Abstract This essay explores synecdoche as an extended argumentative structure in Roman defenses of rhetoric. While contemporary scholarship often limits synecdoche to semantic substitution or distinguishes it from metonymy, theorists have recognized its potential as a form of argument. In Roman rhetoric, Quintilian describes synecdoche as both a trope of part-whole relations and a parallel argumentative form in Institutio Oratoria with comparable aims and lexical choices. This study examines how Roman rhetoricians, notably Quintilian and Cicero, employed synecdoche in extended arguments in defense of rhetoric. These arguments structured interconnected ideas such as categorical distinctions, hierarchical significance, and temporal sequence by employing synecdochal structures. By comparing ancient definitions and examples, this analysis reveals synecdoche’s capacity to organize complex argumentative discourse, offering a lens to scrutinize its structural and functional role.

In Phaedrus, Plato invokes a mythic exemplum concerning the Egyptian deity Thoth. Though often interpreted as an overt critique of writing, this argument posits Thoth is offered analogically to contrast Plato's rhetorical epistemology with that of the ancient Egyptians. To do so, this argument addresses why a mythic Egyptian figure might be so significant to Plato in the 4th Century B.C. Greece, whose culture already had multiple gods and cultural heroes to whom the invention of writing is attributed, when the episode in Phaedrus is axiomatically described as a critique of writing. Because Plato may have had some degree of firsthand knowledge of Egyptian traditions it explores those traditions personified in the figure of Thoth, which should be examined as an analogical device advised by Egyptian rhetorical epistemology. A closer examination of the comparative rhetorical epistemological perspective not only illuminates Thoth's appearance in Phaedrus but also the Egyptian rhetorical-epistemic tradition. Thoth's role as epistemic mediator between humans and truth, in the broadest terms, was to act as psychopomp who moves both between humanity and the arrival at knowledge that prefigures rhetorical action.

In Phaedrus, Plato invokes a mythic exemplum concerning the Egyptian deity Thoth. Though often interpreted as an overt critique of writing, this argument posits Thoth is offered analogically to contrast Plato’s rhetorical epistemology with that of the ancient Egyptians. To do so, this argument addresses why a mythic Egyptian figure might be so significant to Plato in the 4th Century B.C. Greece, whose culture already had multiple gods and cultural heroes to whom the invention of writing is attributed, when the episode in Phaedrus is axiomatically described as a critique of writing. Because Plato may have had some degree of firsthand knowledge of Egyptian traditions it explores those traditions personified in the figure of Thoth, which should be examined as an analogical device advised by Egyptian rhetorical epistemology. A closer examination of the comparative rhetorical epistemological perspective not only illuminates Thoth’s appearance in Phaedrus but also the Egyptian rhetorical-epistemic tradition. Thoth’s role as epistemic mediator between humans and truth, in the broadest terms, was to act as psychopomp who moves both between humanity and the arrival at knowledge that prefigures rhetorical action.

This argument demonstrates how rhetorical theory was shaped recursively by the mythology of ancient Sumer and China, and resulted in new discursive formations in subsequent rhetorical theory. These discursive theoretical formations occurred after the advent of widespread literate practice. The myth of Cangjie shaped the teleology of rhetoric of ancient China and the myth of Enmerkar shaped rhetorical theory in Sumer in similar ways. Following the authority of Walker, Schiappa, and Johnstone, which charted a similar phenomenon in ancient Greece, these non-Greco-Roman myths were deployed to form a similar pattern. By following Rita Copeland’s call to “allow the history of rhetoric to be written through mythic time,” it can be shown that the use of myths by ancient cultures to shape their rhetorical theories suggests that this is not merely a Greco-Roman feature of rhetoric in antiquity, but a human one.

This essay will demonstrate how both the cultural and temporal antecedents of classical rhetoric are linked to Mesopotamian writing by their shared use of similes, such as fable, aenigma, and parable as pardeigmae. Mesopotamian myths employed allegory and aenigma to advance a cultural argument that intersects with common theoretical topics in ancient rhetoric through analogical reasoning. Finally, this essay will introduce this obscure but highly relevant source of rhetorical thinking from Mesopotamia and their culturally transmitted theories in a neglected primary source, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. This brief epic shares similar philosophical ground with ancient Greco-Roman rhetoric, and addresses rhetoric’s fundamental nature at a much earlier point in history than accounted for in existing histories of classical rhetoric.

ABSTRACT Alcuin’s Rhetoric possesses a singular relationship to the history of rhetoric and to its own unique historical period. The puzzlingly diverse evaluations of the Rhetoric’s purpose and “importance” are often clouded by the question of its subsequent historical influence. The purpose of the present argument is to present contextualizing information based on newly emerging historical data surrounding the mid-790s, the date of the Rhetoric’s composition, and its Augustinian influence. Alcuin’s Rhetoric is an early example of consular rhetoric to “advise the prince” that forms, in itself, a deliberative argument regarding a very specific set of historical exigencies that relate to legal policies toward unconverted subjects in the Carolingian empire. Alcuin’s motivation for the composition of the Rhetoric can be understood in the historically imminent adoption of the Saxon Code and its contradiction of the rhetorical counsel found in Augustine’s De Catechizandis Rudibus.

This article discusses two nineteenth-century rhetors who engaged in cultural persuasion through their respective lexicons. It argues that lexicography served an epideictic function in nineteenth-century culture, entering educational values and pervading print culture. Nineteenth-century lexicography functioned epideictically as a storehouse of cultural values and influenced the discourse of nineteenth-century rhetorics, evidenced in their concern with clarity, usage, and the disambiguation of language. But there is an acceptance and awareness of the inherent ambiguity of language in nineteenth-century rhetoric, which is also reflected in other satirical lexicons. The two poles of lexicography in theory and practice illustrate how dictionaries became a site of cultural dialogue and dissent.