Rhetorical education: history, practice, and pedagogy

Rhetoric is best defined as the use of words, whether through speaking or writing, in order to convince others of a certain course of action or even to rouse them to action. One of the earliest codifiers and practitioners of a rhetorical system was the Greek Aphthonius, whose Progymnasmata is the earliest known textbook of rhetoric, and divides the art into fourteen successive lessons that were to be learned and mastered by pupils before they attempted their own rhetorical orations (Heath). He is also known for his collection of forty fables in the Aesopian style; the fable was the first type of rhetoric that appeared in his textbook and can be considered the simplest form of rhetoric; in fables, an untrue story is used to illustrate a true point, usually about moral behavior. Aphthonius' fables were of the same style as Aesop's.

Servius Sulpicius Rufus was a Roman rhetorician, and though he ended his pursuit of rhetoric with the feeling that he could never surpass his teacher Cicero, his style is still admired for its lucidity and directness. This reflected on Roman school of thought on rhetoric, which believed that less adorned and less emotional appeals to truth alone should be considered good pieces of rhetoric, eschewing the more emotional appeals advocated by Aristotle and other Greek rhetoricians (Easterling & Kenny, 233-4). His own teacher Cicero was less caught up in this Roman sparseness, apparently realizing that it was indeed by emotional appeals -- even when based in rational thought -- that obtained verdicts and decisions, and not purely logical appeals to truth (Easterling & Kenny, 234). Rufus went on to become a respected jurist, and his style served him well enough to earn him a public funeral and a proconsulship under Julius Caesar in the years before his death.

Polemo was another great Greek philosopher, and ended up running Plato's famous Academy after Xenocrates. His attitude was one of stoicism; he remained unmoved by great passions, excitements, and confusions, but instead undertook life and thought -- including rhetoric -- with a calmness that his contemporaries found unusual, if not a little frustrating (Yonge, par. 4). Polermo's approach to rhetoric was not like the emotional appeals advocated by the other ancient Greeks, nor did it contain the same adherence to logic and truth that the Romans would later develop, but rather he undertook al things as simply as he could, distrusting both intense emotional passions and an adherence to logical arguments that seemed to show more of an individual's own shrewdness than it did the validity of their rhetoric (Yonge).