Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 084 - Silver Tongues in Golden Mouths - Rhetoric and Ancient Philosophy.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Levergume Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Silver Tongues in Golden Mouths, Rhetoric and Ancient Philosophy. It was December 1981, with New Year's Eve just around the corner, and Busy B. Starsky was at the microphone. He was enthusiastically laying down some rather simplistic rhymes over a beat. His main theme was that everyone should party. Then fellow hip-hop performer Cool Mo D leapt onto the stage. Cool Mo D proceeded to demolish poor Busy B with a torrent of rhyming improvised invective, accusing him of lacking lyrical imagination, of stealing rhymes from other rappers, and of generally being really lame. A typical passage, which I quote mostly because of its unusual lack of obscenities, went like this, In a battle like this you know you'd lose Between me and you, who do you think they'll choose? If you think it's you, I got bad news, cause when you hear your name you're gonna hear some booze. Okay it's not T.S. Elliott. But Cool Mo D's tongue was quick and poisonous enough to make this a legendary humiliation for Busy B, and a pioneering moment in the development of freestyling battle rap, in which MCs throw rhymed insults at one another. As Cool Mo D put it on one of his albums, he considered rapping as a competitive sport. In the ancient world, too, there were performers who competed at improvised verbal pyrotechnics. They did not rap to a beat, but they could help defendants beat a rap. They were rhetoricians, and they were at home in the law courts as well as legislative bodies or even before the emperor himself. The art of public persuasion already played a role in classical Greek philosophy, Plato contending with the sophists, and Aristotle devoting a treatise to rhetoric. But it also helped to shape the philosophical scene in late antiquity. And no wonder. Rhetoric was part of the standard educational curriculum for the young men, and occasionally women, who might go on to learn and write about philosophy. If your parents could afford to educate you at all, you would be packed off at an early age to learn to read and write. Many did not progress beyond this stage of basic literacy. Those who did would study grammar to become properly lettered. The Greek word gramata, in fact, means letters, or the alphabet. For the ancients, this discipline included what we think of as grammar, but much more besides. It meant learning to appreciate the classics of Greek or Latin literature. Young students would be taught to read aloud properly with poetic meter, about the historical allusions and difficult vocabulary used by Homer and other authors, about etymology, and so on. Again, some students would stop there, but those who progressed would study rhetoric. Studying grammar and then rhetoric, especially with the right teachers, was a way to climb the social ladder. Students paid handsomely to learn from well-respected and influential masters, who reciprocated by greasing the wheels of power to their students' advantage. Having learned at the feet of an outstanding teacher was a status symbol, even if one didn't exploit the connection for direct favors. In towns like Athens, which retained a reputation as centers of learning, teachers of rhetoric could draw well-paying students from all over the Roman world. An outstanding witness to the place of rhetoric in the educational affairs of the Roman Empire is Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, known to you and me as Quintilian. Born in 35 AD, he was a rough contemporary of Seneca, and in fact both men hailed from Spain in the western reaches of the Empire. Quintilian came to Rome where, eventually in 88 AD, he was appointed holder of the chair of Latin rhetoric, established by the emperor Vespasian. This chair was not unique. In a previous episode I mentioned the chairs of philosophy established at Athens by Marcus Aurelius, and he also created chairs of rhetoric there. Such prestigious posts brought wealth and political influence. Quintilian profited greatly from his silver tongue, rising to the rank of consul under Domitian. But he did not present rhetoric as a pathway to wealth and power. Rather, he saw education as a path to moral excellence. A teacher of rhetoric needs not just mastery of his art, but also mastery of his self, a paragon not only of persuasion, but also of virtue. Quintilian's enormous treatise Institutio Oratoria would become a classic treatment on both rhetoric and educational theory for later generations down to the Renaissance. In the 14th century the Italian humanist Petrarch wrote a letter to the long-dead Quintilian. It is not recorded whether Quintilian wrote back, but given his way with words you wouldn't put it past him. Of course, most of Quintilian's Institutio deals with rhetoric itself—how to assemble material for a persuasive speech, the art of memory, indispensable to those living before the age of the teleprompter, the use of gesture, correct pronunciation, and so on. But tellingly, it begins with two books on the education of the youngsters who are to grow into perfect orators. He starts at the beginning, giving advice