Gorgias Of Leontini Research Articles

Aspasia of Miletus and Gorgias of Leontini

Aspasia of Miletus and Gorgias of Leontini

The Ancient Greek Sophists in Emanuele Tesauro’s Il cannocchiale aristotelico (1670): Thrasymachus and Gorgias

Emanuele Tesauro’s Il cannocchiale aristotelico (The Spyglass of Aristotle) is widely considered a masterpiece of the Baroque, mainly because of his theory of metaphor as a cognitive tool. But this work is much more than that. Tesauro presents his volume as the ultimate interpretation of Aristotle’s rhetorical art, which is clearly not the case. Indeed, his work is a polycentric discourse on a revolutionary theory of rhetoric that goes beyond any previous treatise written on the subject, including Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Despite his relevance in the history of rhetorical theories, Tesauro’s work is still waiting for a comprehensive study of its own as well as investigations of some of its specific aspects. Furthermore, the majority of the existing studies of Tesauro are in Italian (with only very few in English), which makes it difficult for this text to reach an international public. This essay explores what seems to be a specific aspect that has so far been almost completely neglected: the role played by the ancient sophists in the Cannocchiale aristotelico and in the history of rhetoric that Tesauro redesigns. Tesauro proclaims his fidelity to Aristotle but actually contradicts Aristotle’s anti-sophistic approach. During this analysis, we will discover even more about Tesauro’s pro-sophistic attitude: he grounds the climax of Latin rhetorical tradition in Greek sophistry. This positive assessment of the ancient sophists, especially Thrasymachus and Gorgias of Leontini, coexists with a critique of Socrates. Except for Sperone Speroni, no other early modern Italian author—or European author—has proposed this radical inversion of the canon established by Plato. This reversal makes Tesauro a relevant case study in the on-going exploration of the legacy of ancient sophists in Western literature.

CAN FIGURES PERSUADE? ZEUGMA AS A FIGURE OF PERSUASION IN LATIN

AbstractUse of rhetorical figures has been an element of persuasive speech at least since Gorgias of Leontini, for whom such deliberate deviations from ordinary literal language were a defining feature of what he called the ‘psychagogic art’. But must we consider figures of speech limited to an ornamental and merely stylistic function, as some ancient and still many modern theorists suggest? Not according to contemporary cognitive rhetoric, which proposes that figures of speech can play a fundamentally argumentative role in speech by evoking a level of shared meaning between speaker and listener, and simultaneously by affording the possibility of reorganizing this common ground. This paper argues that, in Latin literature, zeugma—the ‘linking together’ of two elements (usually nouns or prepositional phrases) with a third (usually a verb) that is semantically compatible with only one of them—can and very often does operate argumentatively, and that it does so by surfacing figurative relationships that normally remain below the conscious awareness of Latin speakers and by imparting a certain structure to these relationships. What very often motivates the selection of elements within zeugma—and what makes zeugma more than simply a stylistic device—are in fact metaphorical structures that are highly conventionalized in Latin's semantic system. In tapping into symbolic associations that are deeply entrenched in the language and thought of Latin speakers, zeugma therefore provided a ready-made device for constructing arguments in context.

Tucídides y la vía parmenídea de la verdad

En el presente artículo exploramos el contexto filosófico de la obra de Tucídides. A través del análisis de la verdad en la obra de Tucídides definimos una conexión intelectual con filósofos presocráticos como Parménides de Elea y Gorgias de Leontinos.

