Kicking a Dead Orator in the Eloquence

I feel a little guilty kicking a dead orator here, but I am going to pick up our previous class discussion, which I believe is also continued in the reading. It seems that a significant part of the transformation of rhetoric from the ancients to 16th Century, and the 16th to 17th Century has to do with the definition of eloquence. I will concede that my attack of Quintilian was incomplete; he didn’t state that a good speaker must be a good man; he said that an “orator” must be a good man. It was a perfect speaker that Quintilian was focused upon, and this orator possessed eloquence, which Conley tells us the humanists saw as “the harmonious union of wisdom and style whose aim was to guide men toward civic virtue” (109). While this idea is noble, it is impractical for humans in the same way that chivalry is impractical for the battlefield.

Keeping this analogy in mind, I find it interesting that Conley points to rhetoric as the bloodless alternative to physical warfare because it lessened the need for actual war and provided the educated with an ideal, much like Quintilian’s “orator,” of “philosopher and statesman” (112). The Renaissance’s revival of this perceived idealization allowed the elite to model their political structure on the hallowed ancients and provide an avenue for them to be “esteemed because they advocated a code of civic duty, gave education a genuine relevance to political life, and were themselves accomplished speakers” (113). The focus of the humanist take on Cicero, Aristotle, and Quintilian can be summed up for the early humanists by Salutati: “The good is to be more highly valued than the merely true, virtue preferred over knowledge, the will over intellect, and thus rhetoric over philosophy and eloquence over wisdom” (114).

The real shift does not occur until Trebizond, who Conley clearly doesn’t like. Trebizond completely cuts Quintilian, and his work, as Conley tells us, is “devoid of the requirement that the orator be a good man, in the moral sense. Rhetoric was rather, a pragmatic political art indifferent to morality” (115). High five, Trebizond. By the way, this was not a new concept. Augustine wrote in the 4th and 5th Century that rhetoric can be used effectively for either good or evil (Matsen 361). From this point, eloquence becomes a matter of style, and although Erasmus states that “the end of education was a development of eloquent persons of character,” there is no mention regarding the orator’s ability being influenced by his morality. The rest of the section has little more to add to this point until the coming of the 17th Century.
Here the focus becomes “affect” or emotional appeal of persuasion. Where Quintilian said the end of rhetoric is "‘the moving of men’s minds’" (153), Caussin, Keckermann, and Vossius say the end is "‘the moving of the heart’" (158). Bacon says the same thing, if more eloquently (pun intended): rhetoric is used “to affect the imagination ‘to excite the appetite or will'” (164). This finally brings me to my point regarding Quintilian and eloquence from last week; the end of rhetoric has always been “the means by which any unspecified motive may be accomplished in the persuasion of an audience by an eloquent speaker who is able to ‘move souls’” (179).

For Quintilian and his ilk, the requirement of a good man was simply a lever to move the emotions of the audience, an idealized ethos, and even if I am wrong, and Quintilian, the philosopher-statesman, truly believed in the requirement of the good, the actual speakers of his day did not; they simply didn’t need to.