The history of oratory and rhetoric is bound up with politics and religion, but just as today you are more likely to be going shopping or watching television than attending Church or going down to the Colosseum on a Sunday, oratory has changed over the centuries.
The world has evolved since ancient times but while the game has changed the rules still hold. We can still learn a lot from Aristotle (384 – 322BC), Demosthenes (384 – 322 BC) and Cicero (106 – 43 BC).
Aristotle would say that rhetoric is about means of persuasion; finding the means of persuasion on any subject that will move the audience to your point of view and that this technique is right and proper. He held that if you cannot persuade the audience to take your part despite being in possession of the best case it follows that you, the speaker, are at fault. And if you merely employ “instruction” on an audience you may fail, since some audiences do not have the critical faculties that enable them to be simply “instructed”.
In summary, Aristotle was of the view that there are three ways to persuade the audience: by appealing to their emotions; by demonstrating your own character; and by proving you are telling the truth. He was not wrong, and the best speakers both then and today will employ all three techniques. Aristotle was a pupil of Plato, who for a time thought it better to give the audience bald facts to enable them to make up their own minds. He held the belief that all rhetorically persuasive devices were merely lies, mendacious attempts to lay a false trail or trick the audience.
It is probably the case that Plato considered those he debated with were always on the same level – philosophers and politicians – and that rhetorical devices were unnecessary. Aristotle would have been more aware of the need to speak to those outside the political and legal establishment as democracy took hold in ancient Greece… and facts needed a bit of help.
Demosthenes is said to have been one of the greatest of the Greek orators, all the more impressive when you consider his overcoming a speech impediment. He came from more modest beginnings than many others in the political classes – his father was a swordmaker – which might explain his direct, uncomplicated speaking style, said to be without rhetorical flair. Perhaps his rhetorical flair was that he had the ability to speak to both the establishment and the proletariat. He was very effective and hugely popular with the general populus. One might surmise, since much of his speaking was to the masses urging them to rise up against Philip II of Macedon, that he deliberately employed a straightforward, unembroidered style as this was what they could best understand.
A few centuries later Julius Caesar is said to have travelled to Greece to learn, amongst other arts, how to be an orator. He used his ability to persuade the masses and the Roman Senate, to great on his triumphant return to Rome.
Amongst the most famous of the Roman orators was Cicero, a man not known for his modesty. He had a broadly similar view to Aristotle; that orators must appeal to the emotions of the audience as well as convince them through facts. At the time of Cicero oratory was taught alongside philosophy and other arts, and Cicero thought the best orator would also be well versed in all the arts, seek to live the best life possible and give good example to others.
Cicero held rhetoric above both law and philosophy in terms of importance, in that the art of persuasion and an eloquent portrayal of the facts are essential components of the man. He ended his life where he might have wanted, at the lectern in the Senate: unfortunately it was only his head and his hands that were nailed there on his execution, he and his family having fallen foul of the political regime’s carve-up of the Senate after the murder of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44BC.
Greek orators and scholars in the arts made their way to Rome from the early centuries of the first millennium until the fifth century. It was as Cicero would have liked: philosophy and oratory being taught together. However, when oratory and rhetoric split from philosophy we start to get the notion of ‘empty rhetoric’: of people speaking in public but not really knowing what they are talking about.
And in the 19th and early 20th centuries rhetoric again got a bad name, as creationists used all their powers of persuasion to try to stop Darwin and other theorists of evolution by appealing to the emotions and fears of the masses.
So it is clear that through the centuries varying degrees of rhetorical flair have been employed, with the art of persuasion always at the forefront, whether it be Elizabeth I extolling the troops to great heights on the eve of the battle of Tilbury in 1588, Charles I defining the difference between subjects and sovereigns on the scaffold in 1649, or Martin Luther King appealing to over 200,000 at the Lincoln memorial and millions in America and the world over for an end to racism in America as recently as the 1960s.
Far from being redundant or outdated in the 21st century, oratory and rhetoric are more essential now than ever: we still try to impress our peers with our words, and we have even less time in which to do it. And the game remains the same, but the rules have changed. In times past the game was, as it is now, to persuade the audience by the means you have at your disposal. But audiences in the past were much more predictable than they are today. In Rome, it was generally either the Senate or the hoi polloi; at Tilbury for Elizabeth I in 16th century Britain, soldiers; and in the 17th century a parliament full of educated, landed men for Charles I (though it didn’t do him much good).
Bottom line? You could more easily predict in the past who your audience were going to be and know how to satisfy their needs. Listeners were also much more patient than in these days of round the clock communication. Today, with many different audiences for public speakers to get to know, and huge competition from other modes of communication, the environment is more complex and audiences more diverse and demanding.