rhetoric. The separation of these dis­ ciplines, after all, turns upon a view of that period in which the emergence of the category of the aesthetic warrants separate twentieth-century specialties to study "literature" and oratory. No book I have read since Jeffrey Walker's Rhetoric cud Poetics in Antiquity does more to trouble that separation than this one, for Bevis shows not only that all these literary writers were deeply engaged by the oratory of their moments but also that their literary work might best be understood as itself both a kind of rhetoric and a criticism of rhetoric. The literary texts come into clearer focus when read as responses to the rhetoric of their times, and the oratory reveals its powers and limitations when re-presented in the less exigent reflection of poems and novels. Specialist scholars have noted in passing these writers' interests in orators of their day, but Bevis convincingly makes these interests central to the style and substance of their works. Byron was an MP engaged by the rhetoric of Burke and Sheridan as well as the parliamentary conflicts of his time. Dickens, who started as a parliamentary reporter, engaged the radical rhetoric of his time and responded especially to the parliamentary rhetoric of Bulwer-Lytton. Tennyson, a public poet in his role as Laureate, followed current parliamentary debates and engaged in extended dialogue with Gladstone. Joyce was imbued with and responsive to the rhetoric of Parnell and more radical Irish nationalists. These engagements, Bevis shows, were not incidental but formative and sustaining, making it problematic to read these writers in aesthetic isolation from them. Our recent historicisms in literary studies might well have captured some of these relationships in order to debunk the purported autonomy of the aesthetic and reassert the political investments of art, but Bevis pursues a different line of argument. He works instead to recuperate the aesthetic as a Rhetorica, Vol. XXX, Issue 4, pp. 433-468, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2012.30.4.433. 434 RHETORICA kind of rhetoric that both responds to the immediate appeal of the rhetoric it represents and makes that rhetoric available for reflective criticism and political amelioration. Although the "art" of his title is not the Aristotelian techne oriented toward persuasion but the Kantian work of art engaged in imaginative free play, he argues that we mightfocus on how writers negotiate contending political demands in and through their work, and on how the literary arena can be considered one in which political questions are raised, entertained, and tested—not only decided or 'settled'. The conflicts and divided loyalties embodied in this arena need not be construed as merely impracticable or disingenuous hedging ofbets. They might also be seen as models of responsible political conduct, for their willingness to engage with multiple and sometimes contradictory values can prepare the groundfor a richer political response, (pp. 8-9) He sets out to redeem and apply to the work of literary art the muchmaligned Arnoldian term "disinterestedness" recapturing it from its association with a "retreat into an autotelic aesthetic realm" to link it instead with the sophistic principle of in ntramqne partem (p. 10). Following Adorno, he argues that "disinterestedness is achieved not in spite, but because, of an attentiveness to other points of view. Disinterestedness stays interested even as it seeks to resist certain forms of interest, and this resistance is...

Reviews 441 plification, a corpus of copiousness, an encomium of invention, a well; it is difficult to read such a long book about excess and extravagance with­ out resorting to the hyperbolic. But, hyperbole aside, this is a remarkable book. It is difficult to imagine that Johnson has left much unsaid about his subject. The display of erudition can be both dazzling and daunting—and occasionally bewildering. Simply surveying the 129 pages of notes can be remarkably instructive. In telling the story of hyperbole he seamlessly inter­ weaves ancient rhetoricians, mannerist poets, Enlightenment philosophers, and post-Modern critics—sometimes in the same sentence. In Hyperboles Johnson makes a compelling, and certainly exhaustive, case that his subject "is more than a figure of style: it is a mode of thought, a way of being" (4). This formerly neglected figure is now elevated to the status of an "liber trope" situated in the very center of human consciousness. Or as Johnson puts it in a probably irresistible paraphrase of Descartes: "I hyperbolize, therefore I am" (376). Don Paul Abbott University of California, Davis L. Albert et L. Nicolas, Polémique et rhétorique de l'Antiquité à nos jours, De Boeck - Duculot, Bruxelles, 2010. ISBN: 9782801116394 La dynamique équipe du GRAL de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles consacre un nouveau volume, fort de vingt-six contributions et d'une abon­ dante bibliographie mise à jour, aux mécanismes de la polémique. L'ouvrage s'ouvre sur une synthèse claire et inspirée de la problématique abordée, qui est signée par les deux co-directeurs. Luce Albert et Loïc Nicolas y précisent d'emblée les objectifs du recueil et justifient l'intérêt d'une ap­ proche rhétorique. Aux antipodes de la vision réductrice d'une parole pure­ ment violente, échappant à tout contrôle, la polémique est ici conçue comme« un duel par les mots » , ce qui la rend disponible pour l'analyse rhétorique et discursive. Dans leur synthèse, les deux auteurs s'attachent à identifier les modalités du polémique au-delà de ses incarnations dans des polémiques par­ ticulières, qui dépassent les frontières des genres qu'elles investissent. Selon eux, la polémique met en scène, sur un terrain commun et fictionnel, deux adversaires irréconciables ainsi qu'un Tiers, qui peut être tantôt 1 arbitre, tantôt l'un des enjeux du duel. Les acteurs du conflit passent entre eux un pacte implicite qui engendre un ensemble d'attentes et d'interdits supposés, crée le cadre d'une fiction régulée et fixe les limites de violence verbale. La polémique correspond donc à une forme de rituel qui fait peser des contraintes sur les participants, mais cette ritualisation n est pas déterminée à l'avance et les contraintes sont propres à chaque polémique. Les contra­ dicteurs construisent ensemble et tentent d accaparer à tour de role le lieu de la lutte qui n'existe que comme espace d'échange. Ils entrent ainsi dans 442 RHETORICA une dynamique de surenchère qui, dans une quête perpétuelle de 1 argument décisif, les incite sans cesse à repousser les limites et à renégocier les rapports de forces établis. Dans le dialogisme à trois termes qui se met ainsi progres­ sivement en place et évolue au fil des échanges, la critique, voire 1 injure, de l'un attend la riposte de l'autre comme un besoin vital et une opposition nécessaire : il faut accepter la coexistence de l'erreur et de la vérité pour rendre possible l'entreprise d'authentification qui fera triompher la cause pour laquelle on livre ainsi bataille. Les rapports de places fonctionnent en miroir : chacun devient à tour de rôle attaquant et défenseur, doit redéfinir sa position tout en récusant celle de l'autre. Pour vaincre, il faut anticiper et pénétrer la pensée de l'adversaire afin d'en trouver les failles. Le com­ bat se déroule généralement entre deux personnages très proches sous bien des rapports, qui se reconnaissent les capacités nécessaires...

