The Practice of Rhetoric: Poetics, Performance, Philosophy

By Debra Hawhee, Vessela Valiavitcharska, Jeanne Fahnestock and 8 more

Essays that show what a broad conception of rhetoric means and does in relation to practice
 
Rhetoric is the art of emphasis, in the ancient sense of bringing to light or obscuring in shadow, and it is both a practice and a theory about that practice. In recent decades, scholars of rhetoric have turned to approaches that braid together poetics, performance, and philosophy into a “practical art.” The Practice of Rhetoric: Poetics, Performance, Philosophy presents just such an account of rhetoric that presumes and incorporates theoretical approaches, offering a collection of principles assembled in the heat and trials of public practice. The essays gathered in this volume are inspired by the capacious conception of rhetoric put forth by historian of rhetoric Jeffrey Walker, who is perhaps best known for stressing rhetoric’s educational mission and its investments in both theory and practice.

The book extends that vision through the prisms of poetics, performance, and philosophy of argument. Poetics shows rhetoric’s meaning making in all its verbal possibilities and material manifestations, in contexts ranging from mouse-infested medieval fields to the threat of toxin-ridden streams in the twentieth century. Performance puts what is created into the heat of public life, tapping out the rhythms of Byzantine prose or using collage to visually depict the beliefs and convictions of Martin Luther King Jr. Philosophy of argument enacts the mutually constitutive relationship between rhetoric and dialectic, offering new insights on and contexts for old tools like stasis and disputation, while keeping the focus on usefulness and teachability.

Ranging across centuries and contexts, the essays collected here demonstrate the continued need to attend carefully to the cooperation of descriptive language and normative reality, conceptual vocabulary and material practice, public speech and moral self-shaping. This volume will rekindle long-standing conversations about the public, world-making practice of rhetoric, thereby enlivening anew its civic mission.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Oct 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9780817394196

Book preview

The Practice of Rhetoric

Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique

SERIES EDITOR

John Louis Lucaites

EDITORIAL BOARD

Jeffrey A. Bennett

Carole Blair

Joshua Gunn

Robert Hariman

Debra Hawhee

Claire Sisco King

Steven Mailloux

Raymie E. McKerrow

Toby Miller

Phaedra C. Pezzullo

Austin Sarat

Janet Staiger

Barbie Zelizer

The Practice of Rhetoric

Poetics, Performance, Philosophy

Essays in Honor of Jeffrey Walker

Edited by

Debra Hawhee and Vessela Valiavitcharska

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Adobe Caslon Pro

Cover design: Lori Lynch

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2137-6

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9419-6

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Rhetoric’s Practices

DEBRA HAWHEE

PART I. POETICS

1. The World-Building Power of Ekphrasis

SUSAN C. JARRATT

2. Prose before Prosa: A Brief Exposé

MICHELE KENNERLY

3. Dear Mice:

DEBRA HAWHEE

4. Exploring the Performed Argument: Teaching Poetry Rhetorically

GLEN MCCLISH

PART II. PERFORMANCE

5. Reading Poetry, Performing Rhetoric: The Place of Poetic Performance in Byzantine Rhetorical Education

VESSELA VALIAVITCHARSKA

6. Performing History, or, Imitation with a Difference: Examples from the Alexiad

ELLEN QUANDAHL

7. A Small Communicability

DALE MARTIN SMITH

PART III. PHILOSOPHIES OF ARGUMENTATION

8. The Stases—Then and Now

JEANNE FAHNESTOCK AND MARIE SECOR

9. John Locke and the Paradox of Tolerant Disputation

MARK GARRETT LONGAKER

10. Rational Rhetoric: Using Tibetan Debate to Teach Persuasive Writing

CLEVE WIESE

Conclusion: Practice’s Questions

VESSELA VALIAVITCHARSKA

Notes

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

Figures

5.1. Venetus A, fol. 18v, Iliad 1.327–53

5.2. Venetus A, fol. 18v, Iliad 1.334–35, main text (detail)

5.3. Venetus A, fol. 18v, Iliad 1.334–35, Nicanor’s scholion (detail)

5.4. Venetus A, fol. 19v, Iliad 1.393, with Nicanor’s remark in the left margin

5.5. Genevensis 44, p. 295, Iliad 7.171, with scholia by Theodore Meliteniotes

7.1. Harmony Holiday, Adultery

7.2. Harmony Holiday, Martin Luther King . . . at Communist Training School

Acknowledgments

Jeffrey Walker, this book’s raison d’être, directed both of our dissertations. He mentored us both well beyond graduate school with equal attention to kindness and scholarly rigor. We hope that he feels our gratitude, as well as the friendship and enthusiasm of each contributor, with every page.

