Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Artistry from Solon to DemosthenesSIU Press, 2006 - 249 من الصفحات James Fredal’s wide-ranging survey examines the spatial and performative features of rhetorical artistry in ancient Athens from Solon to Demosthenes, demonstrating how persuasive skill depended not on written treatises, but on the reproduction of spaces and modes for masculine self-formation and displays of contests of character.
Studies of the history of rhetoric generally begin with Homer and Greek orality, then move on to fifth-century Sicily and the innovations of Corax, Tisias, and the older Sophists. While thorough and useful, these narratives privilege texts as the sole locus of proper rhetorical knowledge. Rhetorical Action in Ancient Greece: Persuasive Artistry from Solon to Demosthenes describes rhetoric as largely unwritten and rhetorical skill as closely associated with the ideologies and practices of gender formation and expression. In expanding the notion of rhetorical innovation to include mass movements, large social genres, and cultural practices—rather than the formulations of of individual thinkers and writers—Fredal offers a view of classical rhetoric as local and contingent, bound to the physical spaces, local histories, and cultural traditions of place.
Fredal argues that Greek rhetorical skill remained a function of local spaces like the Pnyx, social practices such as symposia or local meetings, cultural ideologies like those surrounding masculine friendship, and genres of performance such as how to act like a man, herald, sage, tyrant, or democrat. Citizen participation, he explains, was motivated by the desire to display masculine excellence in contests of character by overcoming fear and exerting symbolic and bodily control over self, situation, and audience. He shows how ancient Greek rhetoric employed patterns of “action” such as public oratory and performance to establish, reinforce, or challenge hierarchies and claims to political power.
Instead of examining speeches, handbooks, and theory, Rhetorical Action in Ancient Greece examines the origins of rhetoric in terms of performance. The result is a presentation of rhetorical knowledge as embodied in places and practices with spatial and practical logics that are rarely articulated in written discourse. The volume calls on archaeological, literary, and anthropological evidence about the rhetorical actions of Athens’s leading political agents—including Solon, Peisistratus, Cleisthenes, Demosthenes, and the anonymous “herm-choppers” of the Peloponnesian war—to demonstrate how each generation of political leaders adopted and transformed existing performance genres and spaces to address their own political exigency.
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... central , and open masculine space , I could imag- ine Green elites laid out on just such a couch , facing others who looked like them ; any adult Athenian citizen would have looked forward to just such occasions . And so imagining , I ...
... central space , the creation of a field of visibility within which male performers — soldiers and citizens were meant to take turns asserting themselves , competing for rec- ognition . Within the city , politics became a symbolic and ...
... central- ity of this process to the rhetorical culture of the city . Greek contest culture ( that is , its public and political culture of ritualized masculine display ) further idealized visual masculine self - presentation through the ...
... central feature of his historiography , but a simi- lar theme runs through historical writing from Herodotus forward , includ- ing the famous Rankean maxim to tell the past wie es eigentlich gewesen ( as it essentially was ) , which I ...
... central to an- cient rhetorical practice , a thoroughly performative feature that I refer to as action . In chapters 2 and 3 , I look at the culture of archaic Athens in the sev- enth and early sixth centuries and specifically at Solon ...
المحتوى
Rhetorical Performance and the Contest for Fame | 15 |
Seeing Rhetorical Means | 182 |
Notes | 205 |
Works Cited | 225 |
Index | 239 |