The Task of the Bow: Heraclitus' Rhetorical Critique of Epic Language

Abstract

The rhetorical theory and form of Heraclitus' work and the relationship of his manner of exposition to his ideas have vexed critics from Plato and Aristotle through the present. Although Heraclitus has not been studied frequently in rhetorical scholarship, it can be argued that his work is criti cally important for understanding developments in early rhetorical theory and practice, especially as background to the Gorgianic account of logos, Protagorean hermeneutics and epistemology, and the Platonic account of Protagoras in the Theaetetus. The neglect of Heraclitus by rhetoricians is due to a phenomenon, which Edward Schiappa (1991, 1999) has cogently analyzed, of contemporary rhetorical theorists bringing to bear anachro nistic assumptions about disciplinarity on predisciplinary ancient thought, especially about relationships among philosophy, sophistic, and rhetoric, terms which, in antiquity, demarcated fluid rhetorical po sitions rather than fixed concepts.1 Perhaps the most important reason for rhetoricians to study Heraclitus, however, is not merely his subsequent influence on those writ ers who form part of the contemporary canon of ancient rhetorical schol arship, but the ways in which his work both presents and enacts the