Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece

273 Pages·2014·1.17 MB·English

by  Nathan Crick

r h e to r i c & p o w e r
The Drama of
Classical Greece
nathan crick
The University of South Carolina Press
© 2015 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Crick, Nathan, author.
Rhetoric and Power : the drama of classical Greece / Nathan Crick.
pages cm—(Studies in rhetoric/communication)
ISBN 978-1-61117-395-6 (hardbound : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-61117-396-3 (ebook) 
1. Greek drama—History and criticism. 2. Rhetoric, Ancient. I. Title. II. Series:
Studies in rhetoric/communication.
PA3133.C75 2014  882’.0109—dc23
2014007286
To William, Dean, Sofia, and Leo, may you each find your own Ithaca

contents
Series Editor’s Preface  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction  1
Chapter 1
Homer’s Iliad and the Epic Tradition of Heroic Eloquence  11
Chapter 2
Heraclitus and the Revelation of Logos  25
Chapter 3
Aeschylus’s Persians and the Birth of Tragedy  43
Chapter 4
Protagoras and the Promise of Politics  62
Chapter 5
Gorgias’s Helen and the Powers of Action and Fabrication  77
Chapter 6
Thucydides and the Political History of Power  96
Chapter 7
Aristophanes’s Birds and the Corrective of Comedy  118
Chapter 8
Plato’s Protagoras and the Art of Tragicomedy  142
viii Contents
Chapter 9
Isocrates’s “Nicocles” and the Hymn to Hegemony  171
Chapter 10
Aristotle on Rhetoric and Civilization  198
Conclusion  218
Notes  227
Bibliography  247
Index  257
series editor’s preface
Nathan Crick’s Rhetoric and Power: The Drama of Classical Greece tells the story
of how rhetoric emerged as a theory and practice in the centuries leading to
Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Crick examines in detail a series of foundational texts in
Greek thought based on an understanding of the difference between violence
and power, and of the fundamental relation of rhetoric with power. These ear-
lier texts were serving cultural, aesthetic, and intellectual projects of their own,
which Crick honors by refusing to regard them as simply struggling to articu-
late what was later to become rhetorical theory. At the same time, Crick shows
how these early texts prepared the intellectual ground for rhetoric as it did
emerge, under changing political and cultural conditions, as a discipline in its
own right.
Each chapter explores in detail a key text in Greek thought: Homer’s Iliad,
the logos of Heraclitus, Aeschylus’s The Persians and Prometheus Bound, surviv-
ing fragments of Protagoras, Gorgias’s Helen, the history of Thucydides, Aris-
tophanes’s The Birds, Plato’s Protagoras, Isocrates’s “Nicocles,” and Aristotle’s
Rhetoric. The chapters serve as both readings of the chosen text and theoretical
explorations of the growing store of resources for thinking about power and
symbolic action. In addition Crick gives us a highly informative tour of modern
classical scholarship and a lucid, dramatic sketch of the centuries of Greek his-
tory from Homer to Aristotle and beyond. Nathan Crick’s Rhetoric and Power is
an exciting story of early Greek history and thought and a compelling exposi-
tion of the theory of rhetoric.
Thomas W. Benson
Series Editor

acknowledgments
It was at the end of my senior year in high school when I first encountered
Plato. My grandparents Leo and Elsie Conti had a beautiful wood bookcase
at the top of their stairs whose contents had remained unopened for decades.
Until that year, I had never really paid any attention to these books, treating
them as background in a house that I always considered filled with antiques. A
stately, stucco home built in the Tuscan style, it was the product of the labor of
my great-grandfather who came to the United States from Italy as a teenager,
alone, and who built the house in Springfield, Massachusetts, with his own
hands after founding a masonry business. Naturally, such a home, filled with
decades of artifacts and memories, was a perfect place for a child to ransack
for props for imaginative play, particularly in the basement with its fireplace,
its potato cellar, its furnace, and its piles of dusty boxes and pickling jars.
And it was good for stories, too. Sometimes, when Leo Conti was in the mood,
he would corner the grandchildren and make them listen to him praise the
Romans for their invention of the arch and their general possession of that rare
character trait that Leo called “fire in the belly.” Then he would challenge us to
try to punch him in his sizable belly or try to squeeze his giant hand until he
gave in—something which not even my older cousins who joined the military
could ever actually make him do. One thing Leo never did was give in.
As I was going off to college, however, I felt the urge to take something else
with me from that house along with my fond childhood memories. So I took
two books, You Can’t Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe, and The Last Days
of Plato, a paperback which included the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. The first
book was a sprawling exploration of the upheavals of American society dur-
ing the 1920s and 1930s, before and after the stock market crash which crushed
the illusion of unending prosperity and forced American artists like Wolfe into
literary exile as they attempted to envision a new future for the country. The
second was a dramatization of philosophy in action, of a life acted according
to principle in a time of war, greed, and hypocrisy. It was a vivid demonstra-
tion that ideas are weapons, that virtue is emancipatory, and that artists are the
educators of history. When I read both books that summer, I did not understand
xii Acknowledgments
much about literary criticism or the nuances of Platonic dialectic, nor did I care
to. I read those books for one simple reason—because they were artifacts that
found their way somehow into my family’s biography, linking that place of
my childhood to a larger cosmos of which I, too, would eventually have some
part to play. I was ready to expand my imagination beyond the confines of my
safe, rural upbringing to catch a glimpse of the possibilities of life and death, of
tragic suffering and comic adventure.
The impulse that led me to take The Last Days of Plato off of that bookcase
at the top of the stairs is not so different from what drove my grandfather to
tell stories about the Romans. We look to the drama of ancient history to give
us license to imagine possibilities that we often close off in our own lives once
our childhood fantasies subside. When I told a good friend of mine (also an
academic) that I was writing about Classical Greece, he remarked that such a
project would be “like taking a trip to some beautiful island somewhere where
everything is different yet somehow the same.” Of course, it goes without say-
ing that this beautiful island was also the scene of plagues, burning cities,
executions, slavery, and military conquest—but to the modern imagination, it
is a beautiful island nonetheless. And we cannot ever seem to abandon this
beautiful island. Time and time again, there are movements within academic
disciplines of all types to simply abandon the classics as irrelevant and to con-
centrate on cutting-edge modern scholarship, only to find that we ended up
back where we started. Then there is a call for a revival of some tendency that
was first articulated in a classical author, and the cycle starts all over again. The
reason is plain. Whenever we seem to have run out of inspiration, energy,
passion, or hope, we always turn to the past for rejuvenation. Like a child
exploring a grandparent’s basement, we always locate undiscovered objects
that stimulate the imagination with sudden possibilities.
Although I am forever grateful to the lasting influence of my family, this
book was not the product of an accidental reading of Plato’s dialogues. It was
in large part the result of the Fates guiding me to John Poulakos, who I can
confidently say possesses that “fire in the belly” that would have impressed Leo
Conti. John’s primary goal as an advisor is simply to inspire a love of wisdom
in his students, an unabashed passion for ideas that are validated not by their
popularity but by their power and their virtue. In a university environment
that judges authority by the length of one’s list of secondary sources, it is truly
emancipatory to be mentored by one who cares as little for popularity as does
Socrates on trial. I am forever grateful to have crossed paths with someone who
combines the intellect of Athena with the creativity of the Muses.
My other source of inspiration has been the graduate students with whom
I have been fortunate to work at Louisiana State University. Indeed, much of
this book has been composed in the context of conversations with them in the