Before the beginnings of "poetry" and "rhetoric": Hesiod on eloquence

Rhetorica - Journal of the History of Rhetoric

Volumn 14, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 243-264

  Walker, Jeffrey ^a  

^a PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61949332591     PISSN: 07348584     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rh.1996.14.3.243     Document Type: Article

References (87)

1. There are, of course, Homeric precedents or parallels to Hesiod's account, such as the description of the bard Demodocus' performance and Odysseus' own account of the gift of eloquence in book eight of the Odyssey, as well as scattered references elsewhere in both the Iliad and Odyssey; see Richard Leo Enos, Greek Rhetoric before Aristotle (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1993), pp. 9-10.
2. Hesiod, however, offers something more like an explicit theorizing of what is mostly implicit in Homer's passages; see Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 97-98 ff.
3. The Greek text used here is that of the widely available Loeb edition, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. H.G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), pp. 84-87.
4. My translation is adapted from R.M. Frazer, The Poems of Hesiod (Norman, OK: University Oklahoma Press, 1983), pp. 27-28
5. and from Richmond Lattimore, Hesiod: The Works and Days, Theogony, The Shield of Herakles (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), pp. 127-29, as well as from Evelyn-White.
6. See also Havelock, Preface to Plato, pp. 107 and 110.
7. This view is apparent in a number of widely used texts that can be seen to embody the current "standard" history, such as George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980);
8. Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988);
9. Renato Barilli, Rhetoric, trans. Giuliana Menozzi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989);
10. and Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1990).
11. See also Charles Sears Baldwin, Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic (New York: MacMillan, 1924), which can be seen as an earlier version, or a progenitor, of most of our current "standard" histories.
12. Thomas Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (New York: Longman, 1990), is probably the most iconoclastic, and most interesting, "standard" history now available.
13. Recent revisionary histories of early or "preconceptual/ predisciplinary" rhetoric include Susan Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991);
14. Edward Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991);
15. Thomas Cole, The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991);
16. and John Poulakos, Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995).
17. Bruno Gentili, Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece: From Homer to the Fifth Century, trans. Thomas Cole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 3;
18. Cole, The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece, p. 2;
19. and Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos, pp. 40-49.
20. Pietro Pucci, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 17-18;
21. and Gregory Nagy, Pindar's Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 64.
22. For recent analyses that are similar to the one offered here and in the next few paragraphs, see also John T. Kirby, "Rhetoric and Poetics in Hesiod," and Michael Gagarin, "The Poetry of Justice: Hesiod and the Origins of Greek Law," in Ramus: Critical Studies in Greek and Roman Literature 21.1 (1992): 34-60 and 61-76.
23. On rhetoric, Gorgias, and goêteia, see Jacqueline De Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 6-22.
24. "Composition" here comprises both "arrangement" and "style." I am not suggesting that Hesiod is already distinguishing the "parts of rhetoric" identified in rhetoric manuals from the fourth century BCE onward, but only that the theory embodied in those manuals can retrospectively see in Hesiod's account an embryonic anticipation of itself.
25. Gentili, Poetry and Its Public, p. 184.
26. Berkeley Peabody, The Winged Word (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1975), pp. 31 ff., 202, 206-15, and 268-72;
27. Robert T. Oliver, Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971), pp. 23-26;
28. and Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 34 ff.
29. See Eric A. Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 9-10, 187 and 190;
30. and Robert Lamberton, Hesiod (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 67.
31. See also Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 61-73.
32. See Richard J. Chase, "The Classical Conception of the Epideictic," Quarterly Journal of Speech 47 (1961): 293-300;
33. and Michael Carter, "The Ritual Functions of Epideictic Rhetoric: The Case of Socrates' Funeral Oration," Rhetorica 9.3 (1991): 209-32.
34. See Theodore Burgess, Epideictic Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902), pp. 92-102;
35. D.A. Russell, Criticism in Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 1981), 116-17;
36. and D.A. Russell and N.G. Wilson, trans., Menander Rhetor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. xi-xxxiv.
37. The key passage of Hermogenes is On Types of Style (Peri Ideôn) 403-12;
38. translations are available in D.A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom, Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972);
39. and C.W. Wooten, trans., Hermogenes' On Types of Style (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
40. Chaim Perelman, "Rhetoric and Politics," Philosophy and Rhetoric 17.3 (1984): 129-31.
