ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault examines parresia in both of its primary public manifestations, namely: an orator criticizing the demos in a democratic political context and a counselor offering frank criticism of a prince in a monarchical context. Foucault's lectures have inspired considerable work among scholars, especially classicists, and his analysis of parresia is important and provocative for rhetoric scholars as well. Foucault reads Socrates's identification of Callicles as the ideal interlocutor and parrhesiast as literal, not ironic. Equally unsettling for the claim that parresia is not rhetorical in the sense of not artful are Plato's Epistles 7 and 8, which purport to be Plato's descriptions of his interactions with Dionysius I and II, the so-called tyrants of Sicily. In On Frank Criticism, Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher from Hellenistic Gadara in Syria, analyzes parresia in the context of the philosophical schools, specifically in protreptic instruction in Epicurean schools.
