The Genuine Teachers of This Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiquity

369 Pages·2011·3.19 MB·English

by  Jeffrey Walker

THE GENUINE TEACHERS
OF THIS ART
Studies in Rhetoric/Communication
Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor
THE GENUINE TEACHERS
OFTHIS ART Rhetorical Education
in Antiquity
Jeffrey Walker
The University of South Carolina Press
© 2011University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2011
Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina,
by the University of South Carolina Press, 2013
www.sc.edu/uscpress
22 21 2019181716151413 10987654321
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Walker, Jeffrey, 1949–
The genuine teachers of this art : rhetorical education in antiquity /
Jeffrey Walker.
p. cm. — (Studies in rhetoric/communication)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-61117-016-0(cloth : alk. paper)
1. Rhetoric—Study and teaching. 2. Rhetoric, Ancient—Study and
teaching. 3. Persuasion (Rhetoric)—Study and teaching. I. Title.
P53.27.W35 2011
808.00938—dc22
2011015296
ISBN 978-1-61117-182-2(ebook)
I dedicate this book to the memory of Leonard Nathan,
my old mentor, excellent teacher, didaskalos mou, who passed
away while it was being written.

CONTENTS
Series Editor’s Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Prologue: Rhetoric and/as Rhetorical Pedagogy 1
one|Cicero’s Antonius 9
two |On the Technê of Isocrates (I) 57
three |On the Technê of Isocrates (II) 91
four|In the Garden of Talking Birds
Declamation and Civic Theater 156
five|Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the Notion
of Rhetorical Scholarship 213
Epilogue: William Dean Howells and the Sophist’s Shoes 285
Notes 297
Works Cited 329
Index 345

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
In Greek and Roman antiquity, intensive and prolonged study of rhetoric was
the key preparation for active civic life. In The Genuine Teachers of This Art,
Jeffrey Walker explores, in four extended essays, the practice of rhetorical edu-
cation from Isocrates to late antiquity, with intensive treatments of Isocrates,
Cicero, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and the practice of declamation.
In his opening essay on Cicero’s dialogue De oratore, Walker argues that
whereas the usual interpretation regards Crassus as speaking for Cicero in the
dialogue, with Antonius as a mere foil, Cicero instead prompts us to read the dia-
logue as a genuine argument, thus rebalancing the scale between philosophical,
Aristotelian rhetoric (represented by Crassus) and the rhetoric of Isocrates, often
represented as the sophistic and handbook traditions (defended by Antonius).
The works of Isocrates that have come down to us represent his teaching as
in contrast to the technical or handbook tradition of later rhetorical pedagogy.
Walker speculates that Isocrates probably did write a technê,now lost, but known
among his successors, and that it is possible to make useful conjectures about it
and its influence on later teaching of rhetoric. And so, instead of seeing Isocrates
as hostile to the handbook tradition, Walker suggests that Isocrates may very well
have been its founder, thus providing a link between the philosophical and
handbook traditions and in the process redeeming the handbook tradition as at
least potentially legitimate mode of rhetorical pedagogy.
In Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Walker finds a teacher and scholar who em -
ploys a rhetorical perspective on literary criticism not as the application of pre-
scriptive formulae and not simply to offer good examples for students, but as a
means of extending the insights, understandings, sensibilities, and abilities of his
students as practicing rhetors.
Professor Walker offers fresh and challenging perspectives on the continuity
and variation of the pedagogy of ancient rhetoric, and of its coherence and con-
temporary relevance as an “art of producing rhetors.”
Thomas W. Benson