Abstract

322 RHETORICA differently in theology, mathematics, natural science, politics, ethics, poetics, and-Isocrates's home turf-rhetoric. Aristotle's Rhetoric, for example, focuses on enthymematic forms of syllogismos as appropriate responses to contin­ gent situations. It thereby contrasts with Isocrates's tendency, as Aristotle sees it, to heighten emotions by assimilating deliberative and forensic forms of public address to panoramic epideictic displays (Rhetoric I.9.1368a20-33). I trust it is not just because I am less familiar than Wareh with the fortunes of Academics and Isocrateans in the mid 340s, when Philip began to exercise hegemony over Greek poleis, that I was effortlessly drawn along by his discus­ sion of this subject in the second half of his book. I have no trouble believing that the rise of a courtly style of politics with the Macedonian ascendency had, being Macedonian, its vulgar side. Still, the translation Wareh includes of a remark­ ably sycophantic letter Plato's successor Speusippus wrote to Phillip urging him to purge his court of Isocrateans and give the Academy an exclusive lock on knowledge viewed as cultural capital makes for pretty depressing reading. Wareh sees the same tangle of intrigue in Aristotle's ties to Hermias, the tyrant of Atarnea near Lesbos. Isocrates's pleas for influence were no less attuned to court life. In fact, in the forms of address that emerged when philosophers were first turned into courtiers, Wareh concludes by showing, was born the mirror-of-princes rhetoric that gave Isocrates a rebirth in the Renaissance. David Depew University of Iowa Rachel Ahern Knudsen, Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 230 pp. ISBN 9781421412269 Rachel Ahem Knudsen's Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric (hereafter Homeric Speech) provides a new, detailed perspective on an old debate: how ought we to regard the works of Homer when considering the beginnings of rhetoric in ancient Greece? The standard accounts of rhe­ toric's origins are represented by the traditional scholarship of George Kennedy (The Art of Persuasion in Greece, 1963) and Laurent Pemot (Rhetoric in Antiquity, 2005). These works offer the received view that, while rhetori­ cal techniques are evident in the earliest forms of extant Greek literature, the formalization of rhetoric as a disciplinary art (techne) began in the Fifth Century BCE when it was "invented" by Corax and Tisias on the island of Sicily. Current scholarship by historians of rhetoric—represented by the works of Thomas Cole (The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece, 1991) and Edward Schiappa (The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece, 1999)—have challenged traditional views on the origins of rhetoric. Cole argues that the actual founders of rhetoric are Plato and Aristotle, while Schiappa argues that the term rhetorike did not even exist until Plato created Reviews 323 the term in his dialogue Goryias (pp. 18, 19). Additionally, the traditional distinctions separating rhetoric and poetry have been reconsidered because of such excellent research as Jeffrey Walker's Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (2000), a work that Knudsen "has affinities with" in support of her own views (p. 20). Knudsen's objective is clearly stated: The contention of this book is ... that Homer not only demonstrates rhetorical practice in the speech of his characters, but that the patterns of persuasion that he depicts embody, in very specific ways, the rheto­ ric identified in theoretical treatises from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and that reached its fullest expression in Aristotle's Rhetoric" (pp. 3-4). Knudsen presents impressive scholarship in support of her position, but the merits of her contributions have some qualifications. Knudsen presents a detailed examination of the formal speeches of the Iliad in which she reveals systematic patterns of discourse using the following rhetorical concepts: enthymeme, diathesis, ethos, gnome, paradeigma, and topics. Her findings, appearing in both her criticism and also the frequencycharts citing the use of concepts and speakers, make it clear that the formal speech passages in the Iliad demonstrate the employment of rhetorical techni­ ques throughout the work (pp. 78, 80, 82). The obvious counter-argument to Knudsen's position is that rhetoric can and is employed without a conscious application but rather...