ABSTRACT
The Greeks were both a politically minded and a litigious race, and the arts of speech were as useful a passport to influence with them as they are in a modern democracy; while it was in accordance with their restless spirit of intellectual curiosity that the theory of speaking received from them more attention than it does in modern communities in which its practice is no less important. Several ‘Arts of Speech’ had been written before Aristotle’s time; he complains, however, that they had all neglected the argumentative element in oratory and had attended to extraneous matters such as the production of emotion in the hearers. He himself recognises the part played by the appeal to emotion, but insists that the emotion must be produced by the speech itself and not by the cheap adventitious devices common in the Greek law-courts.1 In fact, he connects this defect of previous writers on oratory with their pre-occupation with the oratory of the courts rather than with the more noble political branch of the art. In both these respects he undertakes to improve upon his predecessors.2 The argumentative element in oratory is emphasised at the outset and throughout. Rhetoric is described as a counterpart or a branch of dialectic.3 Its connexion is with dialectic rather than with scientific demonstration; like the former it deals with arguments which do not presuppose the knowledge of any particular science but can be used and followed by any intelligent man. In principle oratory, like dialectic, can discuss any subject whatever, but in practice it is for the most part confined to the subjects about which men deliberate and thus it is connected with another science besides logic; it is ‘an
offshoot of dialectic and of the study of character which may properly be called politics,’4 taking its form from the first and its matter from the second.