Reviews 451 Nancy Worman, Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2008. 385 + xii pp. ISBN 9780521857871. Insult and character assassination have a long and entertaining history in the annals of rhetoric. Not only do they generate theoretical meditation but they can provide scholars and amateurs alike with the guilty (and for Aristotle, vulgar) pleasures of nicely turned invective. Nancy Worman's fascinating study allows classicists and those with more general interests in ancient rhetorical forms to follow patterns of defamation from Homer and the beginnings of preserved Greek literature to Aristotle and Theophrastus at the end of the fourth century B.C.E. Of the two possibilities adumbrated above, her work facilitates the austere rewards of the theoretical rather than enjoy­ able indulgence in multiple examples of splenetic venting. For the latter one might settle down with Thomas Conley's Toward a Rhetoric ofInsult (Chicago 2010), which, in addition to quotation of virtuosic and delectable passages of invective (starting with Cicero and proceeding through the Flugschriften of the Reformation to end with Monty Python and modern political cartoons), does a useful job in sketching multiple patterns of defamatory language and specifying the factors that constrain their operation. Conley surveys how slurs connected with social status, gender, ethnicity, sexual habits, and the practices of eating and drinking (among others) recur in multiple cultures. He is interested in how invective can be used to create group identity through assertion of communal values, but also in the use of insult to interrogate per­ ceived hierarchies. This generalist orientation makes the book a valuable introduction to the invective mode, and thus, coincidentally, an interest­ ing counterpart to Worman's specialist study. W. carefully maps out how a discourse of abuse developed around public and professional speakers in Classical Greece. This discourse was rooted in practices of commensality associated with banquet and symposium, and was further extended in drama, until it became part of the rhetorical arsenal in the public oratory of Demosthenes and Aeschines. W.'s narrative of a gradual elaboration of a critique of public speaking and the move of this critique into ancient oratory make this an important book. The body of the book is divided into six chapters, charting the devel­ opment of an iambic discourse ranging over a variety of genres. W. uses the ideas of Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Barthes to trace the operations of social performance and figuration in invective, relying in particular on a central notion of metonymy, so that the mouth acts as an emblem (Barthes' "blazon") of behavioral excess. After a scene-setting introduction, Chapter 1 looks at iambic literature in Archaic Greek epic, lyric, and Classical tragedy, where the language of invective is deployed to regulate excess and is regularly as­ sociated with ravenous mouths and dangerous types of consumption. Thus we encounter rapacious and aggressive kings (Agamemnon in Homer is a people-eating king," 29), harsh talk connected with (potentially cannibal­ istic) battlefield savagery, and clever speaking conceived as a trade-off for food. Greed leads both to uncontrolled aggressive speech and sly rhetorical 452 RHETORICA manipulation. These two possibilities will crystallize throughout the course of the book into two broad and recurring types: on the one hand the braggart and voracious politician characterized by crude consumption, and on the other the decadent and manipulative sophist. Chapter 2 explicitly juxtaposes these two types: voracious demagogues are set against glib, effete, and decadent sophists in the comedies of Aristo­ phanes, where "male protagonists engage the culinary as the primary metaphorical register in relation to the regulation of the appetites" (81). No accident, then, that the figure of the comic butcher or cook (mageiros) also becomes prominent. Whether effete or a braggart, an excessive speaker can be imagined as one who cooks up feasts of (deceptive) speech. Yet Worman also complicates (fruitfully) her model by considering how her types are measured against female appetites. In Greek comedy, women are cautionary models for men in their desires for sex, food, and wine; thus the prattling and decadent speaker is also feminized. Sexual appetite becomes an impor­ tant factor in the figuration of public speaking, not only in terms of female desire, but also...

436 RHETORICA with are the values advocated by partisans in the public discourse of the writers' polities. The work of literature is to re-present the speech of that discourse at some distance from the exigencies of decision that it responds to and attempts to create, in the cooler, more contemplative medium of writing that "wards off the decisiveness of the tongue ... and asks us to try out its words on our tongues, so that we might develop our sense of what is at stake in the process of our decision making" (p. 265). Shifting our position in literary eloquence from that of the judge listening to the calls of deliberative or forensic arguments to decide now, we would step back to the epideictic position of the theoros, critical observer, witnessing the representation of conflicting claims without an immediate call to choose, reflecting on those representations, and taking them to heart in a way that might shape our future decisions. Bevis not only rhetoricizes the principles of New Criticism; he also exemplifies a practice of close reading that brings to the fore his authors' ambivalent responses to the public oratory of their times and links their formal devices to their rhetorical criticism. New Critical preferences for ambiguity and indirection and indecision in literature return but with a crucial difference. Sometimes the only way to voice a sufficiently complex attitude is to say two things at once; sometimes an alternative meaning can only shadow the words that declare something else; sometimes the only way to suspend unreflective calls to decision to resort to aporia—that shibboleth of the deconstructive variant of New Criticism. Professors of rhetoric and of literature have much to learn from Bevis's rhetorical criticism and from the rhetorical criticism in the literary texts he explicates. They are well worth working with and, to cite a phrase Bevis cites from Empson, well worth "working out." Don Bialostosky University of Pittsburgh Jan Rothkamm, Institutio Oratorio. Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leiden: Brill 2009, 539 pp. ISBN: 9789004173286 The idea that rhetoric since the time of Plato has been foreign to philoso­ phy is antiquated today. Philosophy isn't aiming at empirical knowledge but providing certain conceptual distinctions by means of elucidations, which are introduced with the help of tropes and figures. An important question is how early modern philosophers reflected on the rhetorical use of language Reviews 437 to express their ideas. The book answers this question with respect to Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza, who appear successively on the philosophi­ cal scene in the short period from 1561 to 1679, as is shown in the instructive svnchronopsis". It was only natural that Bacon used the study of style to demonstrate his high level of education. Not originality, but familiarity with established values was a commonly accepted measure of skill. In order to adhere to good style, Descartes relied on the counsel of a rhetorician like Aemilius. At the same time Latin wasn't completely unchallenged as the one and only language of the educated anymore. Especially French proved to be an exceedingly serious competitor to the ancient languages. Spinoza's in part deliberately idiosyncratic use of Latin wasn't necessarily seen as a defect of his texts. Like many modern scientists, he committed himself to the ideal of the autonomous thinker and not of the educated reader (p. 364). Thus method is one of the most important fields of hidden effects of rhetoric in early modern philosophy. The most important result of this book is that all these effects of rhetoric are to be understood against the background of education. Bacon was well educated in oratory (p. 85). The influence of Roman rhetoric especially shows where Bacon insists on a balance between indicium and elocutio, logos and pathos, and relies on the efficiency of schemes and precepts. This fits with Bacon's strong inclination against the preference of words above matter in the "schools". The answer to "Aristotelism" had to be a new a conception of rhetoric which was at the same time dwelling on passions and actions. Rhetoric should persuade the hearer to undertake actions. The aim of rhetoric consequently is to "apply Reason to Imagination", enabling "a...

