Jeremy Clarkson has just been sacked from his job as a presenter on the BBC’s Top Gear.  (This is a hugely popular programme about cars with a vast national and global audience.  As an export and saleable format, it makes a lot of money for the BBC, not to mention its well-paid presenters).  For the uninitiated, Clarkson had been suspended by the corporation while it investigated an incident which occurred at a North Yorkshire hotel earlier this month. Clarkson and his Top Gear  colleagues were staying at the hotel after a day of filming.  The investigation has now found that Clarkson lost his temper on arriving at the hotel to discover that hot food was no longer being served.  Apparently, he wanted steak and chips.  He blamed one of the show’s producers Oisin Tymon for not arranging a meal. He loudly harangued Tymon for many minutes using derogatory and abusive language and threatened to have him sacked. Clarkson also punched Tymon in the face.  Clarkson himself reported the so-called ‘fracas’ to senior BBC executives.  If you don’t live in the UK or follow Clarkson’s antics, you also need to know that he was on a final warning from his employers due to previous on-camera comments using racist language or ethnic or national stereotyping.  Both he and his show have polarized audience reaction between fans who are prepared to sign petitions demanding that Clarkson be re-instated and those of us who cannot abide the man.

Anyway, the important question which no one is asking about this Clarkson business is: ‘what would have happened to Clarkson in classical Athens?’

Jeremy Clarkson (Photo: Rex Features)

It’s a hard one to answer straightforwardly on account of the fact that democratic Athens did not have flagship television programmes about motoring, but I do think that Clarkson’s behaviour (both admitted and alleged) is ‘good to think with’ for anyone interested in comparing the ancient and modern rhetorics around the excesses of famous and successful men.

The incident which immediately springs to mind as a comparison is as follows. At the Athenian theatrical festival of the Great Dionysia in 348 BC, the prominent politician and orator Demosthenes was punched in the face by a chap called Meidias.  It’s not 100% certain that Meidias actually stood trial for this, but Demosthenes certainly started proceedings against him and wrote a lengthy prosecution speech which survives to this day.Demosthenes, marble statue, detail of a Roman copy of a Greek original of c. 280 bce; in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

Now, there are obvious differences between Demosthenes and Mr Tymon.  First, Demosthenes was a wealthy, famous and powerful politician operating at the centre of Athenian democratic politics and international  diplomacy.  Mr Tymon was an unheard-of BBC employee until he had his lip split by Mr Clarkson.  Secondly, Demosthenes was not a junior co-worker of Meidias’.  Rather, they were both prominent and very wealthy political operators who had held various public offices. Demosthenes claims that the two men had already found themselves at loggerheads over (for example) Demosthenes’ public liability for taxation based on Demosthenes’ private assets (and Medias’ alleged invasion of Demosthenes’ house in connection with it) and in public debates about military policy abroad.  There are some ground to suppose that Demosthenes is exaggerating or even fabricating aspects of this back story.  However, it does look like Meidias was about ten years older than Demosthenes and that age difference may be important.

The way Demosthenes tells it – and we don’t have Meidias’ side of the story – the long-running antipathy between himself and Meidias came to a head when Demosthenes became a chorus-producer of a men’s dithyrambic chorus at the Dionysia festival of 348.  ‘Ooh!’ perhaps you cry, excitedly, before adding:  ‘Demosthenes was a producer when he got punched and so was Oisin Tymon! Uncanny!’  Well, yes, but it’s really not the same thing, I’m afraid.  Being a ‘chorus-producer’ (chorēgos) in the theatrical festivals at Athens meant that you were very rich and periodically required (but often volunteered) to organize and fund the training, costuming and maintenance of a dithyrambic, tragic or comic chorus.  It involved considerable financial outlay, especially if you wanted to make sure you got the best training staff, facilities and costumes with a view to actually winning.  A dithyrambic chorus was fifty-strong, so when Demosthenes tells us in his speech that he provided his chorus with special robes and gold crowns, he’s telling us that he put a lot of Wonga into the production.  But if the chorus you had funded won its category of contest, it boosted your public profile and standing enormously. We know that winning chorus-producers of Dithyramb received tripods as prizes and these were set up on permanent monuments to remind everyone of the victory.  A young Pericles was the chorus-producer for the tetralogy which included Aeschylus’ Persians in 472 BC and we know how successful he became.  (For more on all of  this, and much more besides, see the wonderful work of Peter Wilson).

Demosthenes claims that Meidias was out to sabotage Demosthenes’ efforts with the chorus from the start. He tried to destroy the gold crowns when they were still in the goldsmith’s shop, he bribed the chorus trainer to do a bad job  (and the piper had to step in to prevent disaster), he intimidated the judges of the contest…the list goes on.  On the day of the performance itself, it seems that the sight of Demosthenes strutting around the auditorium in his fine, official, chorus-producer’s robes was too much for Meidias and he punched him in full view of thousands of spectators.

Perhaps, in reality, Meidias and  Demosthenes bumped into each other in a crowded aisle and Demosthenes said something rude to provoke his rival. But Demosthenes’ speech cleverly constructs a very different reality.  For a start, Demosthenes makes quite a fuss of the fact that, although it would have been excusable to hit Meidias back, and he was certainly capable of doing so, he showed self-restraint out of respect for law, order and democratic processes of dispute-settlement instead.   And  in order to prevent the impression that this was just an intra-elite spat of little wider public interest, Demosthenes paints Meidias’ assault on him as a symptom of Meidias’ more fundamental, ongoing and politically-charged hubris.  Because of his wealth, power and high status, Meidias believes himself to be above the law.  Both this and other acts of violence and self-assertion against fellow-citizens are signs of his contempt for ordinary people and their dignity.  Demosthenes oscillates between representing himself as just an ordinary member of ‘the people’ and conceding his elite status in order to explain why he is able to, and must, stand up to the bully Meidias when others dared not do so.