even on the selection of nurses for babes in arms, like a modern writer explaining how to improve a newborn child's chances of getting into a top university. Regarding grammar, he defends the practice of packing young men off to public school, where they can test themselves against their peers and be given public praise or corrective abuse. Marcus Aurelius would disagree. In his Meditations, he expresses gratitude that he was homeschooled. Quintilian and Marcus share something else, though—a deep debt to the Greeks. Marcus actually wrote in Greek, and though Quintilian didn't go that far, his discussions of grammar and rhetoric show the extensive influence of Greek authors. He even draws on the great stoic Chrysippus' lost work on pedagogy. Still, Quintilian speaks in terms of a canon of literary classics in Latin, featuring such authors as Livy and, above all, Cicero. Cicero too had written instructional works on rhetoric, and his style was seen by Quintilian as the best model for young men to learn to imitate. When Quintilian speaks about solicisms or the inappropriate use of foreign words, he bends over backwards to explain away passages where Cicero seems guilty of such lapses. Quintilian's own educational theory is rather appealing. He does want the student to learn by imitation, but only in order to achieve independence, like a bird leaving the nest. Ultimately, the teacher's goal is that the student should need no further teaching. The type of education envisioned by Quintilian was remarkably durable throughout late antiquity. As emperors rose and fell, as barbarians invaded and were repulsed, or not, the children of the well-heeled and the upwardly mobile were put through their paces by grammarians and rhetoricians. Three hundred years after the time of Quintilian, Augustine speaks of his father scraping together money to send him for a first-rate education in Carthage. There, he received a training in rhetoric, as is evident on every page of his voluminous writings. What students learned was not only a set of skills, but a set of cultural references, which identified them as members of the educated classes. Then, as today, education could involve not only intellectual and ethical formation, but also religious belief. After all, you can't read Homer carefully without thinking about the traditional Greek gods. Thus, education became a weapon in the culture war between paganism and Christianity, something we'll examine in future episodes. Nonetheless, the curriculum remained remarkably stable through the transition from paganism to Christianity. Because grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy belonged to the same educational culture, it was inevitable that these disciplines would influence one another. Besides, grammar and rhetoric raise many philosophical issues. Perhaps that's clearer in the case of rhetoric. Its aim of instilling belief brings it into close contact with epistemology, the branch of philosophy that deals with justification and knowledge. It's no accident that when Plato wants an example of a group of people who believe something true without knowing it, he gives the case of a jury persuaded to convict a genuinely guilty man. Less obvious, at first glance, is the connection between grammar and philosophy. But, given that we express our knowledge of the world in language, philosophers have always suspected that understanding language helps us understand the world. For instance, ancient authors compared Aristotle's idea of a species, like giraffe, to the grammarian's common noun. By this they meant a name that was shared by many things, in contrast to a proper noun, like Hiawatha or Socrates. This topic of the parts of speech turns out to be an unexpectedly rich source of connections between ancient grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy. The ancient grammarians recognized numerous parts of speech. A typical list includes noun, verb, pronoun, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and article. That was problematic for philosophers, and especially for Platonists. Their man Plato had in the sophist given a theory of language that recognized only two parts of speech, noun and verb. In the second century, we find Plutarch defending this on the basis that these are the only indispensable parts. The rest are just for stylistic variety, like seasoning on our food, as he puts it. Years later, the Christian philosopher and translator Boethius is still fighting what seems to us a losing battle, trying to show that all the other parts of speech are somehow improper parts or can be reduced to noun and verb. It's interesting that even the more expansive list of the grammarians didn't include adjectives. The ancients needed some time to wrap their mind around the idea of an adjective. Even once the category was identified, the adjective was understood as a noun that needs another noun to complete it. This shows that their idea of a noun was rather different from ours. The relevant Greek word onoma can mean name as well as noun, and it is natural to think of a word like white as the name of, say, the color of a piece of paper. Again, philosophical issues are looming. Aristotle uses this very example to illustrate his idea of an accidental feature that subsists in