Aelius Aristides:

A view on rhetoric

Albert Joosse MA dissertation Ancient Society and Culture Student # 0127418 Utrecht University Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 2

Introduction

Reflection on rhetoric was so well-developed in antiquity that Aristotle’s Rhetoric and other ancient works still have more than antiquarian value today. Late antiquity acknowledged as one of its champions of rhetoric, if not its foremost, Aelius Aristides of Mysia, the preservation of whose writings is due to his equal popularity with Byzantine scribes; in modern times, however, this ancient champion is considered at most an interesting malade imaginaire. Modern scholarship on Aristides has been almost unanimously disparaging. As the title of Baumgart’s Aelius Aristides als Repräsentant der sophistischen Rhetorik des zweiten Jahrhunderts der Kaiserzeit indicates, the only perspective in which Aristides was thought worth studying was as an uncommonly rich source for the cultural life of the second century AD. This approach also dominates Boulanger’s Aelius Aristide, which remains the main source of Aristides studies.1 In this view Aristides’s thought is judged barren,2 his style tortuous for abuse of mechanical procedures of composition and product of incoherent enthousiasm.3 In more recent years, however, the theoretical views and approaches of Aristides have received more positive attention, in the work of scholars as Pernot, Michel, Cassin.4

My attempt in the following is in line with this reappraisal of Aristides. I propose to elucidate and interpret the argument Aristides develops in §§135-177 of Oration II, In defence of rhetoric, in refutation of Plato’s claim that rhetoric is not an art because it uses conjecture. In order to understand Aristides’s position we must discuss the views on rhetoric of Plato and Isocrates. These great figures of classical culture each stand at the head of an intellectual tradition in antiquity, influential not least in their different views on rhetoric. It is with reference to them that later theoretical positions were occupied and must be explained. Knowledge of these views will help us understand Aristides’s view per se as well as his position in relation to the main theoretical positions of his age and of earlier ages. For this reason part II of this paper analyses these views of Isocrates and Plato. Further context is provided in part I, which pays attention to the Second Sophistic, to the position of Aristides’s ‘opponent’, Plato, in this cultural climate, and to Aristides’s place in the Second Sophistic. Part I also discusses form, method and content of Oration II as a whole. Part III will analyse in detail the argument Aristides unfolds in §§135-77. A commentary on the text distils the main statements in this section. Then four terms will be subject of close analysis. The final section of this third part attempts to provide a synthesis of the reflections on rhetoric in this passage, while relating these reflections to the views of Plato and Isocrates.

My aim in this paper is to uncover the view on rhetoric that motivates the arguments of §§135-77. In speaking of a ‘view on rhetoric’ I do not mean undisputed elements of rhetorical theory (the parts of an oration, for instance), but my interest in this paper concerns those points of method, status and conditions of rhetorical activity which Aristides advances against Plato. In my view, comprehension of Aristides’s views and of their significance must include an account of their relation to Platonic and Isocratean theory; I therefore explicitly include this relation in section III.iii as part of the Aristidean conception of rhetoric. Questions about originality need not be answered before one can affirm the relevance of this conception of rhetoric. As one of the central figures of Hellenic culture both to his own day and to centuries to come, what Aristides has to say about the art of rhetoric is worth

1 Except for the religious aspect of Aristides (and his dreams), for which the main text is Behr 1968a. 2 Baumgart: 14; Reardon: 150. 3 Boulanger: 458; Reardon: 151. 4 Pernot 1993a; Pernot 1993b; Michel; Cassin. See also the works cited in Pernot 1993b: 329n.59, which works I have been unable to access. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 3 investigating. The highly skilful way in which Aristides, as will emerge, undertakes a defence which seeks to honour the aggressor, and adapts central theoretical notions in Isocrates and Plato to his own cultural and rhetorical needs, is an additional reward for such investigation. There is no need to say I disagree that ‘le désordre de l’exposition interdit toute analyse suivie’;5 the Defence is neither concise nor always lucidly structured, but well worth analysis. It is not my intention, however, to defend Aristides at all points; in fact, I am not much concerned with whether his arguments are good ones or not, or whether he does justice to Plato. I am interested in the view of rhetoric Aristides uses and develops in one section of his oration, §§135- 77, and in how that view relates to the views of Plato and Isocrates.6

I leave a number of terms in Greek (transliterated).7 These terms play an important role in the argument; some of them have different shades of meaning that are exploited in the argument. Translation of these terms would therefore obscure the argument. If an important change in meaning occurs in the course of the argument I will signal this and assess the consequences of this change for the argument. One such term is stokhazesthai, which means ‘to take aim’ in contexts such as archery, to ‘aim for’ in more figurative contexts, but also ‘to guess at’ something. These are not disjunct meanings, however; Aristides’s argument assumes that there is a continuity of meaning across more literal and more figurative contexts and that the process referred to by stokhazesthai is the same in the activities he describes. Another term I leave untranslated is logos. This term can mean as divergent things as ‘word’, ‘argument’, ‘proportion’, ‘reason’, ‘story’, ‘account’, ‘calculation’, ‘measure’. I also keep eikazein, as it, too, has nuances of meaning, including ‘forming a picture’ to ‘conjecture’. Kairos is another key term that I will generally transliterate. For these four terms I refer to the discussions in III.ii. Other terms that are occasionally left untranslated are prosagein, eikos, anapherein, tekhnê, tukhein.

5 Boulanger: 212. 6 Nor is my aim, ultimately, to specify whether the view on rhetoric that motivates §§135-77 – it is in these terms that I formulate my aim – is Aristides’s view; for my purpose it does not matter, strictly speaking, whether Aristides believes what he says in this section. This question of sincerity is problematic about all dead authors; perhaps even more so for Aristides. Still, for all practical purposes, we may assume that the view on rhetoric that motivates §§135- 77 is a view Aristides would subscribe to. 7 All translations are mine, unless indicated otherwise. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 4

Part I

In this first part I will sketch the movement of the Second Sophistic as a general context of Aristides’s writing (I.i), place Oration II into its immediate context (I.ii), discuss the form and method of Oration II (I.iii) and finally summarise the contents of Oration II, in order to correctly situate the part on stokhazesthai with which we will be concerned here (I.iv).

I.i Second Sophistic as background to Aristides

Aristides was part of a cultural movement known as the Second Sophistic. This section briefly explains the significance of this movement as the background to Oration II. General discussion of the Second Sophistic (I.i.A) is followed by discussion of Aristides’s life and place in the Second Sophistic (I.i.B). Thirdly, I briefly discuss the standing of Plato’s works in the Second Sophistic (I.i.C).

I.i.A SECOND SOPHISTIC

The name ‘Second Sophistic’ is taken from Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists. This work surveys the lives of a number of significant cultural figures, most of them active in the second century AD. This origin of the name is clear; meaning, relevance and accuracy of the name are less obvious. A second sophistic implies the existence of a first sophistic and suggests its decline. Philostratus refers to the classical age of Athens as this first sophistic; recent scholarship has, however, questioned whether Philostratus was right to view the cultural activity in his day and the activity of fifth-century sophists as of one kind. Nor is it evident that the sophistic spirit went underground from the end of the fifth century BC to, say, the beginning of the second century AD, although Philostratus clearly presents matters as such in his biographies.8 A vexed but central question is the meaning of ‘sophist’.9 The relation between this word and ‘rhetor’ or ‘philosopher’ is not clear, nor is clear whether the Second Sophistic should be understood as concerning sophists only. ‘Second Sophistic’ can still, however, be used to indicate a particular movement and period. In the second century a cultural climate became dominant in the Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire that had been developing earlier and that would continue into late antiquity (well after Philostratus’s book). This climate can be characterised as archaising, intellectual, and rhetoric-focused. Insofar one can speak of a movement, this movement had its geographic centre in the cities of Asia Minor and the Greek mainland, while the major players of the movement were typically of the high nobility and in close contact with governmental circles, including the imperial court. Famous rhetors like Herodes Atticus, Polemo and Aelius Aristides belonged to the social and intellectual elite, but were no less popular with the populations of the cities they visited or represented. Rhetors’ performances would be as popular as football matches nowadays. The role of rhetors in political and judicial affairs was much less in this period than in the classical age. Rhetors’ claims to fame were mostly epideictic performances, some eulogising a city on the occasion of a visit or a national holiday, some discussing theoretical matters, some in pretence of participating in a historical situation.10 The effect of rhetors’ speeches was to be

8 See for all this Anderson 1993, chapter 1. 9 Cf. Stanton; Bowersock 11-5; Anderson 1989: 87-8, 118-123. 10 There is some debate about this picture, with some people arguing that the political and judicial role of rhetors was not less during the Roman Empire than in the classical polis (see Walker), but the above is the standard picture. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 5 expressed in terms of values rather than action. Nonetheless these rhetors would often (have to) serve as public officials and benefit their native or adoptive cities both by means of governmental favours and by their private means. The fame of sophists expressed itself in the numbers of students each managed to draw. Mutual rivalry created an actively competitive cultural scene; Philostratus’s book is full of descriptions of battles of greats.11 The archaism of the period, which is also apparent in Latin texts (cf. Fronto), is evident in the sophists’ use of Attic Greek (Atticism); mastery of Attic seems to have been a significant mark of distinction.12 This archaism also expressed itself in the subject choice for historical treatises and for orations; many speeches, including school exercises, were adhortatory or advisory speeches in a historical setting, such as ‘What should Nicias have said to prevent Athens from going to Sicily’. Bowie has proffered as an explanation for the archaising taste of the second century the Greek need to recall past greatness in face of present political impotence. The Greek cultural empire was thus contrasted with the Roman military and political empire.13 I doubt this is a satisfactory explanation – Latin archaism would not be explained, for one –, but the invocation of the sophists as upholders of Greek culture is valid. The retrospection in language and themes served to emphasise the cultural greatness of Greeks. The identity of Greece was inextricably tied to the glorious past.

I.i.B ARISTIDES (LIFE AND WORKS)

Publius Aelius Aristides Theodorus was born near Hadrianoutherae in Mysia, near Pergamum, probably in 117. He received significant part of his education from the grammarian Alexander of Cotiaion, who later became tutor to Marcus Aurelius.14 He travelled to Egypt and Rome, and visited the major Greek centres of culture. His place of rhetorical triumph was his adopted city Smyrna. Aristides is best known to us for the dreams he wrote down, which he dreamed while at Asclepius’s sanctuary close to Pergamum. His health was apparently bad, or perhaps he only imagined it so; in any case his faith in Asclepius was boundless. He also wrote several hymns to several gods. His rhetorical works are all premeditated. Philostratus characterises him as a perfectionist, who sought intellectual and stylistic achievements rather than glory in ex tempore speaking, as he was rather bad at that.15 He wrote eulogies on the cities he visited, many advisory speeches in a historical setting, among which speeches on the Lacedaimonian peace, the expedition to Sicily, the alliance with the Thebans, but he also wrote more up-to-date pieces, including a letter to emperor Marcus Aurelius about the destruction of Smyrna, which made the emperor weep and funds flow to Smyrna.16 The ‘Platonic Discourses’, as Orations II, III and IV are often called, are in size a significant part of Aristides’s preserved output. Boulanger provides no dates for these orations,

11 Bowersock is the classic text on the sophists, their circles, and their public activities, though see Anderson 1993 (:22-39) as well. See on the identity of the movement also Boulanger 58-73 or Sirago 43-50. 12 It should be noted, however, that Attic Greek had been a model for literary writing since Alexandrian scholarship (second century BC). On archaism see Bowie; cf. also Anderson 1993: 85-94, 101-5. 13 Bowie 37-41; similar analysis in Reardon 17-9. It seems there was no real anti-Roman sentiment among the Greeks – this is the conclusion of Palm’s survey of Greek texts – but the question is not entirely decided (see Bowie 40, esp. n.110). 14 A grammarian would teach literature as well as grammar (writing); Alexander seems to have been an exceptionally erudite man, who lectured on Plato and indeed communed with the classics. See Boulanger 114-6; also Wilamowitz 334-5. Wilamowitz’s article is the single best piece on Aristides, offering both a clear survey of Aristides’s life and an appealing overall picture of his artistic intentions. 15 VS 585. 16 VS 582. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 6 but Behr believes he can date II and IV to 145-7 AD, when Aristides was in the Asclepieion at Pergamum, and Oration III a twenty years later.17 The direct-speech form of these orations, addressed to Plato as if he was present to hear and respond – some sections even have Socratic- dialogue form – agrees with the fictional court or assembly settings so popular in the Second Sophistic. In these speeches, Aristides treats the Gorgias as a treatise published, as it were, last year. While modern ears may wonder why Aristides would not attack contemporary proponents of such views and seems to have no regard for the changed conditions (political, social, intellectual) since Plato’s writing to Aristides’s day, the context of Second-Sophistic archaism makes this method understandable.

I.i.C PLATO’S INFLUENCE

Given Plato’s regard in the second century, the seriousness with which Aristides treats his criticisms in the Gorgias are not surprising. Philosophers and literary men alike viewed him as second to none, except perhaps Homer, as a model for literary and rhetorical style, teaching and criticism. Homer, Plato, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Euripides, Xenophon, and a number of others were the core of Greek culture, of which tradition the sophists knew themselves heirs and guardians. Many works were written in imitation of texts of these classics. Such imitation was a popular method of training in schools, but many serious efforts by established sophists that have come down to us (however fragmentary) are clear attempts to emulate the classics, preferably using their style and lexis.18 The Phaedrus in particular was popular, containing models for imitation in the first two speeches of Lysias and Socrates and literarily outstanding passages, side by side with a serious attack on sophistic rhetoric.19 The combination of such a popular theme as love with the intelligent play on sophistic rivalry and rhetorical education that Plato affords in the Phaedrus must have been of exceptional attraction to the sophists of the second century. Thus even the Latin Fronto can send his pupil Marcus Aurelius love speeches in imitation of Lysias’s and Socrates’s speeches, complemented by one by some foreigner (i.e. himself).20 The idyllic description of rural Attica, with the cicadas singing in the background, becomes a much-imitated signal for philosophical discourse or ambition against a leisurely setting.21 As Plato was loved for his style and his style imitated, we can be confident that people had actually read his dialogues, instead of taken his views from introductory texts and handbooks. Yet not only in terms of style was Plato preeminent. As De Lacy shows, Plato was also regarded an authority on the theory of rhetoric. Hermogenes, prominent ancient literary critic, uses a Platonic framework to discuss and evaluate rhetorical ability in his peri ideôn; speeches should be organic wholes (cf. Phaedrus 264c), stylistic imitation should follow from knowledge (epistêmê), not merely experience (empeiria and tribê), of different styles, so that one knows what each style is ‘auto hekaston kath’hauto’.22 The latter is recognisably Platonic language, and the earlier opposition between epistêmê and empeiria is the very distinction used in the Gorgias to discredit rhetoric. Aristides takes up a challenge against a formidable opponent, therefore, precisely because this paradigm of style, thought and culture had attacked the art dear to Aristides and central to Greek culture as it existed in the second century. This dilemma explains Aristides’s

17 Behr 1968a: 54-6. 18 Anderson 1993: 69-85. 19 Anderson 1994: 119-20; Trapp 1990; de Lacy 6-10. Aristides’s oration is also, of course, evidence that not only Plato’s style, but also his thought, was taken seriously. 20 In Greek! (p.20, vol.I Haines) 21 Anderson 1993: 77, 234-5; Trapp 1990. 22 De Lacy 8-9. De Lacy notes that third-century Menander equally uses Platonic terminology for a theoretical account of rhetoric (n.19, p.9). Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 7 attitude in his attack: wanting to free rhetoric from Plato’s accusations he is at pains to convince his audience that he champions Plato against Plato-on-a-bad-day.

I.ii context

Aristides wrote his oration in a particular context, in response to and directed at particular people or theoretical positions. In this section I say a few things about the debate between philosophy and rhetoric (I.ii.A); I then discuss the intent of this Oration (I.ii.B); the final I.ii.C considers Aristides’s understanding and appreciation of philosophy.

I.ii.A DEBATE PHILOSOPHY – RHETORIC

Oration II is formally a defence speech, on behalf of rhetoric, against Plato’s indictments. Many scholars blame Aristides for having written a tiresome defence in a controversy both outdated and absurd.23 Two distinct issues are involved: the anachronism of Aristides’s approach and the anachronism of the debated issues. Aristides’s approach is anachronistic in its direct response to Plato’s criticisms as if Plato were alive and present in Aristides’s court room of rhetoric. As I noted in I.i.B, Aristides seems to have no regard for the political and social changes that made the world of the second century AD dramatically different from the world of fifth- and fourth-century BC Athens. There are no attempts, for instance, to account for the different role of rhetors in society. Significantly, Aristides thereby accepts the classical notion of rhetor, instead of imposing a second-century notion on Plato’s dialogue.24 This anachronism seems incontestably present. Anachronism in the issues that the Defence debates is the more severe of these two charges. In order to agree or disagree with it we must know to what extent the debate between philosophy and rhetoric was alive in the second century. It is perhaps natural to conclude from the polemic material in Plato’s and Isocrates’s writings that their time constituted the heyday of the controversy. Even if all arguments had been worded in the fourth century BC, however, which is by no means certain, one cannot conclude from that fact that the controversy dissipated and disappeared in later centuries. The availability of all arguments does not resolve a debate per se. To positively conclude that there was a living debate in the second century, however, our evidence seems insufficient.25 Absence of material can mean both absence of fact and absence of survival. The following things may be noted, however. First, just as fifth-century sophists were rivals for the favours of pupils, throughout antiquity rhetors and philosophers were competitors in the market of education. This clash of social and economic interests can be trusted to have

23 It is an ‘absurd controversy’, says Behr 1973: 279. ‘Un choquant anachronisme’, judges Boulanger (237; which, incidentally, seems to contradict the admission of continuing controversy at page 210-1). Moreschini 1243 agrees with those who find Aristides’s polemic annoying, because it presents an old and obsolete problematic. ‘La querelle était déjà morte’ and, besides, ‘la rhétorique avait indiscutablement remporté la victoire’, says Reardon 150. Sohlberg (178n.9) thinks that ‘die im Text erwähnte Beweisführung … “auch was exô tekhnês ist, kann gut sein”, zeigt, dass die Frage gegenüber einer früheren Zeit … an Aktualität verloren hat.’ This, to my mind, misunderstands the strategy of the piece; Aristides’s refutation gains force by confronting both alternatives (not-art, art) and showing in both cases that Plato was wrong (as Plato shows); it does not signal indifference about which alternative should be affirmed. 24 Pernot 1993b: 330, also for other such instances. It be immediately admitted that Aristides would not have considered the classical and the second-century rhetors as so dramatically different; note, however, that this is partly the result of the tendency to conceive of all contemporary events in classical terms, and that the rhetor as he emerges in the Defence is much more like a classical rhetor than like what we (as opposed to Aristides) can reconstruct second- century rhetors have been. 25 I have not been able to see D. Karadimas’s Sextus Empiricus against Aelius Aristides. In their reviews, both Trapp (1997) and Flinterman conclude that Karadimas fails in his aim of reconstructing a second-century debate from the texts of Sextus and Aristides. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 8 fuelled the exchange of intellectual sneers and accusations. Border traffic provides evidence of this; Fronto, for instance, sends his pupil Marcus Aurelius letters of serious rebuke concerning his decision to turn to philosophy.26 Secondly, if we cannot reconstruct an ongoing debate in which Aristides joined by means of his oration, we can nonetheless find traces of a debate arising from this oration. Thus Oration IV is a reply to Capito, seemingly a Platonic philosopher who responded to the first oration against Plato (Oration II). Furthermore, Porphyry wrote a work in seven books Against Aristides, which has survived in fragments via a commentary on the Gorgias by Olympiodorus.27 This same Olympiodorus also cites from Aristides’s Platonic orations in other works. Furthermore, the many scholia to Aristides’s Platonic orations are evidence of their relevance in their time.28 Anachronism of issues, therefore, seems an unjustified charge against Aristides. The arguments he addresses in his Defence still played a role in the debate about rhetoric in his day – if only rhetoric’s own reflection on its foundation. It is true that Aristides does not explicitly address any of his contemporaries or confront other arguments than those advanced by Plato (excepting §§315-8, on which see I.iv.F); however, this literary strategy – for it is a literary strategy – finds two strong motivations in the preferred, historical mode of expression of the Second Sophistic and in the central place of Plato in the cultural heritage that the Second Sophistic cultivated. Pernot astutely remarks that Plato’s attack on rhetoric and the Four constitutes an attack on the values of Hellenism from within, which Aristides’s defence seeks to rebut as such – hence Aristides’s double aim of defeating and saving Plato.29 Anachronism of approach, in the distinction I made above, is therefore central to the whole project. Aristides’s anachronism is an anachronism of culture.