Reviews 439 century (p. 517). Can we also conclude that classical early modern philos­ ophy did contain a (hidden) philosophy or philosophies of rhetoric in the sense of attempts to justify rhetoric? This question is important, especially with respect to Descartes and Spinoza. The answer must be negative. The results clearly show that rhetoric does not contribute to the meaning of signs in the work of these authors. Only Bacon, who grew up under nearly ideal circumstances with respect to humanist education and rhetoric, arrives at something like a philosophical theory of rhetoric. To a much lesser extend, this can still be said with respect to Hobbes, who is much more than Bacon a critic of rhetoric, but still in search of an new rhetoric. In Descartes and Spinoza we still find rhetorical education and many reflections on rhetoric (it is one of the great merits of this book to have shown this). At the same time they were convinced that rhetoric constrains the expressive power of language. The conclusion must be that the way the early modern thinkers distinguish between res and verbiuu prevents them from providing a pow­ erful theory of meaning which is the cornerstone of a philosophy of rhetoric. Not a prejudice against rhetoric, but the idea that language only provides a deficient expression of thought proves to be inconsistent with the very idea of a philosophy of rhetoric. In Descartes and Spinoza these effects are enforced by the rationalist assumption that thought is a sphere of reality to which the mind has access independently of linguistic expressions. This book thus proves to be a strong contribution to the literature. Rothkamm enables us to see the real limitations of early modern rationalism with respect to rhetoric much clearer than before. Temilo van Zantwijk Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena Christopher D. Johnson, Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought. Cambridge: Harvard Studies in Comparative Lit­ erature, 2010. 695 pp. ISBN: 9780674053335 According to Christopher Johnson the hyperbole is the "most infamous of tropes, whose name most literary criticism does not praise, and whose existence the history of philosophy largely ignores" (1). As a result of this neglect "no full-scale defense has been made of the Baroque's most Baroque figure. This book aims to remedy that lack" (16). And what a remedy it is. To say that this is a study on a grand scale is certainly not hyperbolic. In nearly 700 pages Johnson "moves from the history of rhetoric to the extravagances of lyric and then through the impossibilities of drama and the aporias of philosophy" (521). The grand scope of Hyperboles is made necessary by the protean role of hyperbole in discourse: "as a discursive figure integral to the success of classical and Renaissance epic, Shakespearian tragedy, Pascalian apology, as 440 RHETORICA well as the viability of the Cartesian method, it can be narrative, dialogic, or structural" (8). Thus hyperbole is no mere figure of speech but rather, says Johnson, following the lead of Kenneth Burke, it is "a 'master trope,' one that vies with metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony for our attention (3). Indeed, Burke's approach to the four "master tropes" in A Grammar of Motives might serve as a preview of Johnson's method in Hyperboles. Say Burke: "my primary concern with them here will not be with their purely figurative usage, but with their role in the discovery and description of 'the truth.' It is an evanescent moment that we shall deal with—for not only does the dividing line between tne figurative and the literal usages shift, but also the four trope shift into one another" (Grammar ofMotives, 503). The hyperbole, now rechristened a "master trope" supersedes the merely figurative. It is more than a stylistic device, so much more that at times it is difficult to say what a hyperbole is—or what it is not. It is a figurative element, to be sure, but hyperbole is also an argumentative tech­ nique, an inventional device, a philosophical critique, and ultimately a world view. In establishing the hyperbole a "master trope" Johnson begins with an examination of the place of hyperbole in the rhetorical theory of Aristotle...

454 RHETORICA speakers moved (along with a comic lexicon of abuse) from drama to oratory, surfacing also in the Platonic dialogue (although ignored for the most part by Aristotle) and proliferating in Theophrastus. Although for the sake of clarity I have focused in this review on the central opposition between the aggressive versus and the weak and decadent speaker, W. is clear that these two types exist at opposite ends of a continuum and that characteristics of one type can slide into another. Particularly welcome is her insistence that the iambic mode transcends genre. This enables her to make wideranging and successful connections between comedy, satyr play, tragedy, philosophy, and forensic rhetoric. One of the pleasures of the book is to trace the various instantiations of the paradoxical figure of Socrates from Aristophanes to Plato and Theophrastus. Socrates does not occur explicitly in the last of these, but the cumulative force of W.'s analysis compels the reader to give serious consideration to her suggestion that he is a shadowy presence in several of Theophrastus7 caricatures, the product of "a tradition of characterization that wittily assimilates to intemperate types a teacher who used his famous recalcitrance to disparage and tease haughty, boastful elites" (317). Individual readers will, of course, find places where they could desire reformulation or areas where further questions arise. I, for example, am not entirely comfortable with the contention (22) that Plato adopted the language of insult from dramatic genres—this seems to me to be perhaps an overly reductive way of formulating a process that was surely more complex. This leads in turn to problems about how informal practices of insult bleed into and from the rhetoricized versions we find in our literary texts (a reading of the treatment of invective found in Plato's Laws 934-936 would be useful here). Yet it is no insult to suggest that the book presents opportunities for future reflection; some discomfort is a small price to pay for such thoughtful and productive work. Kathryn A. Morgan University of California at Los Angeles Sergey Dolgopolski. What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. xii + 333 pp. ISBN: 9780823229345 This book joins an increasing body of work devoted to the study of Jewish discourse. The study of Jewish rhetoric has found a place in the work of rhetoric and composition scholars who are turning their attention to the subject of non-Western or alternative rhetorics (Carol Lipson and Roberta Binkley's Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics), as well as scholars who imagine that the conceptual integrity of the notion "Jewish perspectives" can be coherently expressed as a book (Andrea Greenbaum and Deborah Holstein's Jewish Perspectives in Rhetoric and Composition). What is Talmud? Reviews 455 also shares a concern with work in Jewish studies devoted to pedagogy (Simcha Assaf), rabbinic literary activity (Daniel Boyarin, Jeffrey Rubenstein, David Stern), historiography (Ismar Schorsch), systematic Hebrew rhetorics (Isaac Rabinowitz, Arthur Lesley) and the hermeneutical activity of textbased communities (Moshe Halbertal). While there are resources enough from which to construct a course on "Jewish discourse," the idea of teaching and studying "Jewish rhetorics" is still problematic inasmuch as there is a sense that organizing the considerable scholarly activity devoted to "Jewish discourse" under the phrase "Jewish rhetorics" is at best an anachronistic projection and, at worst, an act of violent appropriation. One way to avoid the charges of appropriation or anachronism would be to treat "rhetoric" as a set of methodologies that could be productively applied to any "text." The problem with this approach is that often the methodologies that fall under the heading of rhetoric were produced in support of philosophical or historical investigations. For this reason, others have chosen to treat rhetoric as a set of concerns, or even a predisposition to ask certain kinds of questions. The idea of "Jewish rhetorics" might, in that instance as well, avoid the violence of appropriation, but "rhetoric," then runs the risk of simply being another name for something that is being productively and more accurately examined as "discourse" or "literary activity." The concept of "Jewish rhetorics" may encounter some resistance because, in avoiding the charges of anachronism or violence, "Jewish...

