The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman

civic life . . .
    Only against death he fights in vain.
    But clear intelligence—a force beyond measure— moves to work both good and ill . . .
    When he obeys the laws and honors justice, the city stands proud . . .
    But man swerves from side to side, and when the laws are broken, and set at naught, he is like a person without a city, beyond human boundary, a horror, a pollution to be avoided. 29
    The closing lines of this famous speech are a reminder that the great achievements of the Greeks in the use of rational thought have to be set within the wider context of their views of just government and correct moral behaviour. How the Greek philosophers tackled this problem is the subject of the next chapter.

3
    THE QUEST FOR VIRTUE

    If men are to be motivated to fight with commitment, they need to be given good reasons for doing so. In Homer, it is a mark of aristocratic status that one is able to persuade others to risk their lives. Yet Homer also highlights the importance of discussion between leaders who meet in common council at the end of the day. The views of one speaker need to be tempered by those of his listeners so that there is a reasoned consensus. By the sixth century, however, speakers found themselves faced by the much more demanding audiences of the citizen assemblies, raucous, volatile and much less ready to defer to aristocratic status. New demands on speakers forced the Greeks to think about the nature of
rhetorike,
rhetoric, itself, and how to exploit it effectively before audiences. Was it even to be seen as a skill that could be taught? Yes, said the rhetorician Gorgias, who arrived in Athens in 427 from his native city, Leontini, in Sicily. Gorgias had learned his skills negotiating property disputes and had come to Athens to plead for the city to support Leontini against its neighbour Syracuse. He was unashamedly a performer— he would stride into the Athenian theatre, call out “Give me a theme” and then declaim on it without hesitation—but he gave younger citizens starting their political careers in the assembly the confidence that the art of good speaking could be learned. 1
    Yet Gorgias’ success highlighted the tension which lay at the core of rhetoric. The effectiveness of a speech seemed to depend as much on the emotional power of the speaker, his learned skills and oratorical devices, as on the quality, in rational terms, of its argument. In the activities of the Athenian assembly, for example, during the tense days of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431–404 B.C.), the citizens, swayed by powerful speeches, decided one day in 427 that all the men of the island of Mytilene, captured after a revolt, should be executed. When tempers had cooled the next day, they realized that so harsh a decision might rebound against them and they reversed it. 2 (A trireme sent off hurriedly to communicate the reversed decision arrived in Mytilene just as the executions were beginning.) In 406, the assembly was persuaded by impassioned speakers to order the execution of eight of its generals who were accused of failing to pick up shipwrecked sailors after a battle. After the executions, the assembly regretted its decision and somewhat hypocritically condemned the speakers for “forcing” it to act the way it did. So emotions could be seen to overrule reason. Playwrights and philosophers explored the dangers of rhetoric. Parmenides has the goddess who declaims his ideas tell her listener: “Now I put an end to persuasive
logos
and thought about truth, and from this point do you learn mortal opinions by listening to the deceptive appearance of my words”—words that, when separated from the
logos
of argument, the goddess recognizes, might prove in themselves “deceptive.” 3 In his play
Clouds,
Aristophanes sets up a debate between “Just Speech” and “Unjust Speech,” in which “Unjust Speech” triumphs through the unscrupulous use of verbal trickery.
    These concerns were