Sophistry is Pretty Great Actually | Rhetoric in Ancient Greece

Hey, you’re just in time for our first journey through time and space—today, we’re looking at the origins of rhetoric, its early critics, and the surprisingly not-so-influential role of the man who wrote the book on it—Aristotle.

Before we depart for Ancient Athens, though, a couple points of passenger information: in this series, we’re talking about the history of rhetoric, not the history of the world. Really, we’re interested in tracing the developments of how people have practiced and studied rhetoric through the ages, so, while that will require some talk about the larger goings-on of each respective time period, the goal here is not, for example, to make you an expert in all of Greek history—but, instead, to familiarize you with major ideas, figures, and movements in rhetorical thought.

And that also means, of course, that we’re being selective. There’s always more we could say, always more speakers and writers and scholars we could cite—but this would quickly spiral into unwieldiness if we did. My goal for today is to help you understand rhetoric’s origins, the major debates about its value, and, of course, the key strands of rhetoric that continue to be useful to us today—not that you can name the Ten Attic Orators and their major works. We’ll get you the interesting and useful things if you’re in it for the theory of writing, and we’ll probably point you in the direction of more if you want to get into the historical details yourself.

But, with that, I think it’s time we head to the ancient city-states of Greece. 

Kaput: All aboard the least interesting time machine journey you’ll ever take…

At the beginning of our story, we find a loose collection of fairly isolated city-states engaged in the business of raiding each other. As historians of rhetoric Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg put it, in such conditions:

military prowess was highly valued. A few families in each city-state were slightly more well off than the rest by virtue of holding more land, and they could afford heavy weapons and the leisure to train in using them. These families occupied a powerful position in the city-state, and the city-state king had to defer to them as counselors. Oligarchy thus became the typical form of government in the early city-states.

As a starting place, notice where political power lay—wealth and violence—coercion, in other words. Political power came from owning enough military power to get your way. Over time, however, the rule of the oligarchs became less sustainable, and we saw two important shifts in government. For one, we saw the increase in written codes of law: not only was literacy on the rise at the time, but written laws helped to temper the dependence on tyrannical whims. And then, as city-states became more prosperous and populous, people began to find power in numbers, which of course, led to early democracy. In such a context, individual citizens were empowered to make political and legal decisions, whether debating policy with other citizens or defending themselves in the courts before massive juries of their peers.

Here, political power came not from just owning the most swords but from giving the most convincing speeches. With so much political opportunity to be found in oratory, a rising middle class wanted education that would enable them to to climb socially—much to the discontent of the aristocrats of the time. Nevertheless, the demand for education grew, attracting a class of teachers to Athens, among whom were the sophists.

[The Sophists]

The sophists were wandering teachers and early philosophers. As George A. Kennedy points out, many of them were foreigners, which meant they weren’t able to participate in Athenian democracy, but they could find opportunities for themselves as teachers and speech writers.

And find opportunities they did: where people wanted education in political oratory, the sophists found great success as teachers of rhetoric, offering to train those with political aspirations in the arts of making persuasive speeches.

Unfortunately, because the sophists attracted a lot of disdain, many of their actual works have been lost to history, but we do have a good idea from some suriving texts of what they believed and taught.

Gorgias was a prominent sophist, and some of his important speeches have survived. Perhaps his most famous, the Encomium of Helen, was a speech that praised Helen of Troy and attempted to clear her name of the generational blame she bore for more or less causing the Trojan War in Gorgias’ words:

It is the duty of one and the same man both to speak the needful rightly and to refute [the unrightfully spoken. This it is right to refute] those who rebuke Helen, a woman about whom the testimony of inspired poets has become univocal and unanimous as had the ill omen of her name, which has become a reminder of misfortunes. For my part, by introducing some reasoning into my speech, I wish to free the accused of blame and, having reproved her detractors as prevaricators and proved the truth, to free her from their ignorance.

So here, from the opening gesture of the speech, we see a core element of sophistic rhetoric: arguing from opposite sides of an issue. If everyone says that Helen is a bad lady, a sophist is going to try to make the argument that she isn’t.

In fact, a prominent sophistic text of unknown authorship, the Dissoi Logoi, embodies that spirit expressed by Gorgias. The Dissoi Logoi consists mostly of catalogues of arguments on opposite sides of a litany of questions. For example, “It is bad for everyone else, but good for the cobbler if footwear wears out or gets ripped apart” and “It is shameful to run away from one’s enemies, but seemly to run away from one’s competitors in a stadium.”