a substance. But rhetoric, too, influenced the theory of adjectives. It seems that the adjective, sometimes called a quality or epithet, was made a distinct grammatical category in part to account for the terms of praise and blame that rhetoricians practiced applying in their speeches. One Latin grammatical text tells us that a so-called epithet is simply a word used to praise or censure someone in terms of their soul, body, or their external circumstances. Not coincidentally, that threefold distinction of soul, body, and externals itself comes from Platonist discussions of the virtues. It's no wonder that Plato and Platonism keep coming up in discussions of grammar and rhetoric. Plato was, after all, a literary classic. He was widely praised as a great stylist of Attic Greek, a dialect that was fetishized in the imperial age when the great rhetorician Aelius Aristides could praise Attic as the only type of Greek that possesses both dignity and charm. Philosophers like Plutarch followed suit, cultivating an interest in antique Attic vocabulary and style. Even the doctor Galen, also in the second century, wrote philological works on the differences between Greek dialects. Previously, I've explained the victory of Platonism over the Hellenistic schools by mentioning how Platonism co-opted those schools and lent itself to religious belief. But another significant factor was that well-educated people considered Plato to be part of their canon. For the Romans, just as for us, effortlessly quoting authors like Homer or Plato was a way to establish one's breeding and refinement. A standard technique was to allude to what was already ancient Greek literature, but without identifying the source. The reader is flattered by the assumption that they, too, are in the know. Another way to prove one's refinement was to go hear philosophers lecture. Hypocritical or superficial devotion to philosophy became an obvious target of satire. The star example is Lucian, a rhetorician of the second century AD who wrote stinging parodies of the philosophy of his day. In his work The Negrinus, a philosophical tourist waxes enthusiastic about his recent visit abroad, where he sat at the feet of a Platonist master. The comedy comes in part from the fact that the tourist's philosophical adventure has left his character entirely unchanged. For him, philosophy is nothing but an exquisite performance. It makes no demands on him to become more virtuous. Here, Lucian has put his finger on a sore spot. Cultivated Romans studied Greek literature in the context of an education that included philosophy, but when philosophy threatened to subvert the values of this cultivated elite, they were unmoved. Many an aristocrat swooned at stylish speeches showing that money and reputation are valueless, and then returned to the forum in search of wealth and fame. All these trends culminated at the high point of the Roman Empire from the first century to the early third century AD. It was an age of sophists. The word sophist is familiar to us from 5th century BC Athens, but it re-emerged in 3rd century AD Athens, where a man named Philostratus devised the expression second-sophistic to describe the movement covered in his treatise The Lives of the Sophists. The rehabilitation of the term sophist signified the rehabilitation of eloquence for its own sake. In this period, rhetoricians devised showpiece speeches about historical topics, just as the sophists of classical antiquity had done. Gorgias had written a speech in defense of Helen. The great sophist Dio of Prusa went him one better with a speech proving that, whatever Homer might say, Troy was never sacked in the Trojan War. This man Dio was also called Christostom, meaning golden mouth. Like modern-day hip-hop artists, sophists like Dio could wield the silver tongues in their golden mouths without preparation, speaking extemporaneously, often on a topic given to them by the audience. Ever ready to mock his peers, the satirist Lucian found humor in the reliance of rhetoricians on pre-prepared tropes, exaggerated gestures, and dramatic facial expressions. But hey, it worked. Ancient sources tell us of rhetoricians so admired that their adherents affected the same style of clothing, or could be induced to violent weeping by the mere mention of the orator's name. The Second Sophistic is now taken seriously by classicists and historians, but it used to be seen as a sign of the decadence of the empire. Some contemporaries tended to agree. We already find Seneca in the first century complaining about those who value style over substance, and in the second century, the heyday of the Second Sophistic, Plutarch is banging the same drum. Such serious-minded men were bound to be exasperated by the self-conscious playfulness of rhetoric in this period. My favorite example comes from somewhat later in antiquity. Before he became a bishop, the fourth- to fifth-century author Cinesius wrote a treatise in praise of baldness. On behalf of the follically challenged, I extend my thanks to him. Nor was philosophy immune to the witty use of eloquence and self-aware appropriation. The sophists loved to rework themes from Plato, producing pastiches or retellings of the Ring of Gyges story from the Republic or the speeches on love in