Rhetoric - Ancient, Classical, Modern

Although knowledge of rhetorical traditions is essential to the modern student’s work, it must be borne in mind that he is nonetheless divorced from those traditions in two important ways. First, there is an almost exclusive emphasis upon the speaker or writer in traditional rhetoric; and, second, there is an implicit belief that the truth can be detached from the forms of discourse and can be divided into the demonstrable and the probable. In both of these respects, modern rhetorical practice differs. Ancient Greece and Rome Since the time of Plato it has been conventional to posit a correlative if not causal relationship between rhetoric and democracy. Plato located the wellsprings of rhetoric in the founding of democracy at Syracuse in the 5th century bc. Exiles returning to Syracuse entered into litigation for the return of their lands from which they had been dispossessed by the overthrown despotic government. In the absence of written records, claims were settled in a newly found...