I.ii.B INTENT OF ORATION II

The question whether the debate between philosophy and rhetoric was alive may be decided more easily if we knew to whom the Defence was addressed, or for what occasion it was composed or delivered. Unfortunately we know neither. Behr thinks Oration II was written in 145-7AD, while Aristides was patient at the sanctuary of Asclepius near Pergamum.30 If true, the oration would have been delivered only, if at all, to a select group of fellow patients. It is in any case hard to see how this treatise would have been delivered before a crowd as we can, with some difficulty as to its length, imagine the Panathenaic Oration was, for instance. In the other long oration against Plato, On the Four, there is a reference to, or rather a philippic against people who should probably be identified with Cynics, who slander rhetoric;31 it is not clear whether this is more than a straw position or a literary device, nor whether this would

26 Fronto, p.52-70, vol.II Haines. 27 Behr 1986b. 28 See for this and the reception of the Platonic orations more generally Pernot 1993b: 336-8. 29 Ibid.: 330-1. 30 Behr 1968a: 54-6. 31 III.663-686. Some scholars have considered the possibility, based on a reference to people from Palestine (III.671), that the people attacked here are Christians, so Jebb and writers on the history of Christianity (see Boulanger 256-8). Recently Moreschini wrote that Christians are meant, albeit among others (1240-1). But, as Baumgart (26n.19) says, it would be rather strange if the Christians would be thought to refer to Plato as a more than incidental witness in indicting rhetoric. Most scholars think of itinerant philosophers (so Boulanger 259-65) or more specifically of Cynics (most prominently Behr, see 1986: note ad III.633, or 1973: 278 & note ad §464). De Leeuw (68) absurdly suggests that armchair scholar Aristides hasn’t wondered who he might mean here – indeed, Aristides didn’t even know the difference between the lower class movements Cynicism and Christianity. Still, it is not clear whether Aristides meant to address a specific group or school, instead of vaguely ‘everyone who slanders rhetoric’. §464 of Oration II seems to refer to the same people as the passage in Oration III (again, probably the Cynics). Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 9 have constituted an actual debate between philosophy and rhetoric (more than a usual mutual calling names between Cynics and ‘civilised’ people).32 It has been rightly noted that the Defence constitutes a eulogy of rhetoric, Greek culture and Aelius Aristides.33 In vindicating rhetoric against Plato rhetoric receives praise; §§362-437 in particular eulogise rhetoric, with §§429-437 rendering homage to Aristides, the rhetor who, rare as a Phoenix, embodies all the virtues of rhetoric which he has been at pains to portray. The negative strategy of exculpating the Four, in the comparison of Plato’s actions with the actions of the Four, should not cloud our view of the eulogising aspect of this section, expanded in Oration III, in its praise of the Four as paradigms of Hellenic culture. Indeed, the virtuoso discussion of theoretical notions which he employs to rebut Plato’s attack signals Aristides’s intention to present himself as a paradigm and champion of rhetorical culture.

I.ii.C ARISTIDES’S APPRECIATION OF PHILOSOPHY

The extent of Aristides’s knowledge of philosophy is not easily determined. Philostratus tells us he was educated at Athens and Pergamum,34 so he would in any case have had philosophers close at hand, even if his education itself didn’t include philosophy.35 Claudio Moreschini points out that a distinction between rhetoric and philosophy is to a certain extent academic, as much philosophy had been diffused among the educated classes, so that everyone was acquainted with some philosophy as a shared cultural background.36 On the other hand, as Anderson notes, philosophy and rhetoric had become such specialised disciplines in the second century, that one may well wonder how much time a student of either discipline had left to study the other discipline.37 Still, cultured individuals like Aristides, who also counted philosophers among their friends, were probably familiar with a good deal of philosophical doctrine. In the case of Aristides specifically, the judgment of his contemporaries that he was the master of well- thought-through speeches should not be deemed empty without serious reason.38 It is above all on the basis of his works, therefore, that we should pass judgment on Aristides’s understanding of the philosophical ideas of his day and before. It is worth noting that the theology in Aristides’s sacred hymns (he wrote several, including to Sarapis, Heracles, and Zeus) is a rather philosophical theology, and that some terminology that later philosophers were keen on using occurs in Aristides’s Zeus hymn for the first time.39 Given this background, it is surprising that Aristides nowhere refers to Stoic ideas about rhetoric, especially since his own ideal of rhetoric seems to derive from the Stoics.40 Aristides’s appreciation of Plato specifically is somewhat hard to gauge. On the one hand, Aristides’s Platonic orations are unique material, as no other extant ancient text confronts Plato’s criticism of rhetoric so systematically.41 On the other hand, the polemical nature of these texts might obscure Aristides’s understanding; he might, for instance, wilfully misinterpret a

32 Pernot (1993b: 332) does take this reference as an indication of an ongoing debate in Aristides’s time. 33 e.g. Anderson 1993: 140. 34 VS 581. 35 The suggestion by Behr that Aristides was taught by Gaius in Pergamum seems speculative, see Moreschini 1242, following Dillon 266-7. 36 Moreschini 1235-6. 37 Anderson 1993: 133-5. 38 VS 585. 39 Aristides uses the word autopatôr for the first time we know; probably he adopted the word from Hellenic syncretist circles in Egypt (Moreschini 1239). Porphyry and Iamblichus, as well as writers of Orphic hymns, use the word later as well. 40 Diogenes of Babylon, in particular: Sohlberg 266-77. 41 We know other treatises against Plato have been written, but these have been lost (see Pernot 1993b: 316n.5). Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 10 statement for polemical reasons. Then again, Aristides attacks Plato while adoring him as a cultural hero.42 The texts on which we must base our judgment on Aristides’s understanding of Plato show in any case that he was well acquainted with many of Plato’s dialogues.43 The versatility in citing Platonic material and alluding to dramatic situations in one or other of the dialogues is impressive. Furthermore, in my view such citations and allusions are often not merely verbally parallel or apposite, but bear on the conceptual issue being discussed. From the passage that concerns us in this paper I mention two instances of a perceptive use of major concepts. The sharp distinction between epistêmê and doxa (not mentioned, but implied, as the result of stokhazesthai and eikazein) shows a clear sense of the fundamental divide between a Platonic and an Isocratean understanding of artistic competence. The virtuoso use of eikos as implying truthful judgment both echoes Plato’s own use and shows that Aristides knows how to meet Plato’s demands while rejecting his method. Opinions on specific citations or arguments may differ, but we cannot deny Aristides a charitable opinion on his philosophical understanding in general. Baumgart’s judgment that Aristides has not comprehended the thought of ancient literature, has only the outer form in view, and knows philosophy only from hearsay, should be rejected.44

I.iii form and method of Oration II

This section discusses the formal aspects of Oration II. Observations about the formal structure of the oration in I.iii.A are followed by a discussion of the Platonic aspects of the style Aristides employs in this oration.

I.iii.A STRUCTURE

Aristides’s speech is formally a judicial defence speech.45 I have commented already on the anachronism of this literary strategy. The speech can be divided into an exordium (§§1-20), narratio (§§21-22), refutatio (§§23-203), probatio (§§204-437), peroratio (§§438-466). The narration reproduces what is at once dramatic event and accusation, the discussion between Socrates, Polus and Gorgias. Aristides proceeds, in his own words, as if the Gorgias were an illegal text;46 he opts for the offensive, in other words. However, since the offensive material itself was an offensive against rhetoric, Aristides’s offence becomes defence. The distinction between refutatio and probatio is to some extent artificial, as both aim to refute Plato’s charge. There is, however, a clear difference in tone and scope between §§23-203 and §§204-437. The refutatio concentrates on showing that Plato’s arguments are not correct. It comprises four different sections. In the first Aristides points out that Plato’s allegations are

42 Boulanger’s remark, that Aristides hates Plato insofar an enemy of sophists (119) is inappropriate – never does veneration for Plato’s stature leave Aristides. 43 As were many of his cultured contemporaries. Moreschini (1241) says Aristides knew only the Gorgias, Republic, Phaedrus, the Seventh Epistle, and, superficially at most, the Parmenides. This cannot be right. The second oration alone contains quotations from and references to the Laws (§§275, 304), Symposium (§§132, 424, 447), Apology (§§ 299, 439), Euthydemus (§457), Politicus (§§171, 438), and Phaedo (§176). And, given the lesser relevance of a whole number of other dialogues, one shouldn’t deny Aristides knowledge of them because he hasn’t cited from them. Cf. De Lacy (6-7), who says Aristides knew at least 20 of 36 Platonic dialogues. 44 pp. 14, 25. See Sohlberg 256-61, whose judgment is also rather negative, agreeing with Wilamowitz that ‘Aristeides habe von Platon eigentlich nichts begriffen’ (261); similar statements also in Boulanger (211-2, 232), De Leeuw (63, 131) and even Pernot (1993b: 328). 45 Pernot 1993b: 317. 46 §21: ‘w 3sp er ou]n oi9 ta\j tw =n p arano/mw n grafa\j ei0sio/ntej a0p ’au0tw =n w [n ei1rhke th\n a0rxh\n p oihso/meqa’. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 11 slander, for not substantiated. The second section shows that being non-art does not imply being shameful. In the third section, which will occupy us particularly, Aristides argues that the method of rhetoric, which Plato says makes it non-art, proves that rhetoric is art. The fourth section targets the charge of flattery and argues that the very notion of being a rhetor excludes flattery. These four sections chiefly aim to show that Plato’s arguments cannot be right, or that his conclusion does not follow from the arguments he adduces. The probatio, in contrast, primarily intends to praise rhetoric and only secondly, by means of the picture of rhetoric created in this praise, to show that Plato’s presentation is wrong. This overall intention does not exclude the presence of critical sections, but these are embedded in praise of rhetoric. A good example of such embedded criticism is the contrast between the Four and Plato in §§331-9; these paragraphs attack Plato for not having met his own demands and for not having participated in active politics, but this criticism serves to underline the virtue of the Four, exemplars of rhetoric. In this probatio, Aristides uses individual anti-rhetoric statements by Plato to elicit praise for rhetoric either from Plato’s own writings, or from the reflection on the original statements. The refutations of these individual statements thus have the double character of proving Plato wrong or contradictory and eulogising rhetoric. Worth noting is another difference between refutatio and probatio: while the refutatio proceeds rather naturally – moving from the observation that insufficient argument is provided, to argument of the non-art case, to argument of the art case, divided in a discussion of method (stokhazesthai) and of effect or aim (to flatter or not to flatter) – the probatio often gives the impression that topics are addressed randomly. The rationale for the discussion in the probatio is to be sought rather in the gradual completion of a picture of rhetoric as the ultimate human endeavour than in a systematic refutation of Platonic claims. The distinction between refutatio and probatio is made explicit in §204, where Aristides says:

That, furthermore, [not only] is rhetoric not alogos nor such as, so to speak, to stokhazesthai, [nor only] is it not a great discovery if it partakes of art or if it is included among the many arts which I just went through, but that it is also something that to the highest degree partakes of logos, and is moreover wholly in logoi, and is the greatest and first of all human things, and the most complete and, if one can say such, the ultimate thing worth praying for, is to be shown.47

The part of the oration that precedes this § is here typified as a mainly negative project, while the subsequent part is announced as proof that rhetoric is the ultimate human achievement. §437 signals the end of a large section: mentioning that both the ‘first’ and the ‘later’ arguments have proved rhetoric the most beautiful thing, Aristides prepares to move to the last section of his speech.48 In combination with the clear structural role of §204, I think we may take the ‘first’ to refer to the arguments in §§23-203, while the second would then refer to the arguments in §§204-437. The remaining §§ constitute the peroratio. Although this section can be divided into three parts, with §§462-6 more expressly pronouncing victory and mocking the

47 Besides obscure, the text is elliptical; Behr’s emendation, however, is best taken as explanatory, and not as an attempt to reconstruct the original text – ellipsis is Aristides’s trademark. My translation accepts half of Behr’s emendation. I here provide the text as presented in Behr’s editions: ‘w 9j toi/nun ou1t’a1logon h9 r9htorikh\ ou1q’oi[on, w 9j ou9tw si\ fa/nai, stoxa/zesqai, ou0d’, ei0 mete/xei te/xnhj, eu3rhma p oiei=sqai, ou0de\ meq’w [n a0rti/w j diech/|ein texnw =n ei]nai tw =n p ollw =n, ou0 mo/non a0p odeikte/on a0lla\ kai\ p lei=ston lo/gou mete/xon, ma=llon de\ a3p an e0n lo/goij, kai\ me/giston kai\ p rw =ton tw =n e0n a0nqrw /p oij kai\ telew /taton kai\ p e/raj, ei0 oi[on t’ei0p ei=n, eu0xh=j a1xion dei=cai.’ The addition ‘w 9j ou9tw si\ fa/nai’ shows that Aristides here uses ‘stoxa/zesqai’ in the meaning it has for Plato in the Gorgias (it must, for otherwise he would deny what he has just proven). This shows that Aristides’s reinterpretation of ‘stoxa/zesqai’ is conscious – pace the accusers of Aristides’s intellect. 48 ‘ou0kou=n kai\ kata\ touj e0c a0rxh=j lo/gouj kai\ kata\ tou\j deute/rouj tou/touj kai\ o3p oi stre/foi tij a2n kalo\n kai\ gennai=on kth=ma kai\ e1rgon a0ndro\j h9 r9htorikh\...’ Note the echo of Isocrates’s e1rgon y uxh=j a0ndrikh=j, see II.i, note 88. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 12 muttering opponents,49 the peroratio is united by a feeling of certain victory and the ultimate effort to show that Plato, in his heart of hearts, is on the rhetorical side.50

I.iii.B PLATONIC METHOD

The title of this section is, of course, a reference to the ‘Socratic method’; Aristides’s method is to show inconsistencies in Plato’s statements and deeds, just as Socrates’s method is to show inconsistencies in the beliefs of his fellow Athenians.51 His overriding strategy is to turn Plato against Plato (as he states in §§50, 137), both by showing inconsistency within the Gorgias and by showing inconsistency between the Gorgias and, particularly, the Phaedrus.52 Use of this method is motivated by several concerns. Firstly, a biaion, as the method of turning one’s opponents’s statements against himself was called, was the most powerful method of refutation.53 Secondly, Plato’s reputation and authority, as we have seen, were enormous. No better candidate to prove Plato wrong, therefore, than Plato. Thirdly, attacks on Plato can be painful for admirers;54 in order not to offend them (and himself, for that matter), Aristides sets out to show that really really he is championing the true Plato. He is, in other words, playing ‘will the Real Plato please stand up?’. Fourthly, the better Plato that Aristides appeals to also enables Aristides to show Plato, one of the cultural heroes of the Second Sophistic, in fundamental agreement with the prime occupation of these same sophists. Finally, by proceeding in this way Aristides imitates Plato; imitation was a literary virtue anyway in Aristides’s day, but the virtuoso imitation in this treatise must have inspired admiration. In using Plato against Plato, Aristides seems to proceed according to Demosthenes’s dictum, which he cites in §280, that he holds ‘the best answer for the true answer’.55 The true position of an author is taken to be the position that agrees with most of the statements of that author, and with common-sense intuitions. Aristides’s attitude to Plato in oration II is generally very respectful, even if there are sections that argue ad hominem, particularly when Aristides attacks Plato on the basis of biographical details about his journey to Sicily.56 He is nevertheless at pains to emphasise that he does not slander Plato, e.g. in §295.

I.iv content

After discussion of the formal aspects of Aristides’s speech, this section summarises the content of the speech (I.iv.A-L) and ends with a few remarks on the place of the section that will

49 Behr considers §§462-6 the peroratio (1973: 279). 50 ‘loip o\n e3n moi dei=cai, o3ti kai\ P la/tw n au0to\j tau0ta\ e0moi\ p eri\ r9htorikh=j fqe/ggetai’, Aristides says in §438; this project is carried out by citing passages in which Plato agrees with Aristides, by mentioning an objection which basically constitutes an evasion of the refutation and an admission that Aristides’s case is proven – as Aristides is quick to point out – and by distinguishing Plato, the father and master of rhetors (§465), from the evil slanderers of rhetoric. These three parts have one aim: proclaiming victory. 51 In the so-called Socratic dialogues, I mean; this is not the place for discussion whether this is indeed the deepest analysis of Socrates’s way of doing things. 52 Aristides was certainly not the first in antiquity to note the difference between these dialogues, cf. e.g. Quintillian II.15.24-31. 53 says Hermogenes: Pernot 1993b: 328. 54 Not, to my mind, restricted to ancient admirers, witness the disdainful or outraged dismissals of Aristides’s refutation of Plato by modern scholars. 55 Aristides’s version is condensed: ‘ei0 ga\r to\ be/ltiston a0lhqe\j ei]nai doi/hmen’, which is in Demosthenes X.17: ‘ei0 ga\r o3 be/ltiston ei0p ei=n a2n e1xoij, tou=to/ soi doi/hmen a0lhqe\j le/gein’. 56 §§273-98. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 13 concern us in the rest of this paper, §§135-77, with respect to the other parts of the speech (I.iv.M).

