Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Artistry from Solon Demosthenes - Hardcover

9780809325948: Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Artistry from Solon Demosthenes
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James Fredal’s wide-ranging survey examines the spatial and performative features of rhetorical artistry in ancient Athens from Solon to Demosthenes, demonstrating how persuasive skill depended not on written treatises, but on the reproduction of spaces and modes for masculine self-formation and displays of contests of character.

            

Studies of the history of rhetoric generally begin with Homer and Greek orality, then move on to fifth-century Sicily and the innovations of Corax, Tisias, and the older Sophists. While thorough and useful, these narratives privilege texts as the sole locus of proper rhetorical knowledge. Rhetorical Action in Ancient Greece: Persuasive Artistry from Solon to Demosthenes describes rhetoric as largely unwritten and rhetorical skill as closely associated with the ideologies and practices of gender formation and expression. In expanding the notion of rhetorical innovation to include mass movements, large social genres, and cultural practices rather than the formulations of of individual thinkers and writers Fredal offers a view of classical rhetoric as local and contingent, bound to the physical spaces, local histories, and cultural traditions of place.

 

Fredal argues that Greek rhetorical skill remained a function of local spaces like the Pnyx, social practices such as symposia or local meetings, cultural ideologies like those surrounding masculine friendship, and genres of performance such as how to act like a man, herald, sage, tyrant, or democrat. Citizen participation, he explains, was motivated by the desire to display masculine excellence in contests of character by overcoming fear and exerting symbolic and bodily control over self, situation, and audience. He shows how ancient Greek rhetoric employed patterns of action” such as public oratory and performance to establish, reinforce, or challenge hierarchies and claims to political power.

 

Instead of examining speeches, handbooks, and theory, Rhetorical Action in Ancient Greece examines the origins of rhetoric in terms of performance. The result is a presentation of rhetorical knowledge as embodied in places and practices with spatial and practical logics that are rarely articulated in written discourse. The volume calls on archaeological, literary, and anthropological evidence about the rhetorical actions of Athens’s leading political agents including Solon, Peisistratus, Cleisthenes, Demosthenes, and the anonymous herm-choppers” of the Peloponnesian war to demonstrate how each generation of political leaders adopted and transformed existing performance genres and spaces to address their own political exigency.

 

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About the Author:

James Fredal is an assistant professor of English at Ohio State University. He has published articles on performance studies, on the history and theory of rhetoric and classical rhetoric, and on theories of delivery, space, and practice.

Review:

Rhetorical Action in Ancient Greece takes a novel and provocative approach to reading’ the history of rhetoric. Read in the context of other recent accounts of the origins and early developments of rhetoric in ancient Greece, it takes a distinctive and, to my knowledge, unprecedented approach to reconstructing the emergence of the speaker’s art. It is well written, the arguments are thought provoking and cogent, the evidence is deployed well, and the chapter arrangement is clear and logical. Drawing on a variety of respectable scholarly sources, Fredal has effectively sketched the spatial and bodily conditions from which oratorical performance sprang.” Christopher Johnstone, editor of Theory, Text, and Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory



Move over rhetorica. In a forward thrust for masculinity studies, James Fredal reclaims what might be called "rhetorico." Far from being in any way anti-feminist, however, Fredal's Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens is more anti-theorist. For Fredal's rhetorical taste, theorists think and study too much, and don't live rhetoric as they should:



Theorists too often rely on the mountaintop perspective provided by an entrenched logo centrism, looking at schematic "maps" rather than walking the city, and reading the ruled delineations of its cartographers rather than the entangling narratives of its inhabitants.
The process of writing informed by rhetorical artistry requires calm, quiet, and leisurely thought, isolated from the place of public interaction and separated from the demands of the contest, the shouts of the audience, and the shifting tone of debate. (32-33)