Demosthenes’ overriding point is that men like Meidias must be brought to book, not because of one isolated act of violence against another wealthy man, but because that act forms part of a pattern of behaviour which betokens a dangerous, hubristic attitude towards the rest of society.  In the face of Meidias’ individual strength, that  bringing-to-book has to be job of society as a whole. As Demosthenes puts it:

‘All this [the story of Meidias and his supporters], is frightening to each one of the rest of you, living individually as best you can. That’s why you should unite: individually each of you is weaker than they are, either in friends or in resources or in something else; but united you’ll be stronger than each of them and you’ll put a stop to their hubris. […] If a man is so powerful that he can prevent each of us from getting justice from him, now, since he is in our grasp, he must be punished jointly by all for all, as a common enemy of the state.’

Demosthenes’ further point is that Meidias and his ilk are ultimately anti-democratic in their attitude and thus need to be made an example of.

Now one might ask whether the HSBC bank and its tax-avoiding clients or the CEOs and shareholders of tax-avoiding multinational companies who exploit their low-paid workers are not a more appropriate focus for this sort of public forensic outrage than the likes of Jeremy Clarkson.  But Demosthenes’ speech – for all its self-aggrandizing motives –  makes a very compelling case for seeing Clarkson’s physical and verbal abuse as more than just  a clear breach of ‘good practice at work’.  Demosthenes reminds us that Clarkson’s outburst was more than just the sign of a quick temper or a certain boorishness.   Rather, it also showed contemptuous disregard for the fundamental dignity of the person whom it targeted. That dignity is rooted in, and should be guaranteed by, the principles and rights of democratic citizenship and equality under the law.  Demosthenes reminds us that it is very dangerous politically  to condone or turn a blind eye to Clarksonian nonsense.  So, Demosthenes would doubtless approve of the BBC’s decision to sack Clarkson for his ‘unprovoked physical attack’.  But I think he would also be puzzled by the way in which the incident has very much been debated as a question of ‘what is acceptable behaviour in the workplace’ or ‘what celebrity talent can get away with’.  He would think that what Clarkson did was (or could be easily represented as) the mark of someone who believed he was superior to most other people and that this was a sure sign of a certain undemocratic and pro-oligarchic sensibility.  Not to mention that unprovoked assault is against the law.  Athens was such a punch-uppy sort of place that Demosthenes wasn’t sure that he could get Meidias convicted for serious assault, so he seems to have brought the charge under the auspices of a law against ‘criminal activity at a festival’.  Will Clarkson be charged now? I can hear Demosthenes’ ghost rehearsing his prosecution speech already.

I always enjoy Professor Jonathan Wolff’s ‘Marginal Comment’ column in the ‘Education’ section of The Guardian.  He talks a lot of sense about the trials and tribulations of being an academic or a student in UK Higher Education.  A piece he did a few weeks back  particularly caught my eye because it was entitled ‘Sophists’ return? We’re not quite back to Athens’ pseudo-tutors for hire’.  A little confusingly, the online version of this has a different title: ‘Has higher education recreated the conditions that led to Sophistry’s rise?’

Wolff’s argument is a little hard to pin down.  On the one hand he concedes that ‘many sophists were decent thinkers’ and seems to understand that Plato’s image of them as pseudo-philosophers should not be taken at face value.  (On this, see one of my old posts).  On the other hand, he builds an argument to the effect that university academics are in danger of becoming the modern-day equivalents of the Sophists of fifth-century Athens and that they will similarly ‘fall’.  Wolff points out that current usage of the term ‘Sophist’ is entirely negative and he is not wanting to rehabilitate the label.

(Contrast the writings of American anti-foundationalist intellectual and literary critic Stanley Fish, who revels in the label ‘sophist’, despite the fact that the term is used by his many academic critics to characterize his ideas as sinister, specious, lacking in ethical foundations and logical rigor.  I always get worried about the fact that, on the one hand, I admire so many thinkers who have gone on record as anti-Fishians and yet, on the other, I rather like Fish’s book There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and it’s a Good Thing too.   I have the same experience with the work of Judith Butler …).

Anyway, why are we academics in danger of becoming Sophists?  Wolff argues that what did for the Sophists’ reputation was their popularity with politically ambitious rich young men who paid them handsomely in return for rhetorical training.  Wolff cites Protagoras’ claim to be able to make the weaker argument defeat the stronger.  And although academics have always been paid for their services and competed for students, Wolff thinks that the recent introduction of significant fees for university education in the UK offers a parallel.  The fact that Athenian young men spread positive and negative gossip about the quality of their sophistic teachers is compared to ‘rapid opinion sharing in the form of the National Student Survey (NSS), repeated every year and widely publicized’.  The fact that the Sophists were clearly competing with each other for audiences and pupils is compared to ‘desperate competition between universities’.  Wolff also thinks that the ambitious young men who created a demand for ‘Sophistry’ had an ‘instrumental approach to learning’: they ‘had no interest in philosophy or logic for its own sake’. He then asks whether today’s university students are enrolling in degrees for the love of knowledge and to learn the skills and content which we academics judge they ought to know.  At the moment, it’s all okay, he thinks,  but he then adds this warning:

‘ I don’t want to alarm anyone, but do watch out for students who want you to teach them how to make a weak case look strong. Heightened enthusiasm for presentational skills could be an early warning sign.’

