There is a deep-seated and long-standing ambivalence toward rhetoric that, while its origins may change, remains constant over time and across cultures.
One day in the mid 80's as I was hitchhiking the brief distance from the Greek neighborhood of Kitsalano in Vancouver to the University of British Columbia campus on Point Grey, a man driving a plumbing van with the name Mavrotsakis painted on it offered me a lift. During the five minute ride we hardly spoke. I said hello and he nodded. A minute later he asked what I was studying, and I said rhetoric, being young and silly and pretentious enough to use the word outright. He said nothing for maybe 10 seconds and then he said, "Never argue with a man, just fight him." We didn't speak again until I thanked him for the ride and got out. I had no idea what he meant.
Many years and miles later I came across a quotation from Thucydidies, recounted by Thomas Conley in his Rhetoric in the European Tradition: “You know as well as we that what is just is arrived at by argumentation only when the necessity for arguments on both sides is equal; but that the powerful do whatever they want, while the weak yield.” History of the Peloponesian War 5.89, Conley, 2.
Cicero, in the guise of Crassus, observes in the same vein, though more gently, that "speaking itself is never anything but foolish, unless it is necessary" (83).
For the Athenians, the single greatest virtue was autonomy. A self-sufficient man owed nothing to anyone and was therefore his own master. Because he needed nothing from anyone else he was superior to everyone else. To desire is to be beholden and to be beholden is to be other than autonomous. Thus, if a man desires something from someone else, he would rather take it than ask for it, the way Plato's Callicles asserts the Aristes, the excellent ones, take whatever they desire and leave the scraps for the others to snarl over. If confiscation wasn't an option, because the owner was too powerful or had friends to support him, then the next most honorable move would be to argue it out of him, to convince him that what was his was yours somehow. A "real" man would argue toe to toe, exchanging arguments like blows until one combatant had to submit, to accept that the other was right and therefore better and more worthy. However, if the impassioned man wasn't sure he could win in open argumentation, and wasn't willing to give up his desire, he might swallow his pride and take a more indirect approach, like Odysseus tying his men to the bellies of sheep in order to bewilder the cyclops. He might lie, or mislead, or if worst came to worst, flatter and simper to get his way. Desire leads to debt and debt to slavery just as argument can descend into rhetoric and from there into servility (or tyranny). The rhetoricians were constantly warning their students to above all argue like men, the underlying feeling being, I think, that it was bad enough one was reduced to having to argue for what one wanted in the first place. And yet, at the very same time, to be able to talk others out of their possessions was admired just as wily Odysseus was admired, for being crafty enough to defeat someone far bigger and stronger and more powerful. Of course, I'm not asserting that all Greeks felt this way; Iscorates for one, clearly felt that language made civilization possible, that the autonomous man was a myth and that rhetoric was like fire, necessary and ambivalent.
Plato tried, I think, to create a competitive language art that would be like pancration, a manly contest, empty handed, above board and irrefutable in its conclusions, but not as deadly and destructive as outright warfare. Dialectic, a process of exchanging questions and answers like blows until the truth is discovered, requires willing submission to "the truth" and belief that reality is not socially constructed or in anyway personal but discernable if the will is disciplined enough to inspect its ideas and abandon all those found wanting. The problem with dialectic, as Plato's Gorgias clearly shows, is that the participants have to be willing to submit in the first place and submission doesn't come easy for most people, especially militaristic androcentric peoples. They want to be right. They want to win. And they can't see the difference between winning and being right because they they want to dominate.