I.iv.A INTRODUCTION & RHETORIC AS DIVINE GIFT (1-134)

Aristides opens by arguing that anteriority should not decide a case (§§1-12); the mere fact that Plato is ancient should not mean that rhetoric cannot supply arguments against his position (§§13-8) – a sound warning in any time, but perhaps particularly so in the archaising climate of the second century. Aristides then invokes Hermes, Apollo and all Muses to help him accomplish his defence (§§19-20). Then he proceeds to citing Plato’s words (§§21-2), to which he initially responds by asserting it is slander, because no argument is provided, and the word ‘rhetoric’ could equally well have been substituted by ‘philosophy’ and nothing would change (§§23-31). Aristides then proceeds to the refutation of Plato’s arguments, first by granting him that rhetoric is not an art;57 in other words, he concedes to Plato the conclusion he has Socrates reach in the Gorgias, but denies that this conclusion warrants the further allegation that rhetoric is like cookery. This first stage of the refutation takes us to §135, where Aristides starts to argue that rhetoric is an art. The case that rhetoric is something worthy even if it is not an art – let us call this the non-art case – divides into two: the first part regards rhetoric as a state of being possessed by the divine (§§32-83) while the second part discusses the relation between nature and art (§§84-130). As in the latter case the teaching by the gods and natural ability are closely associated if not identified, the common gist of the non-art case is that rhetoric is a divine gift and therefore not to be slighted the way Plato does. In §§32-49 Aristides offers a general argument that non-art things can be divine, referring to oracles as instances of such valuable non-art activities. §§50-7 shows this to be the case more particularly using the Phaedrus and its praise of the irrational inspiration of oracles and poets. Aristides aptly remarks in §§58-60 that Plato’s testimony for love as something divine works equally well for rhetoric as something divine. Leaving Plato’s testimony, Aristides now uses Aeschines as a source for Socrates’s words and deeds; this testimony supports the non-art case (§§61-5). Aristides even ventures to use his own experience as testimony that the gods can restore one’s health, for instance by means of dreams (§§66-72). That said, Aristides returns to Aeschines who cites Socrates on his love for Alcibiades, which he describes as an inspiration like the inspiration of Bacchants (§§73-7). As a climax, Aristides cites Socrates, who never wrote anything; but everyone agrees, says Aristides, that Socrates said he knew nothing. From this statement it is clear that Socrates did not possess art, but was nonetheless rightly called wisest of men (§§78-83). Aristides then moves to considering the testimony of Homer (§§84-96), Hesiod (§§97- 108) and Pindar (§§109-12). In doing so, the emphasis of the testimony shifts from divine frenzy as in oracles to something more like natural ability. This theme is expanded in the following argumentative section, §§113-30, in which Aristides argues that nature leads art and art follows nature;58 in fact, art is the product of nature: this shows in three aspects: art without nature deteriorates (§118), champions of art are champions because of their nature (§120) and nature invented art (§122).59

57 §33: ‘p rw =ton me\n ou]n ei0 ta\ ma/lista mh\ te/xnhn ei]nai doi/hmen au0th/n…’ 58 We may note in passing the following description of rhetoric which echoes the Isocratean phrase (see note 88): ‘r9htorikh\ kalo\n kai\ qei=on, ei0 kai\ te/xnh| me\n a0nqrw /p oij mh\ p aragi/gnetai, fu/sew j d’e0sti\n e1rgon a0ndrei/aj kai\ blep ou/shj nika=n’ (§113). 59 This last remark is significant against the background of the Homeric argument in the debate on rhetoric’s being art. Opponents of rhetoric, mostly philosophers, had used the recognition of Homer commentators that Homeric heroes were masters of rhetoric and the common view that the art of rhetoric began with Corax and Tisias in fifth- century BC Sicily to argue that rhetoric cannot be art, because no product of art can precede the art (cf. Quintillian Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 14

A last few paragraphs (§§131-4) argue from the opposite side, though still within the non- art case: many arts are rather menial. This observation should weaken the simple identification of non-art with shameful, although it does not, of course, refute a claim that art is a necessary condition for valuable things.

I.iv.B RHETORIC AS ART & INSTRUCTION OF THE MASSES (135-203)

The following seventy paragraphs, §§135-203, argue that rhetoric is an art. In §§135-77 Aristides argues that the method of rhetoric, stokhazesthai, because of which Plato had denied it being art, shows that rhetoric is art. This is the section that concerns us here and which I will analyse in detail in part III. §§178-203 seek to refute Plato’s allegation that rhetoric obeys the masses in trying to please them. If rhetors did flatter the masses, Aristides argues, people would not honour them, ask their assistance in court and in politics; instead, it is clear that rhetors seek what is best and speak as the situation demands (§§178-86). Rhetors rule, teach and chastise their audience (§§187-95). It is furthermore impossible that rhetors would say what their audience approve: firstly, multitudes are variable in make-up (like hippocentaurs) and opinion, so that there is not one opinion that the rhetor parrots (§§196-8); secondly the very notion of persuasion (the business of rhetors, Plato agrees) precludes such parroting (§§199-203).

I.iv.C RHETORIC EMBODIES VIRTUE (204-36)

Aristides signals in §204 that one part of his business is now finished, i.e. to show that rhetoric is not alogos etc., but that it remains for him to show that it is the greatest thing available to humans. In §§205-236 Aristides sets out to turn Plato’s classification of rhetoric upside-down; instead of ‘a shadow of a part of politics’60 he will prove rhetoric the way in which each of the virtues are accomplished. He does so in three phases, successively discussing the origin of rhetoric, the introduction of legislation, and the maintenance of justice. The first phase, §§205-11, relates a myth about the origin of civilisation, of the type familiar from treatises by sophists and rhetors.61 The myth shows that the introduction of persuasive speech enabled the physically weaker to establish harmony in an otherwise Hobbesian world. This situation is best for everyone, eventually, as the strongest would otherwise eliminate themselves at last, when no weaker people are left. §§212-21 argues that rhetoric was necessary to introduce legislation, to which there are two aspects: on the one hand rhetoric (persuasion) is necessary for the weaker to get legislation accepted – the stronger, for whom the Hobbesian state is not so bad at all, must be persuaded – and on the other hand laws themselves are solidified arguments, which differ from ‘live’ speech in that they never stop speaking, for they are written down. The last of these three phases is the maintenance of justice, for which again rhetoric is indispensable (§§222-32). Justice cannot apply its judgments about just and unjust if it does not know what has happened in each case; rhetoric examines what happened. Justice can only pronounce a just sentence in a case, rhetoric can persuade those involved to accept that sentence as just. Furthermore, and this is a significant conviction of Aristides’s noticeably close to his

II.17.5-7). Aristides’s position is therefore that a systematic elaboration of rhetoric, making it an art, does not preclude the existence of rhetoric as a natural phenomenon. Aristides’s position agrees with Quintillian’s (II.17.9- 10), although it seems Aristides has less qualms about calling pre-art rhetors ‘rhetors’ than Quintillian (II.17.11). See on the whole issue and its presence in Oration II Kennedy. 60 ‘p olitikh=j mori/ou ei1dw lon’ (Gorg. 463d2). 61 Such as in Plato’s Protagoras or Isocrates’s Antidosis. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 15 heart, rhetoric, as the art of words that replaced reliance on physical prowess, would destroy itself if it advocates a ‘law of the strongest’; it is of the essence of rhetoric that it advocates just laws (§§227-32). Rhetoric, therefore, must needs seek justice, while justice is nothing without rhetoric. The thrust of this triad finds its climax in §§232-6.62 Aristides draws a picture of the two pillars of politics, legislation and justice, which are bound together by and interwoven with rhetoric, which becomes ‘first, middle, and end’.63 As if this reversal of the Platonic charge – signalled explicitly in §234 – is not enough, Aristides adds in §§235-6 that the four parts of virtue, wisdom, moderation, justice and courage, are all achieved through rhetoric.64

I.iv.D ARTISTS’ FAILURES DO NOT FAIL ART (237-60)

The next few paragraphs rebut the accusation that rhetoric cannot be an art because of the wrongs of practitioners of rhetoric. These wrongs seem of two kinds: ethical wrongs, as when a tyrant murders many people, and mistakes in rhetorical performance. The close association between rhetoric and justice that Aristides has just been arguing for, however, implies that these two kinds are not very far apart. The point Aristides insists on, however, is that the art must not be equated with all actions of a (would-be) artist. Archelaus and other wrongdoers are adduced as rhetors who have committed terrible wrongs (§§237-46) – in fact Aristides does not introduce these cases at all but starts arguing against them as if the Gorgias had just been read in court as the charge.65 Aristides points out that the connection of such wrongs to rhetoric remains to be proven and suggests that one might equally well adduce all good deeds in the world as reasons to praise rhetoric. He adds, referring to what was said previously, that rhetoric was discovered to stop these very crimes. Rhetoric, Aristides continues in §§247-53, remains good even if people use the means of rhetoric to bad ends, just like medicine remains good even if a doctor uses its methods to poison someone. A rhetor, moreover, loses rhetoric together with justice, for art does not err.66 A parallel case is found in legislation; although bad laws exist, legislation itself remains a good thing (§254-6). The final reply is thus that wrongdoing and art do not go together: not in philosophy, not in rhetoric (§§257-60).

I.iv.E USE OF RHETORIC IS LEGITIMATE (261-314)

The next section concerns the legitimacy of use of rhetoric and responds to Socrates’s assertion in the Gorgias that to suffer wrong is better than to inflict wrong.67 This assertion is cited at the start of §261 and the implication, not made explicit as a charge, is that rhetoric should not be used, as it prevents one from suffering wrong. In this section Aristides refutes the

62 This climax starts halfway §232, which is why I include it in this and the preceding section indication. Behr’s editions start a new section at §235 and continue the text at §237 as if §§235-8 belong together; in my view §237 should be indented to mark a wholly new section (continuing up to §260). 63 §233: ‘p rw /th kai\ me/sh kai\ teleutai/a gi/gnetai, o9mou= me\n ga\r a0mfoi=n au9th\n me/shn, o9mou\ d’a1mfw me/saj au9th=j kaqista=sa, w 9j ma/list’e1mellon a3p asai summe/nein, a0nti\ sunde/smou th=| r9htorikh=| xrw /menai.’ 64 Sohlberg makes much of Aristides’s attempt to relate rhetoric to the four virtues. In fact this relation serves only a minor role in the eulogy of rhetoric. Nonetheless, it is worth while to make this aspect of Aristides’s thought explicit. The ideal of a rhetor who possesses all virtues is also present in the Roman dictum vir bonus dicendi peritus, which occurs most famously in Quintillian (XII.1.1). It seems to have been developed most elaborately in the Stoic tradition – Sohlberg traces it to Diogenes of Babylon – but it seems a more significant observation that the ideal is ultimately rooted in Plato’s Phaedrus. (See Sohlberg 266-77; also Pernot 1993b: 319, 322; Pernot 1993a: 592.) 65 Archelaus is mentioned in Gorg. 471a-c. 66 §251, which alludes to a Republic passage where Plato seems to endorse this position. See further note 121 in III.i.A. 67 This famous part of the exchange between Socrates and Polus is in Gorg. 469a-75e. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 16 objection by first analysing the argument (–§272), then proving that Plato did not act according to it (–§298), that Plato’s associates did not (–§303) and finally by showing that Plato’s own statements conflict with it.

Aristides first corrects the objection by pointing out that Socrates would not prefer suffering wrong to suffering nothing (§262-3);68 he then argues that where rhetoric can prevent people being wronged, it can equally prevent wrong being done, since wherever someone suffers wrong, someone must inflict wrong (§§264-72). Indeed, if rhetoric must be expelled from the city, so must the laws, for they prevent that people suffer wrong. Moreover (§§273-6), if Plato really believed that being wronged is a good thing, he should not have created a guardian army and have let barbarians destroy his ‘bookish republic’.69 Noting that everyone agrees with his position, Aristides states as his aim to prove that Plato too agrees, and not just in word, but also in deed (§§277-9). In §§280-98 Aristides discusses Plato’s journey to Sicily to help Dion and his motives to do so. Plato’s support for Dion shows that he agrees with the case for rhetoric, as he went to Sicily to offer persuasive speech as his means of support. §285 cites from Epistle VII, in which Plato states his reasons for embarking, which prove that Plato does not act as if being wronged is best.70 In §295 Aristides makes clear that his aim is not to slander Plato, but, as it were, to protect him from himself and to show his support for the case for rhetoric.71 Aristides then adduces the military exploits of Socrates and Xenophon (§§299-303): their taking up arms is surely incompatible with a firm conviction that one should let wrong be suffered. Indeed, Socrates seems to have been rather pronounced about his combative attitude.72 In paragraphs 304-314 Aristides returns to Plato’s statements. In the Laws he states that preventing wrong being done is a difficult thing, yet necessary for a happy life – easy goal for Aristides. Then, in §§307-14, he returns to the opposition between force and rhetoric. Plato refutes himself in three ways, Aristides argues. He denounces tyranny and has also denounced rhetoric as flattery. But surely, says Aristides, flattery and tyranny are contradictory charges? Furthermore, the identification of rhetoric and flattery has been disproved before. To complete the triple refutation, rhetoric is the opposite of tyranny. To elaborate this last point, Aristides calls rhetoric and tyranny as different as night and day; where the one exists, the other must necessarily not exist.73

I.iv.F NON-PLATONIC INTERMEZZO (315-8)

Oddly, Aristides introduces a standard argument against rhetoric that is not present in the Gorgias (he signals that himself). Rhetors disagree, runs the objection, therefore it cannot be an art: an art does not destroy itself.74 However, Aristides argues, disagreement does not destroy the

68 Gorg. 469c1. 69 ‘Bookish republic’ is Behr’s translation for ‘th\n e0n th=| bi/blw | p o/lin’ (§273) – a great find. 70 The genuineness of Epistle VII is doubted, although not universally denied; we should note, however, that for Aristides this testimony was not suspect. The cited section is from 328c-329a. 71 Aristides has been the object of modern charges of ad hominem argumentation; if moderns are offended at his treatment of Plato, imagine the response of his contemporaries (and in fact Oration IV is a reply to one response). His repeated emphasis that his aim is to bring out the real Plato, not to slander him, seems therefore justified. 72 We may note in §302 the incidental statement of a definition of rhetoric, basically the Roman vir bonus dicendi peritus: ‘ei0 ga\r dei= sunelo/nta ei0p ei=n, ou0de/n e0stin a1llo r9htorikh\ h2 fro/nhsij lo/gw n du/namin p roseilhfui=a’. 73 Although presented carefully, as it is still Plato he attacks, Aristides’s remark in §314 seems to me to be as sharp as any open-society criticism of Plato in our days: ‘Again what price would those who desire to be tyrants have paid for the race of orators to be distrusted in the cities, and for those who try to persuade through argument to be thought of as flatterers and no better than cooks, so that not in vain the proverb might announce the harvesting of unwatched vines’ (Behr’s trans.) 74 The gist of the objection and its refutation are the same as in Quintillian II.17.30-6, although Quintillian is more elaborate and precise. The illustration of navigation is the same, however, as is the notion that the argument is Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 17 art, because it does not prevent the aim of rhetoric being reached (persuasion). The case is the same for rhetoric as for philosophy (conflicting arguments) or even navigation (ships fighting each other).

This section marks the end of book I of Aristides’s Defence; the division into two books, however, probably dates from the fourth century and is out of place in terms of subject matter, as the argument continues at the other side of the book-divide.75

I.iv.G EXCULPATING THE FOUR (319-43)

In the Gorgias Socrates denies of Perikles, Themistocles, Kimon and Miltiades (the Four) that they were good men, or at least good rhetors.76 In this section Aristides targets that accusation. He first notes (§§319-20), as he did before in similar cases (see I.iv.D), that the deeds of the Four strictly speaking do not concern rhetoric, but he decides to address the charge in order to refute Plato in every way, just like the charge against the Four is not strictly necessary in the argument of the Gorgias. Aristides resurrects the Four, the way Socrates was wont to resurrect interlocutors,77 and has them point out that their actions provided Plato safety and has them reject the charge of flattery (§§321-3). From Epistle VIII Aristides produces the statements of Plato and Dion that exhort the Sicilians to show gratitude for people who delivered them from evil; it is clear, Aristides argues, that Plato should show the same attitude to the Four as he preaches to the Sicilians (§§324-7). An inconsistency is pointed out in Plato’s description of the misfortunes that befall the Four at the hands of the Athenians and the charge that rhetors are flatterers (§§328-30). Aristides then turns Plato’s argument against Plato and his associates in §§331-9: Plato himself has not met his standard in leading his people to what is best. If Plato must agree that making people perfect is impossible, why blame the Four for not doing so? At least the Four did something, which is more than Plato and Socrates’s inactivity, and better than the crimes of Alcibiades and Critias, Socrates’s companions. Indeed, even the gods, who have been reigning since eternity, have not managed to ban injustice from the world. In the final paragraphs of this section Aristides shows that Plato praises the Four in praising the feats accomplished under their command (§§340-3).78

I.iv.H PLATO ADMITS RHETORIC IS NOT FLATTERY (344-61)

During his discussion with Callicles, as Aristides is keen to point out, Socrates admits the existence of two ‘kinds’ of rhetoric: one aiming at (their own) pleasure and the other at what is

‘destroyed’. It should be noted that the text is ambiguous between the rendering I give above – logos as any logos when rhetoric is active, or indeed the logos, method, of the art – and the claim that the objection does not refute the position Aristides argues – logos as the line of argument in refutation of Plato: ‘a0ll’ou0de\n ma=llon o3 g’e0c a0rxh=j lo/goj diafqei/retai’. The double nature of rhetoric mentioned in Gorg. 503ab does not concern incompatible arguments, but a division according to aim; Aristides will discuss this in §§344-61. 75 The sentence ‘o9 me\n ou]n u9p e\r r9htorikh=j lo/goj ou[toj’ is, in my view, just as non-Aristidean as the division into books. The absence of this sentence in a number of manuscripts and the many different versions of this sentence in the manuscripts that do have it corroborates this view. Its content makes no sense: why would Aristides say his logos is ended if it continues full speed in book II? 76 This happens in Gorg. 503c and 515dff. 77 Most vividly the head of Protagoras, Theaetetus 171d1. Interestingly, Aristides feels the need to depict the resurrection of the Four, but takes Plato’s presence for granted – although at other times he does point to the inavailability of Plato’s live witness (e.g. §272). 78 In Menexenus 240d1-41c3. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 18 best. He also admits that Aristides (our man at Plataia) was a good rhetor.79 The admitted possibility of a non-flattering kind of rhetoric and the actual existence of a good rhetor both mean that the identification of rhetoric with flattery stands refuted (§§344-56). Aristides returns to the charge against the Four when he argues that the instance of Aristides as a good rhetor is inconsistent. Nothing significant distinguishes him from the Four, so that either Aristides must be condemned with the Four, or the Four must be exculpated with Aristides (§357-61).