Tragic Elements in Josephus

While the discussion on how to classify Josephus’ works within ancient historiography is not new and attention is increasingly being paid to the genre of “tragic history,” more recently there have been attempts to draw parallels between the Jewish War and Greek tragedy (e. g., Chapman and Feldman). Following a sociological definition of “Hellenism,” my paper argues not only that optimal conditions existed in Flavian Rome after 70 C. E. for Josephus to use in his account of the Jewish War certain elements of tragedy and that at least in reference to some aspects a bridge can be constructed from Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles to Josephus via the Exagoge of the Jewish tragedian Ezekiel, but also that the Jewish War, among other goals, in many ways pursues the same goal as the influential theory of the Aristotelian Poetics defined for the tragedy and that was already named by Gorgias of Leontini: Pity is to be aroused by scenes that cause horror. In discussing this theory of tragedy, which is controversial in many details and must be brought into relation with other statements by Aristotle on awakening pity, this paper presents arguments for the thesis outlined above, which is based on the observation that Josephus’ horrific representation of suffering is without parallel in the context of Greco-Roman historiography, that he embeds the motif of pity in the work in various ways, and that in the proem he himself problematizes the classification of the account as historiography by justifying the pathetic elements, which ancient historians like Polybius criticized as being only suitable for the tragedy. Of critical importance in all of this is a clear distinction between tragedy and ancient drama on the one hand and pathetic and horrible elements of ancient historiographies and tragedies on the other. With reference to the key text, Ant. 7.127–129, this paper concludes that the generally accepted intentions of the Jewish War—to sketch the Jewish people as inherently noble and for the most part not to blame for the insurrection—can in some respects also to be understood against the background of the theory of tragedy, according to which pity can only result from the staging of a suffering “tragic hero.”

Горгий Леонтийский и античная модель дескриптивной эпистемологии

Горгий Леонтийский и античная модель дескриптивной эпистемологии

The Ghost Tradition: Helen Of Troy In The Elizabethan Era

Abstract Reputedly the most beautiful woman who has ever lived, Helen of Troy (or Sparta) is less well known for her elusive, ghost-like dimension. Homer wrote that the greatest war of Western classical antiquity started because of Helen's adultery followed by her elopement to Troy. Other ancient writers and historians, among theme Aeschylus, Stesichorus, Hesiod, Pausanias, Aristophanes, Euripides and Gorgias of Leontini, challenged the Homeric version, in various ways and attempted to exonerate Helen either by focusing on her phantom/ ghost/ as the generic object of man's desire and scorn or by casting doubt on the mechanisms of the blaming process. This paper argues that the Elizabethans Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare adopted and adapted the anti-Homer version of the depiction of Helen, what I here call “the ancient Helen ghost tradition”; nevertheless, in so doing they further reinforced the character's demonic features and paradoxically achieved a return to the adulterous Homeric Helen.

Vision and Knowledge in Greek Tragedy

Vision and Knowledge in Greek Tragedy* Chiara Thumiger (bio) It is to be expected that the problematization of seeing features importantly in theater, especially so in tragedy, since it emphasizes the acquisition of knowledge and the process of human ‘learning’ from experience.1 First, the sense of sight is central to human existence and is, at the same time, a characteristically close and remote experience. As Robert Michaels (1986, 303) explains, “Seeing is immediate, personal; it carries conviction … Vision is also the most distant, the least inner of perceptions. We can touch, smell, feel and even hear the inside of our body, but never see it.” Seeing is ‘biologically’ the most self-evident and forceful of the senses, as well as the most readily loaded with metaphorical meaning, whereby physical sight becomes an image for reflective knowledge in its various forms.2 Second, seeing engages with theatricality (the specific type of seeing that is proper to a theatrical audience as they watch the show). A play is a performed spectacle, as much as a literary text. The themes of vision and knowledge interact, therefore, with the conventions and the medium of theater itself.3 Third, the problem of seeing and appearances as epistemologically charged has great relevance within Athenian culture in the second half of the fifth century. The Sophistic movement (exemplified notably in Protagoras and Gorgias) focused on the problem of defining knowledge and the way it is gained. Plato’s late work Theaetetus (ca. 369 BCE) illustrates vividly the extent of the debate: in the first part of the dialogue (142A—158E) the Platonic Socrates explores Protagoras’s doctrine of knowledge and sensible perception, refuting the Sophist’s statement that “Man is the measure of all things.”4 Socrates focuses on the ambiguity of the senses and on the importance of his own mission to dispel the false ideas about knowledge spread by the Sophists, opposing ‘image’ and ‘imposture’ to the ‘real’: So great, then, is the importance of midwives; but their function is less important than mine. For women do not, like my patients, bring forth at one time real children [] and at another mere images [] which are difficult to distinguish from the real … The greatest thing about my art is this, that it can test in every way whether the mind of the young man is bringing forth a mere image, an imposture [] or a real and genuine offspring. (Tht. 150B—C) [End Page 223] Gorgias of Leontini is also known to have been concerned with the reliability of appearances in building knowledge in his lost work On Not Being. Sextus Empiricus’s account (Against the Logicians 1.65—87) summarizes the content of the treatise along three points: “First, that there is nothing; second, even if there is [something], it is not apprehensible by a human being; third, that even if it is apprehensible, it is still not expressible or explainable to the next person.” This evidence points at a rich philosophical debate initiated in the fifth century, at first dominated by the philosophy of Parmenides, continued in the second half of the century by the Sophists, and then reformulated by Plato in his later dialogues (Theaetetus, Parmenides, Sophist). In this debate the unknowability of reality and the incommunicability of knowledge between subjects are crucial.5 Knowledge as originating in the senses is questioned, and a definition of ‘real knowledge’ and ‘real being’ is sought. The motif of the reliability of seeing and vision in tragedy has to be understood within this cultural milieu. In this article I explore how the issue of vision and knowledge emerge in Greek drama in the second half of the fifth century. I will follow a working division into three ‘levels’: the subject as viewer, the world as object of viewing, and flawed viewers and unclear sights. These correspond to different approaches to the fundamental epistemological topic—the reliability of sensory perception and the communicability of knowledge. Although they are simultaneously present in the cultural reflection of the period (and they are, indeed, three crucial components of the cognitive experience of viewing), I propose that they also reflect a development in the history of philosophical thought. The emphasis on...