Thank you to the volume’s contributors, brilliant scholars and amazing humans, every one of them. They have been patient, kind, and cheerful throughout the editing, revising, and publication stages.

Abigail Fourspring and Megan Covone both provided valuable assistance with citations and formatting.

Thank you to Dan Waterman, editor extraordinaire, whose encouraging enthusiasm and understanding of rhetoric buoyed us. The manuscript’s anonymous readers helped strengthen each essay and the volume as a whole.

Publication of The Practice of Rhetoric is supported in part by the McCourtney Professorship in Civic Deliberation.

DEBRA HAWHEE AND VESSELA VALIAVITCHARSKA

Introduction

Rhetoric’s Practices

DEBRA HAWHEE

A practice of rhetoric 1, mid-twentieth century: a marine biologist wishes to impress upon her fellow citizens just how harmful pesticides are to their world. She composes vivid descriptions, urgently directing imaginations into a grim future: desolate forests, neighborhoods without songbirds, a hollowing out—even destruction—of noisy, verdant life.

A practice of rhetoric 2, second century BCE: the early life of the marks now known as punctuation, learned and taught as rhythmic guides, designed to be breathed, felt, performed.

A practice of rhetoric 3, twenty-first century: a teacher incorporates principles of Tibetan debate in his college writing classroom at a Western university. The habits of engagement carry with them their own philosophy, a commitment to structures of reasoning that infuse the course assignments and the students’ accounts of the experience of the course itself.

These practices of rhetoric are but three of the practices elaborated in this volume. The descriptions, the marks, the philosophically infused structures all point to rhetoric as a practice, which the volume defines as a collection of principles assembled in the trial and error of use, shaping and shaped by reflection, bodies, worlds, with the goal of offering something useful and teachable.¹ Such a conception of practice does not eschew theory but rather presumes and incorporates theoretical activity. Such a conception presents rhetoric as an enterprise that braids together poetics, performance, and philosophy. This volume presents essays that explore the implications of such a framing of rhetoric, a framing inspired by Jeffrey Walker, the scholar whose work this volume honors. As Thomas O. Sloane (Walker’s own teacher) put it in 1991, the history of rhetoric has always been entwined with the history of education.² But Walker himself took that observation further two decades later with this assertion: Its pedagogical enterprise is what ultimately makes rhetoric rhetoric and not just a version of something else.³ And that presumption—that rhetoric’s commitment is chiefly educational—has been shared by scholars such as Richard Graff, Michael Leff, and Mark Garrett Longaker and elucidated by work on rhetorical education by scholars such as Shirley Logan, Jessica Enoch, and Cheryl Glenn such that rhetoric becomes a more inclusive practice.⁴ The assertion of a constitutive relation between education and rhetoric is simultaneously capacious and specific.

Like the conception of rhetoric it pursues, this volume is capacious because it draws poetics, performance, and philosophies of argumentation into its mission. And it is specific precisely because of that mission—education for civic life, which requires a mind engaged with others, informed by philosophical and theoretical principles yet navigating concrete circumstances, and turned toward future practice.

One important implication for this conception of rhetoric as a practice is disciplinary, for it begins to recombine the distinguishing strengths of the two institutional locations of rhetoric (in US institutions), English or writing departments, where rhetoric has long been entwined with composition or the teaching of writing, and communication departments, where rhetoric tilts toward criticism and public address.⁵ A conception of rhetoric as a practice nourishes what writers of the Mount Oread Manifesto call a unified vision of rhetorical education.⁶

Communication scholar Gerard Hauser, sharing Walker’s presumption that rhetoric is foremost a teaching art, argued that we—scholar-teachers of rhetoric—require a manifesto that connects our disciplinary history and expertise to the character and quality of civic life. We need a statement that ties what we know to what we teach, and how what we teach contributes to an engaged and informed citizenry and to the quality of public decision-making.⁷ Hauser’s account presents the teaching of rhetoric as a bridge between disciplinary expertise and public deliberation. The account also builds and reinforces a new bridge between rhetoric as studied and practiced in English and writing departments and as it is studied and practiced in departments of communication. The conception of rhetoric as a practice brings curricular efforts and classroom practices closer to the discipline’s center and at the same time values public life and democratic processes. What becomes possible from there is a focus on public figures, like the marine biologist in the first example in the opening of this chapter, who turned her expertise to the public and who sought to teach through vivid description, to show through her words what she knows, and to share that knowledge in order to inspire action.

