Charis Jo, University of Oxford
Dialectic is crucial to both Latin rhetoric (its ‘counterpart,’ e.g. Orat. 113) and philosophy (a main subdivision of λογικὴ, e.g. Ac. 32), but of the ancient disciplines, dialectic is the most difficult to define (Castagnoli 2010; Inwood 1990). The paragraphs on dialectic scattered across works of Latin philosophy or rhetoric are among the most notoriously unclear passages in Latin literature. Scholars usually take dialectic (dialectica, dialecticae ars, disserendi ratio, etc) to mean formal logic (e.g. Barnes 1997). This paper builds on recent work which complicates the traditional picture of dialectic in classical Latin literature (Woolf 2023; Reinhardt 2022; Aubert-Baillot 2018; Bénatouïl and Ierodiakonou 2018). Drawing on a data set containing all the names, definitions, and imagery for dialectic from the ad Herrenium to Aulus Gellius, I show that dialectic was a particularly unstable concept in classical Latin and argue that the way dialectic is named in these texts reveals fundamental uncertainty about the nature of dialectic.
The first part of this paper analyzes the occurrences of technical terms for dialectic in this data set. The evidence shows that these names have largely become detached from their more stable Greek sources and are used in the Latin material with a high degree of inconsistency: sometimes dialectic is portrayed as formal logic; sometimes as a study of language similar to grammar; sometimes as sophistry. The attending definitions of dialectic are characterized by ellipses, references to competing schools of thought, and anxiety about the borders between dialectic and other disciplines. I argue that though these names are presented with the markers of stable technical terms for a clearly defined science, they instead often function as short-hand for a vague conception of dialectic.
The second part of this paper analyzes the occurrences of imagery in the names and definitions of dialectic across the same data set. This evidence shows that dialectic (in contrast with other disciplines) is described with similes far more often than it is glossed with definitions: dialectic is like a striking fist; Penelope unravelling her warp; a bowl of dry wine; etc. I show how such imagery gives the reader a vivid impression of dialectic while concealing the absence of a clear definition of dialectic.
Taken as a whole, this evidence indicates that our classical Latin sources were more invested in maintaining dialectic’s claim to some important role within both philosophy and rhetoric than they were in getting clear on that role. The final part of this paper reflects on dialectic as a case study for translation methodologies. I argue that modern translations of names for dialectic often reflect older Greek predecessors rather than the actual evolution of Latin terminology and propose three alternatives to translating Latin technical terms for dialectic as ‘logic.’ Finally, I outline two principles that might help the translator avoid clarifying what the ancient evidence leaves confused.