Critique of The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece
by Edward Schiappa. Yale University Press, 1999; 225 pp.

Dale Sullivan
@ Michigan Technological University

The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece, according to its author Edward Schiappa, "is an effort to revise the traditional accounts of the Older Sophists and early Greek theorizing about rhetorical theory" (3). The book contains an implicit narrative of the emergence of rhetorical theory in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. It is a narrative told in the guise of individual scholarly papers collected as chapters, some of which are presented in an objective tone, but many of which are agonistic. The "objective" chapters, chapters 2 and 9, are philological studies of the emergence of disciplinary terms. In chapter 2, Schiappa demonstrates that the word rhetorike (rhetoric) appears in Greek texts for the first time in Plato's Gorgias in approximately 380 B.C.E. Similarly, in chapter 9, he shows that rhetoreia (oratory) and rhetoreuein (to orate) do not appear before the fourth century. These findings are essential to Shiappa's purpose; indeed, they are the hard core of evidence from which he builds the rest of his case. He insists that "standard accounts of the origins of classical Greek rhetorical theory have not paid sufficient attention to the dramatic differences between the vocabularies employed by writers of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E." (155). Paying attention to such vocabularies matters, he says, because, "Naming . . . is never neutral. If Plato was the first person to popularize the word rhetorike, he probably did so to depict the teachings of his rival Isocrates" (26).

If chapters 2 and 9 provide the evidence supporting Schiappa's claim to certain factual information, then the rest of the book may be seen as his moving beyond the first question of stasis to engage the more controversial questions in the rest of the book. Divided into three sections, the book first subverts traditional accounts of rhetoric's origins. In the second section, he reinterprets Gorgias' contribution the evolution of rhetorical theory, and in the third section, he explores Isocrates' and Aristotles' influence on the emerging disciplines of philosophy and rhetoric. Because he is attempting to revise traditional accounts of how the discipline of rhetoric emerged, most of these chapters have an agonistic tone. It is easy to come away from reading the book with a vivid image in one's mind of the author engaged in polemics on several fronts.

In Part I, "Reconstructing the Origins of Rhetorical Theory," Schiappa engages the traditionalists‹or old guard‹represented by George Kennedy. These scholars have erred by believing the stories the ancients told each other and passed on to their students. They have believed the myths. Like conservative Biblical scholars, they have taken the ancient texts literally and have failed to question them with sufficient skepticism. Schiappa's cure is a liberal dose of demythologizing, especially evident in chapter 3, where the historical Tisias is disentangled from the Corax of faith and very nearly consigned to the realm of pure mythology: "It is even possible . . . that the entire Corax and Tisias story is a convenient myth" (39). He makes his case by tracing the accounts of the story in ancient literature, showing persuasively that the several accounts are retellings of a common legend, and that there is no clear, objective, historical evidence to support that they existed, much less that they wrote a handbook of rhetoric. Not only does our author dispute the existence of technical rhetoric represented by Corax and Tsisas, he also rejects the notion that there was a sophistic rhetoric or a philosophical rhetoric, categories presented by George Kennedy in his very successful Classical Rhetoirc and Its Christian and Secular Tradion from Ancient to Modern Times. Although he engages his opponents from the old guard with some energy, Schiappa treats them with appropriate deference and moves on to the new guard in Part II, "Gorgias and the Disciplining of Discourse."

Of particular interest among the new guard are the Neo-Sophists, who err, apparently, by reading into the historical sophists their own modern, or rather post-modern, ideological perspectives. Schiappa refers to this process as "contemporary appropriation." His purpose in this section is to reposition Gorgias as a "prediciplinary" thinker who was concerned with a wide variety of questions, among them the power of logos to influence others. Rejecting John Poulakos' argument that Gorgias is "the personification of rhetoric," Schiappa claims that all such readings are anachronistic because they assume rhetoric had already achieved the status of a discrete discipline (119). Like twentieth century theosophists who strove to legitimize their own views by rehabilitating Gnosticism, the Neo-Sophists describe ancient sophistry in the image of their own desires, garnering status for their own views by identifying them with a marginalized past. Schiappa's cure: a solid dose of traditional historical research done with a critical eye that attempts to see the sophists in their own world without the warping influence of current categories. Instead of lumping the sophists together as an ideological or disciplinary cadre, Schiappa claims that they were a diverse lot. Nevertheless, Gorgias did have much to say about the influence of logos in persuading others, but he evidently did not think of this power in the same way that we think of rhetoric (126).