Book Review| August 01 2012 Review: [Quintilian], Die Hände der blinden Mutter (Größere Deklamationen, 6), by T. Zinsmaier T. Zinsmaier, [Quintilian], Die Hände der blinden Mutter (Größere Deklamationen, 6), Cassino: Edizioni Università di Cassino, 2009, 281 pp. ISBN: 9788883170775. Rhetorica (2012) 30 (3): 328–331. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.3.328 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: [Quintilian], Die Hände der blinden Mutter (Größere Deklamationen, 6), by T. Zinsmaier. Rhetorica 1 August 2012; 30 (3): 328–331. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.3.328 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| August 01 2012 Review: Reason's Dark Champions: Constructive Strategies of Sophistic Argument, by C. W. Tindale C. W. Tindale, Reason's Dark Champions: Constructive Strategies of Sophistic Argument (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication), The University of South Carolina Press: Columbia, 2010. 184pp. Rhetorica (2012) 30 (3): 323–325. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.3.323 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Reason's Dark Champions: Constructive Strategies of Sophistic Argument, by C. W. Tindale. Rhetorica 1 August 2012; 30 (3): 323–325. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.3.323 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews 323 C. W. Tindale, Reason's Dark Champions: Constructive Strategies of So­ phistic Argument (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication), The Univer­ sity of South Carolina Press: Columbia, 2010. 184pp. Renewed interest in the Sophists may have achieved an unbiased, if not fully acknowledged, rehabilitation of their philosophical ideas, yet what is likely their most extensive contribution to Classical civilisation, mastery in rhetorical argumentation, has so far lacked any comprehensive summary, let alone a comparison with modern theories of reasoning. Tindale analyses the standard textual evidence on the sophists' practice of reasoning to describe those strategies which may specifically be cate­ gorised as part of their rhetorical techne. However, the inherent difficulty of separating sophists and their occupation from their contemporaries and supposed opponents (as, for example, the relevant works of Isocrates and Alcidamas indicate) makes any such endeavour, however valuable it may be, necessarily tentative. The title, Reason's Dark Champions, may seem surprising, perhaps even paradoxical, considering that the essence of sophistic argumentation required public engagement and an open display of rational discourse. In the book T. follows a dual division with the first part being devoted (one would say - almost compulsorily) to the justification of sophistic practice in the face of its often distortive Platonic and Aristotelian representation, whilst the second part brings forward an appreciative account of several individual strategies. Although this may be a practical approach, it still reflects a somewhat defensive scholarly position in studying the Sophists, which may not be justified and so necessary anymore. The introductorv chapter contrasts the opinions of key classical authors and modern scholars with a view to clear the term "sophistic" of the semantic thicket that overgrew it in the past couple of centuries, as exemplified by Xenophon's De Venatione 13. He presses ahead with his point early on that all too often eristic argumentation a la Plato's Euthydemus has become the standard label for sophistic reasoning. However, refusing to understand the positive philosophical assumptions behind strategies such as the contrasting arguments will result in overlooking the relatively solid and extensive counterevidence from Gorgias to Euripides on the legitimate use of logos to reflect the contingent nature of the world and human actions. In the second chapter T. counters the regular (albeit rather vague) charge against the Sophists that they made a weaker argument the stronger. In a lu­ cid analysis of how mistranslating "make" with "make appear could mask Aristotelian or Platonic epistemological preconceptions, T. demonstrates on a particularly vivid example the general tendency of denying the Sophists of a legitimate sceptical standpoint in judging the truth of opposing claims. In fact, the arguments in Antiphon's model speeches and Protagoras's On Truth make it clear that the sophists applied pragmatic strategies, such as probabilistic arguments, to deal with matters without an appeal to abstract principles. 324 RHETORICA The next two chapters focus on the representation of sophistic tech­ niques in selected works of Plato and Aristotle. First, T. shows how the Protagorean measure-maxim and the resulting oratorical or dialectical practice focused on persuasion was incompatible with the absolutistic epistemology of Plato, which relied on dialogue and strategies such as the elenchus to clear the way for eternal Truth. The much-reviled fallacies in the Sophistical Refutations and the Euthydemus not only demonstrate the difference be­ tween the practices of real and apparent refutations, but (more importantly) bring out the conflicting approaches to reality by the sophists and Plato. In the end T. offers a highly interesting comparison of the two kinds of refuta­ tions, showing that despite fundamental differences arising from contrasting epistemological positions both strategies show striking formal similarities. In the second major part of the book T. aims at offering a list of in­ dividual techniques that could set apart the Sophists as unique innovators of argument. Confronting the problem of distinguishing sophistic practice from later rhetorical studies T. accepts rather uncritically Schiappa's distinc­ tion between the two theories of rhetoric and logos to draw a line between the Aristotelian and Protagorean idea of persuasion. That concept, although seemingly attractive, nevertheless raises more questions about the system­ atic description of evidence on Greek sophists/rhetoricians/philosophers than it solves. The...