In addition to drawing out the importance of teaching and learning, practice—especially its adjective form, practical—carries overtones of use, amplifying the useful features of rhetoric. In academic worlds in particular, in an almost commonplace way, the word practice stands in contradistinction to the word theory. The sometimes-frustrated question of what can be done with a theory often lingers in the air, in queries about how a theoretical concept or insight can be put to use. In a book-length investigation of the uses of use, Sara Ahmed notes that using something brings it back down to Earth.⁸ The Earth as a stand-in for material, for the here and now, can also inhere in the word practice. Such a conception extends into characterizations of high theory as stratospheric, which implies the need to think—or speak or write—in more earthly terms.

Rhetoric, of course, has long operated on the ground, in the contingent world of public deliberation, and its Earth-bound people, bodies, and material.⁹ That on-the-groundness, on my reading, helps to account for the flashes of near-contempt for the art that rise up from the pages of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (e.g., in his framing of delivery in book 3).¹⁰ That on-the-groundness also requires of rhetoric a kind of flexibility or nimbleness. To be useful, that is, in a variety of communicative situations, a practice of rhetoric needs to be adaptable. As Ahmed writes, the idea of use involves a way of arranging worlds as well as ourselves.¹¹ A practice of rhetoric exerts its usefulness in similar ways.

We are of course not alone in returning to this idea of rhetoric as a practice at this moment; a handful of recent books have led the way in something of a return to practice, though perhaps they amplify a feature of the discipline that has long been latent. Casey Boyle’s Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice formulates practice as a set of concrete particulars that point to generalizable knowledge as well as activities that through repetition create the grooves of knowledge.¹² For Boyle, rhetoric as a posthuman practice accounts for the material forms and movements of information and shows how, through serial movements, practice composes a body and exercises its tendencies that will later activate new or different capacities.¹³ This volume documents instances of just such a productive conception of practice. Public address scholar Kristy Maddux examines citizenship as a practice, which she conceives of as a set of repeated behaviors that are constantly under negotiation, which is to say rhetorical.¹⁴ And Michele Kennerly, who presents editing as both a practice and as a language for indexing that practice, elucidates the material habits and reflective processes that combine with editorial practices.¹⁵ The portraits of rhetoric as a practice presented in this volume join these recent scholarly contributions to present rhetoric as a complex entwinement of poetics, of material objects, of streams of habits, of performance—of arranging worlds, to use Ahmed’s phrase again.¹⁶

Such is the spirit of this volume. The Practice of Rhetoric focuses on rhetoric’s distant and near pasts in order to fashion a forward-looking account, asking primarily where recent reformulations can take the future of rhetoric as a discipline and—importantly—as a practice. This volume brings to life studies of rhetoric’s practice across a variety of historical contexts and with specific implications ranging from feminist and ecological to religious and pedagogical. Those three distinct but still at-times overlapping sets of practices—poetics, performance, and philosophical argumentation—organize the volume. But that very organization itself argues in a more subtle and recursive way: these three categories of rhetoric’s practice need each other to make sense. I will now consider each in turn along with the chapters comprising the three sections.

Poetics

Thomas Farrell, writing in 1986, argues that Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric as a practical, public art both constituted and limited by the poetic, defined as that which could be made.¹⁷ Poetics, in this scheme, as in ours, puts forth a making, and in all its lexical possibilities—Liddell, Scott, and Jones list these as fabrication, creation, and production—have a comprehensive ring to them. Such making both constitutes and is constituted by the practical art of rhetoric.¹⁸

Susan C. Jarratt’s essay, The World-Building Power of Ekphrasis, presents our guiding conception of poetics by showing how rhetoric participates in what Michael Warner calls world-making. Jarratt focuses on the practice of ekphrasis or vivid description, long an inventive, creative—read, poetic—component of rhetorical education with the power to build desired worlds by depicting alternative futures. Jarratt productively reads the writings of biologist and environmental scientist Rachel Carson as ekphrastic efforts to stun readers into caring about the future of the Earth’s resources by bringing before readers’ eyes a bleak picture of the inevitable destruction that would result from the use of chemical toxins. Michele Kennerly’s exploration of a little-studied predecessor to the term prose—logos psilos, or naked speech—reveals early rumblings of a separation between poetic and rhetorical texts and practices even as it further historicizes the idea of clothed or ornamented speech. In an essay that reflects on the poetic, almost magical, properties of writing, Debra Hawhee builds on the idea of world making by considering the curious practice of people writing letters to nonhuman animals in order to banish or punish them and uses rhetorical education to cast the letters in a new light. Finally, Glen McClish presents a case and a method for teaching poetry rhetorically. His approach gains vividness and usefulness for language arts teachers at all levels through his consideration of a broad range of poems and sample analyses of three more: Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier, Thomas Hardy’s Drummer Hodge, and Josephine Miles’s Teacher.