Figuring the Feminine: The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval Hispanic Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Figuring the Feminine: The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval Hispanic Literature Núria Silleras-Fernández Ross, Jill . Figuring the Feminine: The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval Hispanic Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. 305 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8020-9098-0 Figuring the Feminine uses five medieval Iberian literary texts to examine "the implications of the conjoining of body and language especially when the body is figured as feminine" (8). The author situates the feminine body at the center of medieval hermeneutics and writing, searching "to contribute to the ongoing exploration of a medieval poetics that uses the body as the primary vehicle for 'thinking through' questions of critical cultural importance" (9). Ross's selection of texts for "figuring the feminine" is particularly interesting. Three of the works analyzed are among the most canonical of Castilian literature: the Poema de mio Cid, Gonzalo de Berceo's Milagros de Nuestra Señora and Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor. But the other two are less conventional; they frame the canonical readings chronologically, giving an interesting and comparative twist to the project. They situate the book in a more complex, multicultural and exciting medieval Iberian space, with its rich diversity [End Page 212] of language and ethno-religious traditions and interactions. The inclusion of the Peristephanon by Aurelius Prudentius, a late antique Hispano-Roman poet (c. 348-413) from the Tarraconensis, pushes the chronological limits of what is traditionally considered medieval. The other noncanonical author included is Rabbi Shem Tov ben Isaac Ardutiel of Carrión, better known in Spanish as "Santob." He was a contemporary of Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita, and was, like him, from northern Castile. Thus, the book covers a selection of Iberian texts written in Latin, Castilian/Spanish and Hebrew that span ten centuries, from the end of the fourth to the mid-fourteenth century — an exercise of reading in the longue durée. Readers will appreciate that Ross provides translations into English alongside excerpts given in the original languages. Together, the introduction and ch. 1, "Carnal Knowledge: Metaphor, Allegory, and the Embodiment of Truth", provide a theoretical framework for the study. Ross acknowledges her debt to Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics and E. Jane Burns's Bodytalk among others works that have explored the possibilities of an embodied medieval poetics, and builds her argument through a discussion of key figures, including Plato, Augustine, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida, as well as feminists scholars such as Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Toril Moi, Carolyn Dinshaw, and Jane Burns. She discusses male writers' attitudes toward the female body and uses the concept of kairos, "the 'right or opportune moment' that governs all human communicative situations and informs the production of belief" (11), to break the binary associated with Plato's epistemology as employed by the fifth-century sophist, Gorgias of Leontini. Ross aims through a series of close readings of the texts, or episodes within them, to bring out this kairos in order to contribute to our understanding of how male authors manipulate a text embodied as feminine, and to reflect on the implications that this gendered textuality entails regarding the processes of both writing and reading. Each of the remaining chapters center on a specific work; these are treated in chronological progression. Ch. 2, "Dynamic Writing and Martyrs' Bodies in Prudentius's Peristephanon", studies this early-fifth-century collection of fourteen poems about Spanish and Roman martyrs (six from Hispania), regarded as the founding work of Hispanic hagiography. Ross analyzes the metaphor of the text as body and the connection between martyrdom and writing. She sees Prudentius's poems as transforming tortured bodies into salvational texts with the aim of earning the author "a hearing with the holy martyrs who then will plead his case with Christ" (77). These poems resonate in the following two chapters. [End Page 213] The third chapter, "Macho Words: Writing, Violence, and Gender in the Poema de mio Cid", examines a concrete episode of the anonymous epic poem: the so-called Afrenta de Corpes in which Dona Elvira and Doña Sol, the daughters of the Castilian hero par excellence, the Cid, are...

