Philosophy took a part in the discovery and development of all these, and gave us
education in the field of affairs and civilised relations with each other.... Our city
showed the way to it, and also gave honour to skill in words, which is the desire
and envy of all. She realised that this alone is the particular and natural possession
of man, and that its development has led to all other superiorities as well. She saw
that other activities showed such confusion in practice that wisdom was often the
way to failure in them, and folly to success, while good and skilled powers of
speech were outside the scope of the ordinary people, but were the province of
the well-ordered mind: and that in this respect wisdom and ignorance are furthest
apart, and the birthright of a liberal education is marked not by courage, wealth
and similar distinctions, but most clearly of all by speech, the sign of which presents
the most reliable proof of education, so that a fine use of words gives not merely
ability at home, but honour abroad. Athens has so far outrun the rest of mankind
in thought and speech that her disciples are the masters of the rest, and it is due
to her that the word ‘Greek’ is not so much a term of birth as of mentality, and is
applied to a common culture rather than a common descent.Plato was distrustful of rhetoric and of the teaching of the sophists because he felt
that they were not grounded in the quest for truth. In the dialogue Gorgias, for
example, he shows Socrates refuting the sophist Gorgias, who asserts that rhetoric is
the most important of human concerns because successful statesmanship relies not
on knowledge of the good but upon the art of persuasion. Nevertheless, in the
education system of Greece, it was rhetoric rather than philosophy that came to be
central, and this continued to be the case at Rome and in the Renaissance.
The art of rhetoric affected not only oratory but all kinds of composition; similarly
the analysis of prose in antiquity is invariably rhetorical. A useful introduction here is
provided by the analysis of the Greek rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus (writing
about 30 BC) who wrote essays on various Athenian orators and a substantial work
entitled On Composition.At the beginning of an essay on Demosthenes, he cites the
account of stasisfrom Thucydides quoted above (p. 41) as an example of the grand
style. It is strikingly elaborate because the style is remote from normality and much
embellished; it can startle the mind, induce tension or strain and express violent
emotion. Dionysius commends Thucydides for his ability to represent the terrible, the
remarkable and the pathetic. He distinguishes four characteristics of his style:
artificiality of vocabulary, variety of figures, harshness of word order and rapidity of
signification (when discussing Thucydides, 24).Though he does not eschew pleasing
rhythms, he is often abrupt, varying his constructions in unexpected combinations
and so jarring the ear and surprising the mind. Later in the same essay, Dionysius
describes Thucydides’ style as austere and archaic, one that aims at dignity rather
than elegance (in regard to Thucydides, 38–39). In translation, Thucydides appears
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