Performance

If poetics helps focus on the world-making practice of rhetoric, performance nudges things a step further by altogether reworlding.¹⁹ Much has been written, especially in the field of communication, about the potentially productive relationship between performance studies and rhetorical studies. This section means to honor the heft of performance as a set of repeated, enacted practices, even as it newly construes its workings in rhetorical education.²⁰ Performance lends emphasis to self-reflection in rhetorical education, a point Mary Frances HopKins made about criticism toward the end of last century when considering the use of the term in the context of rhetorical criticism.²¹ Reflection, and particularly intersectional reflection, after all, as Bernadette Marie Calafell notes, is a central methodology of performance studies and of women of color feminist theories that can productively blend with critical rhetoric to resist traditional rhetoric.²²

Given its theoretical foundation in the art of training up orators, even the most traditional accounts of rhetoric can show how bound up that art is with performing. The selection of essays gathered in this section add to recent work on rhetoric and performance by zeroing in on exactly how rhetorical education has nurtured and shaped performance. Vessela Valiavitcharska examines the role of punctuation in intertwining poetic rhythm with rhetorical performance in Byzantine education, suggesting that such practices underlie rhythmical components of stylistic theory as manifest in oratory. Ellen Quandahl looks at the ever-rich tradition of Byzantine encomiastic rhetoric, using an oration written about a woman and an immense history composed by that woman to show how these speeches operate as memory performances that rely on imitation. Dale Martin Smith’s essay rounds out the performance section by using the ancient stylistic theory of Dionysius of Halicarnassus along with the activist work of contemporary poets Amiri Baraka and Harmony Holiday to show how performance and persuasion have—and can continue to—unify rhetoric and poetics. These three contributions show better than I can tell the overlap between poetics and performance. HopKins notes, a performance is always a kind of repetition, and Quandahl’s contribution highlights how that repetition works in rhetorical education—with imitation it is a performing of another person’s words, behaviors, or really, persona.

Philosophies of Argumentation

When the first issue of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric was published in the winter of 1968, part of its mission was to concern itself with the rôle of rhetoric in philosophical argument.²³ Of course scholars and thinkers concerned themselves with such matters well before that date. This section presents new considerations of the role of philosophy—especially philosophies of argumentation—in rhetoric. Scholars here work with a variety of tools and traditions that productively—and practically—enact the mutually constitutive relationship between rhetoric and dialectic or rhetoric and philosophy. This section begins with a new account of a familiar heuristic, a procedural approach to invention known as stasis. Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor update this classical framework that encourages aspiring rhetors to ask after the nature of things, their facts and their qualities, as a way of locating an argument’s position. They re-present the new stases of cause and of proposal, adjusting them for contemporary conditions—which stem mainly from developments in scientific reasoning as well as multimodal modes of argumentation. Mark Garrett Longaker, next, momentarily inhabits the early modern practice of disputation in order to marshal a new argument about why, exactly, John Locke detested rhetoric. What he finds in Locke’s opposition between science and rhetoric as modes of proof has lasting implications for the way argument works today. And in the final chapter of the section, Cleve Wiese draws from the Tibetan monastic tradition a dialectical practice of reasoning to rethink current Western approaches to argumentation pedagogy. Whereas most joint treatments of philosophy and rhetoric begin and remain within a philosophical framework, presenting what Walker is on record as calling just another kind of philosophy,²⁴ the chapters in this section break out of that mold by focusing on the utility of underlying principles in the context of rhetorical education and practice.²⁵

Together, then, the essays in each of the three parts demonstrate the continued usefulness of rhetoric’s principles, tools, and yes, practices, even as they perform the important work of revising and reconsidering prevailing narratives of rhetoric’s history and the implications of those revisions for current practice.

PART I

Poetics

CHAPTER 1

The World-Building Power of Ekphrasis

SUSAN C. JARRATT

Description is the highest and rarest achievement.