312 RHETORICA relato del libanés. Lafabula docet podrá obtenerla mi lector sin necesidad de mucho batallar mental. José Calvo González Malaga Lois Peters Agnew, Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics (Columbia, SC, University of South Carolina Press, 2008. 211 pp. The thesis of Lois Peters Agnew's Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philos­ ophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics is a bold one: "This book argues that the history of British rhetoric cannot be understood without attending to Stoic strains in influential language theories of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (p. 1). Since Stoicism hardly appears in scholarly works on eighteenth-century British rhetoric, we must conclude that these histories are wanting. The narrative that Agnew in part contests has two parts and is as follows: First, the empirical epistemologies of Locke, Hume, Hartley, and Reid offered a new account of cognition and emotional response that had implications for rhetorical theory. Campbell and Priestly, recognizing the importance of these ideas, incorporated them into their theories. In their new epistemologicalpsychological accounts, rhetoric moved away from in its civic function as the means for reaching decisions in social, political settings and toward an inter­ est in the way an individual formed ideas, became emotionally engaged, and then acted. Rhetorical theory became concerned with providing a description of the way an individual processes sense impressions at the expense of the Classical concern with public deliberation. Second, the rhetorics of Smith, Karnes and Blair replaced an emphasis on helping students create speeches with developing students' receptive capacities—with developing students' taste—and establishing standards of judgment for all the types of discourse that constitute belles lettres. Taking these changes together, some scholars have depicted eighteenth-century rhetoric as abandoning rhetoric's tradi­ tional political mission and transforming rhetoric into a technical, psycho­ logical, and instrumental science in the service of bourgeois individualism and self-improvement. Agnew does not contest specifically that the overtly political is no longer thematized in eighteenth century rhetoric; nor does she deny that eighteenth century rhetoric is different. She does deny, however, that a social mission vanishes in the theories she analyzes. She insists that eighteenth-century rhetorical theorists were themselves anxious about movements tow ard indi­ vidualism, secularism, and scientism and developed their theories of rhetoric not to accommodate these movements but to ameliorate their effects. Her ar­ gument is that the concepts central to eighteenth-centurv rhetoric-—common Reviews 313 sense, taste, and propriety—constitute a technical vocabulary that, if cor­ rectly read in the context of Stoic concepts familiar to the eighteenth-century theorists, are the basis for a social theory of rhetoric. Agnew's "Introduction" and first chapter, "Stoic Ethics and Rhetoric," offer a short summary of Stoicism that attempts to complicate some of the stereotypes that readers may hold of it. While Agnew acknowledges that Stoicism has a long, complex history, she is not much concerned with nu­ ance or the ensuing historical complications. Rather, she mines the tradition for Stoic themes that serve her purposes—a somewhat circular way of pro­ ceeding but forgivable since the eighteenth-century rhetorical theorists who are her concern would themselves be interested in Stoicism as appropriators . She is interested in dispelling or complicating stereotypes of the Stoic wise man who stands above the social norms, proudly beyond influence by others, and practices at best a disciplined sympathy, cultivating an austere self-command that hardly seems social. And of course the Stoics had notori­ ously little use for rhetoric. But as Agnew points out, the wise man has a civic obligation, and she highlights themes of civic duty and responsibility, in Roman Stoicism especially. With regard to rhetoric, Cicero, who faulted the Stoic attitude toward rhetoric while advocating Stoicism, judged the impoverished Stoic theory of language and rhetoric a remediable deficiency. In Chapter 2, Agnew traces the concept of commonsense in Shaftesbury, Hutchenson, and Reid to Stoic antecedents. The three eighteenth-century theorists had, among themselves, distinctly different understandings of the meaning of commonsense, which Agnew acknowledges while maintaining that their different articulations are similarly motivated to find in human innate cognitive and moral capacities an argument against skepticism and the basis for...

328 RHETORICA di Omero per gli Antichi quale modello di una técnica oratoria, quale inventor dell'arte oratoria nel suo complesso (Introd., p. 16). Interessante é a questo riguardo 1'analisi pseudodionisiana (P. ¿a/, a, 68,17-26) della replica iliadica di Achille a Fenice, come primo esempio nella letteratura greca di spiegazione di una técnica oratoria di un maestro, Fenice, per bocea di un allievo, Achille; «delegando un proprio personaggio a commentare il discorso di un altro», puntualizza D.A. (Introd., p. 44), «il Poeta riflette su se stesso e si fa modello non soltanto per i poeti -di una técnica compositiva- ma anche per oratori e retori - di una técnica oratoria» , come testimonia Puso del verbo didáaxeiv (P ¿ay. a, 68, 21), con cui si intende l'insegnamento al retore di una tevcnh oratoria e non la semplice spiegazione al lettore delle intenzioni di Fenice. Αννα Caramico Université di Salerno T. Zinsmaier, [Quintilian], Die Hdnde der blinden Mutter (Grôfiere Deklamationen , 6), Cassino: Edizioni Université di Cassino, 2009, 281 pp. ISBN: 9788883170775. La pubblicazione delFedizione critica delle 19 Declamationes Maiores dello Pseudo-Quintiliano ad opera di L. Hakanson (Declamationes XIX maiores Quintiliano falso ascriptae, Stutgardiae 1982) è stata seguita dalla traduzione di L. A. Sussman (The Major Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian. A Transla­ tion, Frankfurt a. M. 1987) e da una serie di studi specifici che sottolineano il rinnovato interesse per la retorica in generale e per questo argomento in particolare. Nonostante l'indubbio valore di questi volumi, è comunque noto che, da una parte, essi non soddisfano le richieste di esegesi (sono troppo scarne le note di commento alia traduzione di Sussman) e che, dall'altra, una profonda e corretta esegesi del testo, che affronti e chiarisca aspetti formali e contenutistici, è presupposto indispensabile per una corretta constitute textus. D. A. Russell sottolinea (Class. Quart. XXXV 1985, pp. 43—45) proprio all'inizio della sua recensione all'edizione di Hakanson che «no latin text is more continuously testing, not to say tormenting, to the reader than the Major Declamations» . Un progetto di ricerca dell'université di Cassino, cui afferisce la pubblicazione del volume qui recensito, mira a colmare questa lacuna attraverso la pubblicazione, sotto la direzione di Antonio Stramaglia, delle declamazioni accompagnate da traduzione e commento (Rhetorica ha dedicato al progetto il fascicolo 27/3, 2009). Nella serie sono state finora pubblicate le seguenti declamazioni: A. Stramaglia, I Gemelli Malati: un Caso di Vivisezione (Declamazioni maggiori, 8\ 1999; Id., La cittd die si cibb dei suoi cadaveri (Declamazioni maggiori, 22), 2002; Catherine Schneider, Le soldat de Marius (Grandes déclamations, 3), 2004 e G. Krapinger,;Die Bienen des armen Mannes (Grôssere Deklamationen, 23), 2005; Id., Der Gladiator (Grôssere Dekla- Reviews 329 mationen, 9), 2007 e Giovanna Longo (ed.), La pozione dell'odio (Declamazioni maggiori, 14-15), 2008. II volume di Zinsmaier (d'ora innanzi Z.) riempie un altro tassello di questo mosaico e fornisce un'ampia e approfondita analisi della declamazione : esso costituisce una rielaborazione approfondita e aggiornata della tesi di dottorato pubblicata precedentemente dall'autore (Der vori Bordgewormationen . Einleitung, Übersetzung, Kommentar. Frankfurt a. M. 1993). Tenendo presente il radicale cambiamento di prospettiva che negli ultimi vent'anni ha interessato lo studio della declamazione latina, Z. (i cui studi precedenti rivelano il suo interesse e la padronanza dell'argomento) discute non solo di questioni letterarie, ma anche del molo che le declamazioni svolgono nella ricostruzione del quadro culturale e sociale del tempo. II volume è articolato in tre parti. Nell'ampia introduzione (pp. 15-106) l'autore svolge un'analisi dettagliata della trama della declamazione e un approfondimento giuridico, mentre limita l'analisi stilistico-retorica solo ad alcuni aspetti: Z. non ritiene né opportuno né possibile analizzare tutti gli aspetti retorici della declamazione, ma fornisce indicazioni specifiche relative alla dispositio, alla organizzazione interna del materiale e ad alcuni aspetti formali il cui ruolo risulta particolarmente enfático (sententiae, descriptio, locus communis, exemplum, color, cfr. pp. 60-106:). L'introduzione è seguita (pp. 108153 ) dal testo con traduzione in tedesco e da un ampio e attento commento (p.155-250). Chiudono il volume la bibliografía, suddivisa in due specifiche sezioni tematiche (la prima dedicata alio Pseudo-Quintiliano...