This is all good fun.  But of course, academics have always helped students to get good at evidence-based reasoning, making coherent, clearly-structured arguments (written or oral), weighing two sides or interpretations of an issue, being confident, assertive and effective communicators (and so on).  And even if we didn’t do so with their future lives and careers as an explicit focus, we surely knew that most of them weren’t going to be translating Sophocles for a living in ten years’ time.  And as for ‘making the weak case look strong’, well we don’t really know for sure what Protagoras meant by this.  Again, one thing which academics have always done is helped each other and their students to see the weak points in their essays, theses, monographs and articles.  I don’t think we should be embarrassed about the age-old practice of reading students’ and colleagues’ work or listening to their arguments with a view to improvement.  And I certainly don’t prioritize style and delivery over substance when it comes to my students’ presentations.  Furthermore, if my students want to know how to present their work more clearly, loudly, logically and confidently, all power to them. I don’t want them to be the colleagues of the future whom everyone else wishes would speak louder, make more sense or be less excruciatingly apologetic.

No, the real worry for all academics is that they become perceived as ‘sophists’ in the same way that Socrates was.  We don’t think of Socrates as a ‘sophist’ because Plato and Xenophon did such a good job of depicting him as the scourge of the so-called ‘sophists’.  But several decades after Socrates was put to death, the orator and politician Aeschines could still remind the Athenians that they executed ‘the sophist Socrates’ for being the teacher of Critias. (Critias became a murderous oligarch – one of the ‘Thirty Tyrants’).  The UK government’s REF-led ‘Impact agenda’ means that we academics are now required to show that our research has caused significant changes in public policy, culture or the general public’s perception of our subject.  We are encouraged to find ‘user groups’ outside the academy for our research and to make sure our research can be shown to have influenced what they do and how they think in a measurable way.  The temptation here is to pretend that our work solves problems which it cannot or claim that we can help or provide understanding in areas where we can’t really.  I have myself very recently been in a situation where I had to resist the temptation to claim that my own thoughts on Euripides and extant plays of the ancient playwright himself were ‘applicable’ to modern morality or politics in a straightforward and simplistic manner.  I think I managed to avoid this pitfall and my audience were just happy to learn something fresh about the ancient world for its own sake.  But if I could show that my work on Greek rhetoric had changed the communications strategy of Vladimir Putin and his aides, I’d probably get a better Impact score.    Not likely to happen, but ‘Impact’ is making paid consultancy and simplistic ‘applications’ of our work more attractive as a proposition.

I started writing this post over six months ago.   ‘I’m just so busy’ is no excuse for a blogger, although it is a very ancient apologetic strategy.  In a letter to his brother Quintus, dated August 54 BC, Cicero opens like this:

‘When you receive a letter from me by the hand of an amaneuensis, understand that I have not an atom of leisure, and if from my own hand, that I have very little. And I believe that I have never been more pressed by cases and trials, and this too at a time of year most oppressive by reason of sultry heat.’ (Q. Fr. II.16)

I too have recently had to prosecute the occasional ‘Academic Misconduct’ case on hot days.  And I have been very busy with what modern institutional rhetoric dubs my ‘core mission’  – teaching, administration and research.  Unlike Cicero, however,  I don’t own an educated slave who can act as my amaneuensis.   I don’t even have a free research assistant with full access to holiday pay, citizenship rights and employment protections. (Mind you, I shudder to think what life would be like if St Andrews Classics didn’t have its much-appreciated support staff: thanks Carol, Irene, Margaret and Mary!).

Anyway, I am back now, so watch out.

Now that Andy Coulson has been found guilty and the behaviour of the UK national tabloids is back on the agenda, it seems a good time to finally finish and publish this post.   For non-British readers, I had better give a quick summary of why Ed Miliband fell out with the Daily Mail last Autumn.  His late father was a famous Marxist academic, Ralph Miliband, and the Mail printed an article in which it used Ralph’s political views and biography to intimate that Ed has a ‘Marxist dream’ for Britain which is similar to that of his father.  But it was the headline of the article and its flimsy basis which attracted Miliband’s public condemnation:  ‘The man who hated Britain: Red Ed’s pledge to bring back socialism is a homage to his Marxist father. So what did Miliband Snr really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country’.

‘Red Ed’s Pledge’: this sounds good because it deploys what ancient rhetorical handbooks call ‘homoioteleuton’ – two or more endings with the same or similar sounds.

Ralph Miliband was a Jewish refugee who had fled the Nazis with his father and settled in Britain.  He served in the Royal Navy during the war.  Ed publically rebutted the allegation that Ralph hated Britain or that his own politics are the same as his father’s.  The Mail‘s basis for the first allegation was a 1940 diary entry in which the 16 year-old Ralph wrote this:  ‘The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world… When you hear the English talk of this war you sometimes almost want them to lose it to show them how things are.’  But the Mail didn’t print some crucial wider context for this remark, namely the high levels of Anti-Semitism which the young Ralph was experiencing on his arrival in England (see historian John Simkin’s blog for details, including some rather important, ironic material on the political sympathies of the great-grandfather of the current owner of the Daily Mail!).

What interests me about all this that the Mail‘s headline is very redolent of the sort of invective which fourth-century Athenian politicians used against each other in high-profile, politically-motivated court cases. (I have recently been writing about these in my own research).  So, for example, in his speech Against Ctesiphon,  Aeschines attacks his arch-political rival Demosthenes on the grounds that he possesses all the attributes of an ‘oligarch’ as opposed to a ‘democrat’ or ‘man of the people’ (Aeschines 3.169-70).  Aeschines’ first piece of ‘evidence’ for this is that Demosthenes’ maternal grandfather had been impeached for betraying an Athenian colony to the enemy (171).   His Athenian father illicitly married a non-Greek, Scythian woman (171-2).   Aeschines continues as follows (Ag. Ctesiphon 172) :

“So then, from his grandfather he would naturally be the enemy of the people (you condemned his ancestors to death), while on his mother’s side he is a Scythian barbarian who speaks Greek. Hence his dishonesty too, is of foreign extraction. And in his daily life, what sort of man is he? He suddenly turned from trierarch [warship commander/financier] to speechwriter after squandering his inheritance in a ridiculous way. And after losing his credibility even in this trade by handing speeches over to the opposing side, he leapt onto the speaker’s platform.” (Trans. Carey 2000)

After this, we are told that Demosthenes’ political career is one in which treachery and bribes fund his extravagant lifestyle at the expense of the dēmos (173).   This is a ‘causal’ narrative in which Demosthenes’ alleged anti-democratic leanings are explicitly rooted in his grandfather’s treachery against Athens and his mother’s unAthenian and ‘barbarian’ identity.  It relies on a very embedded ancient Greek view that one inherits traits from one’s ancestors and that foreigners are morally and politically untrustworthy.

