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Prooemion, or Introduction, and Should Then Continue With A Diêgêsis, or

Citizens in democratic Syracuse found themselves needing to argue cases in court with no experience in public speaking. A man named Tisias began teaching basic techniques for effective presentation and argumentation for a fee. He wrote down his teachings, which were copied and spread, reaching Athens. By the late 5th century, various technical handbooks existed that provided basic principles of public speaking for anyone to use.

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66 views1 page

Prooemion, or Introduction, and Should Then Continue With A Diêgêsis, or

Citizens in democratic Syracuse found themselves needing to argue cases in court with no experience in public speaking. A man named Tisias began teaching basic techniques for effective presentation and argumentation for a fee. He wrote down his teachings, which were copied and spread, reaching Athens. By the late 5th century, various technical handbooks existed that provided basic principles of public speaking for anyone to use.

Uploaded by

referee198032
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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t e c hni c a l r he t or i c 21

assumed that an ordinary citizen was competent to prosecute or defend


a case, but a person with no previous experience in public speaking
might nd it dicult to address a large jury, explain the case clearly, and
persuade the jury of the justice of the speakers side of the issue. As noted
in Chapter 1, Greek society tolerated and even encouraged contention
and rivalry to an extent not commonly found outside the West, and
Athenians were particularly prone to engage in litigation. At times, the
lawcourts became a kind of public entertainment in Athens.
According to reports derived from a lost work by Aristotle, the rst
attempt to provide an unskilled speaker with some guidelines about how
to prepare and deliver a speech in court seems to have occurred in
Syracuse in Sicily, where democracy on the Athenian pattern was intro-
duced suddenly in 467 b.c.

Citizens found themselves involved in dis-


putes over the ownership of property or other matters and forced to take
up their own cases before the courts. A clever Syracusan, for a fee, taught
simple techniques for eective presentation and argumentation. Later
Greek writers refer to two Sicilian inventors of rhetoric named Corax
and Tisias, but they are probably the same person.

Corax means crow


and is an unusual personal name for a Greek. It is probably a nickname,
and the inventor of a system of rhetoric should be known as Tisias the
Crow, since the rhetorical teaching attributed to Tisias by Plato seems
identical to that attributed to Corax by Aristotle.
The art of Tisias was originally taught orally for a fee but then written
down by him or one of his students, and copies were made and sold.
Copies reached Athens, where their utility was recognized, and various
people there also began to write Technai logn, Arts of Speech. By the
end of the fth century a handbook or technical literature existed to
which anyone could turn to secure basic principles and topics of public
speaking. The best picture of the contents of these early Arts is to be
found in Platos dialogue Phaedrus, written in the second quarter of the
fourth century, when they still existed and were still studied. In discuss-
ing the nature of rhetoric Phaedrus reminds Socrates that there are
books on the subject, and Socrates surveys their contents (Phaedrus
266267d). He says that they indicate that a speaker should begin with a
prooemion, or introduction, and should then continue with a digsis, or
narration, followed by witnesses, evidence, and probabilities. Theo-
dorus of Byzantium was one of the writers of handbooks, and Socrates

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