In Plato's early dialogues, the impossibility of talking to the crowd appears as a constitutive element of the opposition between rhetoric and dialectic and raises the understudied question of the role of the audience in Socratic thought. However, Xenophon's Socrates constantly identifies public and private speech. But this likening is also found in the Alcibiades Major , which gives a key to understand the true meaning of this assimilation: one can convince an audience, by talking to each individual in the crowd. The need to address each one implies an adaptation of language that can be found in the texts of different disciples of Socrates. The rhetorical aspects of the Phaedrus ' psychagogia should then be understood, not as a new Platonic concept which allows the good orator to address the many, but rather as a new formulation of a well-known and shared Socratic ideal.

I argue here that the medieval French Philomena , found exclusively within the Ovide moralisé , a fourteenth-century translation and adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses , adumbrates a theory of vocal repetition as an aesthetic that is shared by both birds and humans. Various common rhetorical devices that foreground acoustic reduplication appear in high density in the text, where they are often collocated with evocations of birdsong. After exploring the parallels between these devices and the structure of avian vocalization, I show the presence of several passages in the text that can be read simultaneously as onomatopoeic evocations of birdsong and as standard referential language. I also propose a solution to the mysterious label associated with the text's author, “Chrétien li gois ” (“Chrétien the jay”).

Il saggio esamina alcuni trattati di retorica pubblicati tra la fine del Cinque e l'inizio del Seicento. Partendo dall'analisi di alcune retoriche cinquecentesche, passando dal confronto tra due dei maggiori esponenti teorici dell'oratoria sacra, Francesco Panigarola e Paolo Aresi, e arrivando ad alcuni trattatisti del primo Seicento, il contributo si concentrerà prevalentemente sulle informazioni retoriche relative alla pragmatica, ossia tutto ciò che nella predicazione riguarda l'uso della voce e dei gesti. L’ actio infatti si configura come un'importante chiave di lettura per l'interpretazione della predica cinque e secentesca e permette di individuare come e quanto il parlato intervenga sullo scritto.

El presente artículo interpreta la obra de Adam Smith a partir de la retórica. Basándose en el análisis comparativo de los textos, afirma la dependencia de la Historia de la Astronomía con respecto a las Lecciones sobre retórica y, con ello, la naturaleza retórica del uso smithiano de la ciencia. Tras analizar las metáforas utilizadas por Smith, deja de lado la metáfora gravitacional y la de la mano invisible y se centra en las basadas en el teatro y en la analogía con la máquina. De esto concluye que Smith recurrió al potencial constructivo de la retórica para superar el escepticismo humeano, lo cual, a su vez, tiene consecuencias sobre nuestra comprensión de la historia de la retórica.

Not much is known about the actual practice of delivering orations in the Renaissance. In some instances—particularly in instances of orations held at universities—there is the possibility to consult sources like the diaries of the faculties, in order to get some information about the actio of a specific oration. In other instances, sometimes the printed orations themselves, the context they were given in, the author's rhetorical upbringing, and the links between oratory and contemporary acting can provide indications of the way orations were performed. The Latin oration Europa heautentimorumene by the Spanish doctor Andrés Laguna, which was delivered in January 1543 at the University of Cologne and printed shortly afterwards, constitutes such a case.

This paper argues that Elizabethan handbooks on poetics enact two coevolving traditions in the history of rhetoric and poetics: one sees poetry as a rhetorical art of stylistic invention, while the other sees it as an object of study, analysis, and ethical training. To show this, I examine George Puttenham's Art of English Poesy and contrast it with William Scott's recently discovered Model of Poesy . Puttenham demonstrates how poetic style works as a tool of rhetorical invention; Scott, on the other hand, treats poetics as a method of literary critical analysis. Scott's poetics, I argue, is derived from a “paideutic” tradition, the aims of which mirror those found in educational treatises that concern the hermeneutic training students received in English grammar schools. Puttenham, writing for courtiers, instead makes a case for poetics as a means of rhetorical adaptation at court—his handbook, in short, shows poetry to be a rhetorical and pragmatic art of verbal performance that exists outside the schoolroom.

Horace's Art of Poetry supplied the medieval schools with the only available classical doctrines on fiction and poetry before Aristotle's Poetics became widely studied in the fifteenth century. Horace exercized both practical and theoretical influence on literary exegesis, and shaped medieval and early Renaissance doctrines of composition by discussing the very nature of fiction, narrative techniques, authorial roles, description of character and tone, including performance and reading of a text. The anonymous commentators as well as the Dante commentator Francesco da Buti (1395) were deeply influenced by the twelfth-century “Materia” Commentary, but also by the Arabic notion of an independent art of poetics, and remained in lively dialogue with the teaching of Ciceronian rhetoric of invention, disposition, elocution, and delivery.

The presence of a singular rhetorical figure, the dialogismos , in Charisius' Ars grammatica , in Iulius Ruphinianus' De figuris and in some exegetical notes by Donatus to Terence, yields the opportunity to reflect on the mutual influences between rhetoric and grammar in the textbooks of the Late Empire. A mediating role seems to be played by the Progymnasmata .

The aim of this paper is to show how the dialogical form is an essential structure of the Platonic texts in which the interrogative form is the very form of philosophy. According to the intentio auctoris , the dialogues can change the lives of their readers and this can only happen thanks to the readers' internalization of the dialogical form as an interrogative structure. Like Socrates' interlocutors in the dialogues, readers with the dialogues, can change their live making it coherent with their own thoughts examined through the philosophical discourse. This form of coherence is the only possibility of virtue, and therefore of happiness.

It is a disciplinary commonplace to identify Plato as the enemy of rhetoric. While it is also common to suggest a more complex role for Plato and his dialogues in contemporary rhetorical studies, this is often treated as a revision of his traditional role. In this article, I question the historicity of the narrative that Plato is the historical enemy of rhetoric. I investigate the role that Plato played in the rhetorical tradition from Demosthenes to Du Bois and compare it to how he is framed in the contemporary discipline – first, in disciplinary histories and second, in contemporary theory. What I find is a distinct disconnect between his traditional treatment and the contemporary construction of his place in the tradition.

The ms. Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, plut. 58.24 contains a collection of texts extracted from rhetorical works for some of which it is the only witness. Each passage displays a rhetorical figure or a metabasis , but their typology and arrangement within the collection remain unclear. This paper aims at illustrating the ways in which the compiler selected specific comparative formulas by analyzing some marginal notes and the source texts of the related excerpted passages.