Why Socrates and Thrasymachus Become Friends

Why Socrates and Thrasymachus Become Friends Catherine Zuckert In the Platonic dialogues Socrates is shown talking to two, and only two, famous teachers of rhetoric, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon and Gorgias of Leontini.1 At first glance relations between Socrates and Gorgias appear to be much more courteous—they might even be described as cordial—than relations between Socrates and Thrasymachus. In the Gorgias Socrates explicitly and intentionally seeks an opportunity to talk to Gorgias and treats him with great respect. Socrates shows that Gorgias’s claims concerning the power of his art are contradictory, but the philosopher does not press his advantage or embarrass the rhetorician (Stauffer 2006, 34). Although Gorgias indicates his interest in hearing what Socrates has to say by urging his young friends Polus and Callicles to continue the conversation, Gorgias never says that he is convinced by Socrates. And Socrates never announces that Gorgias has become his friend.2 In the Republic Socrates reports that Thrasymachus burst into the conversation like a lion. Socrates even claims that he and his interlocutor (Polemarchus) were frightened. The initial exchange between Socrates and Thrasymachus thus appears to be hostile. In the argument that follows, Socrates embarrasses Thrasymachus; the famous teacher of rhetoric blushes. Nevertheless, Socrates declares later in the conversation (1900, 498d) that he and Thrasymachus have become friends.3 [End Page 163] The difference in the relations Socrates had—or at least thought that he could have—with the two teachers of rhetoric is important, because it indicates what sort of rhetoric Socrates thought was compatible not only with his philosophy but also with a just political order and what was not. The differences between the claims and arguments of the two teachers of rhetoric are not easy to pinpoint, however. Many of the charges that Gorgias’s associates Polus and Callicles make against Socrates, at least partly in defense of Gorgias, sound very much like charges Thrasymachus makes against Socrates. In order to discover the grounds of the difference in the relation between the philosopher and the two teachers of rhetoric, it thus becomes necessary to review and compare the claims Gorgias and his students make with those Thrasymachus levels against Socrates at the beginning of the Republic. Socrates’ Encounter with Gorgias At the beginning of the Gorgias the famous rhetorician’s Athenian host Callicles expresses surprise that Socrates has come to hear Gorgias declaim. But Socrates is not interested in witnessing a demonstration of Gorgias’s prowess as a speaker; he wants to ask the rhetorician what the power of his art is and what he teaches. Since Gorgias had previously offered to answer any questions after his speech, he agrees to respond to Socrates’ queries. In order for them to converse, Socrates emphasizes, Gorgias will have to keep his responses short. Although Gorgias sensibly observes that all questions cannot be answered adequately with brief replies, his first responses to Socrates’ questions are very short. Since Gorgias claims to be a knower and practitioner of an art, Socrates asks what he does and makes others capable of doing. Gorgias replies that he gives speeches and teaches others how to orate. Socrates asks what the speeches are about. “The greatest of human affairs, and the best” (1998, 451d), Gorgias vaguely and rather evasively responds. Pressed to be more specific, he finally declares that his art provides “the greatest good and cause both of freedom for human beings themselves and rule over others in each man’s own city” by enabling them to make speeches that “persuade judges in the law court, councilors in the council, assemblymen in the assembly, and in every other . . . political gathering” (1998, 452d–e, translation slightly modified). The Grounds of Gorgias’s Claims If Gorgias had not been restricted to brief replies by his agreement with Socrates, he might have explained the reasons for his vast claims with [End Page 164] arguments like those to be found in two of his remaining fragments. In his “Encomium to Helen” he explains the overwhelming power of speech, and in “On the Nonexistent” he demonstrates the reason or basis of this power by arguing that there is no form of “being” that exists independent of our...

