SCS-71: Rhetoric and Education

Isocrates composed speeches (non-forensic ones, except for Antidosis) that appear to aim at various addressees in various settings--the assembly, panhellenic gatherings, and sole rulers, etc. However, it is well-known that his speeches were never actually delivered but only existed in written form. It may result in a distinction between the internal and external audiences. Who were his speeches written for? I will approach this issue from two angles: the rhetorical strategies he used to articulate his authority, and the modes of communication and dissemination he employed.

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).

In a curious passage of Xenophon’s Cynegeticus the author concludes his exhaustive description of a hare’s visible qualities with the judgment: “and so pleasing is the spectacle, that no one, if he sees it being tracked, found, chased, and captured, could not forget if he should love anything” (5.33). The notion of a sight so overpowering as to obliterate love compares to a later statement in the treatise that refers to hunting and identifies it as the only pleasure of young men that also benefits them (12.7).

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).

This paper demonstrates that copyists in the ancient Mediterranean were trained and worked as scribes from a significantly earlier age than previously understood. Scholars have noted that the writing exercises used to train the bookhands of apprentice copyists employ the same paradigms found in elementary school texts (Bellet; Cribiore, 1996, 2001; Fournet). My analysis of these exercises, informed by data from apprenticeship contracts and documents, indicates that training copyists practiced using elementary school texts because they were elementary school-aged children.