Well, the idea, of course, is that what counts as good or shameful or true is, in many ways, dependent on circumstance. It’s embarrassing, according to the anonymous sophist, to run away from your enemies—unless they’re your enemies in a race. Then, running is expected.

So Gorgias, in attempting to absolve Helen of her blame for the Trojan War, could be attempting to show that the conventional wisdom, the received truth of her culpability, isn’t so ironclad—that there is, in fact, room to interpret events differently. Implicit in that gesture, then, is the idea that truth is a far more flexible category than many ancients had previously thought.

In fact, many of the sophists believed that a knowledge of absolute truth was beyond human reach—and that the best we could do was to approximate the truth as far as we could see it. In fact, Gorgias is reported to have argued that, if anything exists at all, nothing can really be known about it.

But even to a less extreme degree, the sophists understood that all of our knowledge—and especially our deliberations about what is and isn’t true—is filtered through language, which, because it carries all kinds of baggage and associations that we can’t control, unavoidably reflects and deflects the truth. So, at a minimum, absolute truth is always out of reach because the imprecision of language keeps it that way.

So it’s no surprise that sophists also put a lot of energy into studying language. If language cannot be objective, then we need, they argued, to learn how to pay critical attention to how language works. And, again, we see evidence of that in Gorgias’ Encomium:

To understand that persuasion, when added to speech, is wont also to impress the soul as it wishes, one must study: first, the words of astronomers who, substituting opinion for opinion, taking away one but creating another, make what is incredible and unclear seem true to the eyes of opinion; then, second, logically necessary debates in which a single speech, written with art but not spoken with truth, bends a great crowd and persuades; [and] third, the verbal disputes of philosophers in which the swiftness of thought is also shown making the belief in an opinion subject to easy change.

Things that seem unbelievable and obscure become scientific fact through the language of astronomers, insincere speeches can nevertheless delight a crowd, and philosophers—in all their supposed search for truth—change and reconfigure definitions of truth in all their back-and-forth. 

Kaput: Too true, one day alchemy is in, and the next, I’m trapped in a skull on some wannabe sophist’s bookshelf…what a tangled web we weave…

Tangled indeed. Since absolute truth is out of reach, all we have is language, so, as the sophists argued, we’ll get closer to truth if we have a solid understanding of how language works.

And Gorgias was nothing if not a virtuoso of language. George A Kennedy remarks that his surviving works all demonstrate “different, although always exaggerated, self-consciously artistic styles in different genres,” and Kennedy goes on to describe how his distinctive stylistic techniques—contrasting thoughts, clauses of equal length, rhyme at the ends of clauses, and “fondness for sound play of all sorts” became known as Gorgianic figures, indicating just how much of an influence Gorgias had on rhetorical practitioners in the ancient world.

Related to their nuanced approach to truth and focus on training linguistic and discursive skills, the sophists also set their work apart with the concept of Kairos or the opportune moment. In other words, a rhetor does not just have the ability to navigate the probabilities and uncertainties of human society or the ability to speak with persuasive force—the rhetor also has the ability to find the right time and place to employ their skills and knowledge, to speak up when it will make the greatest difference. Though less apparent in Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, it was nonetheless an important feature of sophistic rhetoric—and one we’ll see again.

But, of course, when you’re someone who gives fantastically entertaining speeches at festivals and makes enough money teaching rhetoric to commission a gold statue of yourself, your’re bound to attract some critics—and Gorgias may have attracted no harsher critic than the philosopher Plato.

Kaput: Whoa, whoa, whoa--gold statues? Now we’re talking…

[The Critics]

Plato probably needs little introduction—he was a philosopher as we think of the term today, a student of Socrates, and, as I just mentioned, a harsh critic of the sophists. And it makes sense: Plato was an idealist at best and maybe a dogmatist at worst. He believed that there were absolute truths, ideal forms, and transcendent reality beyond the senses. So you can probably already see the collision course that we’re on with the sophists.

And Plato didn’t steer away from the confrontation: he wrote two major works interrogating rhetoric and the practices of the sophists—the first, a dialogue entitled Gorgias and the second, Phaedrus.

In the Gorgias, we see a back-and-forth between Socrates and who else but Gorgias. Socrates wants to get to the bottom of this rhetoric stuff that Gorgias is doing and asks him a series of questions about the nature of rhetoric. For example:

Socrates: Come now, answer me in the same way about rhetoric: with what particular thing is its skill concerned?

