Interest in ancient rhetoric and its relevance to modern society has increased dramatically over recent decades. In North America, departments of speech and communications have experienced a noticeable renaissance of concern with ancient sources. On both sides of the Atlantic, numerous journals devoted to the history of rhetoric are now being published. Throughout, Aristotle's central role has been acknowledged, and there is also a growing awareness of the contributions made by Theophrastus and the Peripatetics. Peripatetic Rhetoric After Aristotle responds to this recent interest in rhetoric and peripatetic theory. The chapters provide new insights into Peripatetic influence on different periods and cultures: Greece and Rome, the Syrian- and Arabic-speaking worlds, Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the international scene today. Contributors to this volume include Maroun Aouad, Lucia Calboli Montefusco, Thomas Conley, Tiziano Dorandi, Lawrence D. Green, Doreen C. Innes, George A. Kennedy, Michael Leff, and Eckart Schutrumpf. This comprehensive analysis of the history of rhetoric ranges from the early Hellenistic period to the present day. It will be of significant interest to classicists, philosophers, and cultural historians.

Each paper explores the influences on different parts of Peripatetic rhetoric, its discussion of character, emotion, reason, and style, its relationships with other texts, including those of Theodectes and the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, and its relationship with the oratory of the 4th century BC.

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West, from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages, represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring that rhetorical history between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle's rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.

This complete guide to ancient Greek rhetoric is exceptional both in its chronological range and the breadth of topics it covers. Traces the rise of rhetoric and its uses from Homer to Byzantium Covers wider-ranging topics such as rhetoric's relationship to knowledge, ethics, religion, law, and emotion Incorporates new material giving us fresh insights into how the Greeks saw and used rhetoric Discusses the idea of rhetoric and examines the status of rhetoric studies, present and future All quotations from ancient sources are translated into English

Anonymous’ and Stephanus’ commentaries, written in the 12th century AD, are the first surviving commentaries on Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Their study, including the environment in which they were written and the philosophical ideas expressed in them, provides a better understanding of the reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Byzantium, the Byzantine practice of commenting on classical texts, and what can be called “Byzantine philosophy”. For the first time, this book explores the context of production of the commentaries, discusses the identity and features of their authors, and reveals their philosophical and philological significance. In particular, I examine the main topics discussed by Aristotle in the Rhetoric as contributing to persuasion, namely valid and fallacious rhetorical arguments, ethical notions, emotional response and style, and I analyse the commentators’ interpretations of these topics. In this analysis, I focus on highlighting the value of the philosophical views expressed, and on creating a discussion between the Byzantine and the modern interpretations of the treatise. Conclusively, the two commentators need to be considered as independent thinkers, who aimed primarily at integrating the treatise within the Aristotelian philosophical system.

The present volume brings together thirteen articles as so many chapters of a book, devoted to the history, methods, and practices of the commentaries that have been written on Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Examining both the linguistic and factual background, these contributions attempt to insert each of the commentaries into its particular historical, political, social, philosophical, and pedagogical context. The historical periods and geographical areas that arise – from Greco-Roman antiquity to Heidegger’s philosophy, from the Syriac and Arabic traditions to the Western world – make it possible, in sum, not only to indicate how the Rhetoric has been read and interpreted, but also to offer general perspectives on the practice of explicating ancient texts. Le présent volume rassemble treize articles envisagés comme autant de chapitres d’un livre et dédiés à l’histoire, à la méthode et à la pratique des commentaires à la Rhétorique d’Aristote. Mêlant l’approche matérielle et linguistique, ces contributions se proposent de réinscrire chacun des commentaires dans son contexte historique, politique, social, culturel, philosophique, et pédagogique particulier. Les périodes et les aires géographiques considérées ici—de l’Antiquité gréco-romaine jusqu’à la philosophie de Heidegger, des traditions syriaque et arabe au monde occidental—permettent, in fine, non seulement de suggérer des pistes de lecture pour la Rhétorique et l’histoire des interprétations de la Rhétorique, mais aussi de dessiner des perspectives plus générales sur la pratique du commentaire.

In this collection edited by Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer, scholars in communication, rhetoric and composition, and philosophy seek to “reread” Aristotle’s Rhetoric from a purely rhetorical perspective. So important do these contributors find the Rhetoric, in fact, that a core tenet in this book is that “all subsequent rhetorical theory is but a series of responses to issues raised by the central work.” The essays reflect on questions basic to rhetoric as a humanistic discipline. Some explore the ways in which the Rhetoric explicates the nature of the art of rhetoric, noting that on this issue, the tensions within the Rhetoric often provide a direct passageway into our own conflicts.

This volume is a commentary on the rhetorical and poetic texts collected in the second volume of Theophrastus of Eresus: Sources for His Life, Writings, Thought, and Influence. The commentary begins with a discussion of the ancient and medieval sources from which the texts are drawn. Next comes discussion of the titles of Theophrastus' works on rhetoric and poetics. After that each text is discussed individually. In sum, Theophrastus is shown to be an important, though sometimes seriously misunderstood, contributor to the development of Greek rhetorical and poetic theory. The commentary concludes with a bibliography of the modern scholary literature followed by several indices: important Greek and Latin words, titles of works (non-Theophrastean as well as Theophrastean), persons and places, and subjects discussed in earlier sections of the commentary.

The two centuries following the rise of the Abbasid caliphate in 750 witnessed a wave of translations from Greek into Syriac and Arabic. The translation and reception of Aristotle's Rhetoric is a prime example for the resulting transformation of antique learning in the Islamic world and beyond. On the basis of a close textual analysis of the Rhetoric, this study develops elements of a comparative “translation grammar” of Greek-Arabic translations. Contextualizing the analysis with an account of the textual history and the Syriac and Arabic philosophical tradition drawing on theRhetoric, it throws new light on the inner workings of the “translation movement” and its impact on Islamic culture.

This book provides a collection of sources, many of them fragmentary and previously scattered and hard to access, for the development of Peripatetic philosophy in the later Hellenistic period and the early Roman Empire. It also supplies the background against which the first commentator on Aristotle from whom extensive material survives, Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. AD 200), developed his interpretations which continue to be influential even today. Many of the passages are here translated into English for the first time, including the whole of the summary of Peripatetic ethics attributed to 'Arius Didymus'.