the everyday world of the democratic assembly and law courts, in which success awaited the man – for
only male citizens were entitled to address the assembly or the jury – who was most skilled in persuading
his fellow citizens. The unflattering image of rhetoric and its instructors has persisted (ironically, in part
because of the stylistic sophistication and persuasiveness of Plato’s dialogues) and today the word
“sophistry” is used as a term of denigration.
But rhetoric can be, and has been, a serious intellectual pursuit. The formal study of oratory had only
begun around the middle of the fifth century, but it immediately attracted the attention of many of the most
brilliant and creative minds. These included not only the sophists but even Plato’s pupil Aristotle, who in
the middle of the fourth century BC wrote a treatise on rhetoric that includes important discussions of
different types of argumentation, discussions that are closely related to Aristotle’s groundbreaking
development of formal logic. The fact that rhetoric had developed so rapidly and had become fully
professionalized is testimony to the competitive nature of Greek culture and to the pervasiveness of
litigation, particularly in Athens. As we saw in chapter 10, it was up to the individual citizen to bring
charges before the court, and it was required by Attic law that that individual, as well as the person
against whom the charges were brought, address the court himself. For this reason, many Athenian citizens
found it prudent to learn the skills that the sophists promised to teach. The alternative was to hire a
professional to write a speech, which one could then memorize and deliver oneself. This had the effect of
creating a demand for professional speechwriters and teachers of rhetoric, who came to Athens from all
over the Greek world, and of encouraging the proliferation of speeches in written form. Copies of these
written speeches could then be produced, either by the orator himself to advertise his skills or by others
to serve as models. And copies continued to be made for educational purposes, since rhetoric formed the
basis of higher education throughout antiquity. For this reason, we have today the texts of well over a
hundred speeches delivered by Athenian orators in the late fifth and fourth centuries BC. Two of the most
prominent of those orators were Isocrates and Demosthenes, who illustrate well the range of styles and
outlooks among these men.
“It is disgraceful that, in the private sphere we see fit to use barbarians as slaves whereas, in the
public sphere, we stand by and watch as so many of our allies are enslaved by them. It is disgraceful
that, in the case of the men engaged in the Trojan War, the abduction of a single woman aroused such
universal indignation on behalf of the wronged party that no one was willing to end the war until the
city of the man who dared to commit this crime had been obliterated whereas, in our case, when the
whole of Greece has been outraged, we have taken no unified action in retaliation, although we have
it in our power to accomplish what we have every right to wish for. This is the only case where war
trumps peace. It is more like a pilgrimage than a military campaign. Both those who crave war and
those who want peace would come out winners, for it enables the latter to enjoy the fruits of their
labor without any dangers and the former to make a fortune at the expense of strangers.” (Isocrates,
Panegyricus 181–2)Isocrates lived for almost a hundred years, from 436 BC until 338. He came from a wealthy Athenian
family and studied under the leading sophists. In particular, Isocrates was a pupil of the Sicilian Gorgias,
who had developed a dazzling, incantatory style of delivery which introduced some of the effects of
poetry into spoken prose. Of Gorgias it has notoriously been said, “starting with the initial advantage of
having nothing in particular to say, he was able to concentrate all his energies upon saying it.” This
comment, made in the 1950s, before we had learned that the medium is the message, serves as a good
illustration of the suspicion in which rhetoric has been held and seems to proceed from the assumption
that whatever is cleverly expressed must be lacking in substance. In fact, Gorgias and his pupil Isocrates