I.iv.K THE SUPERIORITY OF RHETORIC (362-437)

This long section is a great eulogy of rhetoric and reason, which proceeds largely by way of comparison. From §378 until §410 this comparison explicitly involves logos, the faculty of reason. In §§362-7 Aristides addresses the question of the hierarchy of arts that is raised in Gorgias 511c4-512d8. The primary thought in that passage is that knowing how to save people’s lives might not be so great after all, since for some people life might not be worth living. This is brought out by a comparison of rhetoric with swimming, navigation, engineering. It is these comparisons that question the alleged superiority of rhetoric over other arts, given that they can all save people. Aristides argues that rhetoric is superior to these other arts, because it can decide when these arts should be used (when one should embark, whether the harvest should be done), and it must help these other arts when orders are to be given to subordinates. The main thought of the Gorgias passage is addressed in §§368-71. Rhetoric is superior to arts like navigation, because it can make the distinction between people justly killed and people justly saved. Rhetoric, furthermore (§§371-77) has a much wider scope than other arts. In determining the activity of other arts, rhetors can save many more people than other individual arts. Moreover, rhetoric is useful and necessary everywhere and at all times. The most ‘authoritative’ (kuriôtaton) argument,80 Aristides says (§§378-9), is that rhetoric employs logos, the faculty by which humans are superior to animals. This statement seems isolated at first, as Aristides continues with something different: a complaint about the childishness of Plato’s analogies (§§380-1). A eulogy of logos is in the making, however. As a preliminary move, Aristides reiterates that rhetoric partakes of the four virtues (§382, from §235- 6).81 Then he opens a different register. What is finer, he writes with a clear reference to the Phaedrus, than to know the different types of speeches with the appropriate types of audience, to know what is proper and what are the right occasions, and to know when to speak and when to be silent? This knowledge no more belongs to a philosopher than to a rhetor (§§383-5). The praise continues with the remark that to combine speaking and doing is much better than only to speak – a remark apparently directed at philosophers (§385). Immediately afterwards, however, the rhetor is praised because he who tells others what to do is superior to him who merely does something; this is accompanied by exegesis of Homer and Hesiod, who prove the dignity and kingliness of rhetoric in this respect (§§386-93). §§394-99 offer another myth about the natural condition: mankind was helpless until the gods gave them – the noblest among them – rhetoric; since then they fought off the beasts and

79 The two kinds: 503a5-b3; Aristides: 525e5-26b4. 80 This may be no more than a pun on the common label for the reasoning faculty, the ‘ruling’ part, but probably Aristides does mean this to be the essence of rhetoric’s superiority. 81 We may note in §382 a definition of rhetoric: ‘for being a rhetor, I think, is finding and arranging what is necessary and to deliver what is fitting with beauty and power’ (‘e1sti me\n ga\r dh/p ou r9htoreu/ein to\ ta\ de/onta e0ceurei=n kai\ ta/cai kai\ ta\ p re/p onta a0p odou=nai meta\ ko/smou kai\ duna/mew j’). Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 19 lived together. Aristides stresses (§§400-2) that this myth is true: civilisation is impossible without rhetoric. The superiority of logos is evident from the fact that one man with superior logos remains superior even against a whole mob of inferior logoi – quite unlike strength or wealth. When that superior man shares his logos, moreover, it does not become less (§§403-10). The comparison of rhetoric with other arts continues with the observation that rhetoric remains necessary even if all evil disappears, for panegyrics, prayers, and eulogies (§411). In a combination, furthermore, of rhetoric with another art, this other art is elevated far above its singular position (§§412-6). Even compared with beauty, or with arms, rhetoric emerges as superior; it is the gift even the gods want for themselves, it is the bond that keeps the universe together (§417-24). The greatest evidence of the superiority of rhetoric, Aristides says, is that it is everywhere, yet its perfect form is extremely rare – everyone prattles, few are rhetors (§425-6). The best of literature is the literature that makes most use of rhetoric (§427-8). As the finale of his praise, Aristides introduces himself, thinly disguised (§§429-37). A rhetor forced by circumstance to retreat from public life is not thereby unable to answer Plato: that rhetor pursues rhetoric as the highest thing, as his only love, for its own sake, without distractions – would he be a flatterer?

I.iv.L PERORATION: PLATO AGREES (438-466)

At the end of his oration Aristides once more attempts to show that Plato is on his side. In §§438-45 he produces witness from the Statesman, Apology, and the concluding remark of the Gorgias, where Plato ascribes to rhetoric that it seeks justice and speaks the truth. §§446-61 constitute what seems an objection to Aristides’s position, although it also fits very well with his attempt in this finale: Aristides’s attack on Plato is irrelevant, the suggestion is, because it was Plato’s intention to denounce the bad kind of rhetoric. Aristides responds that this leaves the arguments in the foregoing just where they are; that the division of an art into two kinds according to the use made of that art is arbitrary and could equally well be made about philosophy; and that such a division essentially constitutes bad use of words – just as bad wisdom is slyness, rhetoric should be discussed on its own terms, the way it really is, ‘even if nobody attains to it’.82 Furthermore, it may be that Plato wished to leave true rhetoric in peace and attack only the vile kind, but it should be made clear to the masses that this is so, and therefore Aristides’s defence rightly extols rhetoric. Aristides ends (§§462-6) with a contrast between muttering, grumbling contemporaries who actually slander true rhetoric, but are punished right away,83 and Plato, who, he expects, will receive this countermove in the rhetorical game gracefully and nobly; Asclepius, in any case, consents.

I.iv.M PLACE OF §§135-77

The section on stokhazesthai (including ‘stokhazesthai’ and ‘eikazein’) is the third part of the refutatio (see I.iii.A). It is thus part of the project of countering Plato’s arguments in the Gorgias. More specifically, it is the first and most significant section that argues that rhetoric is an art. The preceeding part of the refutatio had declared the Gorgias attack irrelevant – applicable as much to philosophy as to rhetoric – and had argued that rhetoric is not a shameful activity if it is not an

82 §453: ‘ou3tw toi/nun kai\ r9htorikh\n kata\ tou\j o0rqw =j metaxeirizome/nouj kai\ tw =| o1nti tugxa/nontaj au0th=j … kat’au0to/n ge to\n tou= p ra/gmatoj lo/gon, ei0 kai\ mhdei\j tetu/xhke…’ 83 Probably this reference is to the Cynics, who had non-Greek names and were not very eloquent in Greek. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 20 art. From §§135 onwards the oration argues or (later) assumes that rhetoric is an art; the non-art case is now finished. In proving that rhetoric is an art, Aristides uses other arts as analogies and shows that they proceed by means of stokhazesthai, which Plato had declared the core of rhetoric and the reason why rhetoric cannot be an art. The refutation of Plato thus also becomes a positive justification and account of the method of rhetoric. That Aristides argues both on the grounds that rhetoric is not an art and that rhetoric is an art does not show that Aristides was not concerned about the content (the truth, if you will) of the dispute, but is a manifestation of Aristides’s use of the apagogic method.84 Aristides wishes to strengthen his case by refuting Plato in both of two alternatives, that rhetoric is not an art and that rhetoric is an art. Nonetheless it is not clear whether Aristides would actually choose one of these two alternative views of rhetoric, if presented with the choice. His other writings testify to a strong sense of divine favour granted to him by Asclepius and other gods, a favour that was not restricted to healing of his many maladies. The sacred discourses, relating Asclepius’s revelations and Aristides’s stay at the sanctuary near Pergamum, are just as much about Aristides’s rhetorical activity as about the specifics of his illness. The divine-gift theory, then, has a personal resonance for Aristides (as shows in §§66-72).85 Yet Aristides would also affirm rhetoric’s status of art. Indeed, one may well wonder whether the dichotomy between art and non-art is not a concession of Aristides to Plato’s conceptual system, which he accepts for the purposes of this oration, while he does not himself view art and non-art – or perhaps rather divine gift and human training – as mutually exclusive.

84 This method proceeds by enumerating several possibilities and showing for each of these possibilities that one’s opponent is wrong. The strongest (but not the only) form is the negative: given ways A, B and C in which something could have happened, and given that neither A nor B nor C is the case, it is clear that it did not happen. A classic example of apagogy is Gorgias’s Helen, in which possible reasons for Helen’s journey to Troy are given and it is shown for each of these that Helen was not to blame. Use of this apagogic method can also be detected, for instance, in §46, where Aristides speaks of the people possessed by the gods without having art: ‘if not many, this supports my case, […] if many, who has such expertise at slander to blame them?’ (‘o3soi d’au] kai\ kaqa/p ac u9p odu/ntej qew =| kai\ te/xnhj ou0de\ mikro\n metasxo/ntej ou0 mo/non toi=j e0f’au9tw =n, a0lla\ kai\ toi=j u3steron p olla\ dh\ kai\ qauma/sia p roei=p on, oi[on ei0 bou/lei, Ba/kij, S i/bulla, e3teroi meta\ tou/tw n, ei0 de\ mh\ p olloi/, kai\ tou=t’e0sti\n u9p e\r tou= lo/gou: ta\ ga\r me/gista e0kp e/feuge tou\j p ollou/j: ti/j ou3tw texni/thj tou= kakw =j le/gein e0sti\n o3stij kai\ tou/touj kaki/seien a1n;’) Despite its flamboyancy Aristides’s prose can be highly elliptic, as here. Of the opposition between ‘few’ and ‘many’ only the ‘if a few’ is mentioned explicitly as a hypothetical case; the other must be understood from the mention of p ollou/j … tou/touj. My translation follows Behr’s (in the Loeb, 1973). Another instance of apagogy is in §81, where Plato’s claim that any non-art is shameful entails that either Socrates must have lied about his not knowing anything, which is shameful, or he must be ashamed for not having art; so that Socrates and his god show in two ways that Plato is wrong, says Aristides, by naming wise an artless man and by wisely stating he is artless. 85 See also Pernot 1993a: 627-31. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 21

Part II

It is important to briefly sketch the positions of Plato and Isocrates on rhetoric and kairos as a background against which Aristides’s treatise becomes intelligible and obtains its theoretical significance. Plato and Isocrates each stand at the head of an intellectual tradition, the one consisting predominantly, but by no means exclusively, of philosophers and their schools, the other more exclusively the domain of the rhetorical education of the Greek world, but not thereby less widespread. Slightly simplifying one might view the struggle between philosophy and rhetoric in antiquity an extrapolation of the polemic between Plato and Isocrates.86 Aristides’s contribution, as we will see, creates a virtuoso synthesis of these two positions. Highlighting the views of Plato and Isocrates does not imply claims about the originality of views or notions; such originality is hard to prove for the absence of much material from before these writers, although for some notions there are clear indications that Plato and Isocrates used ideas that were around before.87

II.i Isocrates

Isocrates’s view on the philosophical basis of rhetoric is fundamentally different from Plato’s. Two of his works are particularly relevant in determining Isocrates’s views on his art: the early Against the Sophists, and the late Antidosis. I will consider the two stages of education that Isocrates describes, the kairoi that make the second stage the most difficult; next I discuss Isocrates’s use of doxa in opposition to epistêmê; the same message emerges from his contrast of fixed and creative arts; and finally I mention two passages that use ‘stokhazesthai’.

II.i.A TWO-STAGED EDUCATION & THE KAIROI

In Against the Sophists Isocrates criticises rival teachers who claim that they can pass on an art that provides their students with complete rhetorical mastery of every possible subject, irrespective of the students’ natural abilities and practical experience. Whether there actually were such teachers in Isocrates’s day is an irrelevant question for our purposes; Isocrates defines his own thinking and the education he offers in opposition to these teachers. Isocrates says he never makes firm promises about the result of a particular education, because he takes the need for natural ability and practice in becoming a successful rhetor very seriously.

I say that it is not something difficult to obtain knowledge [epistêmê] of the forms [ideai] based on which we pronounce and compose all speeches, if one entrusts oneself not to those who make easy promises, but to those who know something about it. But to select and combine together and arrange correctly from these things the ones necessary on every occasion, and moreover to not miss the kairoi, but both to cover the whole speech in a fitting way with enthymemes and to deliver it with rhythmic and musical words, these things require much training and are the product of a manly and judgment-able [doxastikê] soul…88

86 Which I think we can properly call a polemic, although both authors’ views may be less divergent than that label suggests and than is often thought. Nevertheless the competition for pupils fed the debate in the 4th century as much as in later centuries. 87 See Shorey. 88 Against the Sophists 16-7: ‘bou/lomai d', e)p eidh/p er ei)j tou=to p roh=lqon, e)/ti safe/steron ei)p ei=n p eri\ au)tw =n. fhmi\ ga\r e)gw \ tw =n me\n i)dew =n, e)c w (=n tou\j lo/gouj a(/p antaj kai\ le/gomen kai\ sunti/qemen, labei=n th\n e)p isth/mhn ou)k ei)=nai tw =n p a/nu xalep w =n, h)/n tij au(to\n p aradw =| mh\ toi=j r(a|di/w j u(p isxnoume/noij a)lla\ toi=j ei)do/si ti p eri\ au)tw =n: to\ de\ tou/tw n e)f' e(ka/stw | tw =n p ragma/tw n a(\j dei= p roele/sqai kai\ mi=cai p ro\j a)llh/laj kai\ ta/cai kata\ tro/p on, e)/ti de\ tw =n kairw =n mh\ diamartei=n, a)lla\ kai\ toi=j Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 22

A student must master the many possible forms and arguments of rhetorical discourse firmly.89 Nonetheless, such theoretical mastery is only the beginning of successful speaking. From these forms and arguments one must on every actual occasion select the appropriate ones, arrange them properly, and clothe them in persuasive and agreeable language.90 If one makes a speech according to these demands, one does not miss the kairoi. Isocrates presents his education as a two-stage process: the first and easiest stage is the theoretical grasp of the different possible forms a discourse can take; the second, more advanced, stage is the application of these forms to each particular opportunity. This application consists in a responding to the demands of each particular occasion, in terms of the rhetor’s choice of type of argumentation, style of language and length of the discourse.91 The artistry of a rhetor shows in his grasp of the kairoi: possibly a mediocre rhetor would have been able to deliver a passable speech on the same occasion as well, but a rhetor who has mastered his art is able to fine-tune his speech to the particularities of the situation he faces, in selecting from the speech-elements at his disposal those elements that respond exactly to the demands of the situation and thus making the most of the opportunities hidden in this situation. In Antidosis §§183-4 Isocrates repeats this description of his teaching, likening it to the instruction of a gymnastics teacher: after an initial stage of mastering the theory, students are given exercises to bring their judgments (the doxai) closer to what is required on the relevant occasions (kairoi).92 In these contexts the kairoi can be the right measure or moment in general, the audience-, issue-, or speaker-dependent challenges of a particular rhetorical situation, or, as the word is often used in Isocrates’s own orations, to the proper length, proportion and organisation of a speech or of speech parts.93

II.i.B DOXA

Isocrates grants his opponents that mastering the theoretical forms of discourse is easy; he also grants them that this constitutes an epistêmê. He denies, however, that this is the whole of rhetoric. The most difficult part is still to be done when one has epistêmê. At least part of this difficulty is because the second part of rhetorical education does not admit of epistêmê. Foreknowledge of the future, Isocrates says in §2 of Against the Sophists, is incompatible with our nature.94 In Antidosis §271 he states ‘it is not in human nature to grasp knowledge (epistêmê), having which we would know what is to be said and done’.95 The object of this knowledge, and e)nqumh/masi p rep o/ntw j o(/lon to\n lo/gon katap oiki=lai kai\ toi=j o)no/masin eu)ru/qmw j kai\ mousikw =j ei)p ei=n, tau=ta de\ p ollh=j e)p imelei/aj dei=sqai kai\ y uxh=j a)ndrikh=j kai\ docastikh=j e)/rgon ei)=nai…’ 89 On the meaning of ideai in Isocrates generally, see Bons 1996: 19-64, on ideai in this passage 27-31. 90 See ibid.: 35-6 and 80. 91 On the two stages, see ibid.: 36 and 80-82; on length, see ibid.: 96-8. 92 ‘e)p eida\n ga\r la/bw si maqhta/j, oi( me\n p aidotri/bai ta\ sxh/mata ta\ p ro\j th\n a)gw ni/an eu(rhme/na tou\j foitw =ntaj dida/skousin, oi( de\ p eri\ th\n filosofi/an o)/ntej ta\j i)de/aj a(p a/saj, ai(=j o( lo/goj tugxa/nei xrw /menoj, diece/rxontai toi=j maqhtai=j. e)mp ei/rouj de\ tou/tw n p oih/santej kai\ diakribw /santej e)n tou/toij p a/lin gumna/zousin au)tou/j, kai\ p onei=n e)qi/zousi, kai\ sunei/rein kaq' e(\n e(/kaston w (=n e)/maqon a)nagka/zousin, i(/na tau=ta bebaio/teron kata/sxw si kai\ tw =n kairw =n e)ggute/rw tai=j do/caij ge/nw ntai.’ NB a translation of doxais as ‘theory’ such as in the Loeb and also in Bons 1996 (:35n.58) is, in my opinion, beside the point. As a modern description of what is at stake in bringing one’s judgments near the kairoi, talk of the application of theories may well be appropriate. However, besides the question whether Isocrates would have phrased his point in these terms, it is important to distinguish between the application of theory and the way in which this application happens, i.e. in bringing a person’s judgments (doxai) closer to the kairoi of real life situations. 93 This last dimension emerges clearly from the discussion in Bons 1996: 85-99. 94 ‘ta\ me/llonta p rogignw /skein ou) th=j h(mete/raj fu/sew /j e)stin.’ 95 ‘e)p eidh\ ga\r ou)k e)/nestin e)n th=| fu/sei th=| tw =n a)nqrw /p w n e)p isth/mhn labei=n h(\n e)/xontej a)\n ei)dei=men o(/ ti p rakte/on h)/ lekte/on e)sti/n, e)k tw =n loip w =n sofou\j me\n nomi/zw tou\j tai=j do/caij e)p itugxa/nein w (j e)p i\ to\ Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 23 at the same time the cause of the inattainability of this knowledge, Isocrates specifies as the kairoi in §§184, which escape epistêmê.96 Isocrates seems prepared to say that the kairoi make foreknowledge impossible – if not, there are two sources for the impossibility of epistêmê: the fact that the future is hidden, and the fact that the future (and the present) contains kairoi. Like Plato, therefore, Isocrates opposes epistêmê and doxa. Since he holds humans cannot possess knowledge of what is to be done, however, Isocrates chooses doxa, which consequently receives a higher valuation in Isocrates’s works than at the hands of Plato.97 Doxa is not wild opinion, but judgment informed by experience. Thus in Antidosis §184, Isocrates says that those who pay proper attention to the kairoi can hit upon them (tugkhanein) in most cases. In §271 he calls wise whoever, by means of doxai, hit upon the best in most cases.98 Isocrates’s valuation of doxa clarifies his use of the word doxastikê in §17 of Against the Sophists, which I cited above. The emphasis that the second is the more difficult stage of rhetorical education and the subsequent statement that this requires a doxastikê soul already imply that Isocrates considers doxastikê a mark of distinction. In the two contexts discussed just now, in Antidosis §§183-4 and 271, doxai are related to things that happen in most cases. An experienced man will know what sort of process is evolving before his eyes and will make a judgment in accordance with what usually, or mostly, happens in conjunction with that sort of process. The soul of this man has seen many different sorts of processes, has seen (sufficiently) many instances of each sort of process, and is able to learn from these observations – whence the need for natural ability. A soul of this type is doxastikê, able to make good judgments.

