Abstract

Reviews Walker, Jeffrey. The Genuine Teachers ofThis Art. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011.356 pp., ISBN: 978-1-61117-016-0 Walker s 1 he Genuine Tenehers of This Art takes its title from a line in Cicero s De orntore in which Antonius attempts to delineate "inexperienced teachers ' who do not train rhetors like Aristotle from sophists like Isocrates who train skilled speakers (pp. 5,44). The title line frames the major argument of the book—that training rhetors, that is, teaching is the unifying element of rhetoric that brings together strains of "discourse, practices, analysis, [and] teaching" (p.l). Walker claims scholars of rhetoric have much overlooked the "school masters." His attempt to correct this omission establishes Isocrates as the founder of the sophistic paideia, which Walker traces from the fourth century BCE, through the Hellenistic period and stasis theory, the late Repub­ lic in Cicero's De orntore, and finally into the Second Sophistic in the works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Through this pedagogical history, Walker ar­ gues, that for Isocrates the "handbook" (teehne) and sophistic traditions were one, effectivelv decentering the "philosophic" tradition. There are too manv high points in The Genuine Teachers of This Art, particularly' for scholars of the history of rhetoric and teachers of rhetoric and composition, to summarize here but permit me to try to touch on a few. Walker's first chapter, a (counter) reading of Cicero's De orntore, begins by classifying Aristotle's rhetoric as primarily interested in "judgment and theory" as opposed to "civic deliberation" and therefore largely outside the realm of training rhetors (pp. 19, 22). Walker makes a brief but interesting argument that Antonius' topics are not from Aristotle but rather are closer to Isocrates' ideai, arguing Aristotle is primarily referenced for the sake of authority (pp. 23, 30-1, 48). Ultimately, Walker argues what Cicero's Crassus and Antonius finally agree on—broad experience—is fundamentally Isocratean (pp. 41, 53, 56). The claim that "there was a teehne of Isocrates, and that it probably was the ancestor of the later sophistic technai” concludes Walker's second chapter (p 90). In order to advance the possibility of an Isocratean teehne, Walker must refute several lines of argument prevalent in the field, specifically that if Isocrates did write a teehne, it was more likely a collection of example speeches, that the teehne attributed to Isocrates was written by a "younger Rhetorica, Vol. XXXII, Issue 2, pp. 195-211, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . C2014 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.2014.32.2.195. 196 RHETORICA Isocrates/' and that it was against Isocrates' own philosophy to write a handbook of precepts. These lines of argument, predominantly advanced by Karl Barwick, though fairly broadly accepted, are refuted by Walker at length, in part, by using parallel case based on other sophistic technai and, most interestingly, by suggesting two definitions of techne, which Walker distinguishes with a subscript to differentiate a non-creative, rule driven art with a more or less guaranteed product from a creative, methodological driven art with the possibility of a successful outcome produced by a skilled practitioner (pp. 63-75). The following chapter takes in an in-depth look at what a techne of Isocrates might have looked like with Walker concluding that the techne likely had two main parts, "the pragmatikos topos [concerned with inquiry and invention] and the lektikos topos [concerned with style] and possibly ... an organized set of progymnasmata" (p. 154). While many of Walker's conclusions in this chapter suggest the techne probably looked similar to the Rhetoric to Alexander, this third chapter is a fascinating look inside Isocrates' pedagogy. These two chapters on Isocrates are likely the most controversial in the book, and while Walker admits he has offered no "irrefutable" evidence of a techne of Isocrates, he does marshal a persuasive case based on available evidence, however scant. The Fourth Chapter, "In the Garden of...