Abstract
After briefly considering Plato’s objections to rhetoric—it disregards the truth, aiming only to persuade, and it manipulates our emotions rather than instructing us—I turn to the historical Gorgias. The ‘Encomium of Helen’ ascribes to logos (speech) virtually all-powerful capacities for persuasion, seduction, and even bewitchment. Here Gorgias (seemingly) celebrates the very things Plato rejects. Yet in the ‘Defense of Palamedes’ considerable anxieties about whether logos actually does possess such (persuasive) strength are voiced: the weakness, not the power, of logos comes to occupy center stage. Gorgias’ own views thus are likely more complex than Plato allows.
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Notes
- 1.
E. Schiappa, in [25], and T. Cole, in [5], go so far as to argue that the very word ῥητορική is a Platonic coinage. On the origins of the term, see also Schiappa [26], 14–29, and [27], 39–58. N. O’Sullivan, in [23], and G. Pendrick, in [24], by contrast, argue that the term must have been in use earlier. This issue is in principle separable from one with which it is sometimes coupled, the question of whether the earliest so-called handbooks (τέχναι) of rhetoric were, roughly speaking, theoretical works, consisting of, among other things, precepts about how speeches should be structured, or were rather collections of something like sample speeches. (Cf. Aristotle, SE 183b36–184a1, with Solmsen’s emendation, in his [31], 214, n. 3, on Gorgias’s practice of ‘handing out [sc. to his students] speeches (λόγοι ῥητορικοί) to be learned by heart (ἐκμανθάνειν)’.) To the extent that there is a consensus on the matter, it has been shifting more towards the second picture. See also S. Usher [34], 1–6, for a brief, sensible discussion, with extensive references to earlier literature, of the earliest practitioners of oratory/rhetoric. Usher there also provides a helpful introduction to the roles of Corax and Tisias, two somewhat shadowy (for us) figures, who in antiquity were frequently credited with having ‘pioneer[ed] . . instruction [in] oratory’ ([34], 2, n. 4)—unless the origin of artful speaking was projected all the way back to Homer; see, e.g. G. Kennedy [12], A. J. Karp [11], and P. Toohey [33], esp. 153–162. Resolving these issues luckily does not matter a great deal for my present project, since all parties will agree that Gorgias offers us exempla of Kunstprosa, i.e. a very deliberately and artfully wrought language (at times shading into something artificial and mannered), and so counts as producing speeches of the kind Plato wishes to label as ‘rhetoric’, irrespective of whether he, Gorgias, in addition had theoretical underpinnings for his practice, or would want to use the word ῥητορική to speak of either his practice or his theorizing (if any).
- 2.
See, for example, the discussion of the ‘wisdom of the Spartans’ at Protagoras 342 A–343 B, and the references there to seemingly any random Spartan’s ability to fire off, pretty much at will, a ‘memorable, brief saying’ (ῥῆμα ἄξιον λόγου βραχύ) (342 E 2), and to the Spartans’ fondness for expressing their wisdom using ‘brief sayings [that are] worthy of being remembered’ (ῥήματα βραχέα ἀξιομνημόνευτα) (343 A 7–8)—all of which is summed up as ‘a kind of Laconic brevity’ (βραχυλογία τις Λακωνική) (343 B 5).
- 3.
The larger question of which sorts of discourse were recognized (already in the mid- to late fifth century) as making for something like distinct genres of discourse is treated well by H. Ll. Hudson-Williams, in [10].
- 4.
See A. Nehamas [22]. G. E. R. Lloyd’s [16], Ch. 2 (‘Dialectic and Demonstration’), 59–125, contains much useful discussion, especially also of relevant antecedents of the method of question and answer in the Hippocratic Corpus. W. Müri’s [21] remains fundamental, not least for laying out clearly that Plato uses a variety of expressions as de facto synonyms for διαλεκτική, including διαλέγεσθαι, ἐπίστασθαι λόγον τε δοῦναι καὶ δέξασθαι, and ἐρωτᾶν τε καὶ ἀποκρίνεσθαι (as well as variants of all of these). I offer a brief discussion of the expression λόγον διδόναι in my [19]. On the proximity of Socratic dialectic to sophistic eristic, see also R. Barney’s [1], esp. at 81–82.
- 5.
I offer a more detailed discussion of eristic and dialectic in the Euthydemus in my [20].
- 6.
