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.

Although much has been written about ancient rhetorical theories of example, few scholars have examined the subtypes of example contained in these ancient rhetorical theories. As a corrective to this scholarly blind spot, this article explores the lesser-known conceptual history of “comparison,” which Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian all theorize as a subtype of example. Taken together, their rhetorical theories suggest that arguments by comparison are hypothetical, contentious, indirect, interrogative, and frequently deceptive. Moreover, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian all theorize comparison by calling attention to the persuasive artistry of Socrates, notably his use of arguments by comparison to provoke interlocutors without challenging them directly. Understanding and explaining these rhetorical theories of comparison is the primary task of this article.

It has long been stated that, in Isocrates' Helen , there seems to be an open contradiction between the author's harsh criticism of logoi paradoxoi and the simple fact that his own encomia of Helen and Busiris appear to be specimens of that very genre. Traditionally, this contradiction has been explained by Isocrates' need to distanciate his own work from that of his predecessors. This paper undertakes a different approach. Isocrates' criticism of paradoxographic literature is based upon observations about what is and what is not allowed in moral epideictic discourse. Isocrates' specific instructions about proper and improper moral argumentation can function as hermeneutical tool to analyze Helen and Busiris . Only in Helen does he observe the rules of argumentation formulated in that very discourse. In Busiris , however, Isocrates adopts the typical modes of argumentation in paradoxographic literature as represented in the works of Gorgias or Polycrates. In consequence, his arguments in Busiris prove to be unconvincing when measured by his own standards formulated in the proemium of both Helen and Busiris . Consequently, the discourse ends in an apology of these arguments which is, once again, defective. In his corresponding discourses Helen and Busiris , Isocrates implictly demonstrates the moral and technical defects inherent in paradoxical discourse. He explicitly reflects these defects in the proemia and epilogues of both speeches. Helen and Busiris should, therefore, be understood as Isocrates' manifesto for moral discourse as opposed to paradoxographic showpieces.