What the Greeks got from their training in places like Plato's academy was experience with ideas from Eastern countries and the opportunity to sharpen their verbal skills, skills that would become useful as they became more active in the ecclesia or general assembly where laws were made and maintained. Because any landed citizen male could if he had enough money to afford sustained periods of leisure get involved in politics and law, which weren't separate in the way they are now, rhetorical skill was highly prized and since rhetorical training was thought to lead to rhetorical skill, rhetorical training was considered valuable, at least among those offering it. Although rhetorical skill would enable a person to work their will on deliberative occasions, political positions like that of general of the army or archon of the festivals, were drawn by lot and no one served in a position for more than a year, nor was there any connection among the various positions of influence such that one might move from one position of authority to another, at least not in principle. In times of great danger, a successful general might be re-appointed to his position, and the desire to dominate being what it is, there were times when one group of people might install themselves in power over others until by whatever means they were removed. Athens was democratic, but not perfectly and not always. Nevertheless, the gift of rhetorical power was recognized and using the possibility of success through rhetorical skill to fuel an industry in education, the Athenians created paidea, an educational process that was spread by Alexander through out the Aegean islands and on into what are now Turkey and Iran.
When Alexander the great died without an heir, his generals fought amongst them selves and the Greek empire fragmented over time. One of the things that remained universal among the cities of the near east, however, was the Hellenistic idea of paidea, and when the Romans came to dominate, first by colonizing the other economic centers in what is now Italy and then by colonizing its neighboring islands, specifically Sicily in 3bc, they encountered paidea for the first time. Up until the 3rd century BC, Roman education hereditary. You learned what your parents knew and your place in society was to eventually inherit your parent's place in the society. If your parents were patrician, you would become patrician; if your parents were plebeian, so were you, and if you were born in slavery you remained there unless you were freed or were able to buy your way our or in some cases marry yourself out. If you were conquered or wracked up an payable debt, you were enslaved and your children would share your fate. There was little upward social mobility. There was plenty of strife however and occasionally a patrician faction fighting for dominance among the others would use plebeian sentiments to increase unrest and so try to leverage concessions from the other patricians. These struggles led to gradual empowering of the plebeians, culminating in 287 with the Lex Hortensia which made plebiscita (laws past in the plebeian assembly) binding on the whole community, including the patrician. As these changes were occurring, the Romans encountered Hellenistic paidea and the idea of an organized educational process that might create a class of civic leaders, replacing heredity with meritocracy or at any rate the appearance of such, gained currency. The result was potential for upward social mobility through education. Education alone could not guarantee success, however. To climb the social ladder in Rome, one had to succeed through a series of positions known as the cursus honorum, first organizing successful events in Rome, then governing colonies, which meant suppressing insurrections while conquering contiguous territories, then returning to Rome, hopefully in triumph, to assert yourself as far up the government chain as your fame and money could achieve. Rome financed its existence by gathering tribute from its conquered neighbors, money that was collected by the roman governor of the area. He in turn relied on his troops to ensure submission, and often also the help of the local aristocracy who realized that if they were to have any power anymore they would have to get it through Roman connections. What resulted was a period that began in the second century BC and climaxed at the height of the Roman Republic in the first century BC, when a person might come from a colonized province to rise first through education and then the cursus honorum to become a senator and even a consul. A very few people accomplished this. Cicero was one of them.
Athenian and Roman political history share a number of similarities. Both descended from hereditary kingdoms. both achieved wealth by subordinating their neighbors. both developed Democratic ways of living and both devolved into tyrannies and were eventually conquered by outside forces. However, they were significantly different in two ways; there was never even a pretense of absolute equality among Roman citizens, as there was sometimes in Athens, and political positions were elected rather than assigned by lottery. In Athens, during democratic times at least, the people were divided into demos; these were largely religious and ceremonial rather than political groups. while a demos might construct collective interests, in the end each man cast one vote on any legislative or legal matters, but political positions were assigned by lottery. in Rome, the people were divided into groups as well but these groups voted as a block not just on political or legal matters but also on who would obtain what political position. because the patricians were divided into smaller groups, they had more votes and thus they had greater control over the poetical process. There was voting, but there was no notion of one man one vote and while a skillful speaker could sway a vote, in the end a person's influence came from fame and money, both of which were acquired through waging successful foreign campaigns and enriching one' self while collecting taxes for Rome as a governor of a foreign tributary.