Gorgias: With speech.

Socrates: What kind of speech, Gorgias? Do you mean that which shows sick people by what regimen they could get well?

Gorgias: No.

Socrates: Then rhetoric is not concerned with all kinds of speech.

Gorgias: No, I say.

Socrates: Yet it does make men able to speak.

Gorgias: Yes.

Socrates: And to understand also the things about which they speak.

Gorgias: Of course.

Throughout, Gorgias appears to lack any kind of systematic, theoretical understanding of rhetoric, and he’s shown walking into Socrates’ traps in a fated effort to defend the art of rhetoric. In the end, Socrates asserts that rhetoric isn’t an art—but a form of flattery. Rhetoric is an empty alternative to philosophy in the way that cosmetics are an empty substitute for health and cookery is an empty alternative to medicine.

Philosophy is good for the soul. Rhetoric is a sham, an idea that was loudly proclaimed in the Gorgias and that resonated through the ages. Philosophers seek truth. Rhetoricians aim to flatter regardless of truth.

Even as recently as a couple of years ago, I knew a philosopher who said that philosophy is the last discipline that still believes truth exists and who readily dismissed anything that didn’t meet his standards of philosophical rigor as sophistry. Plato showed up, and he showed up to win—and, as a result, Plato’s works have remained relevant to academic practice for thousands of years while most sophistic texts were lost.

Of course, Plato’s absolute certainty about the sham that was rhetoric was misguided. As our two historians of rhetoric (Bizzell and Herzberg) point out:

Plato faults the Sophists for not using rhetoric to try to discover absolute truth. He ignores the fact that they do not do so because they do not believe that absolute truth is accessible to humans and suggests that the Sophists’ neglect of it comes from a frivolous, or worse, malicious intent simply to entertain and manipulate their audiences. 

So, educated as we are in the sophistic ways, we can see Plato’s error pretty clearly. He was so convinced of his own position that he failed to consider alternative views: the sophists weren’t ignoring truth in order to manipulate people—they just didn’t believe that absolute truth was accessible, so why spend your time trying to get something you can’t have? Instead, the sophists wanted to deal with the limited, contingent truths of real life.

No, I don’t know what the absolute ideal essence of chair-ness is, but I do know that we have a school that needs chairs and a limited budget—so let’s try to negotiate a good deal for the school. That’s not a manipulative refusal of truth—it’s a move to prioritize practical action over abstract ideals.

Kaput: But we’re not taking manipulation off the table completely right…?

We’ll talk about that later. For now, though, Plato eventualy  kind of came around to rhetoric—but, of course, not after the damage had been done. More accurately, Plato maintained his dismissal of the sophists but proposed a version of rhetoric that could and did align itself with the kind of absolute truth that he valued.

In the dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates speaks back and forth with, you guessed it, Phaedrus. As they discuss the nature of love and qualities of different kinds of lovers, it becomes clear that Plato is building a theory of good rhetoric—a form of the art that isn’t a sham like the sophistry he criticizes in the Gorgias.

In his influential reading of the Phaedrus, Richard Weaver summarizes the ideal rhetorician in Plato’s view like this: “We now see the true rhetorician as a noble lover of the good, who works through dialectic and through poetic or analogical association. However he is compelled to modulate by the peculiar features of an occasion, this is his method”

Or, as Kennedy puts it, “True rhetoric..becomes the method whereby the philosopher and his pupil free themselves from conventional beliefs and all worldly encumbrances in the pursuit and eventual attainment of transcendent absolute truth.”

So, by the time Plato writes Phaedrus, around ten years after Gorgias, he has articulated a role for rhetoric. Rather than being focused on display speeches at festivals or political maneuverings, true rhetoric, in Plato’s estimation, is a much more intimate affair—a search for truth shared between philosopher and student, modeled as it were by Phaedrus and Socrates as they make speeches about love to one another in order to ascertain its true nature.

But, I don’t know, that seems to be pretty far from what we normally think of when we think of rhetoric. Like, thanks Plato, for trying to rehabilitate rhetoric, but your version doesn’t really work like it’s supposed to.

However, while Plato may have been the most influential critic of the sophists and their brand of rhetoric, he was not the only one. Isocrates, was a rhetorician who set up a school to teach philosophy—not the philosophy of Plato, but something else, and there’s evidence that he sets up his version of rhetoric as a response to the criticisms Plato leveled against it in the Gorgias.