II.i.C FIXED VS. CREATIVE ARTS

A different way in which Isocrates details the status of the rhetorical art, but which affirms the same theoretical distinctions, is in a contrast with letters. Those who claim too much about their instruction liken it to teaching people how to write, but Isocrates asserts that this overlooks a fundamental difference between these two arts: knowing how to write is a fixed art (tetagmenê tekhnê), while rhetoric is a creative activity (poiêtikon pragma). Blind application of theoretical rules is exhaustive of writing, but something extra is needed for rhetoric: speeches must participate in the kairoi, in what is fitting, and in an original presentation.99 This contrast elicits again that rhetoric is outside the domain of theory and knowledge; the demand for control of the kairoi inherent in rhetoric implies that no knowledge of rhetoric is possible and that a soul versed in rhetoric must be an expert judger.

II.i.D INSTANCES OF STOKHAZESTHAI

p olu\ tou= belti/stou duname/nouj, filoso/fouj de\ tou\j e)n tou/toij diatri/bontaj e)c w (=n ta/xista lh/yontai th\n toiau/thn fro/nhsin.’ 96 ‘tw =| me\n ga\r ei)de/nai p erilabei=n au)tou\j ou)x oi(=o/n t' e)sti/n: e)p i\ ga\r a(p a/ntw n tw =n p ragma/tw n diafeu/gousi ta\j e)p isth/maj, oi( de\ ma/lista p rose/xontej to\n nou=n kai\ duna/menoi qew rei=n to\ sumbai=non w (j e)p i\ to\ p olu\ p leista/kij au)tw =n tugxa/nousi.’ 97 Isocrates’s statements on the impossibility of knowledge and the indispensability of doxa are similar to Gorgias’s Helen §11. 98 Texts in notes 96 and 95, respectively. The opposition between epistêmê and doxa is also present in §8 of Against the Sophists. 99 Against the Sophists 12-3: ‘qauma/zw d' o(/tan i)/dw tou/touj maqhtw =n a)cioume/nouj, oi\ (p oihtikou= p ra/gmatoj tetagme/nhn te/xnhn p ara/deigma fe/rontej lelh/qasi sfa=j au)tou/j. ti/j ga\r ou)k oi)=de p lh\n tou/tw n o(/ti to\ me\n tw =n gramma/tw n a)kinh/tw j e)/xei kai\ me/nei kata\ tau)to/n, w (/ste toi=j au)toi=j a)ei\ p eri\ tw =n au)tw =n xrw /menoi diatelou=men, to\ de\ tw =n lo/gw n p a=n tou)nanti/on p e/p onqen:… me/giston de\ shmei=on th=j a)nomoio/thtoj au)tw =n: tou\j me\n ga\r lo/gouj ou)x oi(=o/n te kalw =j e)/xein, h)\n mh\ tw =n kairw =n kai\ tou= p rep o/ntw j kai\ tou= kainw =j e)/xein meta/sxw sin, toi=j de\ gra/mmasin ou)deno\j tou/tw n p rosede/hsen.’ Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 24

Two passages we must consider in view of the texts of Aristides to be discussed in part III. In the Panathenaic oration, §30, Isocrates specifies who he calls educated: ‘those who handle beautifully the things that befall day by day, and who have a judgment that hits upon the kairoi and a capacity for the most part to aim at (stokhazesthai) their advantage’.100 Here Isocrates details successful doxa as stokhazesthai; it is significant for our purposes that ‘for the most part’ precedes stokhazesthai, so that it is clear that Isocrates uses stokhazesthai to mean the successful hitting of the mark, and not just the attempt to aim. The same use occurs in On the Peace, §28, where Isocrates distinguishes between two groups of people who both use doxa. Those with suitable doxa are able to aim at what is necessary (stokhazesthai tou deontos), while the others miss their advantage.101

Drawing together the different elements in Isocrates’s comments, there are firstly the two stages of education: theoretical knowledge and practice in particular situations. Secondly, the second stage is necessary because rhetoric always has to handle the kairoi. Thirdly, as a result, knowledge of rhetoric is impossible. As noted, it is not clear how in Isocrates’s view the kairoi that make knowledge impossible relate to the inscrutability of the future, which also makes knowledge impossible. We should probably consider these as different aspects of the one ultimate incontrollability of each particular situation. Fourthly, since knowledge is impossible, rhetoric must proceed via doxa – belief-based judgments, at which a good rhetor excels. Finally, good doxai are able to stokhazesthai what is advantageous or necessary.

II.ii Plato

More than a brief sketch for present purposes I will not offer, as literature on Plato and rhetoric abounds.102 I will not, therefore, engage in detail with scholarly literature on points of interpretation, although inevitably what I present here must disagree with many accounts offered in the past.

II.ii.A THE GORGIAS

In the Gorgias Socrates denounces the profession of knowledge of rhetors and denies that rhetoric is an art. Instead, rhetoric is an empeiria (462c3) for producing pleasure (c7). Rhetoric seems to be justice, but considers only what gratifies instead of what is best, and guesses (stokhazetai) instead of knows, i.e. ‘it has no account of the nature of whatever things it applies by which it applies them’ (465a2).103

100 ‘ti/naj ou)=n kalw = p ep aideume/nouj, e)p eidh\ ta\j te/xnaj kai\ ta\j e)p isth/maj kai\ ta\j duna/meij a)p odokima/zw ; p rw =ton me\n tou\j kalw =j xrw me/nouj toi=j p ra/gmasi toi=j kata\ th\n h(me/ran e(ka/sthn p rosp i/p tousi, kai\ th\n do/can e)p ituxh= tw =n kairw =n e)/xontaj kai\ duname/nhn w (j e)p i\ to\ p olu\ stoxa/zesqai tou= sumfe/rontoj:’ 101 ‘e)/xei ga\r ou(/tw j. e)moi\ dokou=sin a(/p antej me\n e)p iqumei=n tou= sumfe/rontoj kai\ tou= p le/on e)/xein tw =n a)/llw n, ou(k ei)de/nai de\ ta\j p ra/ceij ta\j e)p i\ tau=ta ferou/saj, a)lla\ tai=j do/caij diafe/ren a)llh/lw n: oi( me\n ga\r e)/xein e)p ieikei=j kai\ stoxa/zesqai tou= de/ontoj duname/naj, oi( d' w (j oi(=o/n te p lei=ston tou= sumfe/rontoj diamartanou/saj.’ Other instances of Isocrates’s use of stokhazesthai in more or less rhetorically technical contexts are Antidosis §43 (guessing the thoughts of the audience – this is relevant to grasp the kairoi, for instance when one is in danger of speaking too long); and Panathenaicus §261 (aiming at the truth). 102 One may consult, for two rather different approaches, Irwin 95-9; and Vickers 83-120. 103 a1-5: ‘o3ti tou~ h(de/oj stoxa&zetai a1neu tou~ belti/stou: te/xnhn de\ au)th_n ou1 fhmi ei]nai a)ll' e0mp eiri/an, o3ti ou)k e1xei lo&gon ou)de/na w |{ p rosfe/rei a4 p rosfe/rei o(p oi=' a1tta th_n fu&sin e0sti/n, w 3ste th_n ai0ti/an e9ka&stou mh_ e1xein ei0p ei=n. ‘ou)k e)/xei lo/gon ou)de/na w (=| p rosfe/rei a(\ p rosfe/rei o(p oi= a)/tta th\n fu/sin e)sti/n’ Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 25

This sketch is ultra short, but suffices for the main features of Plato’s position in the Gorgias. In this picture, then, we have on the one hand art (tekhnê), which uses the logos of the nature of its object, which is the same as saying that it has knowledge (epistêmê), and which aims at the best. On the other hand there is empeiria, which is alogon – without an account of its object, for which reason it cannot give an account of what it is doing –, and must have recourse to guessing as an alternative to knowledge, and aims at gratification (of the audience). Socrates detects three faults in rhetoric: its basis, its method and its aim. Its basis is without logos, its method, therefore, merely stokhazesthai, guessing, and its aim is gratification. It is still a matter of debate whether this wholesale condemnation of rhetoric on these three grounds is the final position of the Gorgias, or whether Socrates might allow for a separation of the art of rhetoric from the grounds on which and the ends to which it is used – so that a properly equipped politician, who has both knowledge and good aims, might legitimately use rhetoric.104 For our purposes it is sufficient that the ancients regarded the position sketched above as the position in the Gorgias, and on that count contrasted the Gorgias with the Phaedrus (which makes precisely that separation of basis and aims from art indicated above). One significant feature of the Gorgias’s discussion is the absence of kairoi.105 In Isocrates’s view, as we saw above, the kairoi make it impossible that epistêmê grasp the whole of rhetoric. Learning the forms of discourse is easy, but in order to control and properly respond to the particularities of speech situations one must train oneself. The consequence of this absence of kairoi in the Gorgias is that Plato rejects rhetoric as not governed by epistêmê, without having considered the main cause why Isocrates thinks rhetoric cannot be governed by epistêmê. The most significant result of not mentioning the kairoi, however, is that Plato’s use of stokhazesthai can become derogatory. Isocrates says that combining the forms of discourse and not to miss the kairoi is the work of a psukhê andrikê kai doxastikê, thus specifying the third of the three paedagogical requirements for successful education, nature. For Isocrates andrikê kai doxastikê is a qualification that separates those unfit for rhetoric from those who are able to become successful rhetors. As we saw in the previous section, therefore, Isocrates considers it possible to distinguish between the judging activities of different people; even without knowledge, therefore, we can appreciate some doxai as qualitatively better than other doxai. A doxastikê mind is precisely one capable of good doxai. Plato uses almost the same phrase in his characterisation of rhetoric: he has Socrates say that rhetoric is not a tekhnikon occupation, but psukhês stokhastikês kai andreias; and, adding the notoriously ambiguous epithet deinos that signified praise or threats depending on the speaker’s intention, calls rhetors phusei deinês prosomilein tois anthrôpois.106 The first half of this sentence is just as intentionally ambiguous as the second, however. Some scholars have suggested that the phrase psukhê andrikê kai doxastikê, in some form or other, was a standard phrase in 5th and 4th- century rhetorical theory. It might even, as Wilhelm Süss argues,107 be an ingredient of typically Gorgianic thinking. In support of this last suggestion one can point to Plato’s use of this phrase in close connection with Gorgias – although such use of Plato’s text has rightly become suspicious in recent years. Another supporting consideration is the close resemblance between the theories of knowledge of both Gorgias and Isocrates108 – and one might add to that the tradition in antiquity that has Isocrates be a pupil of Gorgias. Whatever the truth of these

104 See the excellent article by Cassin, esp. 17-26, which also uses a constructive reading of Aristides, for a discussion of the different positions in the Gorgias and the possibility of separating rhetoric’s aims from the art proper. 105 The search I conducted via TLG found no instances of the word in the dialogue. 106 Gorgias 463a6-b1: ‘D okei= toi/nun moi, w 0= Gorgi/a, ei0=nai e0p ith/deuma texniko\n me\n ou1, yuxh=j de\ stoxastikh=j kai\ a0ndrei/aj kai\ fu/sei deinh=j p rosomilei=n toi=j a0nqrw /p oij. kalw = de\ au0tou= e0gw \ to\ kefa/laion kolakei/an.’ 107 Süss 21-7. 108 The main point of agreement between Isocrates and Gorgias’ epistemologies is the emphasis that humans cannot obtain complete knowledge and must therefore rely on doxai. I discussed Isocrates’s views above and also noted at that point the similarity with Gorgias’s Helena §11. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 26 suggestions, or whether possibly Plato ironically imitates Isocrates here or vice versa, – Plato’s use of this phrase is in a context that conspicuously omits reference to any kairos at all. This absence enables Plato to use stokhazesthai as a term of denunciation, because without kairoi, stokhazesthai stands in natural and unfavorable contrast with epistêmê. In the discussion of the Phaedrus to which we will now turn we will see that Plato apparently felt the need to include some discussion of kairos; given the position in the Gorgias we have just considered, we should examine the way the introduction of kairoi changes Plato’s view on the role of knowledge in rhetoric – if it does at all.

II.ii.B THE PHAEDRUS

The passage in the Phaedrus in which Socrates criticises contemporary approaches to rhetoric and proposes his own model of rhetorical education contains three aspects on which I would like to concentrate: Socrates’s insistence on knowledge, the need for classification, and the kairoi.

II.ii.B.a Knowledge Socrates’s insistence on knowledge figures at five prominent places in the course of Phaedrus 260-273: at 260bc, at 262a, at 265d-266a, at 270b-271d, and at 273d.

260bc Socrates submits the case of a man who uses the word ‘horse’ to refer to a donkey, praising it as the noblest animal; Phaedrus finds this rather ridiculous. Socrates’s rather straightforward demand is that one know the meaning of the words one uses and know at least the basics about the subjects one speaks of. This demands culminates in the need that a speech start with a definition, at 263b, when Socrates has pointed to the difficulty that some words are understood differently by different people (e.g. ‘love’, ‘just’).

262a Arguing by way of similarities is seen as typical for rhetoric. These similarities are not the many comparable instances needed for a generalization, but refer rather to the contradictory arguments of the sophists: a rhetor is able to make one thing look just at one point and look unjust a little later. By assimilating different cases, a rhetor is able to transfer the labels for the one case onto the other case. If this procedure is applied repeatedly, one can even ‘shift from one thing to its opposite’ (262a). Socrates’s claim is now that a proper command oft his technique presupposes knowledge of things in order to make sure on can use as small similarities as possible. Note that this demand for knowledge is based (explicitly stated in the text) on deception. We may therefore suppose it is not Socrates’s preferred option. We should also note that the argument needs emendation, although little depends on this: it is not the nature of things one needs to know for arguing via similarities, but only one’s audience’s opinions about the subject.

265d-266a A speech must be like an animal: head, tail, middle and extremities should all be organically related and rightly proportioned. This requires knowledge of one’s subject. Socrates specifies this knowledge in terms of the different kinds of a thing, and of parts of wholes. Thus it becomes possible, while speaking about what is seemingly one thing, madness, to move ‘from censure to praise’ (265c5), i.e., to praise one part of madness and censure another. Material analysis thus supplies, or even produces, formal arrangement. We must note that Socrates points to knowledge as the provider of the correct arrangement of a speech. Isocrates, as we have seen, understands as an important component of Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 27 the kairoi the proper arrangement and proportion of individual speech elements. As kairoi, these concrete touches of design are outside the grasp of knowledge and require natural ability and practice. Plato’s later list of kairoi-dependent attitudes in 272a does not include any of these acts of combination and arrangement, although length does seem to be understood as context- dependent (cf. also the remark about Prodicus in 267b4-6). All three cases of knowledge discussed thus far are knowledge of subject. Besides knowledge of subject, however, knowledge of audience is also required.

270b-271d Socrates introduces knowledge of audience after he and Phaedrus have drawn up a list of formal speech-parts and argumentative strategies that were current in rhetorical theory and education.109 Using comparison with medicine, music and poetry, Socrates argues that all these techniques are merely the preliminaries to the real art of rhetoric, as a toolbox which one now must learn to use. As this use finds its purpose in the audience, the audience must also provide guidance in this use. Determining the nature of one’s audience thus emerges as the key demand for rhetoric (270b). Furthermore, since empeiria is dismissed as insufficient (270b5, cf. Gorg. 448c and 462c), a rhetor needs knowledge of the souls of the audience. We may note that empeiria is dismissed without much argument. The phrase ‘empirical and artless practice’ (b5) implies that for Plato something empirical is without tekhnê by definition.

273d The last emergence of knowledge is at 273d. When Socrates has finished unfolding his programme for rhetorical education, he introduces, as ‘the wolf’s side of the story’ (272c9),110 and rejects the theory that the basis for rhetorical argumentation is what is probable, the eikos. Socrates rejects this theory because he argues that one must know the truth in order to properly determine what is eikos, similar to the truth.111 It is worth noting that in this picture there is something that is the truth, which one can get at alternatively to the eikos. As we will see in part III, a fundamental principle for Aristides in rhetoric and other arts is that a perfect image of the truth remains an image. There is a second presupposition we should note. Socrates rejects the eikos because we have to know the truth in any case, in order to determine the eikos. Socrates uses, in other words, a notion of eikos as that which is really, in all particularity, like the truth, instead of a notion of eikos as that which is generally speaking like the truth. In terms of the famous example Socrates himself mentions, on Socrates’s view it was indeed eikos that the (cowardly) big man was attacked by one small, weak man, simply because it happened. On this, as we will also see in part III, Aristides and Plato agree.

II.ii.B.b Classification

Two classification mechanisms are at play in the relevant part of the Phaedrus, one governing knowledge of subject, at 265d-266a, and one governing knowledge of audience, at 271ab. Socrates’s description of these classifications detail his conception of the knowledge required in rhetorical education.