R. Barney also holds that the claim about rehtoric’s power to enslave may very well go back to Gorgias himself, see [2], at 21–22. And in the Philebus, too, rhetoric is contrasted with dialectic (see 57 E ff.), though now ‘the power of dialectic’ (ἡ τοῦ διαλέγεσθαι δύναμις) (57 E 7) is said to be ‘concerned with being, and with what is really, and with what is naturally in every way eternally the same’ (58 A 2–3). It would take us too far afield to consider how well this characterization of dialectic fits with the picture of dialectic as the method of question and answer. Note, however, that Rep. 7, 534 B-E already suggests that there will be a close connection between the kind of over-arching knowledge of reality the dialcetician is said to possess and his ‘passing through [sc. unscathed] all refutations, as if in a battle’ (καὶ ὥσπερ ἐν μάχῃ διὰ πάντων ἐλέγχων διεξιών) (534 C 1–2).
- 7.
I set aside the short piece entitled, ‘On Not-Being, or Concerning Nature’. There are challenging questions about the work, including philological ones about the relation of the two transmitted versions (one preserved in Sextus Empiricus, the other in the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, On Melissus, Xenophanes, and Gorgias) to any would-be Gorgianic original. Addressing these questions is beyond the scope of this chapter.
- 8.
R. Barney, in [2], offers an excellent entrée to the larger philosophical issues at stake in the arguments about assigning, or rather, not assigning, responsibility to Helen for her actions.
- 9.
See also [2], 5–7, on the overall structure of the argument.
- 10.
The words are προθυμία καὶ ἅμιλλα ἔρωτος. Older translations here speak of the ‘contest of love’. But this, it seems to me, does not quite make sense. LSJ, s.v. ἅμιλλα suggest ‘eager desire’; but this is perhaps too weak and also does not make for a sufficient difference from προθυμία (which would by itself naturally be rendered as ‘eager desire’). Thus I offer ‘striving for erōs’ as a paraphrase. In their recent Loeb translation [14], Laks and Most offer ‘an eagerness and a striving for love’ for προθυμία καὶ ἅμιλλα ἔρωτος.
- 11.
Cf. Barney, who observes: ‘. . . his discussion of logos here is outsize and extravagant and clearly meant to stand out: the Helen as a whole may be just an elaborate frame for what Gorgias wants to say here about speech’ ([2], 9).
- 12.
Much of the early evidence for this, including material from the realm of the visual arts, is well discussed by R. G. A. Buxton, in [3]; see esp. Ch. 2, 29–65. On p. 31, commenting on our lines, he writes: ‘. . . peitho is the seductive persuasion which may have induced Helen to go off with Paris. Yet it also the power used and the effect produced by oratory in contexts which we would regard as non-erotic—but to the Greeks all peitho was “seductive”. Peitho is a continuum within which divine and secular, erotic and non-erotic come together’.
- 13.
I am following N. Worman’s translation here, except in rendering πόθος as ‘longing’ rather than ‘desire’; see [37], 161.
- 14.
So D. M. MacDowell, in [18], 24; cf. 13–15, and 38, ad loc. He is arguing against the traditional view which takes ὅσοι to mean ‘all’, and which would thus have us render the sentence as: ‘All who have persuaded and do persuade people of things do so by framing a false logos’. Such a view is adopted e.g. by W. J. Verdenius [35], who argues that for Gorgias, all logos is false and deceptive. Laks and Most, in [14], in effect construe the sentence in a similar fashion, rendering it as: ‘Whoever has persuaded, and also persuades, whomever about whatever [scil. does so] by fabricating a false discourse (logos)’. One might think that the very first sentence of the ‘Helen’ is sufficient for refuting so universal a claim, for there Gorgias says ‘truth is the adornment (κόσμος) of logos in the same way as the excellence of its men is an adornment of a city; beauty, that of a body; wisdom, that of a soul; and virtue, that of an action’. As we shall see, the final part of the ‘Palamedes’ would also make no sense if true, persuasive logoi were in principle impossible.
- 15.
Laks and Most [14], following Diels Kranz, print: οὐκ ἂν ὁμοίως ὅμοιος ἦν ὁ λόγος, which translators render as ‘speech would not be similarly similar’. MacDowell, [18], p. 38, argues that this ‘cannot be right’, among other reasons, because ‘“similarly similar” makes no sense’. He thinks that ὅμοιος is a scribal error (‘derived from the previous ὁμοίως’), and it must have ‘ousted a word meaning “effective” or “powerful”’. This is a fairly drastic intervention in the text, but I am inclined to agree that ‘similarly similar’ fails to make good sense.
- 16.
