This volume falls into the category of textbooks and source collections devoted to rhetoric. As an anthology with extensive excerpts from the original sources, intended primarily for French readership, it can serve as a complement to Laurent Pernot’s overview, published twenty-five years ago, or to Pierre Chiron’s more recent short textbook on rhetoric.[1] The volume collects various texts, translated and arranged thematically around the theme of speech and its ‘paradoxical power’ in Antiquity, excluding (with two Homeric exceptions) poetic texts and Christian texts ‘which, whilst drawing on the pagan heritage, belong to a different tradition’ (p. 15). The scope of the theme extends somewhat beyond the boundaries of rhetoric, a fact that is more evident in Chapter IV. The volume essentially reproduces, without cuts or substantial modifications, extracts from French translations published by the same publisher, Les Belles Lettres, in various collections, with a few exceptions: Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric, for which the respective translations by Pierre Destrée and Pierre Chiron (Garnier Flammarion) were preferred to the existing volumes in the CUF, Plato’s Republic (Pierre Leroux, Garnier Flammarion), Sextus Empiricus (Pierre Pellegrin, Seuil), and Tacitus (La Pléiade, Gallimard). The authors occasionally draw on the detailed notes from these various editions, clearly indicating their source.
The volume is easy to use and structured around four chapters that progress from politics to fiction, with a varying number of texts ranging from 10 to 20 depending on the chapter: there is a certain Greek bias (17 texts from Latin literature, compared to 45 Greek texts), which can be explained by the inherent richness of the Greek corpus, by the themes selected, and by the authors’ areas of specialisation.
The first chapter focuses on ‘the political power of speech’ and is divided into three parts, entitled ‘the origin’, ‘the orators’ and ‘the historians’; each text is contextualised and well annotated, followed by a summary of some twenty pages which attempts to compare and open up avenues for diachronic and synchronic reflection on the effectiveness of speech that advises or deliberates. It opens, as a kind of origin, under the patronage of Homer and with a description of Odysseus’s eloquence (note a slight inaccuracy in the presentation of the text: Helen does indeed characterise Odysseus as ‘a man of many thoughts’, but the description of his speech is due to Antenor); the ‘Orators’ section includes famous passages by Isocrates, Demosthenes and Cicero and two later texts by Dion of Prusa and Libanius. The ‘Historians’ section chronologically presents Artabanus’s counsel to Xerxes, two extracts from Thucydides (the exchange between Cleon and Diodotus, an extract from Pericles’s epitaphios logos) and finally an extract from the Dialogue of the Orators attributed to Tacitus. The unity of these texts becomes clearer upon reading the lucid summary: one is somewhat more convinced by the synchronic section, where the texts engage in dialogue with one another, than by the ‘diachronic perspective’; there is a certain tension between the desire to be educational by placing the texts within a long chronological framework — which their presentation sometimes disrupts — and the need for conciseness in the analysis. But the wise decision to place these comments after the presentation of the texts allows the uninitiated reader to approach them with an open mind before grasping their relevance and retaining their essential ideas.
The second chapter, the longest, is entitled ‘How to persuade: rhetoric as a technique of argumentation’. It focuses more on the origins and development of rhetorical technique; in the first section, we find texts dealing with the beginnings of rhetoric, from the Sicilian origins of the art of speaking, up to the complete Encomium of Helen by Gorgias. The second section, the most extensive, brings together 14 texts ranging from Aristotle to Quintilian and Aelius Theon. The commentary following these twenty texts adopts a different approach to that of the first chapter, offering a successive and chronological analysis of each text, organised into two sections: the first focusing on ‘the development of argumentation in the 5th–4th centuries’, and the second on ‘the theorisation of rhetoric’ (the term ‘theorisation’ being used to denote the fact that theory arose from practice). In this section, there are a few expected pages devoted to Aristotle, and a very clear exposition of the ‘theory of topoi’ from Isocrates to Aelius Theon.
The third chapter, entitled ‘Why Persuade?’, examines the aims of persuasion, that is to say, the complex relationship between rhetoric and philosophy: Plato’s attacks on rhetoric as set out in the Gorgias and the Phaedrus are discussed, along with the responses provided by Isocrates, Aristotle, and Cicero (On the Orator, III, 54-61). The enigmatic title of the third section of this chapter, ‘Towards a General Rhetoric’, is rather vague in itself, and one must read through the final comment of these texts to find a clearer subtitle: ‘the absorption of philosophy into rhetoric’. For some authors like Fronto, philosophy is equated with a particular use of language, and thereby regarded as a ‘province’ of rhetoric.
Finally, a last chapter, deliberately more literary in nature and devoted to the ‘powers of fiction’, broadens the discussion to other types of works where the power of speech is understood as the power to invent situations and characters. As in the previous chapter, Plato and Aristotle are at the origins of this debate, in a logical confrontation between the Republic and the Poetics centred on the concept of μίμησις: Plato criticises the illusion and the moral and social danger that poetic fiction represents; Aristotle rehabilitates tragedy through katharsis. Three other forms of the power of language are analysed in the remainder of the chapter: metaphor, enargeia, and ancient ekphrasis—the decision to break the chronological order and to reintroduce a text by Homer into the volume (the description of Achilles’ shield) is highly suggestive from this perspective and brings things full circle. The commentary, albeit succinct, takes care to draw parallels between ancient concepts and their modern use in literature, whilst cautioning against differences in approach depending on the era.
The book is complemented by a well-chosen bibliography. It is deliberately limited to essential works published in French and a few articles, no doubt so as not to overwhelm the novice reader. There is also a handy thematic index that allows for further connections to be made between the various texts and sections. In short, this book offers a good selection of well-defined texts, most of which are certainly well-known, but which it strives to bring into dialogue with one another. It will easily find a large audience, especially among students, teachers and scholars interested in ancient literature, philosophy and issues of communication.
Contents
- Le pouvoir politique de la parole
- Comment persuader: la rhétorique comme technique d’argumentation
- Pourquoi persuader. Rhétorique et philosophie
- Les pouvoirs de la fiction
Bibliographie des sources utilisées
Repères bibliographiques
Index thématique
Notes
[1] Pernot, Laurent, La Rhétorique dans l’Antiquité, Paris, 2000 ; Chiron, Pierre, Manuel de rhétorique, Paris, 2018.