334 RHETORICA 254) he is not wrong strictly speaking, although the observation is too broad to be useful; "radicalized," decorum can look like almost anything including Sunday brunch or the DMV Driver's Handbook. Ultimately these issues are minor when we consider the substantial payoff. David Marshall has written a deeply responsible book that moves with grace, chronologically through Vico's entire oeuvre—including some notable rediscoveries in the archives and beyond—at the same time that it honors the weirdness that makes Vico indispensable. Daniel M. Gross University of California, Irvine Thomas Conley, Toward a Rhetoric ofInsult, Chicago: Chicago Univer­ sity Press, 2009. 132 pp. As he states in the preface to his Toward a Rhetoric of Insult, Thomas Conley's explicit aim is to "stimulate some constructive conversation" (p. viii). Insults have admittedly been a serious political issue in the 2000s. Conley mentions in passing both the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed (p. 8) and the speech by Pope Benedict XVI about Manuel II Palaeologus (pp. 121-122), and quotes one Iranian imam as saying: "I am for freedom of speech, but not the freedom to insult" (p. 1), which puts the problem of political correctness in a nutshell. The style employed in this book is both expansive and discursive. Conley's range of examples and sources is wide: from antiquity (Aristo­ phanes, Cicero, Martial) to the early-modern period (the sixteenth-century Lutheran Flugschriften, Julius Caesar Scaliger's attack on Erasmus, Shake­ speare's comedies); from the political cartoons and the anti-Semitism of the twentieth century (the leading nazi-ideologist Julius Streicher's Kampf dem Weltfeind and the anti-Semitic insults disseminated by The Dearborn In­ dependent, a Michigan newspaper published by Henry Ford) to TV series and movies created by the comedy group Monty Python. Presentations are generous, and the reader is invited to explore the many facets of the topic. Although Conley's expressed intent is not to theorize insult (p. vii), he nevertheless offers some useful semi-theoretical concepts, defining, for example, what he terms the "scenario" and the "intensity" of insults (p. 3-7). Referring to Saara Lilja's work on insults in Roman comedy (from 1965), Conley underlines the importance of studying "who says what about whom and why" (pp. 13-14). These are more or less rhetorical issues, dealing with and specifying the rhetorical situation. Conley emphasizes that the rhetoric of insults does not concern only elocutio (diction, style), but also pronuntiatio (delivery) like the tone of voice, body language, and timing (p. 7). One of the main arguments in Conley's book is that there are also 'positive' or 'nonserious' insults, which have cohesive effects such as fh/tin^ Reviews 335 (the Scottish tradition of of insult poetry), craik (the banter between friends in the Irish pubs), the dozens (a form of verbal duelling used in AfricanAmerican culture), and battle rap or beefing. Indeed, it is quite delightful to read, e.g., about Yiddish insults (p. 11-12), which seem to be both self-ironical and have a kind, sympathetic nature. According to Conley, some insults can even be analysed like jokes with a punch line, as he does when discussing Martial's epigrams (pp. 43-47). Conley calls into question strict manuals or rules of good conduct; he has some apprehensions about the situation when the maxim 'if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all' is in operation (p. 120). In his view, this kind of atmosphere and passing laws against insults censures not only freedom of expression but can also threaten the social relationships based on the many kinds of 'positive' insults (p. 116). However, Conley's own tentative definition does not fit well in the benign situations of 'positive' insults. He defines insult as a "severely nega­ tive opinion of a person or group to subvert their positive self-regard and esteem" (p. 2). Furthermore, Conley's examples of, e.g., the aesthetically valuable insults—such as found in the writings of the English critic William Connor (p. 118)—seems to be examples of irony, not of insults. The definition of insult is the subject of the first section of the book...