the Symposium. But for a true fusion of philosophy and rhetoric, we need to turn to a man who lived in the fourth century after the time of the Second Sophistic, Themistius. Like Quintilian, he rose to eminence thanks to his gift of gab. Eighteen surviving speeches document his relations with a series of emperors. Some speeches were declaimed to the emperors in person, others were written when he served as an emissary. Despite being a pagan, Themistius received his first imperial patronage under the Christian Constantius II, and he showed nimble political skills as well as a nimble tongue to retain an influential position under subsequent emperors, ultimately entering the Senate and helping to decide who else would be allowed to sit in this august, albeit now largely powerless, body. Ironically, the stridently pagan and philosophically-minded emperor Julian was more cool towards Themistius, perhaps because he did not share the Christian emperor's need for a pagan court philosopher to demonstrate ecumenical and intellectual broad-mindedness. Themistius in any case often argued for peaceful coexistence between pagans and Christians, something certainly not on the cards under Julian. In his speeches, Themistius drew on sophists and rhetoricians like Dio of the Golden Mouth and Aelius Aristides, but he also emphasized his philosophical credentials, pointedly wearing the simple cloak of a philosopher at court, and presenting himself as a man bound to tell truth to power, since philosophers always tell the truth, honest. The credentials were genuine. He wrote numerous commentaries on the works of Aristotle, though actually commentaries is perhaps too grand a word. They are more like running paraphrases, easier and clearer versions of difficult Aristotelian texts. Meanwhile, Themistius quietly indicated points of harmony between Aristotle and Plato. In this, he was typical of the philosophy of his age, when Neoplatonism was already harmonizing the thought of these two giants. But his overall philosophical outlook was closer to that of the great peripatetic commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias than to that of later Neoplatonist commentators. Yet Themistius sometimes disagreed with Alexander's interpretations. The best example is his treatment of Aristotle's remarks on the intellect. Themistius especially wanted to sort out one of the most contentious and tantalizing passages in all of Aristotle, the fifth chapter of the third book of On the Soul. In the previous chapter, Aristotle has explained that the human intellect is a kind of potentiality for receiving intelligible forms, just as eyesight is a potentiality for receiving visual forms. Now, in chapter 5, Aristotle says that if there is potential intellect, there must also be an intellect that is always actual. This will be, as he says, a maker intellect, which is comparable to light and always thinking. This intellect alone is separate and eternal. The chapter has always fascinated and frustrated in equal measure. The only thing that is clear about the passage is that it's very important. Down to the present day, there is no real agreement about the identity of the maker intellect Aristotle is describing. In at least one work, Alexander argued that it should be identified with God himself, given that God is always thinking, separate and eternal. But Themistius was convinced that Aristotle must be describing an aspect of the human mind. For him, the universal maker intellect is, as he puts it, what it is to be me. It facilitates the inception of my thoughts, which are actual forms in my mind, just as light makes it possible to see visible objects. The choice between these two interpretations is one of far-reaching importance. On Alexander's view, it looks as if the human mind is just another power belonging to the embodied person. There is little reason to expect that we will survive the death of our bodies. For Themistius, though, we each are above all to be identified with the maker intellect. When Aristotle says that this is eternal, he is promising us a shared immortality. Themistius attained another kind of immortality, too, because his paraphrases of Aristotle were valued for many centuries. His rhetorical gifts were likewise cherished. The Christian theologian Gregory Nazanzius called him the King of Words. In his own day, as we've seen, even emperors found it politically expedient to have a man of his pedigree around. A surviving letter from Constantius to Themistius shows how keen the emperor was to present himself as a guardian of philosophy and the classical heritage more generally. But speeches and court intellectuals could only take an emperor so far. What they really needed was evidence of divine favor. A crushing military victory was always helpful, but failing that, the closest thing to a divine vote of confidence was often found in astrology. Emperors kept astrologers at court to help them make decisions and had their horoscopes published because of the widespread ancient belief that the stars signified the will of the gods. What does this have to do with philosophy? For now, heaven only knows, but the signs are good that we'll find out next time when we look at astronomy and astrology on the history of philosophy without any gaps.