Briefly outline the history of rhetoric from ancient times to the present(500 Words)
Answers
Pre-Socratic philosophers to the emergence of the sophists
Every epoch experiences its changes and upheavals, and 5th Century Greece was no different to this general trend inhistory. The reasons for such changes are complex but, perhaps in the case of Ancient Greece, a new sense of national identity caused by such dramatic events as Greece’s victory over the Persians, its ever expanding trade routes with their resulting wealth, and, most importantly, the evolution of Athens as a nucleus of political, economic and cultural development in the western world of the day provided Athenian society with the logos for believing in its own superiority. As a result of these changes, Athens found itself the most energetic, challenging, and prosperous polis in the Western world, where every citizen could, and was generally expected to, aspire to some public function. In intellectual terms, it was a period that marked the gradual shift from a mythological and cosmological view of the world to a more rational and man-centered interpretation.
This paper is concerned with one particular part of this intellectual shift: the polemical role that the subject of rhetoric played in the 5th century B.C. The essay briefly looks at the historical development of rhetoric, and deals with the change from the Presocratic philosophers to the emergence of the Sophists, from the Sophists to Plato’s rejection, and finally, from Aristotle’s rejection of Plato’s dialectic to the development of his own rhetoric. Throughout this essay the term ‘rhetoric’ is used interchangeably with the term ‘persuasion’.