41. It is sometimes asserted that Aristotle defines the audience of epideictic as "hearers," akroatai, as opposed to the kritai of pragmatic discourse. But Aristotle describes all audiences as akroatai; akroatai subdivide into kritai and theôroi, with kritai further subdivided into dikastai, bouleutai, and ekklêsiastai for dikanic and symbouleutic/ demegoric discourse.
42. Perelman, "Rhetoric and Politics," pp. 129-31.
43. See Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1969), pp. 47-62;
44. Chaim Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1982), pp. 18-21;
45. See also Christine Oravec, "'Observation' in Aristotle's Theory of Epideictic," Philosophy and Rhetoric 9.3 (1976): 164-67 and 171;
46. Carter, "The Ritual Functions of Epideictic Discourse," pp. 213-17 ff.;
47. and Dale L. Sullivan, "Kairos and the Rhetoric of Belief," Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 324 and 327-29.
48. On "identification" and epideictic, see Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 19-46, 49-59 ff., and 70-72.
49. See Nagy, Pindar's Homer, pp. 38-40 ff.;
50. Rosalind Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 21;
51. and Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece, pp. 14, 19, and 195.
52. See also Gentili, Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece, chs. 5, 6, and 8.
53. See Roman Jakobson, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," in Thomas Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350-77
54. and "Poésie de grammaire et grammaire de la poésie," in Questions de poétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), pp. 219-32;
55. Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 25-26, 90-92, 108-9, 118-19, 127-33, and 222-23;
56. James J. Fox, "On Binary Categories and Primary Symbols," in Roy Willis, ed., The Interpretation of Symbolism (New York: Wiley, 1975), pp. 127-28
57. and "Roman Jakobson and the Study of Parallelism," in James J. Fox, ed., Roman Jakobson: Echoes of His Scholarship (Lisse: Peter de Redder, 1977);
58. Don Paul Abbot, "The Ancient Word: Rhetoric in Aztec Culture," Rhetorica 5.3 (1987): 259;
59. and Laurence Goldman, Talk Never Dies: The Language of Huli Disputes (London: Tavistock, 1983), pp. 62-63 and 229-31.
60. See also Maurice Bloch, "Symbols, Song, Dance, and Features of Articulation," Archives européennes de sociologie 15.1 (1974): 58-60;
61. Maurice Bloch, ed., Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society (New York: Academic Press, 1975), pp. 45-64, 93-112, 141-61, 163-83, and 185-203;
62. Stanley J. Tambiah, Culture, Thought, and Social Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 128, 132, and 140;
63. and Paul Zumthor, Oral Poetry: An Introduction, trans. Kathleen Murphy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 126-40.
64. See, for example, W.R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 199-200 n. 10.
65. Oral Poetry, pp. 26, 118, and 214-43.
66. Orality and Literacy, pp. 64-65, 78, and 141.
67. Abbot, "The Ancient Word," p. 252.
68. See Derek Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry (New York: Longman, 1982), pp. 76-82 and 285-315;
69. Richard Gregg, Symbolic Inducement and Knowing (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1984), p. 106;
70. and Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (1931; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 29-45 and 124-83
71. and The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 1-137.
72. See also Zumthor, Oral Poetry, pp. 210-23.
73. Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (Richmond, CA: North Atlantic, 1979), p. 217;
74. see also Tambiah, Culture, Thought, and Social Action, pp. 142 and 145.
75. Bloch, "Symbols, Song, Dance," pp. 60-71.
76. Finnegan, Oral Poetry, pp. 212-13 and 242-43 ff.
77. Andrew Strathern, "Veiled Speech in Mount Hagen," and David Turton, "The Relationship Between Oratory and the Exercise of Influence among the Mursi," in Bloch, ed., Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, pp. 187-88 and 165-70.
78. Francis Jennings, William N. Fenton, Mary A. Druke, and David R. Miller, eds., The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985), pp. 24, 27, and 116.
79. See also Wallace Chafe, "Seneca Thanksgiving Rituals," Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 183 (1961): 147-48
80. and "Seneca Speaking Styles and the Location of Authority," in Jane Hill and Judith Irvine, eds., Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
81. and Horatio Hale, "An Iroquois Condoling Council" (1883), in Elisabeth Tooker, ed. An Iroquois Source Book (New York: Garland, 1985), 1:51-58.
82. See William N. Fenton, "Structure, Continuity and Change in the Process of Iroquois Treaty Making,"
83. and Michael K. Foster, "Another Look at the Function of Wampum in Iroquois-White Councils," in Jennings et al., eds., The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy, pp. 4-7, 16-20, 28-30, and 105-06, 111.
84. See also Karin E. Michelson, "Mohawk Text: The Edge of the Forest Revisited," in Marianne Mithun and Hanni Woodbury, eds., Northern Iroquoian Texts, International Journal of American Linguistics, Native American Texts Series, Monograph 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 26-40.
85. Goldman, Talk Never Dies, pp. 248-52.
86. John Comaroff, "Talking Politics: Oratory and Authority in a Tswana Chiefdom," in Bloch, ed., Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, pp. 150-52.
87. and Elinor Keenan, "A Sliding Sense of Obligatoriness," and David Turton, "The Relationship Between Oratory and the Exercise of Influence among the Mursi," in Bloch, ed., Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, pp. 97-99 and 174, 181.