Largely disparaged by readers since the eighteenth century but revered before then as a guide to living and dying well, the Tusculan Disputations has throughout its long reception been acknowledged as the most rhetorical of Cicero's dialogues. This essay takes as its point of departure not only this acknowledgment but the principal interlocutor's key comparison between finding the appropriate status or "issue" in a legal case and selecting a circumstantially sensitive strategy when offering consolation for the loss of a loved one. It argues, with the help of Cicero's rhetorical works, that he deploys rhetorical status, with its three questions (conjectural, definitive, and qualitative), to structure the conversation, thereby redressing the perceived failure of Plato's Phaedo to provide adequate guidance for navigating life's vexations, including pain, depression, anxiety, and death.

Book Review| February 01 2020 Review: From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics, by Quentin Skinner Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, xiii + 432 pp. ISBN 9781107128859 Kathy Eden Kathy Eden Kathy Eden English Department Columbia University 602 Philosophy Hall New York, New York 10027 khe1@columbia.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (1): 118–122. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.118 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kathy Eden; Review: From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics, by Quentin Skinner. Rhetorica 1 February 2020; 38 (1): 118–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.118 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, xiii + 432 pp. ISBN 9781107128859 Students of the rhetorical tradition will learn a great deal from Skinner's From Humanism to Hobbes; for like Elobbes, Skinner has mastered the rhetorical curriculum that informs the humanist education of sixteenthand seventeenth-century writers like Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Milton, and, of course, Hobbes himself. Even more to the point, Skinner's mastery of this tradition has made him attentive to the fundamentally adversarial nature of their writings, allowing him to uncover the argumentative structures and stylistic figures that underwrite their persuasive effects. It has also, I expect, helped him to hone his own enviable argumentative skills, whether he is making the case for the origins of political representation in the art of the actor, the role of rhetorical redescription in Machiavelli's Prince and Shakespeare's Coriolanus, or the iconographic identity of the colossus in the frontispiece of Leviathan. Without by any means exhausting the impor­ tant and wide-ranging issues addressed in this book, these three cases will surely interest the readers of this journal because they set in high relief how deeply embedded such rhetorical strategies as personation or prosopo­ poeia, paradiastole, and enargeia are in the thinking and writing of earlv modernity. Two of the twelve essays in this collection (chapters 3 and 5) turn—or, for Skinner's devoted readers, return—to the figure of paradiastole, also cal­ led rhetorical redescription by Skinner because it refers to the orator's effort to "spin" the narrative of events, including the moral characters of the agents involved, by reframing vices as virtues and vice versa, impugning caution as cowardice, for instance, or packaging recklessness as braverv. Although arguably not among the most high-profile rhetorical figures, paradiastole, as Skinner demonstrates, propels the core mission of the rhetorician to leverage the affective power of language to alter what an audience believes, to manipulate its responses by using word-choice to elevate or denigrate its targets. In keeping with this mission, Skinner also demonstrates, rhetorical theorists from Aristotle to Quintilian to Susenbrotus to Thomas Wilson take the paradiastolic move into account, whether thev feature the technical term Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 1, pp. 118-132. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http: wwv. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ rh.2020.38.1.118 Reviews 119 in its polysyllabic Greek form, translate it into Latin or the vernacular, or leave it nameless. Following his signature method, Skinner arms his readers with an understanding of this key term before using it to unlock the complex texts he considers in the context of the controversies they engage. In the Prince, for instance, Machiavelli counters the long-standing tradition of classical ethics exemplified by Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero's De officiis by redescribing the qualities they endorse as political liabilities destined to destroy the state, rather than maintain it. With this single-minded end of mantenere lo stato in view, Skinner argues, Machiavelli "redefines the con­ cept of virtu" (56), exposing previously held virtues such as liberality and kindness as vices when practiced in the political arena (60). Shakespeare's use of paradiastole, on the other hand, reflects a reversal in rhetorical theory that Skinner attributes to Quintilian and finds wide­ spread among Tudor rhetoricians. Whereas the figure originally serves to expose or unmask the verbal manipulation of one's adversary, it is eventually deployed to excuse one's own shortcomings and mitigate culpability by redescribing one's vices as virtues. After flagging this strat­ egy in a number of Shakespeare's plays, Skinner concludes that "It is in the assessment of Coriolanus's character, however, that Shakespeare makes his most extended use of paradiastole" (111). For the in utramque partem structure this late Shakespearean tragedy shares with all drama encoura­ ges the representation of controversy or debate, which, in this case, invol­ ves "coloring...

Research Article| February 01 1990 The Rhetorical Tradition and Augustinian Hermeneutics in De doctrina Christiana Kathy Eden Kathy Eden Department of English and Comparative Literature, 401A Philosophy Hall, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027 Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1990) 8 (1): 45–63. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1990.8.1.45 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kathy Eden; The Rhetorical Tradition and Augustinian Hermeneutics in De doctrina Christiana. Rhetorica 1 February 1990; 8 (1): 45–63. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1990.8.1.45 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1990, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1990 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| February 01 1987 Hermeneutics and the Ancient Rhetorical Tradition Kathy Eden Kathy Eden 454 Riverside Drive, 4A, New York, NY 10027 Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1987) 5 (1): 59–86. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.1.59 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kathy Eden; Hermeneutics and the Ancient Rhetorical Tradition. Rhetorica 1 February 1987; 5 (1): 59–86. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.1.59 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1987, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1987 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.