There is, it seems to me, a very important argument buried in chapter 6, "Gorgias' Composition Style." In a chapter devoted primarily to technical questions about Gorgias' style‹something of a stretch for people who, like myself, find the art of scanning the rhythm of a poem or of cataloguing figures of speech to be tedious and of little value‹a heading in the form of a question appears: Did Gorgias Have a Theory of Arrangement? Schiappa, once again in the mode of a debater, resists with Mark Smeltzer's claim that an implicit theory of arrangement is apparent in a Gorgias' use of "canonical quadripartite division of rhetorical speeches" (105). Arguing instead that these speeches are examples of "ring composition," he goes on to spell out "three steps to the emergence of rhetorical theory" (109). Specifically, he suggests that some ancient texts show no sign of theoretical influence; these he calls "nontheoretical texts." Others show evidence of some reflection about composition and may even contain a rudimentary technical vocabulary; these reflect an "undeclared theory." Third, some texts contain explicit discussion of rhetorical rules and principles; these are the only texts that show clear evidence of an existing rhetorical theory. I believe this argument is very important to Schiappa's overall case because it addresses one of the most often cited criticisms of his position, namely that he fails to take into account existing practices of the time and relies too heavily on etymological and philological studies. It is unfortunate that the argument is so well concealed within the belly of a rather esoteric chapter.

Having engaged Traditionalists and Neo-Sophists, our author moves on to a third group‹orthodox historians of philosophy. They are taken to task because they have closed the canon of philosophical texts and have excluded Isocrates. Like reformers who sought to do away with apocryphal works, these historians denied legitimacy to Isocrates who thought of his agenda as a philosophical one. Schiappa's major purpose in chapter 10 is to show that the line clearly demarcating the fields of philosophy and rhetoric had not yet been drawn when Isocrates wrote, that the definition of philosophy was still up for grabs. Would it be a perspective that saw knowledge as contingent, that prepared students for active engagement in politics, and that emphasized the power of effective speech, as Isocrates described it? Or would it be a view that assumed certain knowledge could be achieved, that education should teach students how to discover truth, and that distrusted extended speech making, as Plato argued? Schiappa makes a strong case that it is a mistake to assume that Isocrates really meant "rhetoric" when he said "philosophy," and that modern historians would do better if they considered Isocrates as a very early pragmatist, a forerunner of John Dewey, for example.
Although much of the book is agonistic, chapter 11 departs from the tone. Co-authored by David Timmerman, this chapter catches Aristotle in the act of disciplining rhetoric by forming a new genre out of discrete, politically significant genres. The authors argue that Aristotle constructed the genre of epideictic by downplaying the differences among, and dynamic power of, the enkomiom (speech of praise), panegyric (festival oration), and epitaphios logos (funeral oration). The argument is made by comparing the political utility of the earlier genres with the aesthetic disengagement of epideictic and by showing that the earlier genres do not fit well together under one head.

This is a good book. It is a major contribution to a growing collection of books that focus on early Greek rhetoric. It provides a necessary, though still clearly debatable, alternative to John Poulakos' and Susan Jarret's books. It problematizes the work of George Kennedy, supplements Takis Poulakos' work on Isocrates and Janet Atwill's discussion of Aristotle. It should find its place on the shelf next to those who share Eric Havelock's conviction that a major change in consciousness was occurring in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. as disciplinary and theoretical perspectives emerged. Here I think of the work done by Richard Enos and Jan Swearingen.

I began this review by saying that the book contains an implicit narrative of the emergence of rhetorical theory. The book ends, however, rather abruptly with the final chapter on Aristotle. Perhaps it is best to let the reader write the ghost chapters, to fill in the narrative, but an epilogue could have made the narrative explicit. It would also have brought to the forefront certain questions that are perhaps better saved for another volume or that perhaps need more careful definition in this one: What, after all, is "theory" in the context of ancient rhetoric? Is the notion of disciplinarity anachronistic for the whole of antiquity? Does the method of philological and etymological mining provide sufficient historical data out of which to reconstruct history?