Classification of subject

109 Although we obviously do not know quite what to think of this list as a historical source. The polemical context requires our carefulness also in using Plato’s comments and technical divisions as a direct contribution to the theoretical debate in his time, e.g. in an attempt to reconstruct that debate. 110 ‘le/getai gou=n, w )= F ai=dre, di/kaion ei)=nai kai\ to\ tou= lu/kou ei)p ei=n.’ 111 Curiously St. Augustine uses the same argument in Contra Academicos 2.7.16-2.8.20 to refute skeptic claims that skepticism about truth need not be unliveable, because one can use the probable to make choices. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 28

The classification of one’s subject that Socrtaes details in 265de-266a applies to the knowledge mentioned in the first three of five passages mentioned above, so not only to the knowledge required for making a speech an organic whole, although this classification is introduced in explicit relation to this concern about rhetorical composition. The two movements in this process of classification are a famous description of dialectic generally and as such an important chapter in the study of Plato’s philosophy. More directly, however, collection and division, as these movements have come to be known, specify the knowledge required in the rhetorical process, to be included in rhetorical education and to be demanded of every speaker. Collection is the considering together of all things that are of one kind, even regardless of whether the right kind is chosen (and whether the right definition has been given). Division is the separation of the different species of one kind, along its ‘natural joints’ (265e2),112 in order to predicate the correct things of each species, even if opposite things are predicated of different species. (We may note that it emerges here that Plato considers the possibility of speeches with contradictory content due to insufficient ‘carving up’ of a subject, and not to the different kairoi in each particular situation.)

Classification of audience Granting that a rhetor must know the souls of his audience may seem innocent enough. Howeer, obtaining such knowledge turns out to be a near all-encompassing task. Socrates spells out the three dimensions by means of which all different souls must be classified (271ab). Firstly, it must be described exactly what the soul is, and whether it is simple or consists of many different parts; if the latter, the procedure must be repeated for every part. Secondly, all effects the soul has (or can have) on other things, and all effects the soul undergoes (or can undergo) from other things must be specified. Thidly, every type of soul must be related to every type of speech, and it must be explained why certain combinations of soul and speech produce persuasion and why other do not. Rhetorical education encompasses all the sciences, it seems – is there any things that neither affects nor is affected by the soul?

II.ii.B.c Kairoi Plato’s highly demanding rhetorical instruction is so far only theoretical. We noted that at least in composition this theoretical phase includes elements that Isocrates refers to the practice phase. The practice phase consists in learning to recognize the types of people that so far one had only been talking (in modern universities probably reading) about. The budding rhetorician must learn to ‘discern what [someone] is like’ (271e3-272a1).113 Once he has done this in a particular case, he can unleash all knowledge he has gathered and use it on this person. The practical element is thus far only real-life recognition of soul types. What follows, however, is a curious passage:

When, in addition, he has grasped the right occasions (kairoi) for speaking and for holding back; and when he has also understood when the time is right for brakhulogia and eleinologia and deinôsis or for any other of the kinds of speech he has learned and when it is not (eukarian…akairian)…114 only then one is a perfect rhetor. The curiousness of this passage is not that there are kairoi to be grasped, but that Plato sees the need to add a remark about the kairoi and the context-dependent application of certain styles of speaking after he has supplied an almost all-encompassing education for the rhetor. One would expect, for one thing, that the catalogue of souls, of things

112 ‘kat' ei)/dh du/nasqai diate/mnein kat' a)/rqra h(=| p e/fuken’ 113 ‘p aragigno/meno/n te dunato\j h)=| diaisqano/menoj e(autw =| e)ndei/knusqai o(/ti ou(=to/j e)sti kai\ au(/th h( fu/sij’ 114 272a3-6: ‘p roslabo/nti kairou\j tou= p o/te lekte/on kai\ e)p isxete/on, braxulogi/aj te au)= kai\ e)leinologi/aj kai\ deinw /sew j e(ka/stw n te o(/sa a)\n ei)/dh ma/qh| lo/gw n, tou/tw n th\n eu)kairi/an te kai\ a)kairi/an diagno/nti’ Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 29 able to affect or be affected by the soul, and of fitting speech types for each soul type, would have included brakhulogia, eleinologia and deinôosis – indeed, Plato affirms that these are the speech types one has learned; or are there kairoi that are able to affect the soul (else on need not have taken them into account) and yet escape the reach of Plato’s rhetorical education? In view of Socrates’s other repetitions in this part of the Phaedrus one is inclined to view this passage as a repetition of some of the content of the activity of relating speeches to souls. The prefix pros in proslabonti, the first Greek word in the citation just given, must certainly mean ‘ in addition’, ‘besides’.115 The second reason why this passage is curious is that, on the one hand, it follows a substantial section about rhetorical methodology which is careful to classify and evaluate procedures for the different stages of rhetorical education and composition, but, on the other hand, does not specify itself what method is to be used regarding the kairoi, or how we should classify or evaluate it. Most importantly, Plato says nothing about a possible inclusion of kairoi in rhetorical epistêmê. While some of Isocrates’s kairoi are included in Plato’s theoretical part of rhetorical education, it seems Plato must allow for some other kairoi not reducible to epistêmê. Two elements in Plato’s account fall outside the theoretical dimension of his rhetoric: recognition of soul types in real life and grasp of the kairoi. The former may perhaps be considered mere application and thus not a problem to Plato’s view of rhetorical art, although other ancients will have had different opinions about that, as we will see in part III; the latter, however, are a different case. Plato seems to have wanted to reduce the kairoi to a footnote, but his inability to find a place for a rhetor’s handling them in the description of rhetorical education proper leaves a gap in the wall of epistêmê around the philosophical rhetoric Plato is willing to accept.

115 This also shows that interpretations that, overenthusiastic of having rediscovered kairos, make the kairoi the cornerstone of Platonic rhetoric (in the Phaedrus), cannot be right. See for one Kinneavy, esp. 61. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 30

Part III This part will discuss §§135-77. In III.i I follow Aristides’s argument as it develops. III.ii provides a closer analysis of what III.i has brought to light, by discussing four key terms in this passage. III.iii offers an overall interpretation of this passage and will connect Aristides’s views to the views of Plato and Isocrates as discussed in part II.

III.i The content of §§135-177

In this section I will discuss the part of Oration II that runs from §135 to §177. I will first outline the argument as Aristides presents it in §§137-140, in i.A. I then discuss the analogies in §§141-177; these are subsequently archery (§§141-142, in i.B), navigation (§§143-148, in i.C), gymnastics (§§149-151, in i.D), medicine (§§152-156, in i.E), painting (§§157-162, in i.F), the mantic art (§§163-170, in i.G), and a concluding section about arts in general (§§171-177, in i.H).

III.i.A THE ARGUMENT SEC

Aristides’s argument starts with Plato’s statement

Pl1 Rhetoric stokhazetai and guides (prosagei) logoi in the same way as it stokhazetai.116

From this statement it is not clear what object of stokhazetai is understood, and this gives Aristides the freedom to supply the objects that he thinks appropriate. In III.ii.A I will discuss how Aristides does this in the whole of this passage. For now it is important to keep some possible objects in mind: a rhetor can aim at or conjecture about his audience, some profit or advantage for himself or for others, about plans to be adopted or rejected, about other people’s opinions, about the words he must use, etc. The second statement Aristides attributes to Plato is

Pl2 (a) Since rhetoric stokhazetai, (b) it does not use logos.117

Aristides’s claim is that Pl1 and Pl2(b) are mutually contradictory; what he will argue is in fact the opposite of Pl2. What we may call Aristides’s central claim in this section is

A1: Whoever stokhazetai uses logos to guide himself and in this way stokhazetai.118

We may note at this stage that Aristides repeats both stokhazetai and prosagei from Plato’s ‘definition’. I discuss the relation between these terms in III.ii.A.d. In that subsection I also discuss the objects of prosagein, which are different in Pl1 and A1: words and ‘oneself’, respectively. We should in any case not conclude prematurely that this difference is a sign that Aristides has not actually given much thought to the precise content or formulation of his arguments. Aristides supports A1 by A2 and A3

116 §138: ‘fhsi\ ga\r dh/p ou diaba/llw n au0th\n o3ti stoxa/zetai kai\ p rosa/gei tou\j lo/gouj ou3tw j o3p w j a2n stoxa/zhtai’. 117 §139: ‘kai/toi p w =j ou0x u9p enanti/on fa/skein me\n stoxa/zesqai, le/gein d’w 9j ou0 xrh=tai lo/gw | di’au0t\ tou=to;’ 118 §139: ‘p a/ntej ga\r oi9 stoxazo/menoi dh/p ou tw |= lo/gw | p rosa/gontej au9tou\j ou3tw j stoxa/zontai.’ The ‘and’ is necessary to make this English, but should not be taken to influence the meaning. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 31

A2 There is no stokhazesthai that does not use logos. 119 A3 The logos of the thing is the poiôn stokhazesthai.

A2 almost looks like a definition, also from the language used (a neuter subject and use of mê)/ . So far, this support does not help Aristides much; all of A1, A2 and A3 stand in need of substantiation. For A3 it must also be discovered what Aristides means by it. So far logos is put in close connection with stokhazesthai by means of an internal (which I will call ‘objective’) logos of a thing guessed or aimed at (as opposed to a ‘subjective’ logos, the logos of a person by means of which a person reasons. I adopt this distinction between objective and subjective logos for hermeneutic purposes, which I elucidate in my discussion of logos in III.ii.C). According to A3 we can even say that this objective logos is the author of the guessing or aiming that occurs. This last mechanism in particular must be explained. Aristides continues the argument by offering an example.

A4 Those who stokhazontai and hit from afar stokhazontai referring to (pros) the nature. A5 And stokhazontai using this logos and, so to speak, this target.120

The aiming consists in referring to (anapherein pros) the nature (of something) or the logos. In A4 and A5, nature and logos seem identified; an objective logos is therefore meant. This logos is in fact the target of the stokhazomenos. Aristides next claims that insofar one does not refer to this target one stokhazetai not at all. From a close connection between logos and infallibility, however, Aristides arrives at this, at first sight preposterous, claim:

A6 Those who miss their target stokhazontai not at all, but do rather the opposite.121

The association of stokhazesthai and hitting (tugkhanein) follows from the general rule that

A7 Nobody fails to hit (hamartanei) using logos; rather A8 Whenever someone fails, he has not preserved logos; because A9 logos does not miss.122

Therefore, Aristides concludes, if it is true that rhetoric involves stokhazesthai, then

A10 Rhetoric preserves logos at the most.123

The precise way in which this should be understood will emerge after we have looked at the analogies to rhetoric that Aristides offers. Some important elements of Aristides’s argument that

119 §139: ‘ou0 ga/r e0stin mh\ lo/gw | xrw /menon stoxa/zesqai, a0ll’o9 tou= p ra/gmatoj lo/goj ou[to/j e0stin o9 p oiw =n stoxa/zesqai’. 120 §139: ‘oi[on oi9 tw =n p o/rrw qen o9rw me/nw n stoxazo/menoi kai\ tugxa/nontej a0nafe/rontej oi]mai p ro\j th\n fu/sin ou3tw j stoxa/zontai, kai\ tou/tw | xrw /menoi tw =| lo/gw |, kai\ w 9sp erei\ skop w =| tou/tw | stoxa/zontai.’ 121 §139: ‘w 9j oi3 g’a0p otugxa/nontej a0rxh\n ou0de\ stoxa/zontai, a0ll’au0to\ tou0nanti/on tw =| stoxa/zesqai p oiou=sin. to\ ga\r stoxa/zesqai tou=t’e0sti\ tuxei=n tou= p ra/gmatoj.’ Cf. §251, where Aristides states that art does not err (‘to\ ga\r a9martei=n ou0k e1stin te/xnh’); in this context he alludes to Republic 340d-e, where Plato has Polemarchus argue the very same point, noting that our ordinary language is imprecise, for no craftsman ever errs (‘ou0dei\j tw =n dhmiourgw =n a9marta/nei’, e2-3). 122 §140: ‘ou0kou=n ou0x w [| stoxa/zetai a9marta/nei tij, a0ll’w [| dih/marten ou0k e0stoxa/sato. ei0ko/tw j: ou0dei\j ga\r a9marta/nei lo/gw | xrw /menoj, a0ll’a3ma e0sfa/lh kai\ to\n lo/gon ou0 diesw /sato. o9 g\ar lo/goj tau/thn ei0=xe th\n du/namin, mh\ diamarta/nein’. 123 §140: ‘w 3ste ei0 to\ stoxa/zesqai th=j r9htorikh=j e0stin, e0p i\ p lei=ston h9 r9htorikh\ sw |/zei lo/gon.’ Cf. note 126. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 32 are so far unclear are: the relation between stoxazesthai and logos; which logos is involved at what point in the process (objective logos, subjective logos, words); what things are the objects of guessing or aiming (audience, plans, words, etc.). Before we proceed to consider the analogies, we should briefly consider the use of the word stokhazesthai in the argument so far. Charles Behr notes (n.109 in 1986, and ad loc. in 1973) that ‘the following argument is based on the double meaning of stokhazesthai, “to take aim” and “to use conjecture”.’ I think the argument, as outlined here, certainly uses both these meanings, but would not claim that it is based on it. I will return to this issue in III.ii.A and turn now to the first analogy, archery.124

III.i.B ARCHERY

This first is also the shortest analogy, and can be represented by two statements:

Ar1 The art of archery is hitting the target in the release of arrows. Ar2 Whenever archery stokhasêtai, then it hits the target.125

§142 is set up as an interrogation of Plato; the imaginary Plato affirms both Ar1 and Ar2. Aristides suggests that Ar2 follows from Ar1. This relation does indeed follow from the inclusion of ‘hitting’ (tukhein) in the definition of archery; the tekhnê of archery is not just the release of arrows. Analogously, Aristides seems to imply, the tekhnê of rhetoric is not just the release of words either. In this strict understanding of an art, the element of luck (tukhê) that one would still need in less strict construals of an art is already included in that art. This strict understanding demands a total control of any situation in which the art is employed. It is significant, therefore, that stokhazesthai is attributed to the art, and not to someone versed in that art. This division between art and artist also provides the necessary background to understanding A6. In terms of our understanding of the relation between stokhazesthai and logos, however, this analogy is not very helpful, as the use of the term tukhein prevents a more detailed description of that relation. Nevertheless archery does use logos, as Aristides’s account of the analogy of navigation tells us.

III.i.C NAVIGATION

Aristides begins this passage by noting the similarity between navigation and archery in terms of the logos both arts use. Unlike archery, however, the analogy of navigation does elaborate somewhat on this use of logos.

N1 Navigation stokhazetai in order to save from the sea.126

The art of navigation, then, is not taking people from one place to another as such, but the saving of the ship from the sea. Presumably what the ship is to be saved from is both shipwreck and

124 I treat the arts in §§140-77 as analogies to rhetoric, including the inference of points of method about rhetoric from statements on these arts. The main justification for this strategy is that Aristides emphatically treats the mechanism of stokhazesthai/eikazein as continuous across the different contexts he describes. 125 §142: ‘ti/j ou]n e0stin [h9 tocikh\ te/xnh] kai\ ti/ e0p agge/lletai; tou= skop ou= tuxei=n e0n th=| tw =n belw =n a0fe/sei. kalw =j. ou0kou=n o9p o/tan stoxa/shtai, to/te tugxa/nei. p w =j ga\r ou1;’ 126 §143: ‘ti/ d’h9 kubernhtikh/; e0moi\ me\n ga\r dokei= tou=to o3p er h9 tocikh\ kai\ au0th\ p ra/ttein, kata\ gou=n to\n lo/gon w |[ xrh=tai. stoxa/zetai ga/r, ou0 mh\n w 9j be/lei tuxei=n, oi]mai, a0ll’w 9j e0k th=j qala/tthj sw =sai’. Charles Behr takes ‘men’ as the object of sw /sai, which is unspecified here; in N2, however, and in §317, ‘ship’ is specified as object. We may note that diasw /zein and sw /zein are used in A8 and A10, respectively. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 33 being lost on sea, so that the destination of a journey comes into view for the art of navigation. From the similarity Aristides notes between navigation and archery in their use of logos we may infer that the art of navigation itself is the successful saving, just as archery is the successful shooting of arrows, and not merely the attempt to save. Aristides details navigation’s use of logos by distinguishing between the art of navigation and those things a navigator learns in his education (paideia). We imagine a navigator who has learned everything there is to learn about the art of navigation.

N2 The navigator does not save his ship by means of complete knowledge, but hois eu tithetai to paron.127 N2a The navigator does not save his ship by means of complete knowledge, but by means of the things that he orders well with respect to what is present. N2b The navigator does not save his ship by means of complete knowledge, but by how well he orders what is present. to paron is whatever is actual, or at hand, in the situation in which one finds oneself; for a navigator, for instance, one can be confronted at a particular moment with a wind from the north at 4 Beaufort, rocks on starboard, a discontent crew, which jointly are to paron. This is, incidentally, a term used in rhetorical theory, used to refer to aspects of a situation which can be a constraint on one’s speech, but which can also be used to one’s advantage. The Greek in N2 allows for both N2a and N2b (Behr’s translation chooses the construction of N2b). As the extra requirement for a navigator, above his education, N2a demands a good handling of things that may be familiar but require context-specific treatment. N2b rather points to something new, that which is present in this and only this situation, which demands handling. The difference between N2a and N2b is small, but is nonetheless a difference in emphasis that may be important for properly understanding the role of stokhazesthai. This element of stokhazesthai itself is necessitated, Aristides asserts, by the separation between what one learns in education and what one has to dispose well in particular circumstances.

N3 Ordering well (things in relation to) the present is impossible without stokhazesthai.128

The word used for ‘impossible’ here is amêkhanon, referring to the method by which something must happen. With respect to the way one does things, then, stokhazesthai cannot be absent: there would be no ‘doing’ navigation without stokhazesthai. Aristides provides the reason for this by arguing that a navigator must aim for his destination, either by means of his eyes (as on a ferry from Athens to Aegina), or by means of rational calculation (as on a ship to Egypt).