BRUNO LATOUR, Reassembling the Social

Ekphrasis, the progymnasmatic exercise of description, has attracted interest from many quarters and in many eras. The questions posed for contributors to this volume have a special pertinence for a technique that has been seen to carry almost as much sway as argumentation in the process of persuasion.¹ How does ekphrasis create a relationship between invention and critical thinking? How has it been a site for creativity and constraint? A seemingly simple process—describing in words a scene, a landscape, a building, or an object such as a work of art, an animal, or a plant—occupies an advanced place in the progression of the progymnasmatic exercises.²

A common starting point in discussions of ekphrasis is its capacity to bring the object described vividly before the eyes (enargeia) with an accompanying emotional force. Ruth Webb explores in detail the emotional power produced by ekphrasis with reference to Aristotle, Quintilian, and Pseudo-Longinus as well as the later authors of progymnasmata textbooks.³ As Webb’s chapter titles, "Enargeia: Making Absent Things Present and Phantasia: Memory, Imagination and the Gallery of the Mind, suggest, she, like many others, is interested in the way ekphrasis calls to mind something not immediately available or present to the apprehension of listeners or readers. Through the power of language, rhetors evoke listeners’ internal images of absent things, [that] provide the raw material with which each party can ‘paint’ the images that ekphrasis puts into words."⁴ In recent work on this phenomenon of phantasia, the emphasis falls on the mental activity and the emotional power derived therefrom. Debra Hawhee, for example, in a 2011 article on rhetorical vision, discusses image formation for Aristotle as a kind of conjuring, associated with pleasure and desire, anger and shame. Rhetorical vision resides in short bursts of language, in vivid turns of phrase, in lively and lifelike metaphors; it is sometimes achieved through the heaping up of detail.⁵ Ned O’Gorman, similarly, takes an interest in phantasia as a psychological phenomenon, working with Aristotle’s Rhetoric and De Anima to emphasize the affective state[s] thus produced with urgent and unpredictable affective power. O’Gorman also notes, citing Rhetoric (1368a), that in epideictic, amplification is a key stylistic strategy for producing greatness (megethos). Here rhetoric works at a ‘primal’ level of desire and/or emotion.⁶ Much of the contemporary scholarship on ekphrasis shares this focus, examining the competition between verbal and visual arts in their power and exploring passages of ekphrastic tour de force in, for example, the Greek novel.⁷ At its dazzling extremes, description can overflow boundaries, often stretching the limits of realism. It can move from the thing being described to other things—outside the frame or sometimes within it, creating a three-dimensional picture inside a picture. Or it can become a narrative, introducing a temporal element. It can include senses other than sight, like smell and touch.

But to what end are such emotional effects created? Simon Goldhill, elaborating the strong sense of ekphrastic visualization, notes its capacity to astonish, even to blind the listener or reader. It can be used, Goldhill asserts, as a rhetorical weapon to get around the censor of the intellect.⁸ Without gainsaying this potential, I aim here to look at some ancient and contemporary examples of ekphrasis in which the effects seem to be marshaled, pace Goldhill, in service of a reader’s or listener’s critical capacity: namely, the capacity to entertain a critique of or alternative to a prevailing perspective. Page duBois alludes to this capacity in an early work on description in the epic where she describes ekphrasis as a model of the course of the world. Serving a historical function, the examples duBois presents work to clarif[y] the relation between individual and communal history.⁹ Hawhee moves in a similar direction when she suggests that phantasia can have a role in deliberation beyond the emotional surge, working to construct a composite image involving images of past, present, and future events.¹⁰ And Webb confirms that ekphrasis plays an important role—alongside argumentation—in making the audience share the speaker’s perspective. It also serves to alter their perception of certain events and their relation to the present.¹¹ To designate this capacity, I use the term world building, borrowing from public sphere theory and queer studies.¹² How does ekphrasis come into play when the rhetoric aims not merely to create an emotional effect but, in the process, to change dramatically the perspective of the listener or reader? I propose that ekphrasis is especially useful for such radical changes in perspective.

A contemporary ethnographer of affect, Kathleen Stewart, suggests this phenomenon in a brief reflection on the Still Life: A still is a state of calm, a lull in the action. But it is also a machine hidden in the woods that distills spirits into potency through a process of slow condensation. . . . Still lifes punctuate [the] significance [of ordinary life] . . . , the fragments of experience that pull at ordinary awareness but rarely come into full frame. When a still life pops up . . . , it can come as a shock or as some kind of wake-up call.¹³ Stewart writes here about the visual image that arrests movement, and in so doing, she creates a kind of ekphrasis of her own weighted with reflection on the capacities of still images. The image, she writes, can become an alibi for all of the violence, inequality and social insanity folded into the open disguise of ordinary things. But the verbal description breaks down that alibi, exposing and opening up those dangerous forces constellated in the fixed image. Let us consider the earliest and, arguably, most impressive example of ancient ekphrasis—the description of Achilles’s shield from book 18 of the Iliad—as a case in point.¹⁴ When Achilles, sulking, refuses to fight, his comrade Patroclus begs to wear his armor and enter the battle. After Patroclus is killed, and the armor taken by the Trojans, Achilles is propelled into action but lacks armor. His mother, Thetis, prevails on Hephaestus to forge a new kit. The poet takes the time here to describe the shield crafted for this occasion.