Demosthenes’ response characterizes this allegation as the sort of low abuse and coarse mudslinging which should be beneath the court’s dignity and the standards of proof required by procedure (On the Crown 122-4). He cleverly argues that he is forced to respond in kind, not because he wants to, but because he must set the record straight (123-8). Then we hear about how Aeschines’ father was a ‘slave who wore thick fetters and a wooden collar’.  And the very coarse tone and language which Aeschines used to impugn Demosthenes’ credentials as patriotic and loyal Athenian democrat are taken to be signs that is he and not Demosthenes whose origins are illegitimate and foreign. Indeed, Demosthenes uses humour to underline the vulgarity of Aeschines’ abusive performances:

‘And you (i.e. Aeschines) bawl out, using names both mentionable and unmentionable, a sort of ‘cart-language’ fitting for you and your kind, but not for me.’ (On the Crown 122)

The ‘cart-language’ here refers to the ritualized obscenity, invective and mockery which was performed in the processions of Athenian festivals in honour of Dionysus. [See my colleague Stephen Halliwell’s book Greek Laughter for more on this].  Demosthenes then launches a long section of amusing ad hominem narrative concerning Aeschines’ servile past occupations and treacherous career (125-59).

Scholars often talk of a rhetorical ‘double standard’ here: Demosthenes is using precisely the same racist and snobbish rhetoric as Aeschines does.  But I think this misses the point.  When one looks closely at the way in which Demosthenes frames his own attacks on Aeschines, it is clear that he goes out of his way to argue that they are a regrettable necessity and, unlike Aeschines’ slanders, are based on evidence.  He is doing his best to avoid the impression of hypocrisy.   I will talk more about this ‘performance/evidence’ distinction in ancient and modern discourse in later posts.

Of course, even the Daily Mail shies away from the levels of overt racism and xenophobia which were default settings in Athenian public culture. And I am not suggesting that Ed Miliband should resort to these sorts of attitudes when dealing with his foes in the Press!    But Demosthenes offers a good example of how one can give as good as one gets when dealing with nasty rhetorical attacks and yet do so with humour and a good claim to staying within appropriate standards of discourse.  Next time this happens (and there will be a next time),  Ed can say:-

a) I didn’t start this, they did, and I have to set the record straight here….

b) This sort of  ad hominem abuse is often a sign of desperation, lack of real evidence/argument or and weak reasoning. It’s also beneath the right standards of public debate and news gathering.

c) there is something inherently laughable about these loud – and you can be loud in writing as well as in oral performance – exaggerated and poorly- evidenced attacks. They’re fine coming from a comedian or a comic character, but not from  a serious national newspaper/party politician.  Ironically, Ed should probably employ a comedian to come up with some suitable anti-‘Daily-Mail-froths-at-mouth-at-imagined-Reds-under-beds’ jokes.

The abusive online ad feminam attacks which J.K. Rowling recently received for donating to the  ‘better together campaign’ in the lead-up to the Scottish Independence referendum on independence earlier this month show that the question of how to deal with outright abuse or slanderous innuendo is a live, rhetorical problem.  [And it’s only right to point our that pro-‘Yes’ campaigners have attracted nasty verbal and online abuse too].  One thing we shouldn’t do – and I’m glad to see that senior politicians on both sides of the referendum debate seem to get this – is condone or ignore such dreadful abuse.

Today is the 50th anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King’s famous and brilliant  ‘I have a dream’ speech.  Dr King delivered this address at the Lincoln Memorial as part of the ‘March on Washington’.  The speech has been endlessly analyzed and discussed and it is rightly regarded as one the best examples of public oratory of the 20th century – it could well be the best example.  Although I wasn’t born until the year of King’s assassination, I have a vivid memory of hearing this speech for the first time when I was about eleven years old: a teacher played it to us at a school assembly on a battered reel-to-reel tape machine and I was blown away by it.

As Sam Leith reminds us in his recent book on oratory, Dr King’s speech is best understood as a ‘sermon’ in the tradition of black Southern Baptist preaching .  I hadn’t really appreciated until today the extent to which the speech is filled with allusions to, or citations of, other texts, songs and speeches. We get the Bible and other scripture of course, but we also get, inter alia,  the American constitution,  a traditional ‘Spiritual’, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, the US National Anthem and Shakespeare’s Richard III.  King also re-uses phrases and ideas which he and other activists had been honing in their orations and church sermons for over a decade. I also hadn’t realized that King had pre-prepared the speech but started to depart from his text and improvise.  The ‘I have a dream’ section is the most improvised bit.