“That dialogue objects to rhetoric as lacking any distinct subject matter, thus not a form of knowledge; Isocrates sought to provide an appropriate subject matter and teach knowledge of it. The subject he came to favor was Panhellenism, the cultural unity of all Greeks and the development of international policy to preserve and enhance it” (Kennedy 44)

So Isocrates, like the sophists, taught rhetoric as a cultural and political tool—but he also went to great lengths to distance himself from the sophists. Or, I mean, one of his two famous works is called Against the Sophists, so it kind of seems like he didn’t want to be associated with them despite the similarities.

“But these professors have gone so far in their lack of scruple,” Isocates charges, “that they attempt to persuade our young men that if they will only study under them they will know what to do in life and through this knowledge will become happy and prosperous. More than that, although they set themselves up as masters and dispensers of goods so precious, they are not ashamed of asking for them a price of three of four minae!”

Isocrates goes on to complain that the sophists “are applying the analogy of an art with hard and fast rules to a creative process,” pointing out that fixed rules are not useful or applicable in the art of discourse, which depends on context. And he, delightfully, writes that “those who make use of such analogies ought more justly to pay out than to accept fees, since they attempt to teach others when they are themselves in great need of instruction.”

Isocrates complains about the sophists’ “rash promises” and says that people should instead try to learn from those who have knowledge of the material, including how “to choose from these elements those which should be employed for each subject, to join them together, to arrange them properly, and also, not to miss what the occasion demands but appropriately to adorn the whole speech with striking thoughts and to clothe it in flowing and melodious phrase.” “These things,” he says, “require much study and are the task of a vigorous and imaginative mind” setting a high standard for student and teacher alike.

Ultimately, where Plato saw his approach to philosophy as a search for ultimate truth, Isocrates was more concerned with the practical problems of living. As Bizzell and Herzberg put it: “Isocrates argues that public business won’t wait while the philosopher pursues abstruse studies.” Think of the Kairos!

But, at the age of 82, Isocrates realized that people didn’t like him because he was rich from teaching, so he wrote a speech called Antidosis as a justification of his work as an educator. In addition to laying out his plan for education, which could be an early model for liberal education as we know it now, Isocrates emphasizes the importance of personal virtue and goodness in rhetorical training—a clear response to the mistrust of sophistic views of truth. He says:

And one who wishes to persuade others will not be negligent of his own virtue, but will pay special attention to it that he may get the finest reputation among his fellow-citizens. Who does not know that words seem more true when spoken by those who lead good lives than by those whose lives have been criticized and that proofs based on a person’s life have greater power than those provided by speech? Thus, the stronger a person desires to persuade hearers, the more he will work to be honorable and good and to have a good reputation among the citizens.

Whatever misgivings Isocrates may have had about his reputation near the end of his life, his lasting influence on rhetoric and education are unmistakable. As George Kennedy points out, “Modern scholars often distinguish an Isocratean tradition in classical rhetoric, contrasted with an Aristotelian tradition,” which put more emphasis on writing over speaking, style over argument, and smoothness over forcefulness.

Which, speaking of Aristotle…

[The systematizer]

Now for as much as Aristotle was Plato’s student, he didn’t share his teacher’s obstinate rejection of rhetoric or his theoretical commitment to idealism. Aristotle was and is regarded as a foundational figure in the history of philosophy, and it’s probably for that reason that his Rhetoric survives.

Aristotle’s Rhetoric was never published, and it’s often presumed that the text as we know it consists of lecture notes taken by a student. So, while Aristotle taught rhetoric, he apparently didn’t publish much of what he taught, and he also didn’t have a reputation as a practitioner of rhetoric. Where Gorgias was a renowned speaker who taught others his craft and Isocrates was a skillful writer who imparted his wisdom, Aristotle was more of a scholar of rhetoric, studying it to understand it rather than to practice it. And that’s reflected in his understanding of rhetoric, which he defines, not as an art of speaking or persuasion but as an ability to find the available means of persuasion in a given situation.

I don’t want to spend too much time talking about the Rhetoric because, well, for one, I’ve covered it at length in a playlist all its own. And, maybe more interestingly, its actual influence on ancient rhetoric is fairly limited. As Kennedy notes: “After the death of Theophrastus [Aristotle’s student] the original text of On Rhetoric…was apparently packed up and sent off to Asia Minor, where the books disappeared from view until early in the first century” He then goes on to say, “Although interest in the text and references to it increased somewhat in the Renaissance, it was not until modern times that On Rhetoric began to be appreciated as a fundamental statement of its subject.”

