Plato And Persuasion

Extract

The inculcation of techniques of persuasion by Greeks and Romans, i. e. rhetoric, in those days a highly necessary form of vocational training for top people, led eventually to the British classical education. But it is probable that few topics are more disliked by classical students of today than rhetoric; and examinees blench at the mere sight of questions in which the word ‘rhetoric’ appears. As E. R. Dodds remarks, ‘To the average modern Englishman “rhetoric” means a distastefully emotional or showy way of talking;… to the contemporaries of Socrates it meant the practical art of influencing men's will through the spoken word.’ Such an art is presumably still of some importance, and it is still worth considering what Plato/Socrates had to say about it. The enquiry is made the more piquant by the fact that Plato himself has been called e.g. ‘an orator himself in mocking other orators’ (Cic. De Or. 1.47), a ‘propagandist’,2 and most recently ‘[a man who] writes not as a scholar or scientist but from first to last as an advocate, an heir to the tradition of didactic poetry, a nursling of Attic drama and a product, no less than the politicians and litigants whom he criticized so articulately, of a culture which admired the art of the persuader’.