ABSTRACT
Aristotle's system of rhetoric is perhaps the most influential ever advanced, and still offers valuable insights into many aspects of public and private discourse. Dialectic was a method of debating issues of general interest, starting from widely accepted ideas or endoxa. Central to Aristotle's treatment of rhetoric is a type of argument or an approach to reasoning that Aristotle famously termed the enthymeme. Aristotle recognized that a systematic study of oratory must take into account various kinds of speeches, their settings and audiences, and the issues each type of speech addresses. Classics scholar Jeffrey Walker argues that epideictic was more important in ancient Greece than experts have tended to recognize. Forensic oratory reconstructs the past. Thus, forensic speakers must be skilled in convincing a jury that the available evidence supports a particular hypothesis. Focusing attention on the arguments employed in the three oratorical settings, Aristotle wrote about what he called the eidei topoi or special topics.