Kaput: Boy, I know what that’s like…

In other words, as interesting as Aristotle’s Rhetoric is, it managed not to play a very large role in rhetorical theory and practice until modern times—it matters more to us than it would have to the Romans or anyone else in between.

That said, though, Aristotle does make some key points that are worth pointing out. If I had to say what the value of the text is, I think Aristotle does a capable job of synthesizing and resolving the debate that his teacher Plato started.

So, for example, Aristotle draws a more careful distinction between rhetoric and philosophical dialectic than Plato. For Aristotle, rhetoric is not the sham version of true philosophy. Instead, Aristotle recognizes that they’re different tools suited to different jobs.

“Rhetoric is useful,” he writes, “[first] because the true and the just are by nature stronger than their opposites…. Of course the underlying facts are not equally good in each case; but true and better ones are by nature always more…persuasive.”

So here, Aristotle addresses and largely resolves the concern that Sophists do not care or are not committed to truth of any kind. Rhetoric is not a sham that is ambivalent to truth—so, when Gorgias is defending Helen’s reputation, he is not just flouting cultural norms to flout them. Instead, as Aristotle outlines, rhetoric works to find truth by weighing opposing positions against each other. The truth, he argues, is always, inherently and unavoidably more persuasive than falsehood, so rhetoric’s ability to argue from both sides of an issue is a fundamental part of its search for truth.

There’s a clear link to the version of rhetoric that Plato envisions in the Phaedrus here: by giving speeches on opposite sides of an issue, rhetoricians can present the best possible case for each side and weigh them against one another. Because truth is fundamentally more persuasive, it will always be possible to make a better argument for the truth—present the best opposing arguments against each other for long enough, and the truth will rise to the surface.

So, again, when Gorgias defends Helen, he’s not just sticking a finger in the eye of decency and culture—he’s inviting a rigorous examination of Helen’s reputation. Let someone argue that her shame is well deserved—but it ought to be something that’s been tested through debate and not just accepted tacitly or by tradition. If Helen is to blame, that argument will win out in the end—but the truth is unknowable if the debate doesn’t happen.

Rhetoric is also useful, Aristotle says, because “even if we were to have the most exact knowledge, it would not be very easy for us in speaking to use it to persuade [some audiences].”

Here, Aristotle acknowledges that, while the truth is inherently more persuasive, it is not always sufficiently persuasive by itself. Consider his teacher’s teacher, Socrates, who, though he claimed to possess ultimate truth—or at least the philosophical means of discovering the truth—was ultimately rejected by society and forced to drink poison. Though Aristotle doesn’t make any references to Socrates in this capacity, the point remains: you can insist on having the truth and refuse to do anything to make that truth more appealing or interesting or persuasive on principle—but some audiences aren’t moved by the promise of truth by itself. Or, to borrow from Weaver again, “rhetoric…consists of truth plus its artful presentation.”

But the third point of rhetoric’s usefulness is that, as Aristotle says, “Speech based on knowledge is teaching, but teaching is impossible [with some audiences]; rather, it is necessary for…speeches…to be formed on the basis of common [beliefs]…about communication with a crowd.”

Plato’s concept of good rhetoric involved a philosopher and student making and critiquing speeches one-on-one in order to ascertain the absolute truth of things. As utopian as that sounds, it totally ignores the main application and purpose for rhetoric, which Aristotle acknowledges here: rhetoric is not a methodology for doing philosophy between and among trained philosophers. It’s a methodology for addressing crowds and mobilizing social action.

Like Isocrates said, the business of the city isn’t going to slow down and wait for the philosophers to figure out their answer. Rhetoric is a tool for addressing the public, people who do not have specialized training in the matter at hand and who need to be persuaded to take action.

Again, we’re back at our roots in Athenian democracy: rhetorical practice is not about uncovering transcendent truth it’s about leveraging as much truth as we can get in the moment to persuade enough of our fellow-citizens to vote a certain way about imports or defense or whatever else. As much as Plato prefers the tools of philosophy, those tools are not well suited to that kind of in-the-moment democratic decision making.

And, from there, Aristotle, tireless systematizer that he is, goes on to catalogue so many aspects of rhetoric—dividing rhetoric into judicial, deliberative, and epideictic genres, categorizing rhetorical appeals according to emotions, reason, and character, listing and describing so many different emotional states that audiences can be in and more.

