Correct logos and truth in Gorgias' Encomium of Helen

Rhetorica - Journal of the History of Rhetoric

Volumn 24, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 147-161

  Valiavitcharska, Vessela ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949700616     PISSN: 07348584     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rh.2006.24.2.147     Document Type: Review

References (50)

1. Charles P. Segal, "Gorgias and the Psychology of the Logos," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 66 (1962): 99-155
2. Segal, "Psychology of the Logos," 102
3. Segal, "Psychology of the Logos," 112
4. Segal, "Psychology of the Logos," 127
5. See W. J. Verdenius, "Gorgias' Doctrine of Deception" in G. B. Kerferd, ed., The Sophists and Their Legacy: Proceedings of the Fourth International Colloquium on Ancient Philosophy (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1981), 117-128
6. On a similar note, W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) 50, describes Gorgias' rhetoric as "sophistic in every sense," where "sophistic" carries the same meaning of murky and shifty as it does in Plato's dialogues. Also on Gorgias' theory of logos in relation to deception and tragedy, see Robert Wardy, The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato, and Their Successors (London: Routledge, 1996), 25-51
7. "Jacqueline de Romilly, The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens, trans. J. Lloyd (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992)
8. So too George Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 61-68, and Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 34-36, who concentrates on Gorgias' stylistic innovations in an effort to demonstrate their effectiveness
9. Richard Leo Enos, "The Epistemology of Gorgias' Rhetoric: A Re-Examination," The Southern Speech Communication Journal 42 (1976): 35-51 (p. 50)
10. Bruce E. Gronbeck, "Gorgias on Rhetoric and Poetic: A Rehabilitation," The Southern Speech Communication Journal 38 (1972): 27-38
11. See John Poulakos, "Gorgias' Encomium to Helen and the Defense of Rhetoric," Rhetorica 1 (1983): 1-16
12. "Gorgias' and Isocrates' Use of the Encomium," Southern Speech Communication Journal 51 (1986): 300-307
13. Also on the Encomium of Helen as an implied defense of rhetoric, even though rhetoric can take a license with truth, see Wardy, cited in n. 5 above, 35-39
14. Scott Consigny Gorgias, Sophist and Artist (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), lays out an approach he names "anti- foundationalist" and argues that Gorgias' account of logos is "parodic" in that it draws attention to the "rhetoricity" of every text (p. 30) neither confirming, nor denying truth but incorporating deception as something inevitable
15. All subsequent references to, quotations from, and translations of the Encomium of Helen are from D. M. MacDowell, Gorgias: Encomium of Helen (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1982)
16. All references to Gorgias' other works are from Hermann Diels and Walter Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. 2 (Zurich: Weidmann, 1982), section 82
17. Edward Schiappa, The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, has argued for a "pre- disciplinary" reading of the Encomium, i.e., a reading preceding Aristotle's division of rhetorical genres
18. G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981), argues that the result of Gorgias' treatment of logos is that its power on the soul is comparable to the power of drugs on the body
19. Michael Gagarin, "Did the Sophists Aim to Persuade?" Rhetorica 19 (2001): 275-91 (pp. 288-89). Kerferd, cited in n. 12 above, 80 contends that Gorgias distinguishes two kinds of persuasion, one good and one bad, but I do not see this kind of argument anywhere in Gorgias' extant speeches or fragments
20. Schiappa, cited in n. 11 above, 121; Kennedy, Art of Persuasion, cited in n. 6 above, 167-68
21. Guthrie, cited in n. 3 above, 193-94. For discussion of the problems connected with the interpretation and translation of On Not Being, see Schiappa, cited in n. 11 above, 133-52
22. Kerferd, cited in n. 12 above, 81
23. Richard Bett, "The Sophists and Relativism," Phronesis 34 (1989): 139-69 (pp. 150-53)
24. Schiappa, cited in n. 11 above, 122-23
25. Schiappa, cited in n. 11 above, 123