The craftsman embosses images onto layers of leather covered with silver: of the Earth and the heavenly bodies, of cities and their busy doings, of war and its stratagems and destruction, of agriculture and its fruits, of festivals and even of the potter who commemorates them through his art. As many others have observed, the very first ekphrasis offers an awe-inspiring example of world building.¹⁵ Indeed, such language appears at the beginning of the description:

And first Hephaestus makes a great and massive shield.

Blazoning well-wrought emblems all across its surface,

Raising a rim around it, glittering, triple-ply

With a silver shield-strap run from edge to edge

And five layers of metal to build the shield itself,

And across its vast expanse with all his craft and cunning

The god creates a world of gorgeous immortal work.¹⁶

The following hundred-plus lines describe a world of beauty and complexity. Crowned by the heavens at the beginning and encircled by the river Ocean at the end, the world of the shield is laid out initially in a circular and urban topography.¹⁷ But actually Hephaestus embosses not one but two cities, we read, one located within another. The inside city features weddings with processions through the streets, dancing, and music.¹⁸ But it also includes a quarrel (neikos) in the agora: two men declaim before a judge in the presence of heralds, elders, and crowds, implying that law (and the rhetoric fueling it) will operate successfully to adjudicate the conflict. The listener is offered a series of scenes, many of which are peaceful and bucolic. Fields are plowed, grain reaped and bound, vineyards harvested, and sheep tended in scenes peopled by well-fed workers and young people joyfully dancing and singing. These descriptions offer the reader a utopic vision of life interrupted at points by the warring world of the epic. The other city, however, surrounds the first with a divided army in battle gear. As with the Greeks in Troy, there are competing plans for conquering a handsome citadel.¹⁹ Led by the god and goddess of war (Ares and Athena), the troops dazzle with their brilliant armor. They use treachery to catch their opponents off guard and ultimately engage in the same kind of brutal assault that Homer recounts in the main narrative, including bloody wounds and corpses dragged off the field.²⁰ The poet offers here two dramatically different pictures of collective existence: two worldviews. The point of this ekphrasis is decidedly not a momentary, emotional charge but rather an invitation to a more extended contemplation of two ways of living.

The shield represents worlds, but who observes or receives them? What is the rhetorical effect of Homer’s grand ekphrasis? Although scholars may track reception within the world of the narrative, what listeners or readers of the epics in various historical moments made of the worlds created on Achilles’s shield is another question, one difficult to answer.²¹ As they listened, audiences of the epic might have called to mind images of war or of peace, depending on their experiences, though the peaceful world seems to carry more sway. The examples of ekphrastic persuasion offered in the ancient progymnasmata present much simpler scenarios; they are often stock situations from declamation.²² It is easy to see how these dramatic examples could be useful with students. But in the case of Achilles’s shield, we have something far more complex. If the interpretive response is not obvious with this Homeric ekphrasis, its scope and scale suggest the comprehensive reach and potential of this rhetorical practice at its very beginnings. Another Homeric case turns our attention to the way ekphrasis might be mobilized for radical reimagining.

Thersites

Appearing in book 2 of the Iliad and nowhere else in Greek literature, Thersites is the only common soldier described in the poem and is the ugliest man who ever came to Troy.²³ After nine discouraging years of war, Agamemnon, at the inspiration of Zeus in a dream, tries a devious strategy for urging the Greek forces to gather their strength and beat back the Trojans. In an attempt at reverse psychology—or what he terms a test—Agamemnon reports that his dream message indicated defeat; the troops should cut and run.²⁴ Apparently imagining that they would rally in the face of this message, Agamemnon and his counselors are distressed to find the soldiers eagerly rushing to the ships. As Odysseus seeks to stem the retreat—reasoning with the higher-class leaders and beating the ordinary soldiers with the speaking scepter—a character named Thersites speaks up, boldly and bluntly scolding Agamemnon for bad leadership but advising the same course of action—a retreat. Odysseus beats the lowly and debased truth speaker with the scepter, drawing blood and tears, while the other soldiers (the plethus, or throng) laugh and revile him for wrangling with princes.²⁵ Here is the full description of Thersites:

Here was the ugliest man who ever came to Troy.

