24 - Challenge and response

Summary

The first century of the Christian era has often been termed the ‘age of rhetoric’. Such a designation, which has been used polemically, can be misleading. Nearly all human communication involves ‘rhetoric’ to some degree: for it is nothing other than the art of effective speaking and writing. It is only in relatively recent times that the hypothesis that such a skill can be schematized and taught has passed out of fashion. Among the Greeks and Romans it was the pivot of a whole educational system; they would have found it hard to understand a critical terminology that equates the rhetorical with the artificial and insincere. Just as they recognized medicine or astronomy as sciences (artes) with their own rules and expertise, so the ancients believed that a man could acquire specific techniques to aid him in public speaking and in literary composition. The techniques alone might not suffice, but they were nonetheless indispensable as prerequisites. A young Roman received the rudiments of his education from a litterator; thereafter he studied literature under a grammaticus; a rhetor finally instructed him in the practice of oratory itself. Disertus, eloquens, facundus: the epithets express the aim and object of the whole process. An educated Roman was expected to possess the power of speaking impressively and convincingly in the senate, in the courts and elsewhere. The technicalities of the law could be left to the jurisconsults: but eloquence was universally desirable. There was nothing new in such an outlook. Nor was it any more revolutionary for the precepts and principles of the schools to be adapted to creative writing.