Reviews 325 much wider rhetorical practice or whether the Sophists offered any notable contribution to these fields. T.'s book is a worthy summary of Sophistic argumentation based on a painstaking analysis of a wide selection of available texts and lucid compar­ isons with modern parallels. Unfortunately, it does not consistently address the thorny (and possibly unresolvable) methodological question of what strategies and why we could call genuinely Sophistic, so he occasionaly seems to read Aristotelian or Platonic concepts back into sophistic texts. Sometimes the line of argument is not easy to follow due to the dense pre­ sentation of facts and the book also suffers from some irritating mistakes both in the English and the Greek spelling (e.g. pp. 35, 48 or 169). However, as a rich and perceptive reappraisal of primary evidence, the study will likely to provoke strong response and stimulate further studies on the Sophists not only in classical and modern rhetoric, but in philosophy as well. Gabor Tahin Burnham, England Pseudo-Dionigi di Alicarnasso, I discorsi figurati I e II (Ars Rhet. VIII e IX Us.-RadJ. Introduzione, Traduzione e Commento a cura di Stefano Dentice di Accadia, Pisa-Roma: Fabrizio Serra Editore (AION. Quaderni 14, 2010), 184 pp., ISBN 978-88-6227-220-9 Accompagnata da un'ampia Introduzione (pp. 11-50) e dal Commento (pp. 129-178), Stefano Dentice di Accadia (D.A.) propone nella collana AION. Quaderni (n. 14) la prima traduzione intégrale in italiano dei Discorsifigurati I e II (Ars Rhet. VIII e IX Us.-Rad. ) di ps.-Dionigi di Alicarnasso, basata sul testo edito, agli inizi del secolo scorso, da Usener e Radermacher (da cui D.A. si discosta in alcuni luoghi, come H vede dalla Tavola delle divergenze a p. 51), con un'ulteriore lettura del Parisinus Graecus 1741 e del suo apógrafo, il Guelferbytanus 14. L'idea di tradurre i due scritti nasce nell'àmbito degli studi di ricostruzione dell'esegesi omerica antica; l'impostazione del lavoro tende infatti a privilegiare l'aspetto della critica letteraria omerica rispetto a quello retorico. I due trattati, che analizzano una particolare técnica oratoria conosciu*a nell'antichità col nome di λόγοι ¿σχηματισμένοι, ossia un discorso in cui il pensiero non viene espresso in maniera diretta, ma in forma mascherata (come si legge nella definizione di Zoilo riportata da Febammone III, 44, 1-3 Spengel), rappresentano un unicum nella letteratura antica perché sono i soli scritti monografici nei quali la teoría è spiegata attraverso 1 analisi di esempi letterari tratti da autori greci (Omero, di cui si analizzano molti passi deïVIliade, Demostene, Euripide e Tucidide). I due trattati a e b costituiscono i capitoli VIII e IX di una Τέχνη ρητορική erróneamente attribuita a Dionigi di Alicarnasso, sulla cui paternité e datazione c'è ancora grande incertezza (si 326 RHETORICA tende a ritenere i due trattati composti tra la fine del I sec. e la prima meta del III sec. d.C., cf. Introd., p. 14 n. 19), un'opera che consiste in una raccolta di testi di retorica e di critica letteraria scollegati per lo piü tra loro, frutto di una collezione arbitraria di diversa provenienza. Potrebbe trattarsi, considerato 10 stile frettoloso e spesso inelegante delle due monografie, di testi scolastici, verosímilmente appunti dettati a vari allievi in momenti diversi (ipotesi contestata da M. Heath, Pseudo-Dionysios Art ofRhetoric 8-11: Figured Speech, Declamation and Criticism, «AJP» 124/1 [2003], pp. 81-105). D.A. non esclude che i due trattati possano essere opera del medesimo autore, né che si possano individuare mani diverse da un'opera all'altra o anche all'interno di uno stesso trattato (Introd., p. 15). L'lntroduzione si compone di un parágrafo (1) relativo alia storia della teoría antica del discorso e della causa figurati, di un parágrafo (2) dedicato all'importanza dei due trattati nel panorama del genere letterario in cui sono inquadrati, con l'illustrazione dei tre σχήματα (il parlare con tatto e decoro [μετ’ εύπρεπείας], il parlare 'per obliquo' [κατά πλάγιον], il parlare 'per contrario' [κατά τό εναντίον]) e un utile e dettagliato sunto (pp. 16-21), e di un parágrafo (3) che traccia uno status tpiaestionis degli studi sull'argomento. Nel penúltimo par...

This essay argues that Plato's use of narrative conceals within Socrates' explicit rejection of rhetoric an implicit authorial endorsement, manifested in the dialectical and rhetorical failures surrounding Socrates' deliberations over logos. I suggest that Aristotle's Rhetoric is consonant with Plato's view in its general affirmation of rhetoric's power, utility, and necessity as well as in its specific recommendations regarding logos. I employ Martin Heidegger's explication of logos in Aristotle to illuminate how the term conforms to Plato's implicit position regarding logos and rhetoric. This interpretation entails an expanded meaning of logos as it is found in Rhetoric, assigning it a more primary, pre-logical, oral content.

This paper discusses the function of speeches given by Cicero to the popular assembly (contio) as reports about recent political events or decrees. Several of the few extant examples are part of oratorical corpora consisting of speeches from politically difficult periods, namely from Cicero's consular year (63 BCE; Catilinarians) and from his fight against Mark Antony (44–43 BCE; Philippics). Cicero is shown to have applied his oratorical abilities in all these cases to exploit the contio speeches so as to present narrative accounts of political developments in his interpretation and thus to influence public opinion in the short term during the political process and particularly, within an edited corpus, in the long term.

Plato's chief argument against rhetoric is epistemological. Plato claims that rhetoric accomplishes what it does on the basis of experience, not knowledge. In this article I examine Plato's criticisms of rhetoric in the Gorgias and the Phaedrus. I argue that Plato is right to identify rhetoric's empirical basis, but that having this epistemic basis does not constitute an argument against rhetoric. On the contrary, Plato's criticism of rhetoric serves to give us an epistemological explanation of rhetoric's success.

This essay argues that Plato’s use of narrative conceals within Socrates’ explicit rejection of rhetoric an implicit authorial endorsement, manifested in the dialectical and rhetorical failures surrounding Socrates’ deliberations over logos. I suggest that Aristotle’s Rhetoric is consonant with Plato’s view in its general affirmation of rhetoric’s power, utility, and necessity as well as in its specific recommendations regarding logos. I employ Martin Heidegger’s explication of logos in Aristotle to illuminate how the term conforms to Plato’s implicit position regarding logos and rhetoric. This interpretation entails an expanded meaning of logos as it is found in Rhetoric, assigning it a more primary, pre-logical, oral content.

Reviews Ryan Stark, Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century Eng­ land. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009, pp. vii-234. ISBN: 978-0-8132-1578-5 Ryan Stark has written what is in many ways a charming book, right down to its physical presentation whose quaint details give it the look and feel of an earlier age—the age evoked by Stark's title. That title, however, is a bit misleading since his proper subject is the enduring controversy over seventeenth-century prose style, namely, the causes of its arguable shift from Jacobean and Caroline exuberance to Restoration "plainness." Stark himself takes leave to doubt that any formal shift actually took place because the prose literature of the later seventeenth century, including that of experimental science, demonstrably retains the figured language of its predecessors—although, significantly, not to the same florid degree. In this opinion, he departs from critics like R. E Jones, Robert Adolph, and now apparently Ian Robinson, who would yet persuade us that this literature does not and should not employ figuration, owing to the alleged influence of the "new" science. Needless to say, the attempt to abolish metaphor is at least as old as Aristotle, not to mention a linguistic impossibility since we rely on tropological usage when we want to express new ideas and practices like those science itself is perpetually producing—a point Stark makes. Nonetheless, this particular bout of expressive austerity has as its locus classicus in Bishop Sprat's curiously authoritative misreading of Bacon in his History of the Royal Society, whom he represents as strenuously averse to figurative speech against every indication to the contrary, beginning with the "sensible and plausible elocution" that Bacon recommends in The Advancement ofLearning for the transmission of human knowledge. If in Stark's formulation one pole of the stylistic controversy is again represented by experimental science, the novelty of his argument comes from experimentalism's presumptive opponent—magic or occult knowledge— with which Stark contends the practitioners of the new science saw their own empirical and mechanical innovations in immediate and urgent competition. Such competition in his view generated the later seventeenth-century's focus on prose decorum and specifically what Stark calls occultism s charmed rhetoric," "enchanted tropes" and "numinous language," to which he argues Rhetonca, Vol. XXX, Issue 2, pp. 199-219, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . U2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI. 10.1525/RH.2012.30.2.199. 200 RHETORICA the virtuosi of the Royal Society and their supporters in the larger culture of the Restoration took concerted exception. Accordingly, the book begins by invoking Donne's First Anniversary where "new philosophy" forever "calls all in doubt," and proceeds to describe yet again how Francis Bacon allegedly dismantled the pre-modern world of platonizing similitude, familiar to us from Foucault and before him, Huizinga. Stark then extends Bacon's enterprise of disenchantment to the chemist Daniel Sennert and Joseph Glanvill, interspersed with a generically invidious comparison of Browne's notionally "occult" rhetoric in the Religio Medici with Hobbes' account of "scientific" usage in Leviathan, from which Stark concludes that the evidence for a stylistic shift is ideological as against formal. That is, the issue of prose decorum stands for other epistemological and partisan commitments in the seventeenth century, as indeed it always has, which Stark rather loosely associates with the Restoration's abiding suspicions of republicans, dissenters and the papacy. Although Stark does not spell out the precise semantics of either party, he attributes to the experimentalists an insistence on the evident, ordinary and apparently conventional sense of speech, construed as undertaking the "rhetorical cure" of occultism's glamorous delusions, which aspired to reveal the secrets of things hidden from the Fall, if not from the beginning of the world. By setting such strict bounds to the signification of speech, it is Stark's thesis that seventeenth-century science sought not only the disenchantment of Nature but...

