Elizabeth Lavender, Yale University
What results did rhetoricians ascribe to the school curriculum they recommended? Their instructions to mimic the diction of Attic orators, to assess legal fictions in declamation, or to learn highly abstract prescriptions for style have long puzzled scholars. These exercises exhibit little overt awareness of the practical demands of an oratorical career, even if they effectively train technical skills and acculturate students to desired social values and behaviors (Winterbottom, Bloomer, Cribiore, Kaster). In an influential study of metaphors of vision and sculpting in ancient discussions of ekphrasis, Ruth Webb achieved a breakthrough insight: rhetoricians designed school exercises to target and change students’ cognitive processes (e.g. Webb 41). Building on this work, the present paper argues that an overlooked debate among rhetorical theorists provides important testimonia to their emic account of the cognitive effects of rhetorical training.
At least one group of ancient thinkers pressed questions like those of modern scholars. Greek and Latin sources mention a faction of rhetoricians who argue that schooling is useless and that natural aptitude alone is sufficient for becoming a good orator (e.g., Quintilian, Institutes 2.11-12). These thinkers apparently demanded to know what rhetorical training taught that inborn talent or intelligence could not offer. Responses that other rhetoricians make to these charges supply key evidence for what they think formal schooling confers and how it accomplishes this outcome. Proponents of rhetorical training censure untrained or “natural” orators for speeches whose unintelligible structure, like students’ notes (commentarii), betrays a lack of mental organization (e.g. Quint.Inst.2.11.7).
These thinkers propose that rhetorical schooling confers a faculty of logical thought that is otherwise inaccessible. On the basis of authorities like Isocrates and Aristotle, they posit that logical thinking involves the same operations as an exchange of deliberative speeches or the writing and reading of a text. This claim understands certain physical experiences as instances of “extended” mental activity. Modern philosophy of “extended mind” posits that cognitive functions typically executed inside the brain can be displaced onto external aids: e.g., written notes can substitute for memory (Rowlands et al.) For ancient theorists and students, the “extended” mental activities of listening to an oratorical performance or reading a text offered a valuable glimpse into the obscure processes inside a thinker’s head. “Reading” the larger scenario to understand the smaller (cf. Plato, Republic 368c-9b) picked out the core processes involved in logical thought and suggested how schooling prepared students to execute them. These views of mental activity explain how rhetoricians coherently figure education’s cognitive effects in terms of both aesthetic production and perception: e.g. they compare educated memory to struck metal or etched wax (Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 1.523-4), but also to a keen gaze (Quint.Inst.11.2.10).