Leith mentions an academic journal article on ‘I have a dream’ by Alexandra Alvarez (Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Mar., 1988), pp. 337-357).  I’ve just read this article with great interest and admiration.  What Alvarez does is show how the speech can only be fully understood as a ‘speech event’ in which King is engaged in an antiphonal dialogue – ‘call and response’ – with his audience. This format is typical of oral-traditional black Baptist sermonizing.  By transposing that dialogue form to a context of mass political protest in the heart of Washington, King and the crowd become ‘senders’ of the speech’s demand for equal rights.  The primary ‘addressee’ of this joint call is the US Congress.  Alvarez shows that King’s several repeated phrases (e,g.’Now is the time’  and ‘I have a dream’)  are actually formulae which both encourage the audience to vocalize their affirmation and  encapsulate the speech’s essential message when strung together.  Given that repetition of words or phrases are a well-known Greek and Roman rhetorical device and category of analysis (‘anaphora’) , one is tempted to see whether this dual function  can be ascribed to ancient examples as well.

Alvarez rejects any transcription or analysis of the speech in terms of sentences and paragraphs as a distortion of its performative, dialogic and poetic dynamics.  Here are a couple of excerpts of her transcription.  You need to know that the numbered ‘lines’ correspond to units of utterance which are followed by pauses and whose ends are marked by rises or drops in intonation.   Alvarez believes that falls in intonation are a particular signal to the crowd to respond if they wish.  The words in brackets are the responses of members of the crowd which are audible on tape (you’ll see that some follow a rise in intonation).  ‘A’  denotes a response in the form of applause; ** = falling intonation; *** = rising intonation.

Excerpt 1:

(1) I am happy to join with you today ***A

(2) in what will go down in history***

(3) as the greatest demonstration, for freedom, in the history of our nation** (Yes) A

(4) Five score years ago***

(5) a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today**

(6) signed the Emancipation Proclamation**

(7) This momentous decree came***

(8) as a great beacon of light to millions of Negro slaves** (Yes)

(9) who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice **

(10) It came as a joyous daybreak***

(11) to end the long night of their captivity.**

Excerpt 2:

(134) I have a  dream** (Well, Very well)

(135) that my four little children*** (Yes, Sir)

(136) will one day live in a Nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.** (My Lord)

(137) I have a dream today.***

(138) I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists*** (Yeah, Yeah)

(139) with its governor, having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification** (Yes, Yeah)

(140) one day right there in Alabama little black boys and little white boys will be able to join hands with little white boys and little white girls as sisters and brothers**

(141) I have a dream today.***

I have come across even more complex systems of notation on the part of sociolinguists and anthropologists in their attempt to reproduce and analyze various forms of oratory and verbal art in many different cultures (and the interaction of their audiences) which have been captured on tape. These serve to remind us that a transcript which merely records the words which have been uttered may well fail to convey the essential dynamics of the live occasion.  And it is rather sobering to turn to written speeches by Demosthenes or Cicero and realize that we can only guess at the nature of their live delivery and reception.  Not that we don’t get lots of clues about ideal and problematic forms of delivery in treatises and handbooks.  And  Greek and Roman orators have always been analyzed in terms of the ‘rhythm’ of their prose.  Beneath the most obvious grammatical structures (sentences, subordinate clauses etc.)  a Classicist with the right skills can point to likely pauses and cadences.   But without a time machine we are never going to be able to access an ancient speech in the way that Alvarez can for MLK’s masterpiece.

I have just listened to an excellent radio programme about rhetoric, hosted by Stephen Fry.  It is the first in a new series of his ‘Fry’s English Delight’ Show and it deals with similar subject matter to this blog .  It is available online for 7 days here.  Among others, there were valuable contributions from Professor Jennifer Richards – an expert in Early Modern rhetoric at the University of Newcastle but clearly well-versed in the Greek and Roman material too – and the journalist and writer Sam Leith.  Leith clearly enjoys spotting classically-derived figures and tropes in the speeches of modern politicians and has a book out called You Talkin’ To Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama. Having only just heard of this, I can’t comment on it yet.   I’ll perhaps do a little review of it on this blog asap.

In the show, Fry argues that in place of  dominant pejorative connotations of ‘spin’ and deception, we should try to restore ‘rhetoric’s’ original ‘noble meaning’. In the service of this argument, Fry played back a powerful speech by Gabrielle Gifford, the former US congresswoman who miraculously survived a close-range gunshot wound to the head.  She was shot by a disturbed individual while meeting with her constituents outside a supermarket.  The brief but emotional speech was made at a Senate gun control hearing. Gifford’s head injury was so severe any attempt to speak is still very difficult for her.  Jennifer Richards showed how, despite Gifford’s understandably slow and faltering delivery, the speech’s power and persuasiveness derived in great part from its utilization of rhetorical devices that we find being used and analyzed by the ancient Greeks and Romans.  We do not notice them in so simple and heartfelt a speech as this – but they ARE there.  Gifford’s use of rhetoric to make the case against gun culture – when her own career as a democratic representative was destroyed by a gun and several of her colleagues and constituents were killed or injured by the same gunman – served as a powerful illustration of Sam Leith’s point that rhetoric is the only means we have to debate policy, or argue and settle disputes without recourse to violence.  Richards’ appeal to Kenneth Burke’s definition of rhetoric as ‘equipment for living’ also seemed relevant to Gifford’s case.

One wouldn’t want to argue against the view that rhetoric is a good thing when it serves the ends of non-violent debate, dispute settlement and democratic representation.  But the show didn’t get far into the question of competence and training in the evaluation of arguments amongst those who do not have the power or opportunity to be anything other than members of the ‘the audience’ for other people’s rhetoric.  We heard about Cambridge students learning debating skills from each other at the Cambridge Union and a consultant who teaches his business clients about the art of persuasion.  But for rhetoric to be truly ‘democratic’, we need EVERYONE to be good at spotting a ‘false enthymeme’ or to tell when ‘ethos’ and ‘pathos’ are masking a weak argument.  Otherwise, we risk inhabiting a political culture where what the fifth-century ‘sophist’ Gorgias called the ‘great dynast’ of persuasive speech serves the interests of the trained few and not the majority.  Rhetoric needs to be ‘equipment for living’ in the sense of ‘analytical tools for the critical evaluation of potentially manipulative speech’ as well as in the sense of ‘tools for persuading people’.