N4 During a sea journey one must calculate for every stretch of sea the parameters pertaining to that stretch; because N5 stokhazesthai must be done about ta epi merous.129

A sea journey is a process, during which one finds oneself in continuously different situations. Factors that affect one’s position, one’s direction, one’s safety, such as the direction and force of the wind, the depth of the water, one’s distance to harbours, etc., keep changing. In

127 §143: ‘o3sa me\n ga\r dei= maqei=n e0n p aidei/a| to\n kubernh/thn oi]den kai\ a0kh/koen. sw /|zei de\ ou0 tou/toij to\ su/mp an ei0p ei=n th\n nau=n, a0ll’oi[j eu] ti/qetai to\ p aro/n.’ 128 §143: ‘tou=to de\ a0mh/xanon au0tw =| xw ri\j tou= stoxa/zesqai.’ 129 §145: ‘ou1koun ta\ kaq’e3kasta kai\ di’w [n ei]sin h9 nau=j au0to\n h1dh dei= sullogi/zesqai: […] a0ll’a0na/gkh ta\ e0p i\ me/rouj stoxa/zesqai.’ Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 34 the end, however, it is with these changing parameters that the navigator must work in executing his art. Stokhazesthai is an essential element of navigation because of the inability of that which results from education (paideia) to include the things which concern each part of a sea journey, the things which are actual in one’s present situation. Aristides’s mention of the gods in this section130 implies that the gods do have a complete knowledge that does include all particulars concerning each situation. This agrees with Aristides’s strategy in other part of the oration: agree with Plato about the priority of knowledge, but declare it practically infeasible. I will expand on this strategy and the status of the gods’ knowledge in III.ii.A.e. Aristides returns to the division between artist and art signaled in the analogy of archery by exculpating the art of rhetoric from the failures of rhetors by presenting a direct comparison with navigation: one should not fault the art of navigation if a navigator loses his way, so neither should one fault rhetoric for rhetorical mistakes of rhetors.131 One last element in this analogy that I would like to mention is distance. Aristides does not grant a prominent place to any particular word for distance, and yet the concept is important for his reasoning. It is because of distance between places that navigation is necessary. The target somewhere in the distance provides the direction and meaning for the individual acts of navigation that a navigator undertakes, even if he does so by reference to his present circumstances (wind, current, shallows). Not being where one wants to be is the reason why one navigates at all.

III.i.D GYMNASTICS

Aristides continues to consider two arts that Plato had discussed in the Gorgias passage in which he classified rhetoric as a ‘shadow of a part of politics’132: gymnastics and medicine. Gymnastics is there to develop and preserve healthy bodies; medicine remedies illnesses.

G1 Gymnastics stokhazetai the nature of bodies.

This is a case of stokhazesthai because

G2 A trainer does not know in advance (prooiden) each of our bodies; rather G3 A trainer learns by experience (para têes peiras).133 G4 A trainer stokhazesthai the best. G5 A trainer does not predict results for a particular body.134

A good trainer does not firmly promise any outcome for an individual, because he knows that he does not know in advance the precise constitution of that individual body. Only by experience the trainer will get to know the nature of that body. Therefore all the trainer can do is stokhazesthai. In this picture the necessity to learn from experience seems to imply the method of stokhazesthai. Two alternative construals are possible. Either this method must be used in order

130 §148: Poseidon, the Nereids, the Dioscuri, Zeus. 131 This theme is discussed on a larger scale in §§237-60. 132 ‘p olitikh=j mori/ou ei1dw lon’ (Gorg. 463d2). 133 §149: ‘h( de\ th|= dikaiosu/nh| a)nti/strofoj i)atrikh/ soi kai\ deu/teron a)gaqo\n tw |= sw /mati, ei) de\ bou/lei, kai\ h( gumnastikh/, to/teron ou) stoxa/zontai th=j fu/sew j tw =n sw ma/tw n; nh\ D i/a, e)a/n te ei)/p h|j ge, e)a/n te mh/. h)\ p ro/oiden o( gumnasth\j eu)qu\j kai\ e)c a)rxh=j o(/p w j h(mw =n e(/kastoj e)/xei sw /matoj, ou) p ara\ th=j p ei/raj manqa/nei;’ 134 §151: ‘ou)kou=n h)\ mh\ stoxazo/menon maino/menon to\n gumnasth\n le/geij, h)\ sw fronw =n au)to\j o(mologh/sei stoxa/zesqai tou= belti/stou, toiou=ton d’ ou)den e)/xein p roeip ei=n ou)de\ e)p aggei/lasqai.’ Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 35 to categorise each individual body as an instance of some general type (connecting the particular to the universal), or in order to find the right treatment of this particular body, given that this particular is irreducible to some universal. It will emerge later that in fact the latter construal is fundamental to Aristides’s discussion (see III.ii.A.e). The uniqueness of particulars, which implies their irreducibility to a universal, results in an epistemic inability to predict, which compels gymnastics to use stokhazesthai.

III.i.E MEDICINE

The second art Plato used in his Gorgias is medicine. Aristides now uses it to provide extra information on the mechanism of stokhazesthai, with special attention for the role of experience and eikos.

M1 Medicine stokhazesthai the nature of bodies. M2 An experienced doctor ignorant of the particular nature of a body stokhazomenos guides his treatment referring to probability (anapherôn eis to eikos)135

Ignorance (of particular things) combined with experience results nonetheless in the right drugs and diets because the doctor stokhazetai. Aristides elaborates this stokhazesthai as a proceeding under the guidance of the eikos, another central term in much rhetorical theory. I will discuss this term and its role in this passage in III.ii.B.d. Probability is the reference point or even counsellor of the ignorant – ignorant of the particular case, but not of the general rules of medicine. Worth noting is the high density of terms used in Plato’s accusation: stokhazesthai, prosagein, anapherein, eikos. This may be as much because of the polemical importance of this analogy, and hence the need to use some of Plato’s own terminology, as because of the special suitability of medicine as an analogy to rhetoric.

M3 A doctor cannot be certain about the results of his treatment.

Or else he would be a god. This claim picks up on the ignorance about the future expressed in G2. Human doctors, however, have to have recourse to stokhazesthai.

M4 Doctors eikazousin the particular on the basis of the many and general things. M5 Doctors, searching out what will profit a patient, stokhazontai towards their experience.136

M4 and M5 seem to represent distinct steps in the process of applying medicine to a patient. The first step is the diagnosis: the doctor attempts to create an appropriate representation of the (constitution of the) particular patient on the basis of the many and general things he has seen before. The second step is the selection of a suitable cure. It seems the doctor is involved in a comparison: he first likens the particular case to one of many general types that he has experience

135 §152: ‘o( de\ dh\ th=j me\n p ei/raj ei)j p i/stin i_sxu/saj kai\ toi=j farma/koij kai\ tai=j diai/taij h)/dh xrw /menoj tou/toij i)atro/j, o(/p w j d’ e(/kastoj h(mw =n e)/xei fu/sew j h)\ sugkri/sew j a)gnow =n, a)=r’ ou) stoxazo/menoj p rosa/gei p a/nq’ o(/sa a)\n p oih|= p eri\ to\n ka/mnonta a)nafe/rw n ei)j to\ ei)ko/j; e)gw \ me\n oi)=mai.’ 136 §153: ‘h)\ du/nait’ a)/n tij au)tw =n a)p oto/mw j ei)p ei=n o(/ti tou/toij ou(tosi\ xrw /menoj e)/cw p anto\j e)/stai kindu/nou kai\ dusxere\j ou_d’ o(tiou=n p ei/setai; ou) me/nta)\n tosou=ton e)lei/p onto tou= th\n )Ep i/dauron e)/xontoj qeou=, fai/hj a)/n, kai\ ma/la e)moi\ gou=n kata\ nou=n. a)ll’ a)p o\ tw =n p ollw =n kai\ koinw =n, oi)=mai, kai\ ta\ i)/dia ei)ka/zousin. Ei) d’ a)/ra kai\ i)di/a| tisi\ p arhkolou/qhsan, p ro\j au)th\n th\n p ei=ran stoxa/zontai, to\ me/llon e(ka/stw | sunoi/sein e)kle/gontej.’ Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 36 of; he then seeks out the cure for this particular case with that same likeness to the more general cure. In a rough diagram:

„likeness„ Diagnosis Particular U1, U2… Ux, Ux+1 … Cure CParticular CU1, CU2… CUx, CUx+1 … ‰likeness‰

Aristides details this divide between general knowledge and particular realities in terms of people’s natures:

M6 It is impossible to define the natures of all people. M7 Every man is separated from others in his nature.137

Some sort of abstraction from individual cases seems therefore presupposed, as otherwise a doctor with much experience will only have knowledge of very many particular cases. The different constitution of each person means a doctor faces a new situation every time, to which he has no exact precedent. It is important to emphasise this fact. It means that the process of finding likenesses between particular and general, as illustrated in the diagram above, will not result in perfect likeness. Each particular is unique. The process of finding likenesses, therefore, does not exhaust the mechanism of stokhazesthai.

III.i.F PAINTING

In discussing the art of painting, Aristides moves from a frequent use of stokhazesthai as central term in his argumentation to employing eikazein as characteristic of the discussed arts.

Pa1 The core of painting is stokhazesthai what is present and of which it must create an imitation (mimêsis).138

Aristides uses the phrase ‘tôn parontôn’ (what is present) here. On the one hand, this situational language suggests that he has in mind a practice of painting by demand. On the other hand, the choice of this word to refer to the thing to be painted also seems intended to keep this analogy close to rhetoric, where to paron is more commonly used for features of a situation in which the art of rhetoric is practised (cf. to paron in navigation, N2). Aristides continues this analogy by claiming that the art of painting gave eikazein its name, via the eikones it produces;139 this etymology were little relevant to our purposes if the explication of this origin did not say something about the method of this art, which in fact it does:

Pa2 Painting does not eikazein without logos;

137 §154: ‘ta\j d’a(p a/ntw n au)= diele/sqai fu/seij a)du/naton. w (/sp er ga\r tai=j i)de/aij diafe/rein a)llh/lw n e)n p a=sin a)nqrw /p oij e)sti/n, ou(/tw j ka)(n th|= di’o(/lou fu/sei tou= sw /matoj a)/lloj a)/llou kexw /ristai dia\ p anto\j tou= ge/nouj.’ 138 §158: ‘a)=r’ou)=n a)/llo ti tau/thj kefa/laio/n e)stin p lh\n stoxa/zesqai tw =n a)ei\ p aro/ntw n kai\ w (=n a)\n th\n mi/mhsin de/h| p oih/sasqai; kai\ mh\n ei0 mh\ tou=to, ti/ e3teron; [§159] au3th gou=n e0stin h9 kai\ to\ r9h=ma p ep oihkui=a tw =| p ra/gmati:’ 139 In fact, the text initially seems to suggest that painting gave stoxa/zesqai its name (see note 138); but the direct sequel says ‘ai9 ga\r tw =n grafe/w n ei0ko/nej ei0ka/zein e0p oi/hsan kai\ p eri\ tw =n a1llw n le/gesqai’. Aristides’s claim agrees with our knowledge of the etymology of ei0ka/zein. The common root of ei0ka/zein, ei0kw /n, but also ei0ko/j, is e0/oika (thus in Frisk, Boisacq ad locc.) Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 37

Pa3 logos is the means (di’hotou) of painting; Pa4 Painting eikazei towards (pros) the logos of the nature [of the depicted thing].140

Aristides claims that mimêsis corresponds to the logos of the original. eikazein is therefore a process with as guiding principle logos. Without logos one would produce something at random; only in relation to logos one can say: ‘indeed, this looks like it’. I will return to the phrase eikazein pros ton logon and logos’s being a means of painting below and, in detail, in III.ii.B and C.

Pa5 (a) Mixing colours pertains to a stokhazomenê art, and (b) an adequate nature. Pa6 Mixing colours brings the image closer to the truth.141

Aristides regards mixing colours as distinctive for painting and as a very clear case in which art proceeds by means of stokhazesthai; and that sounds reasonable indeed. One arrives at the right composition with the right balance between different constituent elements based on a judgment about the original. Pa6 makes explicit something that was also implied in the pros in Pa4, as well as in other cases of pros(agein) (M2, in §144, Pl1, A1, A4, ); the notion of approaching something (a standard, original) is an important element in all these arts. I will return to this issue in III.ii.A.d and B.b. It is, incidentally, interesting to note that Aristides mentions the nature of the artist here as an extra element next to the art. The Greek here is not completely clear, but I think the most natural interpretation is indeed that the nature that one needs for mixing is the nature of the actor in this situation. The argument here does not require mention of this nature and it appears a little out of place.

III.i.G SEERS (MANTIC ART)

The mantic art is introduced as representative for all those other arts Aristides will not discuss; it may be regarded as the art which one would be most inclined not to think of as operating by stokhazesthai – a pièce de resistance. This analogy can bear this argumentative role well, as the mantic art is the most unmethodical of all the arts: one thinks of seers as seeing immediately, and not by calculation, whatever there is to see. It is worth noting that this analogy introduces art into contexts that were earlier (§§32-134) used to defend the status of rhetoric when granting that it is not an art. Aristides’s claim about the mantic art is that

S1 The mantic art is nothing other than eikasai.

Aristides mentions an objection142 to his construal which agrees well with a role for the mantic art as pièce de resistance of all the arts. By introducing this objection, Aristides contrasts two theoretical understandings of the mantic art, his own and the understanding behind this objection:

140 §160: ‘ou) mh\n oi)=mai lo/gou xw ri\j ei)ka/zei, a)rxh\n ga\r ou)d’a)\n ei)/kazen, ei) mh\ ei)=xe di’o(/tou, a)ll’ei)ka/zei p ro\j to\n th=j fu/sew j lo/gon.’ Note that where Pa2-Pa4 speak of painting, the text leaves it unclear whether painting or the primordial art of e0ika/zein is meant; for our purposes this does not matter. The unclarity about the art involved extends to the question whether the text introduces a primordial art at all. The letter of the text can be translated properly by reading ‘the art of painting’ whenever the Greek has ‘texnh’/ . I follow Behr (see his translation ad loc.) in thinking that Aristides’s reasoning does use a different art than painting, in order to highlight even more the activity of e0ika/zein. 141 §161-2: ‘a)ll’w (j ou)x h(/ ge tw =n xrw ma/tw n kra=sij stoxazome/nhj e)sti\ th=j te/xnhj, kai\ ou) te/xnhj mo/non, a)lla\ kai\ fu/sew j i(kanh=j. tauti\ mo/non dei/caj katage/la th=j r(htorikh=j. kai\ mh\n to/ ge ka/lliston th=j te/xnhj kai\ telew /taton kai\ w (=| grafikh\n h)\ p lastikh\n ei)=nai diafe/rei, tou=t’e)stin h( tou= xrw /matoj dh/p ou mi/cij. e)ggu\j ga\r a)/gei to\ ei)kasqe\n th=j a)lhqei/aj.’ Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 38

S2 While everyone imagines things, knowing (epistasthai) belongs to the mantic art only.

According to this objection, it is the mark of a seer to know things that other people can only imagine, or infer, or conjecture about. Aristides replies that

S3 The seer knows how to eikasai.143

S2, the objection against S1, wishes to grant a special epistemic status to seers: they know what other mortals merely imagine. The term epistasthai, of course, introduces Platonic epistemology into this context. It is typical for Aristides’s way of arguing that he accommodates this Platonic notion while rejecting the apparent consequences of the objection. The basis for the activities of seers and other mortals are the same: both eikazein. A seer, however, possesses the art that enables him to know how to eikazein. Aristides thus combines what are otherwise considered two mutually exclusive descriptions of people’s epistemic states, whereby eikazein represents an inferior degree of certainty to epistasthai; instead of this picture, he posits eikazein as the joint activity of professional and layman, the mastery of which provides the distinction between the seer and other mortals. In other words, against the objection that ‘surely everyone imagines things’, Aristides responds that non-seers do not imagine well. I will return to this issue in III.ii.B.b Aristides considers the objection refuted and continues to provide support that seeing must be understood as eikazein.

S4 The mantic art operates via signs (sêmeioi). S5 A seer guides requests to the signs and thus eikazei towards the logos.144

Aristides subsequently supports S5 by pointing out that a seer can provide only a very general picture of what will happen (death, victory, profit; not: it will happen in such and such a way); a seer cannot tell one the specifics (hekasta, §169).

This passage also mentions the gods.

S6 The gods know the things they are about to do.145

The significant difference between gods and mortals is here that the gods see everything in the future clearly, because they control it, whereas mortals see only fragments, being

142 Behr’s translation does not very clearly mark the relevant sentence as an objection and a reply, so that the sentence seems part of Aristides’s exposition; however, the Greek makes it clear that two different voices are represented: ‘kai/toi fai/h tij … e)gw \ de/ fhmi…’ 143 §163: ‘au)th\ ga\r h( mantikh\ kinduneu/ei tou=t’ei)=nai mo/non ei)ka/sai: kai/toi fai/h tij a)\n ou(tw si\ skop w =n kai\ diairw =n o(/ti tou/tw | kai\ mo/nw | ma/ntin h)\ i)diw /thn ei)=nai diafe/rei, tw =| to\ me\n ei)ka/zein a(p a/ntw n, to\ d’ e)p i/stasqai tou= ma/ntew j ei)=nai: e)gw \ de/ fhmi to\n ma/ntin au)to\ tou=to e)p i/stasqai ei)ka/sai, p le/on de\ ou)d’o(tiou=n.’ 144 §167: ‘[oi( a)/nqrw p oi] w (/sp er e)n sko/tw | ta\ p ra/gmata kri/nousi, p ro\j to\n yo/fon h)/ tit w =n e)kfane/ntw n, dihneke\j d’ou)de\n e)/xousi p roeip ei=n. tekmh/rion de/: ei) ga\r mh\ fra/saij to\ e)rw /thma, ou)de\n e)/xei soi le/gein p eri\ w (=n ei)=den shmei/w n. A )ll’a)nti\ tou= p eri\ tou= me/llontoj e)/xein ei)p ei=n ou)de\ au)to\ tou=to oi)=den o(/tou xa/rin h(/keij, ei) mh\ p u/qoito. O u) ga\r e)/gkeitai ta\ p ra/gmata au)tw |= p rofaino/mena, a)lla\ ta\j p u/steij toi=j shmei/oij p rosa/gw n ei)ka/zei p ro\j to\n lo/gon.’ 145 §166: ‘[oi9 qeoi]\ a4 me/llousi p oiei=n e0p i/stantai, kai\ p ro/keitai ta\ p ra/gmat’au0toi=j w 3sp er e0n o0fqalmoi=j.’ Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 39 dependent on those future things. Providence gives the gods total knowledge. Mortals must make do with eikazein. I return to this issue in III.ii.A.e.

In S5, the mantic art is portrayed as the making of representations (imagining) based on signs, and the uttering of utterances (prophesies) based on those representations. As with the art of medicine, the activity of the seer can also be expressed as a searching out of likenesses. The questions or circumstances of the seer’s client relate to the representation the seer forms as the signs relate to the client’s fate (or whatever else was to be prophesied). The seer must therefore obtain as good a likeness as possible between the questions or circumstances and the signs, in order that he may arrive at as good a likeness as possible between the representation and reality. The seer, who partakes of his art, can thus make a representation pros ton logon, according to the proportions or ratio of the actual thing. Here again, therefore, eikazein is connected to approaching a logos.

