Abstract
Abstract: Traditional histories of rhetoric assume that the practical oratory of lawcourts and political assemblies is the “primary,” original form of rhetoric in its “preconceptual” or predisciplinary origins in archaic Greece. Hesiod's “Hymn to the Muses,” however, presents both prince and bard as practicing an art of psychagogic suasion, and presents the prince's discursive power as dependent on, and derived from, the paradigms of eloquence and wisdom embodied in the epideictic/poetic discourse of the bard: epideictic is the “primary” form of “rhetoric” in Hesiod's world. Hesiod's account agrees with what is known about the discursive practices of oral/traditional societies worldwide.