Book Review| June 01 2017 Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece. By Nathan Crick. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015; pp. ix + 260. $59.95 cloth. Kristine Bruss Kristine Bruss Independent Scholar Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (2): 360–364. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0360 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kristine Bruss; Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2017; 20 (2): 360–364. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0360 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

AbstractThe term “boring” is pervasive in contemporary popular evaluations of speakers and speeches. Although familiar today, the term is curiously absent from foundational Greek accounts of the art of rhetoric, raising a question about what, if anything, ancient Greeks thought about the subject. In this article, I aim to clarify Greek ways of thinking about boredom and rhetoric through an examination of the texts of Isocrates, focusing in particular on his Panathenaicus. As the evidence in Isocrates suggests, ancient Greek listeners did experience something akin to boredom, namely ochlos, or annoyance. The Greeks were also delighted (and hence not bored) by certain forms of rhetoric; some forms were delightful to crowds, and others, like the texts of Isocrates, were delightful to cultivated minds. Although Isocrates addresses antecedents of boredom, he makes only a handful of references of this sort, suggesting that boredom has afflicted some rhetorical cultures far less than others.