Table Of ContentAristotle’s Art of Rhetoric
A r i s tot l e s
’
Art of Rhetoric
◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉ ◉
Translated and with
an Interpretive Essay
by Robert C. Bartlett
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The University of Chicago Press
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Published 2019
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Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 59162- 9 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 78990- 3 (paper)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 59176- 6 (e- book)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208 /chicago
/9780226591766.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Aristotle, author. | Bartlett, Robert C.,
1964– translator, writer of added commentary.
Title: Aristotle’s art of rhetoric / translated and with
an interpretive essay by Robert C. Bartlett.
Other titles: Rhetoric. English (Bartlett) | Art of
rhetoric
Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago
Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018025296 |
ISBN 9780226591629 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780226591766 (e- book)
Subjects: LCSH: Rhetoric—Early works to 1800. |
Philosophy, Ancient—Early Works to 1800.
Classification: LCC PA3893 .R313 2018 | ddc 808.5—
dc23
LC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2018
025296
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO
Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Preface vii
Overview of the Art of Rhetoric xv
Bibliography xvii
List of Abbreviations xxi
Art of Rhetoric
Outline of Book 1 3
Book 1 5
Outline of Book 2 73
Book 2 76
Outline of Book 3 155
Book 3 157
Interpretive Essay 211
Glossary 275
Key Greek Terms 285
Authors and Works Cited 287
Proper Names 289
General Index 293
Pr eface
The chief purpose of the present volume is to encourage serious study of
the art of rhetoric, by way of a return to its origins in Aristotle. The politi-
cal importance of rhetoric is clear enough: for republican government to
function, citizens must be able to stand before their fellows, express them-
selves clearly, and persuade a sufficient number of them that this policy,
that treaty, these laws, should be approved or condemned. Hence the his-
tories of the great republics supply us with impressive examples of politi-
cal rhetoric— Thucydides’ War of the Peloponnesians and Athenians above
all— just as do the leading republican or democratic statesmen, Pericles,
Cicero, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill among them.
The fate of rhetoric in our time is uncertain. After a long period of
seeming neglect or indifference, rhetoric has in recent decades begun to
attract attention once again. To track this rise, fall, and revival of rhetoric
in any detail would be a great undertaking. Perhaps it will suffice to sketch
some of the principal developments. To begin at the very beginning, the
art of rhetoric seems to have been born in Greek antiquity.1 And in the
leading philosophical circles there, rhetoric was thought to be a necessary
supplement to public life because the truth is of limited political use, ev-
ery community being a Cave that will remain more or less untouched by
the sun’s light. It would always fall to persuasive rhetoric, then, to bridge
the chasm between impotent truth and potent opinion, wherever brute
force did not simply dictate the field. The relatively high status of rhetoric
as a subject of study endured, with some inevitable peaks and valleys, in
the long period stretching from Greek and Roman antiquity— Isocrates
1 ˙ Cicero (De oratore 1.20.91 and Brutus 46) traces the origin of the art of rhetoric to
Corax and Tisias of Syracuse.
viii ] preface
and Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian— through the Middle Ages. As
one-t hird of the “trivium,” rhetoric was regarded as a necessary part of a
sound liberal education, together with grammar and logic (or dialectic).
This high status of rhetoric began to falter with the advent of the modern
Enlightenment, when rhetoric came to be regarded, or at any rate pre-
sented, as an unnecessary “nuisance” and even a danger.2 For in the bright
light cast by scientific reason, invigorated by its novel method, mere per-
suasion came to be viewed as the relic of a benighted age.