Plato’s chief argument against rhetoric is epistemological. Plato claims that rhetoric accomplishes what it does on the basis of experience, not knowledge. In this article I examine Plato’s criticisms of rhetoric in the Gorgias and the Phaedrus. I argue that Plato is right to identify rhetoric’s empirical basis, but that having this epistemic basis does not constitute an argument against rhetoric. On the contrary, Plato’s criticism of rhetoric serves to give us an epistemological explanation of rhetoric’s success.

This paper discusses the function of speeches given by Cicero to the popular assembly (contio) as reports about recent political events or decrees. Several of the few extant examples are part of oratorical corpora consisting of speeches from politically difficult periods, namely from Cicero’s consular year (63 BCE; Catilinarians) and from his fight against Mark Antony (44–43 BCE; Philippics). Cicero is shown to have applied his oratorical abilities in all these cases to exploit the contio speeches so as to present narrative accounts of political developments in his interpretation and thus to influence public opinion in the short term during the political process and particularly, within an edited corpus, in the long term.

202 RHETORICA ilated the texts of the Aristotelian Organon to its own metaphysical purposes, practicing what amounts to an analytic logic long before Frege and Russell. It is this method to which Bacon refers by The Advancement's memorable image of the spider's silk, and by his own polemical emphasis on the observation of things over the manipulation of "mere" words, which is how he regarded the scientific role assigned syllogistic by Aristotle and his followers. As the incumbent authority in early modern England, the neo-aristotelian philoso­ phy of the schools was experimentalism's true competitor. In the meantime, the story of the stylistic controversy, both ancient and modern, still waits to be told. Victoria Silver University of California, Irvine R. Meynet, Appelés à la liberté (Rhétorique sémitique), Paris : Lethielleux 2008, pp. 236. ISBN 978-2-283-61255-2 Si tratta deU'ultima opera del gesuita Roland Meynet, già allievo di Paul Beauchamp, già docente di teología ed esegesi bíblica all'Università Gregoriana di Roma. In precedenza egli ha svolto la propria attività an­ che presso l'Università San Giuseppe (Beirut) ed è stato professore invitato all'Università di Torino e al Centre Sèvres di Parigi. Una traduzione italiana dell'opera qui recensita è apparsa nel maggio 2010 per le Edizioni Dehoniane di Bologna, nella collana "Retorica bíblica" in cui già figurano le principali opere del medesimo autore: La Pasqua del Signore (2002), Morto e risorto secondo le Scritture (2003), II Vangelo secondo Lúea. Analisi retorica (2003), Leggere la Bibbia. Un'introduzione all'esegesi (2004), Una nuova introduzione ai Vangeli sinottici (20062), Trattato di retorica bíblica (2008); Retorica bíblica e semítica 1 (2009), curato insieme a J. Oniszczuk. Tale collana corrisponde sostanzialmente - ma non per il presente volume - ad altra dallo stesso nome edita dalle parigine Editions du Cerf. La produzione di Mey­ net, ben nota dunque anche al pubblico italiano, si colloca all'incrocio tra teología bíblica e scienze del linguaggio, che l'Autore fréquenta non solo in riferimento al corpus degli scritti vetero- e neotestamentari, ma anche alia lingua e alia letteratura araba di cui è egualmente profondo conoscitore. I contributi raccolti nel presente volume sono collegati tra loro da un filo conduttore temático - quello délia liberté - assolutamente centrale nella letteratura bíblica. L'argomento viene sviluppato in tre sezioni: "II dono délia liberté" (su Esodo 14-15), "La legge délia liberté" (su Esodo 20, 2-17 e Deuteronomio 5, 6-21), "Gli inni alla liberté" (sui Salmi 113-118 e 136). Non sfugge a chi abbia una pur mínima consuetudine con l'esegesi e hermenéutica bíblica il fatto che tale modo di affrontare la vasta materia - avvicinando tra loro generi letterari differenti quali la narrazione storiografica, la legislazione e la preghiera innica - va intenzionalmente oltre l'approccio "storico-critico" Reviews 203 oggi prevalente. Si intende con tale formula quell'insieme di metodologie aventi come oggetto le coordínate testuali e fattuali di uno scritto e, nella fattispecie, di un libro bíblico: la costituzione critica del testo; la datazione dell'opera o di una sua sezione letterariamente omogenea; la personalità dell'autore; il genere letterario in cui l'opéra si iscrive; il carattere -unitario o risultante dalla rielaborazione di fonti preesistenti - délia sua redazione; la storicità del contenuto. La "retorica bíblica", alla cui elaborazione teórica e applicazione Meynet ha consacrato la sua lunga attività di studioso, appartiene per contro a quelle metodologie a carattere "sincrónico" che intendono costituire un contrappeso alla prevalenza quasi esclusiva di cui l'indagine a carattere storicocritico ha a lungo goduto in ámbito scientifico. Senza ignorare le conclusioni meglio assodate délia critica storico-letteraria, si punta allora piuttosto alla comprensione di unité letterarie significative - cruciali - del testo bíblico, esaminandole in base alla loro lógica interna e ai significati dischiusi dalle peculiarità délia loro struttura. Il punto di partenza di taie procedimento è quindi non tanto la storia, ricostruita criticamente - e in qualche misura pur sempre ipoteticamente - del singólo libro, quanto l'intero corpus canó­ nico délia Bibbia ebraica e cristiana. Due entità che, com...