Bandy-legged as he was, with one foot clubbed,

Both shoulders humped together, curving over

His caved-in-chest, and bobbing above them

His skull warped to a point,

Sprouting clumps of scraggly, wooly hair.²⁶

Again, as with the Achilles shield example, we have little way of knowing how this small episode may have struck listeners or readers in the era of its composition. It may have confirmed the aristocratic values of physical strength and beauty associated with glory and bravery on the field of battle. But there is a populist logic to Thersites’s argument—a survival ethic—and his treatment at the hands of Odysseus may have evoked sympathy. Indeed, a few centuries later we encounter the work of fourth-century CE Anti-ochian rhetorician Libanius, whose encomium of Thersites praises him for courage, forthrightness, and defense of the powerless. In support of the outlier, Libanius writes,

He was moved to words and accusations against the wrongdoers by the mishandling of the situation, and he did not fear the status of some, and he did not flatter those in power while being harsh to men of the people. . . . For those in power and with full tables and riches, there was need of someone with wisdom and a beneficial frankness of speech, who would understand the wrongs being done and would rebuke and shout down and prevent some of them, but correct others, and who would fear nothing at all—neither a scepter, nor a man’s rhetorical ability, nor a host of friends.²⁷

For Libanius, Thersites challenges the epic power structure completely; he turns it inside out. The character is an exemplar of free speaking, reproaching Agamemnon for his greed, his anger at Achilles, and his duplicity: [Agamemnon was] openly mentioning retreat, but secretly preparing to stay, and saying some things himself, but doing others through flatterers and doing a deed uncharacteristic even of a good private soldier, let alone a king.²⁸ Libanius addresses the physical description in a couple of ways. For one thing, he praises Thersites for joining the military expedition despite his physical deformities: His anger against the wrongdoers spurred him on . . . though he was bandy-legged.²⁹ Further, the Sophist notes that the physical description does not imply mental imbalance, separating the body from the finest of Thersites’s deeds.³⁰ Libanius’s interpretation of the ekphrasis of Thersites challenges the values of the epic world: physical beauty is not a guarantor of virtue; venerable speakers such as Nestor are less brave than one such as Thersites, who speaks up in the face of possible reprimand. Post-Enlightenment classicists follow in Libanius’s path. For nineteenth-century historian George Grote, Thersites is a stand-in for the mass (the Achaian plethus).³¹ In the twentieth century, G. E. M. de Ste. Croix comments on Thersites’s seditious speech and describes him as a proto-demagogue.³² In this example, a reception of the ekphrasis operates less as emotional appeal than as an interruption and a provocation. Interpretation is needed. Does the world of the epic have a place for a Thersites? Or does his presence demand that we imagine that world differently?

This world-(re)building function of ekphrasis would seem to have potential for bringing to light social situations or peoples never contemplated by most listeners or readers, breaking down the alibi, as Stewart puts it. It may reveal something hidden in plain sight: the existence of those whose lives are lived below the level of visibility or regard. Marjorie Curry Woods shows how the performance of another rhetorical exercise, ethopoieia (a speech delivered through the voice of another—another person, place, or even animal), created such effects in her study, Weeping for Dido, the title of which comes from St. Augustine’s account of a moment in his rhetorical education. Required to speak in the voice of the Carthaginian queen, deserted by Aeneas after his short stay on the way to founding Rome, Augustine wept with sorrow, imagining himself in her place.³³ The commonality between the two exercises is the possibility of imagining an alternative to life as we know it. Libanius probably wrote his encomium (as his many progymnasmatic exercises) for students; it may have been discussed in a classroom setting. This exercise may have led students to question commonplaces of the culture.

In what follows, I examine two more ekphrastic episodes in ancient texts and then one from a contemporary source, each of which stages the complexity of ekphrasis as a world-building enterprise. At the end, we move back to the classroom with a critical commentary on ways that teaching description in writing classes may carry the weight of world building, or not. My ancient cases come from the second-century BCE Greek historian Polybius’s Rise of the Roman Empire and from the second-century CE Latin novel by Apuleius, The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses).