Ancient Athenian rhetoric in practice was not about thinking, defining, or theorizing. It was about acting and doing. With the slightest of nods to Judith Butler and Kenneth Burke, Fredal constructs a rhetoric to be seen and heard (not read and studied) from the ordinary "performances" of everyday public life in ancient Greece. Since only Greek males were allowed citizenship and thus much of a public life, Fredal's rhetoric is necessarily a masculine rhetoric. Fredal offers a new emphasis on a rhetoric that is immersed in the noises of the city and that takes account of the physical act of Athenian rhetorical contest in streets, social clubs, political chambers, and battlefields. Reading portions of his text, you can practically smell sweat.
    We won't truly know ancient Greek rhetoric, Fredal implies, until we've walked a mile in the sandals of an ancient Greek. In his aptly subtitled conclusion, "Walking the City," Fredal explains that walking through ancient Greece-he means it figuratively and literally-can lend us moderns some genuine sense of what rhetorical life was like. For they developed their own rhetorical skills by walking in the sandals of their forebears:
To walk where the city leaders and founders walked suggests following their footsteps (walking where they walked). Following suggests imitating (from walking where they walked to walking as they walked); imitating suggests rehearsal (walking as they walked to walking like them); rehearsal suggests impersonation (walking like them to acting like them); impersonation suggests inhabita­tion (acting like them to being another iteration of them, or more properly, of the character type that they, too imitated, rehearsed, impersonated, and inhabited). (187)
Fredal begins his walking tour with stops in Homer, whose narratives he uses to define what I earlier called "rhetorico": a rhetoric of Athenian contest culture resulting from ubiquitous "zero-sum" competitions (played out with swords and shields on the battlefield or with voices and votes on the forum floor), a rhetoric with roots in the quest for honor, fame, reputation, and the consequent avoidance of weakness and shame. The rhetoricians whose performances in the male-display culture Fredal describes have more in common with today's athletes than today's politicians. (A possible exception is the congresswoman from Atlanta who slugged a security guard on the steps of the Capitol earlier this year.) Although this first chapter rather exhaustively repeats his central thesis, its engagement with Homeric texts is vibrant enough to sustain readers until Fredal's writing becomes more confident and enjoyable in later chapters.
Moving on, Fredal spends two chapters on the seventh- and early sixth-century rise of the citizen (and citizens' rhetoric) he claims results from the leadership of the rhetorical exemplar Solon. He examines Solon as political campaigner, lawgiver, and as sage, claiming his works gave rise to Greek citizens' freedom to choose to participate in all facets of governance (assuming they could muster the skill actual participation required).
Of noteworthy interest in this chapter is Fredal's use of the hoplite phalanx as emblematic of Athenian cultural rhetoric. A hoplite phalanx, a line of sworded and shielded foot soldiers that Fredal describes as a fearsome and wondrous spectacle, was an interdependent unit, as the  men's swords would cover only half their own bodies and half of the body next to them. A hoplite line was thus a cooperative unit utterly defended and unyielding in its advance, powered only by its resolve and unity. Military leaders would place friends next to each other on the line to increase the line's togetherness. Like rhetoricians (as we will see), the hoplites' worst enemy was their personal fear; if the line broke at all, it was immediately decimated. The conceptual connec­tion to broader Athenian rhetoric is seamless: rhetorical Athens at the time of Solon was a community of individual men whose separate interests advanced as they worked together against common enemies in whatever zero-sum contest they engaged in. Thus, the hoplite phalanx functions precisely as the sort of cultural rhetorical performance Fredal seeks.
Rhetoric in ancient Greece was hardly wielded effectively only by good men (with apologies to Quintilian). Fredal's next chapter describes how the tyrant Peisistratus was able to use some of the same rhetorical actions, spaces, and events Solon used to give power to the people to transfer that power from the people back to himself. Events became more private, public deliberation more rare and exclusive, and the polis and theater became tools for the tyrant, because "communal talk and commensality lead to common resolve and collective action" (96), anathema to a tyrant. Fredal 's point here is that while many contemporary sources claim rhetoric flourished in democratic Greece, a different form of rhetoric also flourished under tyranny.
Following Peisistratus' reign, Cleisthenes rose to power by once again using rhetorical spaces, actions, and events to empower the citizen. Fredal's fifth chapter explores the culture of that period, examining Cleisthenes' actions and more details of ordinary rhetorical life: for example, the practical impact of stage fright and dealing with aggressive hecklers in a real audience, and the problem of speaking to a crowd so large only a portion can actually hear the speaker.
The final chapter (as the title promises) is an examination of Demosthenes, who despite severe disadvantages (wellborn but finan­cially impoverished parentage; a stutter, weak voice, and "a certain softness or effeminacy" [162]) was able to rise to leadership rank. The chapter, entitled "Acting Hard," is in one sense a validation of the value of teaching and learning as opposed to the focus on natural "gifts" one might or might not possess at birth.
Being a "real man" in ancient Greece is difficult, Fredal points out in this chapter. Rhetors "should attend carefully to their deportment, their voice, and their looks to make them as appealing as possible.. . [However,] the masculine ideal demands that they must not appear to be catering to or attempting to please or arouse the audience at all" (179). Attending too carefully to voice and body for the enjoyment of others is considered womanly and childlike. In ancient Athens, the metro sexual antics of Queer Eye for the Straight Rhetorician would have been only an underground sensation.
          There are many good reasons to recommend Fredal's Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens. Space permits attention to only a few of them.
           Fredal's writing is mined with delightfully wry modem associations. Telemachus is a "not-ready-for-prime-time" rhetorician; orators were the "lone rangers" of politics. Fredal enjoys the history as he tells it. And while his history is traditionally chronological, his atypical approach to that history-with his attention to myths, stories, and the daily events of ordinary life and social interaction-avoids the dusty-dryness of more theoretical histories of rhetoric; this is, of course, part of his point.
              Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens also has valuable intellectual heft for the field, stemming from Fredal's remarkably useful thesis that a focus on the ordinary, everyday masculine culture of ancient rhetorical performance (action, not just theory about action) will give us richer and more dynamic definitions of rhetoric and deeper explanations of rhetori­cal events and strategies. In particular, Fredal's work admirably unifies and offers new explanations of the socio-politics of Athenian cultural habits such as pedagogical pederasty, conversation at social clubs, athletic contests, forum debate, and military readiness and battle. Be­cause he evidences his claims through so many aspects of ancient Athenian culture, his arguments seem utterly sound and unstrained. Fredal's attention to the everyday also gives rise to a fascinating discus­sion of the material conditions of oratory in ancient Athens. He describes the decibels an orator would have to produce to be heard, explores the courage one must muster to face a hostile crowd, and otherwise examines the underexplored physical space of the ancient orator; reading this has

