Aristotle and Cicero on the Orator's Playing upon the Feelings

Abstract

IN VIEW of the close association, amounting almost to identity, which persists even to the present day between rhetoric and the playing upon the feelings, we should expect peoples like the Greeks and Romans, who made rhetoric into a system, to include 4/vxa'yw'yLa among the principal objects of this art and to direct a large proportion of their precepts toward this end. It is no surprise, therefore, to find Cicero stating that movere audientium animos' is one of the three main tasks of the ideal orator and to learn that the paramount importance of 7 8La roiv irao for airo'6etL~s, 'Oos, and ira6os together form the bulk of his rhetorical system. It appears, however, from a closer study of the history of ancient rhetoric that this attitude toward IuvXa'ywy'a, i.e., its recognition as one of the three main objects of the rrXvq, was an exception and that, though its importance was seldom completely ignored, the ancients had several ways of incorporating it into their system.2 The object of this paper is to describe the two main methods which ancient writers on rhetoric adopted with regard to the treatment of the affectus, to investigate, as far as possible, the origin and history of each of them, and to use the results toward defining more clearly than has hitherto been done the place of Cicero in the history of ancient rhetoric and especially his attitude toward Aristotle and what may be called the Aristotelian tradition.