Polybius

Historian Polybius (c. 200–118 BCE) is not a familiar figure for students of ancient rhetoric but perhaps should be. His forty-volume work, Histories (in Greek), has come down to us in fragments but has had an important influence on political theory and historiography.³⁴ In the Hellenistic period, this well-educated Greek aristocrat from the Peloponnese was on his way to becoming a successful diplomat in the path laid out by his father, Lycortas, when he was caught up in the colonizing aggression of the Romans. By the third century, the Romans had moved into Africa, Spain, and turned eventually to Macedonia, sacking the city of Acanthus in 200, possibly the year of Polybius’s birth. Sweeping through many Greek cities to the south, including Polybius’s Megalopolis, the Romans decided that some Greek leaders had been working against Roman interests and deported a thousand of them to Italy, Polybius among them. He, along with his compatriots, was held in detention without accusation or trial for sixteen years (167–150 BCE).

But unlike the other Greek hostages, Polybius was befriended and taken in by the general Aemilius Paullus, and in time, he became a friend and adviser to the general’s son, Scipio Aemilianus. Through this family, Polybius had access to other influential Romans and was allowed freedom of movement in the city and the leisure for writing. Thus he conceived of a grand historical project through which to discover by what means and under what system of government the Romans succeeded in less than fifty-three years in bringing under their rule almost the whole of the inhabited world.³⁵ From the biographical information available to us, we know that Polybius experienced some of the most violent and disruptive events in the history he narrates. After his return to Greece, Polybius served as an intermediary between the Romans and the Achaeans, keeping in touch with the remaining detainees (only three hundred left of the original one thousand). He served as political and military adviser to Scipio in Spain and Africa, witnessing the destruction of Carthage in 146. In that same fateful year, Polybius became aware of another violent demonstration of Roman conquest, the razing of the city of Corinth.³⁶ Thus the Histories provide one of the first and most extensive commentaries on imperial power from the perspective of a colonized subject.

The reader might then expect an account of these experiences—an account that brings before the eyes of his readers the violence of imperial conquest. And yet Polybius is disinclined to resort to pathetic appeals in the project of persuading readers of the validity of his history. In fact, he harshly condemns historians who describe the pain and suffering caused by the Roman conquest. Polybius self-consciously places himself in the line of pragmatic historians, Thucydides standing as the primary exemplar, and criticizes others who indulge in what he considers sensationalism.³⁷ In making such criticisms, he reproduces ekphrastic passages.

In the first such instance, Polybius takes exception to the descriptions of Phylarchus, a historian who describes the calamities of Mantinea, a city destroyed during this period: In his eagerness to arouse the pity and attention of his readers, he treats us to a picture of clinging women with their hair disheveled and their breasts bare, or again of crowds of both sexes together with their children and aged parents weeping and lamenting as they are led away to slavery. This sort of thing he keeps up throughout his history, always trying to bring horrors vividly before our eyes.³⁸ For Polybius, such an approach is not just bad history but an ignoble and womanish treatment. This critique comes from one whose own city, during the same period, was destroyed in so savage and vindictive a manner as to leave no prospect that it could ever be inhabited again and who himself was taken into captivity.³⁹

Self-consciously staging his history as fact based and pragmatic, in contrast with the overly dramatic histories of others, Polybius places his project generically under the mantel of free speech, a frank assessment of facts, dismissing the emotional responses one might feel in the face of such events. Vigorously rejecting what he terms tragic histories, Polybius sanctions those historians who try to bring horrors (ta deina) vividly before the eyes: Phylarchus simply narrates most of such catastrophes and does not even suggest their causes or the nature of these causes, without which it is impossible in any case to feel either legitimate pity or proper anger.⁴⁰ Seeking to apply reason and order to loss, Polybius condemns such exaggerated pictures (ton suggraphea terateuomenon), presented without a discussion of causes, suggesting that they make it impossible to feel legitimate (eulogos) pity or proper (kathēkontos) anger.⁴¹ The negative feminization of this style of historiography is notable; a properly masculinized historian will feel nothing but rather will channel his emotions into appropriate forms, legitimate and proper.⁴² How does ekphrasis relate to world building in this example? Polybius actually experiences world destroying, although he turns aside from that reality. He seeks to accomplish with his writing an explanation of that process, a rationalizing of the Roman rise to power. Through his writing, Polybius rebuilds a world through reason and writing to replace the one he lost. It is not until later in his life and writing process that he is able to acknowledge that loss.

By the end of the project, we understand that Polybius has undergone two traumas: the original hostage taking and then the perhaps even more disturbing developments of 146, the culmination of what he calls troubled times. He was present with Scipio at the destruction of Carthage and then absent but informed of the "ruination