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

countered by teachers of rhetoric such as the influential Athenian Isocrates (436–338 B.C.), who looked back to a golden age when, he claimed, the great men of Athens—Solon, Cleisthenes the bringer of equality among citizens, Themistocles the hero of the Persian Wars, and Pericles—had used rhetoric solely for the good of the state. The very success of Athens in earlier times had shown that good speaking could offer a pathway to greatness. What was vital, argued Isocrates, was the moral independence and integrity of the speaker, and training in moral responsibility was an essential part of training in rhetoric. “The stronger a person desires to persuade hearers, the more he will work to be honourable and good and to have a good reputation among the citizens.” 4 Isocrates even recognized that at times a “moral” speaker might have to put the needs of the Greek world as a whole before the concerns of his native city. This stress upon the moral qualities of the orator was to be echoed by the Romans, by the orator and statesman Cicero and by Quintilian (c. A.D. 96), in whose
Institutio
Oratoria
an upright character and high ideals are presented as the fundamental qualities of a good speaker.
    An input of emotion in a speech was not necessarily a bad thing. In his
Rhetoric,
Aristotle listed the components of a good speech, using the word
logos
to describe the speech itself: “There are three kinds of persuasive means furnished by the
logos:
those in the character of the speaker, those in how the hearer is disposed, and those in the
logos
itself, through its demonstrating or seeming to demonstrate.” 5 One could not, argues Aristotle, disassociate “the character of the speaker” from the rational elements (its “demonstrations”) of the speech itself. They are both essential components of a speech, and the emphasis should not be on trying to eliminate emotion but to make morally responsible use of it.
    Yet for one Athenian, Plato (c. 429–347 B.C.), this was not enough. Plato lived through a time of change and disorder. His native Athens was defeated in the Peloponnesian War by Sparta (404 B.C.), its great walls demolished and its empire dismantled. A new “Government of Thirty,” to which Plato had some family links, degenerated into tyranny, and after the restoration of Athenian democracy a witch hunt was launched against Plato’s mentor, the philosopher Socrates. Socrates had made himself a well-known figure in Athens, not least through his practice of challenging every assumption of anyone he questioned. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” he insisted; “the most knowledgeable man is he who knows he knows nothing.” His demolition of any conventional belief held without reflection proved intensely irritating, especially at a time of defeat and political turmoil for Athens. Eventually the patience of his fellow citizens was exhausted, and in 399 they put Socrates on trial. “Socrates does wrong,” the charge read, “by not acknowledging the gods the city acknowledges and introducing other, new, powers. He also does wrong by corrupting the young.” Such vague charges were a familiar part of Athenian political life and could usually be met by counter-accusations against one’s opponents. Socrates refused to debase himself and argued instead, and provocatively, that he should be honoured by the city for his work, not denounced. This only outraged his accusers further, and he was found guilty and, in a rare case of Athenian political intolerance against a fellow citizen, sentenced to death. 6
    The lesson Plato drew from Socrates’ condemnation was that the emotional and ephemeral impulses of the masses could lead to the commission of evil, in this case, the execution of a “good” man. “Good” and “evil,” it appeared, were unstable concepts, relative to the moment. In his work
Gorgias,
Plato uses the example of Gorgias himself to pour scorn on the idea that a speaker can bring truth