The Romans acquired education from the Greeks whom they saw as highly civilized but subjected people. In other words, while they had some respect for rhetorical and philosophical training, they were keenly aware that it came from outside their own community and from people who, though they once dominated, were now, well, frankly, slaves. This accounts for the archaizing quality of high roman empire rhetoric. while the Greeks who taught rhetoric were now slaves, they were descendents of people who once ruled the world. Thus the great Greek orators of the 4th and 5th centuries were lionized and imitated (even slavishly) so that Demosthenese became a model for roman school boys to follow. "In the Epoch preceding our own, the old philosophic rhetoric was grossly abused and lamtreated that it fell into a decline. From the death of Alexander of Macedon it began to lose its spirit and gradually wither away, and in our generation had reached a state of almost total extinction. Another Rhetoric stole in and took its place, intolerably shameless and histrionic, ill-bred and without a vestige either of philosophy or of any other aspect of liberal education. Deceiving the mob and exploiting its ignorance, it not only came to enjoy greater wealth, luxury and spelndour, than the other, but actually made itself the key to civic honours and high office, a power which out to have been reserved for the philosophic art. It was altogether vulgar and disgusting, and finally made the Greek world resemble the houses of the profligate and the abandoned: just as in such households there sits the lawful wife, freeborn and chaste, but with no authority over her domain, while an insensate harlot, ben on destroying her livelihood, claims control over the whole estate, treating the other like dirt and keeping her in a state of terror; so in every city,the highly civilized ones as much as any, the ancient and indigenous Attic Must, deprived of her possessions, had lost her civic rank, while her antagonist, an upstart that had arrived only yesterday or the day before from some Asiatic Death-hole . . claimed the right to rule over Greek cities, expelling her rival from pubic life. Thus was wisdom driven out by ignorance, and sanity by madness" ("The Ancient Orators", 5)
Rome was a volatile place and when things got ugly, any possible source of unrest might be crushed with armed guards, whether politically sanctioned or not. Foreigners often bore the brunt of these crack downs and twice the Greek teachers were expelled from Rome. The Romans liked to mythologize themselves as having come from the land, hard working agrarians who preferred practical skill to refinement. They preferred the plain style to the grand style, and they were carefully on guard against sounding too Greek, too Eastern or Asiatic.
At the same time, they admired Greek culture and needed ways to keep their colonized people in check through more than threats violence and the illusion of upward mobility provided by rhetorical training was one way. The elite people of each colony received training in Greek language and literature and the rhetorical practice known as the progymnismata or preliminary exercises. These exercises were preliminary to declamation, the practice of offering a speech, usually on a fictive topic from classical Greek mythology or politics. These declamations were presented in schools as practice in preparation for speeches before the courts and the senate, but as most of the few people who had the training never had direct political influence, much of the training became self-referential, declamation became an art form, practiced for amusement and as a festival activity, like drama and poetry and javelin throwing. There were, however, some people who excelled at the practice and through creating their own schools and fetting Roman dignitaries as they came trough the provincial towns, these people, who diogenese laertius called the second wave of sophists, sometimes obtained some local prominence and were on occasion able to obtain money and honors for their city from the emperor.
Chronology of Significant Roman Events
See also: Caplan, Harry. "The Decay of Eloquence at Rome in the Fist Century." Of Eloquence in Ancient and Medieval Rhetoric. Ed. Anne King and Helen North. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1970. pp 160-95.
Clarke, Donald Lemon. Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education. New York: Columbia UP, 1957.
Clarke, M. L. Rhetoric at Rome: A Historical Survey. 3rd edition. London: Routledge, 1996.
Enos, Richard Leo. Roman Rhetoric: Revolution ad the Greek Influence. Waveland: Prospect Heights, 1995.
Kennedy, George A. The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman world, 300 B.C.-A.D. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1972.