Barney, in [2], helpfully distinguishes between a ‘broad’ claim that might seem to underly the ‘Helen’, namely that ‘nobody is ever morally responsible for anything at all’ (16, 17), and a ‘narrow’ claim, where the actions under considersation are, like Helen’s, ‘irrational, self-destructive, and/or wrong’ (17–20). It may be worth recalling that in ascribing responsbility, the Greeks were often assigning, or looking to assign, blame. Consider, for example, the opening of Herodotus, where he seeks to determine ‘on account of what cause (δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην)’ the Greeks and the foreigners ‘entered into war against each other’ (1.1.0), and then quickly moves from talking of which parties were originally ‘responsible (αἰτίους)’ for the emnity (1.1.1) to talking of who committed the ‘first wrong (τῶν ἀδικημάτων πρῶτον)’ (1.2.1) (cf. all the uses of αἰτία, rather, αἰτίη, and αἴτιος in 1.1 through 1.5). If Gorgias is concerned with responsibility in such a narrower sense, then the upshot of the ‘Helen’ would be that no one is ever to blame for conduct that, viewed more ‘naïvely’, calls for disapprobation.
- 17.
At the end of §5, Palamedes says, ‘. . . for neither if I had wished to would I have been able to undertake actions of such a kind, nor if had been able would I have wished to do so’; the end of §21 picks this up, ‘That I would not < have been able to, nor > have wished, to betray Hellas has been proved by what I just said (διὰ τῶν προειρημένων δέδεικται)’. The supplement is due to Keil, who is obviously relying on the final sentence of §5.
- 18.
So D. G. Spatharas, in his [32], here at 395.
- 19.
Gorgias is presumably counting on his intended audience’s (and Palamedes’ fictional audience’s) familiarity with the ‘facts’ (i) that Odysseus knows how to say ‘many false things that are like the truth’ (Od. 19. 203), and (ii) that he boasts of being famous among men ‘for all manner of trickery (δόλοι)’ (9. 19–20). On Odysseus’s association with δόλος and the role this plays in his relation to Palamedes, see M. Christopoulos [4].
- 20.
For evidence from the Epic Cycle, see M. L. West [36], 102–103, and 123–125; see also Philostratus, Heroicus, 33.1–34.7. Such evidence as we have suggests that Palamedes was a popular figure for the tragedians of the fifth century; see for example G. Koniaris [13], esp. 87–89, and nn. 13–16. R. Scodel, in her [29], argues against Koniaris that Euripides’ three plays of 415 (i.e. the Alexander, Palamedes, and Troades) were composed to make up a trilogy of related works. But see two reviews of Scodel [29], namely [30] and [8], for scepticism on the issue. This matters, because if the tragedies are not related in this way, we cannot use the extant Troades as a basis for speculation about the lost Palamedes. What is clear, however, is that Euripides is relying on a version of the story that is consistent with Gorgias’s speech. (The relative dates cannot be established securely, so no inference about the supposed direction of influence is reliable.) — Scodel summarizes the plot of the Palamedes as follows: ‘Odysseus forged or caused to be forged a letter purporting to be from Priam to Palamedes in which Palamedes was promised a certain sum of gold in return for betraying the Greek camp. This letter was given to a Phrygian prisoner, whom Odysseus had killed near the camp; through an elaborate stratagem he secretly buried the amount of gold named in the letter beneath Palamedes’ tent. The central action of the play was the trial of Palamedes. The corpse having been found and the letter brought to Agamemnon, the king investigated the matter. Palamedes defended himself against Odysseus’s accusations, and perhaps himself suggested that his tent be searched for the gold. When the gold was found, he was condemned, but his brother Oiax lamented his murder and wrote his story on oars which he cast into the sea in the hope that one of them might reach his father, Nauplius. The ending of the play is uncertain, but there cannot have been any real resolution’ ([28], 407).
- 21.
Philostratus, Heroicus, 43.15–16, has Homer conjuring Odysseus from the dead and begging him to exclude Palamedes from his narrative: ‘Do not bring Palamedes to Ilion, don’t treat him as a soldier, nor say that he was wise! Other poets will say these things, but because they have not been said by you, they will not seem convincing (πιθανὰ δὲ οὐ δόξει μὴ σοἰ εἰρημένα)’. In return for this favor, the shade of Odysseus provides Homer with material for his epics (see all of 43.10–16).
- 22.
Scholars have long argued that there are significant parallels between the Apology and the ‘Palamedes’; for a close reading of the texts that does so with exceptional care and also provides copious references to earlier literature, see J. Coulter’s important [7].
- 23.
See Worman [37], 173–176.
