L' Odisseo attribuito ad Alcidamante è un discorso falso. Odisseo accusa Palamede con argomenti implausibili che finiscono per dimostrare più la malafede di Odisseo che la colpevolezza di Palamede. L'autore riprende schemi odissiaci già presenti in Omero e li ripropone attualizzandoli nel genere dell'orazione epidittico-giudiziaria. L'autore si serve di varianti mitiche rare o uniche, per alludere all'implausibilità degli argomenti sostenuti.

The first book of medieval Latin beast epic, Ysengrimus , relates imaginary trials. In the episodes of the stolen ham and the fishing, the characters, Ysengrin and Renart, imagine that they would convene an ecclesiastic assembly, a synod, and that they would plead their case. Their plead reverses right and wrong ( translatio criminis ), invents speeches to denigrate each other ( sermocinatio ), and seems to take the form of large digressions. These speeches, which have been considered as “interminable” and “wordy” by J. Mann and É. Charbonnier, can be reassessed through classical rhetoric. This paper aims to demonstrate that, in spite of the extent of these speeches' apparent rambling, we can extricate some rhetorical structures ( constitutiones ) from the judicial oratory. This is the first point of a speech that also uses prolixity as an “art of being right.”

Cicero's Pro Archia has historically been taken as a bona fide expression of humanism. In this article, I demonstrate how this reading of the Pro Archia has allowed the political and cultural tensions in the speech to remain hidden. Cicero's vision of Archias as an idealized amalgam sanitizes both the poetic and the cultural identity of his Syrian client in favour of a projection which combined generic “Greekness” with a politicized invocation of the Roman poet, Q. Ennius. Contextualizing the Pro Archia within its contemporary political moment reveals that Cicero is consciously constructing a narrative of Archias as a “good immigrant.”

This article amplifies the call for a paradigm shift across a range of comparative disciplines relevant to non-European cultures, that decentralizes rhetorical concepts from European traditions in comprehending non-European literary and philosophical practices. Such a post-Eurocentric perspective is necessary to both generate a fair comparative module that centralizes the emic (culture-specific) features of a language and to avoid Eurocentric misrepresentation of the non-European culture under consideration. This paper challenges the common academic position that Eurocentric traditions are foundational to understanding ancient Egyptian and Arabic literary systems. The article also considers the graphic nature of the core hieroglyphic script in comparison with Arabic to refute the modern obsession that concentrates on the verbal layers of the scripts and neglects their visual literariness.

In 1 Cor. 10:1–22, Paul deals with the role of Christ and his relationship to God. This is an important ethical topic that Paul deems necessary to discuss with the Corinthian believers. In order to make an effective, thus persuasive, argument, he follows the ancient Greco-Roman tradition of rhetoric and poetics. I argue that vv. 1–4 is Paul's introduction to his vivid representation of monotheism (vv. 5–22). As he presents his narrative of the wilderness events, he employs various rhetorical-poetic techniques to evoke in his hearers imaginative and emotional experiences that will transport them into a higher level of ethical consciousness, a new monotheistic reality in Christ.

Questo articolo propone una lettura del dialogo fra Trimalchione e il retore Agamennone (Petron. sat . 48, 4–7) fondata sull'analisi delle espressioni legate al mondo dell'insegnamento retorico a cui i due personaggi fanno ricorso: lo scambio di battute fra i due, apparentemente estemporaneo, segue in realtà l'andamento di una discussione tecnica propedeutica allo sviluppo di una controversia , secondo il procedere codificato nella prassi delle scuole di declamazione. Da questa lettura deriva, inoltre, un argomento in difesa del testo tràdito riguardo alle tre biblioteche di Trimalchione.

The Cane Ridge Revival drew nearly twenty thousand participants, sparking the transformative Second Great Awakening. Barton Stone was the minister who organized and shared preaching responsibilities for the revival, and eventually, his disciples formed one of the largest American religious traditions, the Stone-Campbell Movement. In this paper, I examine portions of nine fictional dialogues published by Stone during the final year of his life, wherein he explicitly outlined the parameters of effective rhetoric or “useful preaching.” I argue that Stone developed a rhetorical theory that rebelled against authority by granting agency to the audience even in the processes of invention and interpretation, a theory that produced idiosyncratic theological convictions and a movement practically incapable of confessional unity.

Zottoli argued that the enthymeme theory was a very useful tool to understand Chinese texts. To show this, he analyzed and examined the Baguwen (八股文). The enthymematic features of it are compable to enthymemes of signs or enthymemes of wide-ranging opinions. They are considered to be makers of contexts that are accepted and approved largely by the audience according to common sense. They are also very similar to loci communes of Cicero.

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.