Abstract: This article analyses the way Aristotle constructs the category of "everybody" in relation with himself and his treatise's audience. In the Aristotelian corpus, the noun anthrōpoi ("humans") is chosen when men as a species are contrasted with gods or animals, while the substantivized adjective pantes ("all"), as a universal quantifier, is used in contrast with smaller social subdivisions (e.g., "the majority," "the wise," etc.) and refers to "all men" in a distributive, rather than a collective, sense. Moreover, pantes may often be the subject of a first-person plural verb, thus explicitly including the observers—Aristotle and his readers/listeners—into the object of the observation. "Gnomic" anthrōpoi presents observations about humans as established truths from an external perspective whereas the "social" and hic et nunc character of pantes is at home both in demonstrative arguments and in the discussion of rhetorical tasks in the context of the Athenian democracy.

This study examines the uses of the term harmonia in Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics and aims at identifying a consistent meaning of this word when applied to the literary arts. A difficulty arises from the fact that harmonia commonly denotes the melodic component of music and speech, but is mentioned in connection with the hexametric rhythm in two parallel passages from the Poetics and the Rhetoric, the latter of which is textually problematic. The solution presented in this article suggests an interpretation which assigns to harmonia the meaning of ‘speech melody’ and supports the least disruptive emendation of the contested passage from the Rhetoric.

This study examines the uses of the term harmonia in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics and aims at identifying a consistent meaning of this word when applied to the literary arts. A difficulty arises from the fact that harmonia commonly denotes the melodic component of music and speech, but is mentioned in connection with the hexametric rhythm in two parallel passages from the Poetics and the Rhetoric, the latter of which is textually problematic. The solution presented in this article suggests an interpretation which assigns to harmonia the meaning of ‘speech melody’ and supports the least disruptive emendation of the contested passage from the Rhetoric.