Crucial to the demotion of rhetoric, and of Aristotelian rhetoric espe-
cially, was the assault on the early modern university led most notably by
Thomas Hobbes.3 The university was at its core Scholastic, and Hobbes’s
attack on it took aim at both elements of Scholasticism— Christianity,
of course, but Aristotle too: “And since the authority of Aristotle is only
current there [in the university], that study is not properly philosophy . . .
but Aristotelity.” “And I believe that scarce anything can be more absurdly
said in natural philosophy than that which now is called Aristotle’s Meta-
physics; nor more repugnant to government than much of that he hath
said in his Politics; nor more ignorantly than a great part of his Ethics.”4
It is true that Hobbes omits from this list of bad books Aristotle’s
Rhetoric,5 which Hobbes had studied carefully and fruitfully: his account
of the passions, central to his political philosophy, is to a considerable de-
2 ˙ “What can that large number of debaters contribute to policy with their inept views
but a nuisance?” Thomas Hobbes, De Cive 10.10. Consider also: “And though they [ora-
tors] reason, yet take they not their rise from true principles, but from vulgar received
opinions, which for the most part are erroneous. Neither endeavor they so much to fit
their speech to the nature of the things they speak of, as to the passions of their minds
to whom they speak; when it happens, that opinions are delivered not by right rea-
son, but by a certain violence of mind. Nor is this the fault in the man, but in the na-
ture of eloquence, whose end, as all the masters of rhetoric teach us, is not truth (except
by chance), but victory; and whose property is not to inform, but to allure.” De Cive
10.11 (emphasis original); consider also Hobbes’s contrast between logic and rhetoric
at 12.12.
3 ˙ A classic account of the history of rhetoric is George Kennedy, A New History of
Classical Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), which covers the pe-
riod before 400 BCE through to Boethius, i.e., the early sixth century CE. Consider
also James A. Herrick, The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction, 5th ed. (New
York: Routledge, 2013). See also Paul D. Brandes, A History of Aristotle’s “Rhetoric”:
With a Bibliography of Early Printings (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989).
4 ˙ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 46.13 and 46.11.
5 ˙ According to John Aubrey, Hobbes judged Aristotle to be “the worst teacher that
ever was, the worst polititian and ethick”— with the important qualification that “his
preface [ ix
gree indebted to Aristotle’s own account in the Rhetoric.6 As the printer
of the 1681 edition of Hobbes’s Works put it, in a preface to Hobbes’s
painstaking translation or paraphrase of the Rhetoric (A Briefe of the Art
of Rhetorique, 1637), “Mr. Hobbes chose to recommend by his translation
the rhetoric of Aristotle, as being the most accomplished work on that
subject which the world has yet seen; having been admired in all ages, and
in particular highly approved by the father of the Roman eloquence [i.e.,
Cicero], a very competent judge.”7 Nevertheless, Hobbes declined the op-
portunity to praise Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric, in part because he came to
see the need to attack the rhetoric he had inherited. That the very attack
on classical rhetoric was not without its own rhetoric does not undo the
fact of the attack.8 With the discovery of an altogether new “moral sci-
ence” or of a political science finally deserving of that name, it seemed
that the need for the troublesome rhetoric of old would eventually fade
away, together with the “repugnant” and “ignorant” political philosophy
that accompanied it. Not only the foundation of all government, but also
the regular conduct of it, would for the first time in human history be
guided by the light of reason (“public reason”). A new understanding
of popular sovereignty and the consultation of the law or laws of nature,
for example, would help dislodge antique rhetoric, which too often gave
power to the eloquent as distinguished from the prudent or just— what
rhetorique and discourse of animals was rare.” John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Andrew
Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 1:357.
6 ˙ “It would be difficult to find another classical work whose importance for Hobbes’s
political philosophy can be compared with that of the Rhetoric. The central chapters
of Hobbes’s anthropology . . . betray in style and contents that their author was a zeal-
ous reader, not to say disciple of the Rhetoric.” Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of
Hobbes: Its Basis and Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952 [originally
published 1936]), 35.
7 ˙ “Preface,” in English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. William Molesworth (London:
John Bohn, 1840), 6:422. See also John T. Harwood, ed., The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes
and Bernard Lamy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986).
8 ˙ On Hobbes’s attack on rhetoric, which (to repeat) included the use of a rhetoric
all his own, consider Bryan Garsten’s indispensable account in Saving Persuasion:
A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006),
chap. 1; see also David Johnston, The Rhetoric of “Leviathan”: Thomas Hobbes and the
Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986);
Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996); and Ioannis Evrigenis, Images of Anarchy: The Rhetoric
and Science in Hobbes’s State of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