Under the ‘Thirty-Year Rule’, the UK government has just released the text of a speech written for Queen by Whitehall officials which was never delivered.  It was drawn up as part of an exercise in which officials ‘war-gamed’ the country’s response to a chemical attack by the Soviet Union and their allies.  The 1983 speech assumes that a nuclear exchange between NATO and Eastern Bloc countries is imminent.

You can hear an actress reading the text on the  BBC News website.   Bloggers and columnists  have been criticizing the tone and content of the speech and making unfavourable comparisons with the real ‘eve of war’ speech broadcast on the radio by Queen Elizabeth’s father in 1939.  Interestingly, the hypothetical speech references that earlier speech:

‘I have never forgotten the sorrow and the pride I felt as my sister and I huddled around the nursery wireless set listening to my father’s inspiring words on that fateful day in 1939. Not for a single moment did I imagine that this solemn and awful duty would one day fall to me.’

The speechwriter then has the Queen go on to describe how ‘the enemy is not the soldier with his rifle nor even the airman prowling the skies above our cities and towns but the deadly power of abused technology’.   There are no references to tyrannical enemies and the rhetoric of democracy is muted: the Queen calls on the ‘the qualities that have helped to keep our freedom intact twice already during this sad century’ in the face of ‘the terrors that lie in wait’.  The speech then focuses on the importance of loved ones, family and looking out for neighbours. There is some patriotism in the form of praying for relatives in the armed forces. But there is no reference to hoped-for victory and it ends with a distinctly un-partisan prayer for ‘men of goodwill wherever they may be.’

It would be easy for me to claim some parallels to the content of ancient Greek or Roman speeches made on the eve of battle here or to mine it for classical rhetorical devices.  But the differences outweigh the similarities.  There is something distinctive about the way in which these speech-writers have imagined what a figure-head would say in the face such a destructive, impactful and all-encompassing form of warfare.

This is just not very Periclean, Demosthenic or Ciceronian stuff.  Perhaps classical rhetoric could not deliver plausibility or comfort in the face of the uniquely modern social and political failure which nuclear war represents.  How can you stir your people in terms of the defence of values when such values have clearly failed to deliver protection from ‘the deadly power of abused technology’?  The speech seems to quietly acknowledge this rhetorical problem. Like some ancient  speeches I can think of on different subjects which also refer to the inadequacy of words to encompass and fit the occasion, it is very revealing and effective as a result.  To that extent at least, it has an ancient rhetorical feel to it.

A few months back it was interesting to hear constant references to North Korea’s ‘rhetoric’ in the news media.  For example, White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer urged North Korea to end its “bellicose rhetoric” and “provocative actions.”  The Guardian reported on the contrast between a ‘shrill rhetoric’ which seemed to presage war and the calm atmosphere in North Korea’s capital.

These uses of the term ‘rhetoric’  convey the suspicion that North Korea’s public statements are idle threats which are probably really aimed at internal propaganda and power-consolidation by its young leader.  North Korea is talking tough but will it actually do anything?  In other contexts, the worry seems to be that the ‘rhetoric’ is indeed matched by  ‘actions’ (the re-positioning of missile launchers etc.) but that it represents a deluded and distorted view of the world. ‘Rhetoric’ is also wheeled out as a designation when journalists or diplomats feel that certain public statements are especially manipulative, grandiose or deceptive.  I’ve heard BBC reporters use the term to designate policy statements from the UK Coalition government which they suspect are eliding real differences of opinion within the administration.

If he were alive today, Plato would probably pleased to hear the term ‘rhetoric’ being used so negatively.  In his dialogue, the Gorgias we have the earliest attested use of the Greek word rhetorike when Socrates refers to ‘the so-called “art” (techne) of rhetoric’.  Socrates argues that sophists like Gorgias are wrong to claim that rhetoric is a discipline grounded in genuine knowledge and understanding.  Instead, it is a form of ‘flattery’ aimed at the gratification and deception of its audience.  Where Gorgias points out that it is the rhetorician, and not the doctor, who is most able to persuade a reluctant patient to take medicine that is unpleasant but necessary for his recovery. Socrates dwells on the fact that ‘rhetoric’ does not possess or impart knowledge of any particular subject area.  The rhetorician does not know about diseases and what cures them. Nor  does he know what is justice, the best way to run a city, how best to fight wars or how to successfully  manage public finances.  As a consequence, Athens suffers from being advised by sophist-trained politicians who are good at persuading the people and telling them what they want to hear – even though the laws and policies they are arguing for are not be the best ones for the city and even though those politicians (and much of their audience) are not competent in relevant areas of expertise.

Some scholars bemoan the extent to which the word ‘rhetoric’ seems to retain these negative Platonic associations, even in modern parlance.  When defined as the means and modes by which we attempt to persuade each other, communicate grievances, make a case or enter into debate, ‘rhetoric’ becomes a much more positive notion.  ‘How to argue well’ is a subject that can be taught and it necessarily involves the critical evaluation of arguments we receive.  This (largely Aristotelian) definition can be developed so that  ‘rhetoric’ is re-presented as a vital discourse of democracy, peaceful dispute settlement, equality under the law and citizen empowerment in the face of special interests.  For me, though, the Platonic and Aristotelian views are two sides of the same coin. ‘Rhetoric’ and its dynamics can only be understood, properly monitored and used  when we see that both views are always in play and in tension with each other – and these views are themselves often a vital part of a larger rhetoric.  But the ‘rhetoric’ that lies behind definitions of ‘rhetoric’ will have to wait for another post.

