ABSTRACT
Rhetoric served in ancient Greece primarily as an instrument in political and legal activity, and there were controversies about how it should be taught. Rhetoric not only becomes immediately significant, but can make a contribution to our modes of thought and evaluation. Aristotle starts by criticizing the usual teaching of rhetoric not only for its narrowness but also for the ethical effect of this narrowness. Rhetoric is defined formally as "the faculty of observing in each case the possible means of persuasion". Persuading is a three-term transactional relation—someone persuades somebody about something—and so attention is called to the three factors: the character of the speaker, the frame of mind into which the hearer is put, and the demonstrative or apparently demonstrative force of the speech itself. There are three kinds of hearers: deliberative, which exhorts or dissuades with respect to future action; the forensic, which accuses or defends about the past; and the epideictic, which assesses by praising or blaming.