Gorgias on arrangement: A search for pragmatism amidst the art and epistemology of Gorgias of Leontini

Prior research has focused on Gorgias of Leontini's epistemology and his stylistic/artistic uses of language; while little attention has been paid to the pragmatics of his speech making. An analysis of the Gorgianic corpus reveals that throughout each level of his discourse, Gorgias displayed what appears to be a discernible theory of rhetorical arrangement. The four basic speech parts (introduction, narration, argument and conclusion) are apparent in his speeches, and in addition to generating this quantitative theory of arrangement, it can be shown that Gorgias’ arguments were almost identical in their logical presentation of the claims supported.

The first sophists and the uses of history

(1987). The first sophists and the uses of history. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 67-78.

Tropes of the Composing Process

term tropes-like the term itself-has been given various definitions through the centuries. One definition groups it with under the general heading of style. Edward P. J. Corbett, for example, treats and figures as peculiar niceties of an expressive style, limiting them to the stylistic bric-a-brac which, if suitably employed, make ... prose lively and clear (94). Corbett's use of the term can be traced back as far as Gorgias of Leontini, who-according to Suidas-invented rhetoric by borrowing the oral formulas and figurative devices of Greek poetry and using them in making speeches (Sprague 32). Another understanding of tropes, however, begins with Vico, who claims that all the first [which he classifies as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony] are corollaries of [a] poetic logic, which is the basis of the wisdom of ancient, pre-civilized cultures (129). Vico anticipates Nietzsche, Freud, Kenneth Burke, Hayden White, and many other recent critics who have expanded our understanding of figurative language, calling these four class concepts (Vico 128-31).1 As concepts, these represent not simply the dynamic, imaginative nature of the pre-civilized mind; they map the development of human thinking itself, manifested in the myths, literature, and discourse human beings create. Hayden White, a student of Vico, has pointed out that logic may be merely a formalization of tropical strategies that prefigure our descriptions, explanations, and ideological stances toward the object of a field of study (Tropics 17). White's historian and the composition theorist are similar in this respect. Both do not search for facts so much as they invent the relationships between these facts, relationships inherent in the tropical nature of language itself. master tropes organize fields of study and shape the way theorists describe their object-in this case the composing process (White, Metahistory ix-xii, 1-9; Burke, in Appendix D, Four Master Tropes, Grammar 503-17). Tropes are inescapable; they operate consciously or unconsciously, even in our discourse about discourse. Our theoretical language reveals the turns we 1. literature on is extensive. Besides those writers mentioned in my essay, I am also indebted to the work of Ricoeur, Jakobson, Lakoff and Johnson, de Man, Genette, Richards, Black, Ortony, Pepper, and Derrida. Phillip K. Arrington is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Michigan University where he teaches in the Written Communications Program and is Director of Writing Programs. His article The Traditions of the Writing Process is forthcoming in Freshman English News.

Implications for communication of the rhetorical epistemology of Gorgias of Leontini

Implications for communication of the rhetorical epistemology of Gorgias of Leontini

Impromptu Speaking

A Striking development in recent years has been the rapidly increasing popularity of extempore addresses and discussions of various kinds. Although by no means confined to broadcasting, these are particularly prominent in the programmes of the B.B.C. Well-known men and women deliver impromptu speeches or improvise answers to questions on various points of political, ethical, social, literary, or scientific interest. Their audiences are generally large and appreciative, far larger than those commanded by the lecturer who has carefully prepared beforehand the substance and style of his address.This cult of the impromptu speech has a close parallel in Greece of the sophistic era. A prominent member of the ‘Brains Trust’ in ancient Greece, had one existed, would undoubtedly have been Hippias of Elis. Aided by his vast knowledge, covering, it would seem, every branch of human activity, he used to appear before large audiences, such as the great Panhellenic Festival at Olympia, claiming to answer any question his hearers might put to him. He apparently fulfilled his promise, for he told Socrates that no one had yet got the better of him. However, his system of improvising answers broke down when confronted by Socrates’ inexorable cross-questioning on the nature of Beauty, and he had to ask Socrates for a few moments’ grace in order to think the question over quietly by himself.A close rival of Hippias for ‘Brains Trust’ honours would have been Gorgias of Leontini. He, also, used to appear before large audiences professing his readiness to answer any questions, and once told Socrates it was many years since anyone had asked him anything new.