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Classical Rhetorical Theory

Aristotle defined rhetoric as finding all the available means of persuasion. Rhetoric was divided into five parts: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Classical rhetoric can be defined as the period of rhetorical developments from Corax (470-? BCE), author of the first work on rhetoric, The Art of Rhetoric, or Socrates (469–399 BCE) to Augustine (354–430). Thomas Benson and Michael Prosser define the period of classical rhetoric generally from Socrates to Augustine; Joseph Miller, Michael Prosser, and Thomas Benson argue that the medieval period began approximately with Augustine and extended to about 1400 and the rediscoveries of classical works.

Plato submitted rhetoric to its first philosophical dissection in his Socratic dialogues. The major Greek classical rhetorical treatise was Aristotle's The Rhetoric, followed in Rome by Cicero, Quintilian, and Augustine. Five major classical rhetoricians include Plato (429- or 428–347 BCE or 420–348 BCE), Aristotle (384–322 BCE), Cicero (106–43 BCE), Quintilian (35–95 CE or 40–118 CE), and Augustine.

Plato

Plato, the most significant Western philosopher, articulated Western moral leadership of the universe and developed metaphysical and scientific thinking. In The Republic, he proposed the true lover of knowledge as naturally striving for truth and not content with common opinion but understanding the essential nature of things. His protagonist Socrates dialogically searched for truth, justice, high ethics, and goodness. Plato considered the absolute idea of the good as the highest form of perfect and invisible ideas or forms that are developed by inner meditation, in contrast with concrete objects, which he rejected as constituting real knowledge.

For Plato, the ideal republic included a philosopher-king to support virtue, justice, and wisdom; soldiers to protect and control the citizens in acquiring the society's honor; and the civilian members of the society to provide the material needs of the society. He believed that people would act in accordance with virtue if they knew what formed the basis of virtue. Plato excluded poets in his ideal republic since they dealt with illusion rather than reality.

Gorgias

One of Plato's early dialogues, the Gorgias, deals with truth, goodness, justice, and ethics but also contrasts monological rhetoric, which he considered like cooking or flattery, and interactive dialectic, or discussion, which leads intelligent individuals to reach the truth, perhaps by a kind of authoritarian consensus. Socrates implies that he knows what he doesn't know, while those who think that they are wise often know nothing. The old illustrious teacher of rhetoric, Gorgias, and his followers discuss with Socrates the meaning of a rhetorician and rhetoric. It appears that Socrates leads Gorgias into dialectical traps as Socrates believes that the unknowing rhetorician or orator can persuade crowds or mobs better than the experts in health, medicine, and legislation.

Socrates asks Gorgias what he considers his art to be. Gorgias answers that it is rhetoric. Essentially, Socrates and Gorgias discuss reality as found in philosophical dialectic versus the semblance or pretense of reality as found in rhetorical culture and thus generally untruthful discourse. In ending the dialogue, Socrates makes a geometrical equation that as self-adornment is to gymnastic, so is sophistry to legislation, and as cookery is to medicine, so is rhetoric to justice.

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