Download Women and Ancient Greece

Sophists, Women, and Ancient
Greece
ENG 3306 History of Rhetoric
Dr. Carol Johnson-Gerendas
Sources:
Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, 1997.
Goden, Berquist, Coleman, Sproule. The Rhetoric of Western Thought, 2007.
Hertzberg and Bizzell. The Rhetorical Tradition.
Comparative History: THE GREEKS
Hebrew History
Greek Rhetorical History
• Abraham
• Moses
• David
• Lack of Shared Experience
2,000 B.C.E.
1,500 B.C.E.
1,000 B.C.E.
• Babylonian Captivity
500 B.C.
• Intertestamental Period 400 B.C.
• Christ
3 B.C.E.
• Pre-Socratics: 700 & 600 B.C.E
– Mythos replaced with Logos
▫ Milesians: introduce idea of
cosmic order and natural law
• Early Sophists
▫ Relativism
▫ Oratory
▫ Style & Ornament
Three Kinds of Speeches
• Epideictic (ceremonial,
commemorate, or blame)
• Forensic (to accuse or
defend)
• Deliberative
(legislative, to exhort or
dissuade)
http://listverse.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/rhetoric-1.jpg
Five Canons of Rhetoric
(adapted from Cicero, De Oratore, I.xxxi.142-143)
• Invention:
(discover what to say; e.g. Aristotle’s topoi, proofs,
commonplaces, fallacies)
• Arrangement:
(“marshal discoveries in orderly fashion”)
• Style: (adorn them with appropriate stylistic language)
• Memory:
(keep all guarded in one’s memory)
• Delivery: (deliver all with “effect and charm”)
Three Rhetorical Appeals
• Ethos
• Pathos
• Logos
http://media.photobucket.com/image/Rhetorical%20appeals/kmaddox88/Guernica-1.jpg
Sophists:
Kairos (seizing the right moment to speak)
• Invention
▫ Heuresis (discovery, to find)
• Arrangement
▫ Judicial:
proem, narration, proof,
epilogue
• Style
▫ Ornament, flowery language
Sophists
 Compiled
collections of
common places
 Compiled
glossaries of
beautiful words
(metaphors,
similes, phrases)
Socrates
Introduction to Socrates
- and the Sophists
Knowledge vs. Negligence
The School of Athens – Raphael - Renaissance
Women in Ancient Greece
• Women could testify—but not argue
• Aspasia-mistress & companion to
Pericles, most powerful Athenian 40
yrs.; loved sophists, philosophers,
artists
• Foreign-born women or men could
never be citizens—could have political
influence
From: Audrey Kali, “Phryne and the Rhetoric of Gesture,” The Rhetoric of the Western Tradition, 2007. p.49
“As Hyperides, while
defending Phryne, was
making no progress in his
plea, and it became
apparent that the judges
meant to condemn her, he
caused her to be brought
out where all could see her;
tearing off her undervests
he laid bare her bosom and
broke into such piteous
lamentation in peroration
at the sight of her, that he
caused the judges to feel
superstitious fear of this
handmaid and ministrant of
Aphrodite, and indulging
their feeling of compassion,
they refrained from putting
her to death.” (Athenaeus,
The Deipnosophists
13.590-591).
Gerome, Phryne In Front of the Judges, 1861, oil painting
Phryne
The Rhetoric of Gesture
DISCUSS: The Case of Phryne
• Lamentation, plea of
supplication
• Disrobing – act of exposure
• Imagistic rhetorical power
• Magic of nudity
• Phryne / Aphrodite connection
• Efficacy of rhetorical
gestures?
Aspasia of Miletus
• Mentioned by her male
contemporaries
• Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble
Grecians and Romans (AD 100)
• Fresco over portal at the
University of Athens