In my last post, I discussed the importance of ‘memory’ in ancient rhetorical theory and practice.  It was crucial to develop effective techniques for memorizing entire speeches because there was an expectation that the orator not rely on notes or read from a script.  This is to be contrasted with the way in which modern practitioners of debate and advocacy usually rely on the tools and techniques of writing.  Watch Prime Minister’s Question Time or a debate in the House of Commons and you will see that the front benchers on both sides have pre-prepared notes and that they scribble away with a pen as they listen to speeches and questions to which they will have to respond.

Despite the requirement to speak without written aids, the ancients clearly had plenty of uses for writing when preparing, memorizing and disseminating orations.  Written composition (both of real speeches and imaginary exercises) was an important element of Greek and Roman rhetorical education, theorizing and the creation of ‘real speeches’ from the late fifth-century BC onwards.  So-called ‘sophists’ like Antiphon wrote legal speeches for clients who had found themselves in court. In Athens, litigants had to speak for themselves, and although you could assign most of your speaking time to an experienced advocate this was frowned upon and therefore rare. The comic dramatist Aristophanes offers us an insight into the hard work that could go into learning a speech if you were an inexperienced novice.  In his play Knights the Paphlagonian slave (aka the highly experienced and wealthy politician, orator and litigator Cleon)  mocks his opponent, Sausage-seller, for thinking that he can match him when it comes to public oratory:

‘Do you know what I think’s come over you? What comes over most people.  I suppose you gave a good speech in a piffling little case against an alien immigrant after muttering it over all night, repeating it to yourself in the streets, drinking water, rehearsing it to an audience and exasperating your friends.  And then you thought you were capable of public speaking.  You fool,  what an absurd idea!’ (lines 346-50, trans. A. Sommerstein).

Of course, Cleon turns out to be wrong about his opponent’s abilities in a comic fantasy where the hateful demagogue can only be beaten by someone who has the same low-class background and base instincts as he.  In reality, a successful politician like Cleon would very likely have received training from the ‘sophists’.  For these were not mere hacks churning out speeches for money – although some did also do that.  They were professional researchers and teachers of argumentation and rhetorical technique.  As with modern academics, the line between ‘teaching’, ‘research’ and ‘showing off for money’ was somewhat blurred with the sophists. Plato was not sympathetic to them, but in one of his dialogues, it is clear that the sophist Gorgias is an amazing performer of extemporaneous speech-making who wows the crowds as well as attracting ambitious young men to learn from his example.  In Thucydides’ account of a crucial debate at Athens, Cleon (somewhat disingenuously) chides the Athenian people for behaving like ‘spectators of sophists’ rather than citizens debating matters of life and death for the city (3.38.7).

But carefully crafted written material was also crucial to this rhetorical research and training.  Antiphon wrote a series of ‘imaginary’ court speeches called Tetralogies which may have been used to explore the limitations and benefits of different kinds of evidence and techniques of argumentation with paying pupils.  Gorgias himself wrote a famous speech in defence of the mythical Helen whose seriousness and purpose is hard to gauge.  But it is certainly good evidence for the role of written composition for the display and dissemination of innovative forms of rhetorical persuasion during this period.

The Pnyx was where the Athenian assembly met. This picture details archaeological remains of the speaker’s plaftorm (Bema) of Pnyx III (a rebuild around 345-335 BC).  The Bema was carved right out of the bedrock. View from the northwest. Picture source and further information: http://www.stoa.org/athens/sites/pnyx.html.

And yet, writing was a technology which had to be handled with care by anyone who needed to persuade an Athenian audience.  The surviving orations of speechwriters like Antiphon and Lysias show that speeches written for clients not normally in the public eye had to sound natural, authentic and spontaneous – there are elements which are deliberately chatty or imperfect.  Both writers are excellent at adapting the arguments and style of their speeches to the character and situation of their clients.  Whether the citizen juries who listened to these speeches were fooled into believing that these clients had prepared the speeches by themselves is a difficult question for another post.

But we do have evidence that the memorizing of a speech which had been written out in its entirety was not considered by everyone to be the best way of doing things.  In a fascinating work which is sometimes called On Those Who Write Speeches and sometimes given the alternative title On Sophists, a sophist called Alcidamas denigrates the efficacy of speech-writing as a skill in comparison with the ability to speak extemporaneously.  Here he is on the problems of memorizing writing:

‘I also think that learning written speeches is difficult, remembering them is laborious and forgetting them in trials is disgraceful.  For all would agree that it is more difficult to learn and remember small things than large, and many things than few. In extemporaneous speaking you need to keep your mind fixed on the arguments alone and you can supply the right words as you proceed; but in written speeches in addition you must necessarily learn and remember precisely the words and even the syllables […] Furthermore, if you forget something in an extemporaneous speech, your disgrace is not clear to others. For since the expression can be easily broken up and the wording has not been precisely determined, if a speaker forgets one of the arguments, it is not difficult for him to skip over it and pick up the other arguments in order, thereby keeping the speech free of disgrace […] But if those who recite written speeches during a trial forget or alter even a small detail, they are inevitably beset by uncertainty and wandering and searching […} The speaker’s helplessness is disgraceful, ridiculous and hard to remedy.’ (Alcidamas On Those Who Write Speeches, 18, 20-21, trans M. Gagarin).