41'

 reminded me why even just speaking aloud in class can be a triumph for some students.
To be singled out for special attention is Fredal's concentration on the role of fear in Athenian rhetoric, an aspect of rhetoric that underlies much of his discussion. Conquering one's personal sense of fear was each citizen's private fight, and mastering fear was the price of more influen­... (Kenneth Lindblom JAC 20080925)

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ISBN 10: 0809325942 ISBN 13: 9780809325948
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Book Description Condition: Antiquarian. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 2006. IX,249p. Original blue cloth with dust wrps. Nice copy. 'Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens'is an attempt to re-evaluate key aspects of public oratory in the best-documented polis of the ancient Greek world. 'Action' is here the key word: Fredal wants to shift the emphasis from what he call 'enthymematic rhetoric', i.e. 'that intricate species of discourse that attended to the course of thoughts in the listener' (p.33), to rhetoricas performance, icluding all the symbolic, bodily and topographical features that endowed rhetoric with meaning. (.) In this theoretically informed study, F. offers us refreshing insights into the nature of Athenian rhetoric. He is at his best when he discusses features of oratorical performance that students of Athenian history and literature rarelky think about: the importance of spatial and architectural features in the performance of rhetoric, for ecxample, and the bodily hallmarks of the successful 'rhêtor', often related to social class and acquired through a proces of enculturation. This is a book that will be profitably read not only by scholars of rhetoric but also by specialists in Athenian literature, history and law.' (ZINON PAPAKONSTANTINOU, in The Classical Review, 2007, pp.271-73). Antiquarian. Seller Inventory # 44265

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