Rhetoric
The systematic art of persuasion: born as a teachable craft in 5th-century Greece and built into a discipline by Aristotle.
Rhetoric is the art of persuasive speaking and writing. It emerged as a self-conscious, teachable techne in 5th-c. BCE Sicily and Athens — tradition credits Corax and Tisias, and the sophists Gorgias and Protagoras spread it. Plato then attacked it as mere flattery, before Aristotle (4th c. BCE) rehabilitated it in his 'Rhetoric' as the faculty of finding the available means of persuasion, resting on three pillars: logical proof (logos), character (ethos), and emotion (pathos). The Roman masters Cicero and Quintilian made it the heart of elite education, and it stayed a core liberal art for two thousand years.
How it traveled
- History of the Peloponnesian WarAthens · -400explains
- PanegyricusAthens · -380explains
- PhaedrusAthens · -370explains
- ExordiaAthens · -349explains
- GorgiasAthens · -348redefines
- Against TimarchusAthens · -346explains
- On the False EmbassyAthens · -343explains
- PanathenaicusAthens · -339explains
- AntidosisAthens · -338explains
- RhetoricChalcis · -335explains
- On the CrownAthens · -330explains
- Against CtesiphonAthens · -330explains
- HistoriesMegalopolis · -118explains
- De InventioneFormiae · -84explains
- In C. VerremFormiae · -70explains
- On OratoryFormiae · -55explains
- BrutusFormiae · -46explains
- OratorFormiae · -46explains
- Institutio OratoriaRome · 95redefines
- DemosthenesChaeronea · 120explains
- Noctes AtticaeRome · 180explains
- Rhetorum praeceptorSamosata · 180explains
- Quomodo historia conscribenda sitSamosata · 180explains
- Adversus MathematicosAlexandria · 190explains
- DeipnosophistaeNaucratis · 230explains
- Vitae philosophorum— · 240explains
- Abarbanel on TorahNaples · 1505
- Orationes 45Smyrnaexplains
- Volumina RhetoricaNaplesexplains
- De Demosthenis dictioneRomeexplains
- Lives of the SophistsAthensexplains
- Περὶ ἰδεῶν λόγου—explains
- Ars Rhetorica—explains
- Historia RomanaRomeexplains
- ControversiaeRomeexplains
- In Aristotelis artem rhetoricam commentarium—explains
- Historical LibrarySyracuse (Sicily)explains
- De Figuris—explains
- Orationes 46Smyrnaexplains
- CloudsAthensexplains
Key passages(20)
In Aristotelis artem rhetoricam commentarium · Anonymi in Aristotelis Artem Rhetoricam
In Aristotelis artem rhetoricam commentarium · Anonymi in Aristotelis Artem Rhetoricam
In Aristotelis artem rhetoricam commentarium · Anonymi in Aristotelis Artem Rhetoricam
Ars Rhetorica [attributed] · Aelius Aristides
Ars Rhetorica [attributed] · Aelius Aristides
Ars Rhetorica [attributed] · Aelius Aristides