Alcidamas then makes the more positive point that extemporaneous speakers can respond much more flexibly to the mood and disposition of the audience than those who deliver written speeches.  The latter, he says,

‘take great trouble over their composition before a trial, but sometimes miss the opportunity (kairos): either they irritate the audience by speaking longer than they desire, or they cut short their speech when people still want to hear more.  For it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, for human foresight to reach into the future and know precisely what attitude the audience will have toward the length of a speech.  In extemporaneous speeches, however, the speaker can note the effect of his words and control them, cutting short some lengthy remarks or extending the presentation of short topics.’ (22-3)

The concepts of kairos (the ‘right moment’/opportunity) and to prepon (‘appropriateness’) which Alcidamas champions will have to be unpacked in another post.  But Alcidamas has a good point even for our own modern experience: a fixed text can be stilted and inflexible in the dynamic and fluid context of live debate and disputation.  And many of us have been in situations where we have needed to rapidly adjust the nature, length or style of what we have to say because of the apparent mood or expectations of our audience.  This would  have been even more salient in classical Athens where a massed citizen audience was largely used to listening to and watching oratory rather than writing and reading it.

Alcidamas holds his hand up to the irony that he rails against writing speeches in a piece of writing (29-34: on this and more, see Professor Mike Edwards’ excellent chapter in Ian Worthington’s very useful Companion to Greek Rhetoric).  He says he does so in order to show howeasy speech writing is and he admits that he uses writing to prepare display speeches before a large audience.  For Alcidamas writing should not be rejected out of hand.   But it must only be an ancillary skill.  In live debate, you prepare your arguments in advance but choose the actual words at the time of speaking.  That’s the only way to nail the opposition and secure the good will of the audience.

This polemic may partly have been directed at Isocrates, a contemporary of Alcidamas who wrote out his speeches about policy and educational values and seems to have published many of them to be read like pamphlets rather than delivering them orally.  Isocrates had even written his own ‘speech’ called Against the Sophists.  (In Athens, a ‘sophist’ is usually what someone else is.  You don’t label yourself a sophist).  By  the fourth century, then, the role of writing in the production of oratory has become a highly contentious issue.  In another post we will explore the reasons for this further.  But we only have to think about how we feel when we learn that a politician or celebrity is ventriloquizing words crafted by a paid adviser, to get some sense of what is at stake.

When Ed Miliband gave his leader’s speech to the Labour Party conference in Manchester last year, it caused quite a stir.  He spoke without the aid of notes or an autocue for 65 minutes.  A former adviser to Tony Blair called the speech ‘a spectacular performance, remarkable for the cogency and fluidity of delivery. Its real strength was authenticity and the raw, at times poignant, emotion’.  And the Conservative pundit Tim Montgomerie drew attention to the significance of the speech’s ‘off the cuff’ feel: ‘After today we know that Ed Miliband can deliver a speech without notes and with passion. David Cameron will testify to the fact that that counts. He largely won the Tory leadership on the back of a similarly delivered speech at the Tory conference of 2005′.

Ed Miliband delivers his keynote speech to delegates during the annual Labour Party conference in Manchester. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

There is something about a fluent (and yet authentic and heartfelt) speech delivered without written aids which impresses and affects us.  Of course, Miliband practised this speech with the aid of writing and he was open about doing so. This article in the Independent reveals that he divided the text into 11 sections and then memorized them systematically. The text was 5000 words long and meant to last 50 minutes but the live version ended up running to 6500 words. We are told that ‘every time he practised the speech it came out slightly differently’.

By throwing away their lecterns and auto-cues, modern politicians are in many ways returning to the traditions of ancient Greek and Roman oratory.  In antiquity, there was an expectation that an orator would speak without notes in law-courts and assemblies.  This is why, by the early first century BC,  ‘memory’ (mnēmē in Greek, memoria in Latin) becomes one of the five basic divisions of tasks within the orator’s craft as outlined in rhetorical handbooks and homilies (Cicero On Invention 1.9, The Rhetoric to Herennius 1.3, Quintillian Institutes of Oratory 3.3.1).

The anonymous handbook Rhetoric to Herennius contains the earliest systematic treatment of how an orator should go about memorizing his speech, although he refers somewhat disparagingly to earlier Greek treatments of the topic now lost to us (3.16.28-24.20).  The author of this treatise recommends that the orator develop an ‘artificial memory’ by creating a series of  images of ‘backgrounds’ (loci) for himself: for example a house or an archway.  These are memorized in a fixed order.  Then, the orator places images representing phrases, events and arguments he needs to memorize against the backgrounds.  In this way, the speaker ends up with a system of mental visualization and recall which allows him to memorize the order and content of his speech.

Interestingly, this system also seems to envisage law-court situations where the orator needs to respond, ‘on the spot’ and ‘off the cuff’, to the evidence and arguments put by the other side.  If the prosecution alleges that there are many witnesses to the defendant’s act of poisoning, the defence speaker remembers that he must respond to this point by visualizing an image of the victim which includes ram’s testicles! (3.20.33).  This is because the Latin word for testicles (testiculi) is close to the word for witnesses (testes).

We cannot be sure how far great politicians and advocates like Demosthenes and Cicero used these recommended mnemonic systems or found techniques of their own.  One question which scholars still wrestle with is the nature of the relationship between the surviving texts of these ancient orators’ speeches – some of which are extremely long and detailed – and what they actually said on the occasion of their delivery. There is some evidence that Athenian law-court speeches were revised and expanded before publication and after the event in order to impress potential clients or to carry on politically-charged disputes beyond the realm of the public courts.

But the question remains as to whether Demosthenes wrote out and polished all of his more  gargantuan law-court speeches (for example, On the Crown) and learned them off by heart or whether the texts we have represent a different process of re-composition in writing after a live performance of what was largely a feat of mental and oral rehearsal using some kind of mnemonic system.   The fact that Demosthenes wrote speeches for clients and was often attacked by opponents for being a ‘sophist’ and ‘logographer’ (speech-writer for hire)  might suggest that he used the former method.  But either method makes Miliband and Cameron’s feats of oratorical memory look like small beer by comparison: the live version of On The Crown would have taken at least two hours to deliver – maybe considerably longer.  And that was just one among many legal and political speeches which would have been delivered by him in any single year.