26. Translation from Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff, eds. and trans., Early Greek Political Thought: From Homer to the Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 203
27. Trans. Gagarin/Woodruff, Early Greek Political Thought, 203
28. Plato maybe deliberately misrepresenting Gorgias' views of logos in the Gorgias, when he has him say that the rhetorical art is "to be able to persuade with speeches judges in the law courts, or statesmen in the Council, or the people in the Assembly or at any other meeting" and afterwards agree with Socrates' definition that the "art of rhetoric is the artisan of persuasion" (Gorgias 452e-453a). It seems to me unlikely that the same person who, in a public situation (such as the oral performance of the Encomium of Helen), labels persuasion as "evil" (Encomium 14), would, in an equally public situation (and presumably more than once-for Plato to cite it in his dialogue), define his art as the art of persuasion. It is quite possible that Plato invented the definition of rhetoric himself, just as he probably invented the word "rhetoric." The word rhetorike does not appear in any of the fragments of the sophists; see Edward Schiappa, "Did Plato Coin Rhetorike?" American Journal of Philology 111 (1990): 457-70
29. also Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric, 2nd ed. (Columbus: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 39-63
30. Cf. Atheneaus' comment that, after reading the dialogue that bears his name, Gorgias is said to have exclaimed, "How well Plato knows how to satirize!" (Deipnosophistae 11.113.2 (Kaibel) = DK 82.A15a, trans. Sprague)
31. Cf. Philostratus, Epistulae et dialexeis 73 = DK 82.A35, Diodorus Siculus 12.53.3 = DK 82.A4
32. Rhetoric 1.1404a = DK 82.A29
33. Segal, cited in n. 1 above, p. 127
34. As Schiappa has demonstrated, certain individual phrases are clearly rhythmic, yet the speech fails to repeat an overall pattern that could be recognized as metered poetry (Schiappa, Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory, cited in n. 11 above, p. 111). He argues that both Gorgias and Thrasymachus draw upon poetic meters but do not depend on them; "meter is a natural consequence rather than being an end in itself" (p. 113)
35. See Suidas, Lexicon G. 388 = DK 82.A2, Diodorus Siculus 12.53.4 = DK 82.A4
36. Schiappa, cited in n. 11 above, 85-105, argues that Gorgias' style, although not "poetic" in the strict sense of the word, "resembles" poetry in that it is not everyday language and strikes the listener as strange (p. 94)
37. Kennedy cited in n. 6 above, pp. 64-66
38. Jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 25
39. Claudius Aelianus, Varia historia 12.32.4 = DK 82.A9
40. Schiappa, cited in n. 11 above, 101, describes Gorgias as a "prose rhapsode."
41. MacDowell, cited in n. 10 above, 16. John Poulakos, cited in n. 9 above, p. 3, argues that the word in the last sentence indicates that the composition could not have been intended as a model speech for students because it would undermine its own purpose
42. Schiappa, cited in n. 11 above, 131
43. Michael Gagarin, "Correct Argument in Sophistic Rhetoric" (delivered at the fifteenth biennial meeting of the ISHR in Los Angeles in July 2005), and Antiphon the Athenian: Oratory, Law, and Justice in the Age of the Sophists (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 26-27
44. Gagarin, Antiphon the Athenian, 27
45. Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos, cited in n. 22 above, pp. 163-64
46. Gagarin, Antiphon the Athenian, 38-63, argues that Antiphon referred to as "the orator," Antiphon known as "the sophist" (who wrote Truth and Concord), and Antiphon the author of the Tetralogies are one and the same person
47. Trans. Gagarin, Antiphon the Athenian, 67
48. Schiappa, cited in n. 22 above, 164; Gagarin, "Correct Argument in Sophistic Rhetoric," cited in n. 35 above, p. 10
49. Cf. DK 82.B7-8a, Isocrates, Panegyricus 1-3
50. A shorter version of this paper was presented at the fourteenth biennial meeting of the ISHR in Madrid in July 2003. I am grateful to the audience, as well as to Rhetorica's referees, Rhetorica's editor, Harvey Yunis, and especially, to my advisors Professors Michael Gagarin and Jeffrey Walker, for their suggestions and invaluable help