However, lest we mistake Aristotle’s work as exonerating the sophists—he still holds sophistry as a corrupted opposite of philosophy but recognizes rhetoric as its own thing. So, perhaps most properly, we could say that Aristotle’s most significant contribution is not that he gave the sophists legitimacy but that he separated rhetoric from the sophists and legitimized it as an art.

Or, at least, he did in the eyes of modern readers. Nobody seemed too worked up about rhetoric’s legitimacy because they kept practicing it in force even without reading his account of the art.

[Conclusion]

All this in a little over a hundred years! From the itinerant sophists making money off ambitious Athenians to the grouchy gus Plato and through to Aristotle, we’ve traced the beginnings of rhetorical practice to the most significant surviving scholarly treatise on rhetorical theory from the time.  It’s a lot, so I want to slow down before we quit and point out some important ideas that originated with the Sophists and that continue to resonate with rhetorical practice and scholarship today.

Kaput: You mean I still can’t go home? 

You are home.

Kaput: Yeah, I mean me as a metaphor for the viewer. You’re really holding people here like they can’t just click away at any moment.

Well, hang on, because this is the good stuff.

Kaput: Oh, you hold off until now.

Just, settle down.

First, rhetoric’s origins in Greece are inseparable from early democracy. Where the people were rejecting the tyranny of oligarchs and the coercive power of military force, they found instead a tool in rhetoric to persuade rather than force—to govern by consensus rather than coercion. At its core, rhetoric maintains that vision: talking to each other is the antidote to violence. We don’t have to fight if we can persuade.

The sophists got a lot of grief for rejecting the notion of absolute truth. That’s less strange to modern audiences, but it might still seem odd or even dangerous to some. Whether you claim absolute truth through philosophies or religions or scientific inquiry, it’s a fundamental reality that absolute truth is more or less out of reach—and it’s certainly not universally acknowledged. You may have absolute conviction that your religious tenets are absolutely true, but your neighbor may not—and a flexible, rhetorical approach to those differing perceptions of truth is healthy.

Bizzell and Herzberg explain: 

The Sophists’ ability to see many sides of an issue encouraged cultural tolerance, which would be a stabilizing factor in a diverse society, as Athens increasingly was because of the influx of foreigners seeking to enjoy Athenian cultural and political advantages or to avoid the ravages of war elsewhere…. They saw the possibility of communities uniting, not on grounds of a common (Greek) culture, but on grounds of a common recognition that humanity could express itself in many ways and was not subject to an absolute standard that could mark some ways for annihilation.

By arguing that absolute truth was beyond human reach, the sophists weren’t advocating for moral anarchy. Instead, they had developed rhetorical methods for tolerating difference in a sustainable way. By acknowledging that human perceptions of truth are flexible and contingent based on their circumstances, we can avoid being scandalized by a difference in customs or ideology and instead keep working toward a shared society.

When we think of rhetoric, it’s easy to think about debate and to assume a worldview of division, but that couldn’t be further from the reality of rhetorical practice. Rhetoric is not an art of debate for its own sake—not a game of beating others so that you can win. The sophists embraced Pan-Hellenism, Isocrates envisioned a rhetoric that could foster virtue and unite Greece, Aristotle recognized rhetoric’s ability to negotiate disagreement and arrive at truth, and even Plato came around to a version of rhetoric that united teacher and student in their quest for transcendent certainty.

More recently, the modern scholar A.L Becker offered his rhetorically minded approach to linguistics as a means of “understanding those we have trouble understanding, in distant cultures or right at home.” From its origins in ancient Greece to today, rhetoric has not been a tool of division but a tool of unity, a means to consider and understand a variety of viewpoints, to put forth our best arguments, and to negotiate the differences we run into not with swords but with speeches.

As misunderstood as the sophists were and continue to be—their approach to differences of opinion, the arts of language, and the ability to intervene at opportune moments left a significant rhetorical legacy that not only shaped the rhetorical thinkers of Greece but continued to echo through the ages.

So, yeah, the sophists had their problems—and everybody seemed to get mad at anybody who made money off teaching, so some things never change. But it wouldn’t be wrong to say that they got a lot of important things right, too, things that their successors enlarged, clarified, and refined over the course of rhetoric’s first century or so.

But that really is a lot—and, again, there’s so much more that we could discuss, but we’ve got the major pieces in place. When we come back to this series, we’ll be meeting in Rome, so have some fun using rhetoric to unite rather than divide, and I’ll see you then.