- 24.
Note the artful use of the three interrogative words in quick succession, each introducing its own brief question: πόθεν, τί, and ποῖ.
- 25.
It is tempting to hear ἐπίδειξις in ἀνεπίδεικτος, in which case the meaning might rather be that the accusation has not been demonstrated (i.e. it is as if ἀνεπίδεικτος were standing in for ἀναπόδεικτος).
- 26.
See Worman [37], 174–175, for a discussion of ἔκπληξις (and related terms) in earlier and contemporary literature, including the report (Diodorus Siculus, 12.53.2–5) that Gorgias himself ‘struck (ἐξέπληξε) with the strangeness of his usage’ his Athenian audience when he appeared in Athens in 427. Cf. also ἐκπλάγεντες at ‘Encomium of Helen’, §16. Laks and Most [14] have ‘a manifest consternation’ for ἔκπληξιν ἐμφανῆ; but this seems too weak.
- 27.
πόριμος, viz. ποριμώτερος, is pretty clearly picking up ἀπορεῖν, so the wished-for teachers would, ideally, provide the resources for overcoming the (sense of a) lack of resources of which Palamedes speaks.
- 28.
See D. M. MacDowell [17], at 123, for a defense of the manuscript reading (i.e. for not following Diels either in changing γε to τε, or in inserting καί before φανεράν). He proposes that the γε be understood as both emphasizing and limiting: ‘“The truth of the affair—I mean the whole truth”’. I have italicized ‘unblemished’ (καθαράν) in the translation to bring out this sort of emphasis. Another possibility might be simply to delete γε, as an instance of dittography. Laks and Most [14] follow Diels and render the words as: ‘Well, if it were possible for the truth about actions to become pure < and > clear for listeners by means of speeches . . .’.
- 29.
I have taken over some turns of phrase from D. Graham’s translation, in his [9], 775.
- 30.
There is a question whether the τάξεις referred to here are miltitary ranks, so that Palamedes would be claiming to have invented how to organize an army, via something like a ‘command structure’, or are rather the positions in which e.g. an infantry line (τάξις) was to be arrayed in battle, in order to fight more effectively. For our purposes, nothing depends on which alternative one chooses.
- 31.
See Euripides’ Palamedes, fr. 578 (the text is preserved at Stobeaus 2.4.8): ‘I alone correctly furnished ‘medications’ against forgetting (τὰ τῆς γε λήθης φάρμακ’ ὀρθώσας μόνος), which are speechless and speaking (ἄφωνα καὶ φωνοῦντα), by establishing syllables; I invented the knowledge of writing for human beings, so that someone absent over the ocean’s expanse might know well (καλῶς) all the matters back in his household, and so that a dying man might write down the measure of his possessions (χρημάτων μέτρον) when leaving them to his sons, and the one to whom they were left might know it. And the evils that beset humans when they fall into a quarrel—a written tablet does away with these and makes it impossible to speak falsely’. (Laks and Most [15], 341, ad loc., tentatively offer the attractive paraphrase, ‘consonants and vowels’, for ἄφωνα καὶ φωνοῦντα.) Again, we need to recall that the relative dates of Euripides’ drama and Gorgias’ ‘Palamedes’ cannot be established securely, so no inference about the supposed direction of influence is reliable. — With Euripides, Palamedes, fr 578. compare Sophocles, Nauplius, fr. 432 R which presents a very similar list of Palamedes’ inventions.
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The first ‘offficial’ version of this material was presented at a workshop at the University of Toronto, in 2015. At the last minute, it proved impossible for me to attend in person. Rachel Barney very kindly read the paper out in my absence; many thanks also to David Wolfsdorf for providing me (in writing) with the comments he gave on that occasion. I am in addition grateful to have had the opportunitiy to present subsequent versions of the paper as talks at the NYU Ancient Philosophy Work-in-Progress workshop, at Northwestern University, and at the 2016 Berlin conference, ‘Argumentation in Classical Antiquity: Dialectic, Rhetoric, and Other Domains’. Comments and questions from the audiences at those events helped me to rethink various points. But I owe even deeper and longer-standing debts of gratitude to Kate Meng Brassel, Jonathan Fine, Usha Nathan, and above all Elizabeth Scharffenberger for countless valuable conversations over the years on many of the issues surrounding the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.
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Mann, WR. (2021). Gorgias and the Weakness of Logos. In: Bjelde, J.A., Merry, D., Roser, C. (eds) Essays on Argumentation in Antiquity. Argumentation Library, vol 39. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70817-7_3
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