Abstract

Reviews 201 style demonstrated a facility with his language that went beyond what someone untrained in rhetoric would have been able to produce" (p. 169). He advances this claim in order to prove that a rhetorical analysis of the structure goes a long way toward establishing the authenticity and integrity of the Aducrsits Indneos. I find Dunn s arguments regarding authorship persuasive because of his rhetorical analysis, despite the fact that his critical modus operandi is formalistically tedious and to some extent mechanistic. This approach serves Dunn s purpose of reflecting on authorship, but the rhetorical insights are wooden and not especiallv perceptive. Thomas H. Olbricht Pepperdine University Frédérique Woerther, ed., Literary and Philosophical Rhetoric in the Greek, Roman, Syriac, and Arabic Worlds (Europea Memoria Series 2, Vol. 66). Hildesheini, Zurich, and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2009. 327 pp. ISBN 978-3-487-13990-6 Historians of rhetoric are well aware that in pre-modern eras, there was extensive contact between Europe and the Arabic world. Some of this contact (e.g., Arabic commentaries on Aristotle's Rhetoric) has been extensively discussed for a long time, but some of those discussions are now out of date and other relevant areas have remained largely unexplored. The collection of essays reviewed here, in English and French, is designed to take one topic that has proved important in both European and Arabic rhetoric and in the contact between them and to provide a comprehensive overview of the topic in light of what is now known about it. The collection begins from one of the key commonplaces in rhetorical history, that rhetoric oscillates between two key poles: one philosophical, in which the emphasis is on the relationship between rhetoric and knowledge, and one literary, in which the emphasis is on style. Or, to say it a bit differently, the rhetorician can focus on the truth value of what is said and on the validity of propositions or on the verbal embellishment of rhetorical statements. This book was born at a conference on "Literary and Philosophical Rhetoric in the Greek, Syriac, and Arabic Worlds" which was organized by Frédérique Woerther in Beirut on 3-4 July 2006, where ten of the essays were originally presented. Woerther is to be commended, however, for not taking the easy way out and simply publishing those ten essays. She has added four more papers that fill in some obvious gaps in what the conference covered. The result, unlike many volumes of conference proceedings, is a book that offers reasonable coverage of its subject. The first seven of the fourteen essays cover Greek and Roman rhetoric. This section begins with a short but incisive piece on Plato by Harvey Yunis 202 RHETORICA which offers some interesting comments on how Plato uses various literary devices to convert readers to philosophical values and to inculcate philo­ sophically defensible method. Pierre Chiron drew what is perhaps the key assignment in this section, the treatment of Aristotle's Rhetoric, since this is the text which would prove so influential for the second half of the vol­ ume. Focusing on epideictic and on diction, Chiron shows how Aristotle diminishes the distance which separates rhetoric and literature. Next Niall R. Livingstone presents a nicely nuanced paper which recognizes the sub­ tleties and complexities of Isocrates' ideas in this area. As Livingstone puts it, "[intellectually and stylistically, Isocratean philosophia achieves validation by representing itself as the artistic crystalisation of the public sphere: the mid-point both between self-seeking sophistry and elite philosophical ob­ scurantism, and between the vulgar point-scoring of the lawcourts and the meretricious entertainment-value of poetry" (p. 54). Frédérique Woerther glances forward toward the second section of the volume in her essay, which focuses on how Hermagoras of Temnos and al-Fârâbï preserved and inter­ preted the traditional connections among rhetoric, logic, and politics, show­ ing that in the end, rhetoric and poetics allow a general public that is not able to understand rigorous argumentation to grasp the results of scientific discoveries. David Blank in turn discusses Philodemus, whose work is in the process of being reconstructed on the basis of papyri found...