III.i.H THE ARTS IN GENERAL

Mentioning the strategic art in particular, which stokhazetai the enemy’s thoughts, the nature of one’s own army, and the places and opportunities (kairoi), Aristides closes this section by arguing that since stokhazesthai is present in all arts, the inclusion of stokhazesthai in the definition of rhetoric proves rhetoric’s being an art. This is not merely wordplay, but Aristides rather thinks that he has shown in the foregoing that stokhazesthai is an essential element of what makes the other arts arts, and that this stokhazesthai is present in a particularly pure form in rhetoric. Via an analysis of some key terms in this section (III.ii) and a reconstruction of Aristides’s view of rhetoric (III.iii) we will attempt to see on what basis Aristides was confident of having proven this aspect of the art of rhetoric.

Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 40

III.ii Key terms

In this section I wish to consider four key terms that Aristides uses in his argument. These terms are stokhazesthai (ii.A), eikazein (ii.B), logos (ii.C) and kairos (ii.D). For each of these terms I will detail the meaning Aristides assigns to them, as emerges from the linguistic constructions in which they operate, and the role these terms play in the argument. The analysis in this section provides the basis on which I will draw up a comprehensive account of Aristides’s view on rhetoric in §§135-177, which account I present in section III.iii.

III.ii.A STOKHAZESTHAI

In part II we saw that already Isocrates and Plato use ‘stokhazesthai’. The word seems to play a minor role in Isocrates, but at least part of the concept as it occurs in Aristides is referred to by the more central (in Isocrates) doxastikos/doxazesthai. In Plato stokhazesthai becomes the mark of an empeiria that pretends to be tekhnê. I detail the meaning and role of stokhazesthai in Aristides by firstly surveying the different subjects and objects of stokhazesthai Aristides names in the text (A.a and A.b), by secondly emphasising the situation-specificity of stokhazesthai (A.c), by subsequently noting a number of combinations of stokhazesthai with other words that provide particular insight into the meaning and role of stokhazesthai (A.d), and finally by discussing the main conceptual dichotomy that includes stokhazesthai, i.e. the opposition stokhazesthai – epistasthai (A.e).146

III.ii.A.a Subjects The subject of stokhazesthai, the one who stokhazetai, is always either a person as participating in an art, or an art. Aristides mentions a navigator, a trainer, a doctor, a general, and a rhetor, and also rhetoric, archery, painting, navigation and the arts in general, as agents of stokhazesthai. At the end of the opening, argumentative part of this passage, however, Aristides modifies the claim that artists stokhazontai. Strictly speaking only successful artists stokhazontai. This restriction is closely connected to the only exception to the stokhazomenoi I listed: logos (A3). When Aristides introduces logos as an active principle he restricts stokhazesthai to successful attempts147 and recognises as stokhazomenoi only those whose actions agree completely with their art. I will discuss logos as a subject of stokhazesthai in more detail in section III.ii.C.

III.ii.A.b Objects Of the many things one can stokhazesthai and that can thus be called objects of stokhazesthai, some are objectives of the stokhazomenê art, while others are contextual factors that must be determined correctly in order to reach the objective of the art. These contextual factors are targets, or objects, of stokhazesthai, but not targets, or objectives, of the arts that do the stokhazesthai. The arts must determine these contextual factors in order to adapt their methods optimally to the situation at hand.

Objectives Objectives can be physical targets, for instance in the analogies of archery (Ar2) and navigation (§§144, 145): places where one wishes to end up, either by oneself or by means of missiles. In the analogies of gymnastics and medicine the objective is a future state: fitness or

146 Note that what follows includes uses of stokhazesthai outside §§135-177. 147 We saw earlier that this use has parallels in Isocrates’s use of stokhazesthai; Aristides is not, in other words, treating the word in a way no one ever did before. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 41 health. For rhetoric itself Aristides mentions as possible objectives ‘the best’ and ‘the pleasant’ (§§171, 194). An intriguing sort of objective, that will occupy us further below, is mentioned in connection with painting: its objective is that which is being imitated (Pa1). Within the group of objectives a distinction can be made between final and preliminary objectives. Preliminary objectives are in a sense a means in order to reach a final objective, but they are means precisely by functioning as (final) objectives. This emerges most clearly in navigation. When the final objective of the journey is already visible on the horizon, as with the ferry Athens-Aegina, preliminary objectives are not necessary. Where the final objective is beyond the horizon, however, as with crossings to Egypt, one has to aim for a preliminary objective, a certain point that is visible on the horizon.

As with the subjects of stokhazesthai, there is one complicated object: logos. The difficulty is that it appears both the method by which stokhazesthai happens and an object of stokhazesthai. Section III.ii.C is entirely devoted to logos, but I wish to say some things about the relation between stokhazesthai and logos here. Three textual givens about the relation stokhazesthai – logos are worth noting. Firstly, when ‘logoi’ are ‘words’ (Pl1, see III.ii.C), they follow stokhazesthai. The process of stokhazesthai indicates the direction into which the rhetor must carry his logoi. Secondly, A2 makes clear that logos is always used whenever stokhazesthai happens; the verb for ‘use’ occurs multiple times in an emphatic connection with logos, and it is clear that stokhazesthai must happen by means of logos (cf. eikazein, III.ii.B.b). Thirdly, logos is closely associated with phusis, nature (A4). Interpreting these textual givens about logos, one might consider logos the method of stokhazesthai. Thus spelling out that stokhazesthai uses logos would be like spelling out that in pronouncing words, one must move lips and tongue while releasing air. The emphatic assertions that stokhazesthai uses logos seem to point in this direction. If this is true, logos is a means of the artist who stokhazetai, which is available before stokhazesthai happens; it would then be inaccurate to think of logos as an object of stokhazesthai. However, the relation stokhazesthai – logos is more complicated than that. A3 states that the logos of the thing (ho tou pragmatos logos) is the author of stokhazesthai. Whatever the exact interpretation of this phrase (on which see III.ii.C), logos is here so closely associated with the object of stokhazesthai that we must consider it an object of stokhazesthai itself (and at the same time a subject). In A5 logos is called a skopos, target. Logos must be considered an object of stokhazesthai. In terms of the distinction just made between objectives and contextual factors, moreover, the ‘thing’ and ‘target’ with which logos is associated function in their contexts as objectives of the stokhazomenos art. Logos, therefore, is both means of stokhazesthai – in which role it is not an object of stokhazesthai – and objective of the stokhazomenos art – in which role it is an object of stokhazesthai. It is not, however, a contextual factor. I continue the discussion of logos in III.ii.C, but turn now to the other class of objects of stokhazesthai, the contextual factors.

Contextual factors Contextual factors are objects of stokhazesthai, without being the objective of the arts that stokhazontai. Some contextual factors we may call ‘working conditions’; they determine and circumscribe the available space of action for a rhetor, navigator, etc. Others constitute means which one can use to reach the objective.148 Gymnastics methods (G4) and medicinal cures (M2, M5) are means that one can use to reach certain objectives, and which one must gauge correctly in order not to make mistakes that will lead to failure to reach one’s objectives. As working conditions can be regarded the constitution of a patient (M1), the constitution (nature) of one’s audience (§§185, 187), the nature of ‘things’ involved in any rhetorical situation (§185; the context

148 These two types are analytically distinct; the factors Aristides mentions are only mainly one type or the other, and to some extent play both roles in practice. It is nonetheless useful to divide the factors into two types. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 42 lists death, exile, fears, anger of a jury, the people’s lust for victory as possible ‘things’, §184), one’s enemy’s plans and the condition of one’s troops (§173), and also things about to happen (to mellon, §168); these are givens that one must take into account in deciding what to do or say, that significantly determine what one can achieve in that situation, but that one cannot employ in one direction or other oneself. In other factors both aspects are unmistakeably present. Thus the wind (§148) is an enabling or disabling condition of navigation, but also a means that an able navigator uses properly. For a general, the terrain and opportunities of the battlefield simultaneously limit possible strategic moves and constitute features that an able general turns to his advantage (§173).149 One’s audience’s desires (§193) and opinions (§§185-187) are like wind that, if contrary to the direction a rhetor judges appropriate, can make progress impossible, or, if not so contrary, can be used to reach the right course if one uses one’s words like sails, gathering and bending the different gusts of wind into the driving force towards one’s aim.

The distinction I made between objects of stokhazesthai that constitute an objective of an art and objects that are (merely) contextual factors is an interpretive distinction, meant to facilitate understanding of this passage. Yet Aristides also goes some way towards making just this distinction in §185, which I will therefore discuss briefly. §185 is part of a section that addresses Plato’s reproach that rhetoric serves the wishes of the masses. In this context Aristides makes a distinction between two kinds of stokhazesthai: people ask the advice of orators, Aristides argues, because they know they stokhazontai the nature of the situation facing those people, and do not stokhazontai the nature of the audience, ‘but if, indeed, also the nature of the audience, then not in order to serve their desires […], but as many things are better to be said, by saying these to be able to persuade’.150 The distinction Aristides makes here is clearly one of means and ends. A rhetor aims for the nature of his audience, not as the value-conferring end of the activity, but as a vital component of the situation to which his speech must be adapted, in order that the actual end may be properly reached. Stokhazesthai the nature of one’s audience is a means to reach the end, persuasion. An example is introduced to reinforce this point: a doctor stokhazetai the nature of a patient, because such is necessary in order to establish the best cure.

III.ii.A.c Specificity About all these objects of stokhazesthai everyone can say in a general sense what they are: everyone knows that in archery one’s target is the mark, or that the aim of medicine is to effect health; everyone knows a navigator has to take the wind’s direction and force into account. The difficult aspect of these arts, however, is to pinpoint these targets in specific, concrete situations; the artist must determine the location of his objective, the prevailing conditions, and the direction he himself must take. ‘Stokhazesthai’ itself, then, carries with it the specificity of situations to which it applies. The observation that stokhazesthai is inherently situation-bound brings us to the difference between N2a and N2b, which we deferred in III.i.C, after observing that N2a involves handling of familiar things in new contexts and N2b involves handling of possible new things:

N2a The navigator does not save his ship by means of complete knowledge, but by means of the things that he orders well with respect to what is present. N2b The navigator does not save his ship by means of complete knowledge, but by how well he orders what is present.

149 On the kairoi in this context, see below III.ii.D. 150 ‘i1sasin au)tou\j p o/rrw qen p rose/xontaj toi=j p ra/gmasi kai\ meletw =ntaj le/gein w (j h( p ragma/tw n ta/cij a)p atei=, kai\ th=j tou/tw n fu/sew j stoxazome/nouj, ou) th=j tw =n a0krow me/nw n, ei0 d’a1ra kai\ th=j tw =n a0krow me/nw n, ou0x w 3ste ta\j e0kei/nw n e0p iqumi/aj qerap eu/ein, ou0d’o3sa boulome/noij e0sti\n a0kou/ein le/gein, a0ll’o3sa be/ltion ei0p ei=n, tau=t’ei0p ontaj p ei=sai dunhqh=nai:’ Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 43

We may now note the following: §155 provides the doctor with a new patient and his unfamiliar constitution, while this same doctor uses familiar regimens in new situations in §§152 and 153; in both cases the doctor is said to stokhazesthai. It seems, therefore, that we do not have to choose between N2a and N2b. Nonetheless, the value of distinguishing between them is to see clearly the two different aspects that we can see active in the other situations of stokhazesthai as well, and which relates to the specificity that, as we concluded above, stokhazesthai always involves: these two aspects are on the one hand something familiar, mastered via experience and education, and on the other hand something new, that makes the art inaccessible to epistêmê. More on this in III.ii.D.b.

III.ii.A.d Linguistic combinations In the following I consider a number of constructions with stokhazesthai. Firstly, the combination stokhazesthai – prosagein is worth noting, specifically the differences between two such combinations. These combinations are in Pl1 and A1. Pl1 states that rhetoric stokhazetai and guides (prosagei) logoi in the same way as it stokhazetai. Here rhetoric has two activities: stokhazesthai and, subsequently, guiding words according to the outcome of that first activity stokhazesthai. The guided things are words, and if any instrument at all is mentioned, stokhazesthai is that instrument. A1 is different: whoever stokhazetai uses logos to guide himself and in this way stokhazetai. Here there is only one activity for the rhetor: stokhazesthai is the guiding of oneself. The guided thing is the rhetor himself, not words, and the instrument for this guidance is logos. One might regard this inversion as programmatic for the whole of §§135-77. Stokhazesthai obtains a more central place in Aristides’s rhetoric than in Plato’s, and logos becomes the instrument, indeed, given the object-role of ‘oneself’, nearly the subject of stokhazesthai. It is clear in any case that Aristides is occupied with the mechanism of stokhazesthai itself; in placing the rhetor in object-position, he focuses on the way a rhetor judges, instead of skipping that phase and talking about words straightway, as Plato does.

Secondly, eis, pros, and anapherein are used with stokhazesthai; these terms say something about the mechanism of stokhazesthai and import a notion of movement into this mechanism. A4 states that those who stokhazontai do so ‘referring, I deem, to the nature’, presumably the nature of the thing aimed at. The Greek has ‘anapherontes oimai pros tên phusin houtôs stokhazontai’. A second instance is M2: a doctor ‘stokhazomenos guides his treatment anapherôn eis to eikos’. Three instances involve pros without anapherein: navigators to Aegina ‘pros what they see stokhazontai’, and longer-distance navigators, when their destination is finally in sight, can ‘stokhazesthai pros what is seen’ (both §144).151 The third instance, M5, involves doctors once more, who approach a new patient with the knowledge they have acquired from tending to many previous patients: ‘they stokhazontai pros their experience’. Caution is required when drawing conclusions from merely isolated linguistic uses and combinations, but the instances above justify, to my mind, some comments on the meaning of stokhazesthai. This is the more justified since some of these instances are meant as clarifications of the mechanism of stokhazesthai; A4, M2 and M5 assert that stokhazesthai plays a role in the arts and activities they concern, but also clarify in what way stokhazesthai plays this role. In M2 and M5 this is in relation to the doctor. A4 is in the general, argumentative section; in it, ‘anapherontes…’ follows a conjunction of stokhazomenoi and tugkhanontes; the third participle, anapherontes, explains the way in which the activity of the first two participles happens and in what sense the participles can be conjoined in this way. That this is the intention of this sentence is clear from the emphasis on the method by which stokhazesthai happens (houtôs stokhazontai), and the insertion of

151 ‘sko/p ei ga\r p rw =ton me/n, ei0 bou/lei, tou\j ei0j A i2ginan diakomi/zontaj, o3ti o9rw =si th\n A i2ginan: p ro\j o4 ou0=n o9rw =si stoxa/zontai’... ‘e1p eita fane/ntoj au0=qij stoxa/zesqai p ro\j to\ o9rw /menon.’ Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 44 oimai in the explanatory anapherontes clause.152 The phrases cited above, therefore, are not incidental to the passage and we are therefore justified in paying particular attention to the language Aristides uses in them. Eis, pros, and anapherein imply a movement towards or into something. The main active meaning of anapherein is ‘to bring/carry back’, and from there, more figuratively, ‘to refer’ and ‘to consult’.153 The ‘guess’ or ‘aim’ is carried back towards what one sees, to the nature of one’s object, or towards its perfect likeness (eikos; see III.ii.B.c). This emphasis on the movement towards the object of stokhazesthai directs the attention from the successful hit of the object to the process that precedes that hit. This process is an approach that makes the guess or aim increasingly accurate, that makes the representation increasingly like its model. The latter phrasing suggests how stokhazesthai can be joined to eikazein (I only mention this here; more discussion in III.ii.B.c). If this process of increasing accuracy is completed without failure – stokhazesthai involves logos so cannot fail – the object of stokhazesthai is reached; we knew this already, but now we have seen what Aristides means by stokhazesthai: the successful completion of a process of approaching the object aimed at. The diagram I inserted at M4 and M5 in III.i.E illustrates this mechanism in relation to experience.154 An increasing likeness between universal and particular cure is sought on the basis of a likeness between particular and universal diagnosis. This case is complicated by the two objects involved (diagnosis and cure), which are both objects of stokhazesthai, but the main idea is clear: stokhazesthai of a cure happens by means of a likeness that approaches the way things are.155 In this case anapherein could have been employed (Aristides did not) particularly fittingly, as the present state of things is carried back to the doctor’s experience. In this understanding of stokhazesthai as involving an increasingly accurate representation of the object of stokhazesthai, this object plays two roles, i.e. of measure and of target. Although this distinction is not made in the text, it is worth noting. That stokhazesthai is carried back to the nature of its object or to the eikos means not only that this nature or eikos is the final target of stokhazesthai, but also that nature/eikos is the measure by which the accuracy of the guess or aim is tested and improved – albeit not chronologically: this is an analytical observation about the method of stokhazesthai, not a description of successive steps for the would-be artist. This notion of the guidance of stokhazesthai by the particular object is nonetheless significant because it points to the situation-specificity of stokhazesthai and its product (the successful conjecture; see on this III.ii.C.d).

Thirdly, a number of words that occur with stokhazesthai indicate luck or success, such as tukhein, tugkhanein and eu. We can see a clear development in these combinations. Stokhazesthai and tugkhanein are first conjoined in A4, which speaks of ‘hoi tôn porrôthen horômenôn stokhazomenoi kai tugkhanontes’. Although the precise relation between stokhazomenoi and tugkhanontes is not made clear, the addition ‘anapherontes…’ suggests that one mechanism governs these two words, as I argued above. The subsequent statements leave no doubt about the relation between stokhazesthai and ‘luck’ words, however. The last phrase of §139 asserts that ‘stokhazesthai is the same as hitting (tukhein) the thing’.156 This statement is materially repeated in A7, Ar2 and, more implicitly, N1. In this last context, moreover, stokhazesthai is taken as equivalent to disposing well of present factors (eu tithenai to paron; see N2 and N3). There is one more combination of stokhazesthai with a

152 The Greek, once more: ‘oi9=on oi9 tw =n p o/rrw qen o9rw me/non stoxazo/menoi kai\ tugxa/nontej a0nafe/rontej oi0=mai p ro\j th\n fu/sin ou3tw j stoxa/zontai’ (§139). 153 LSJ: a0nafe/rw , III. 154 The word used here is p ei=ra, not e0mp eiri/a – the word Plato used in the Gorgias, in opposition to te/xnh. Perhaps Aristides wanted to avoid the latter word, although it would be equally like him to employ this word for the very reason Plato did. 155 As I note in III.i.E, the process of finding likenesses never arrives at full likeness between particular and general. Stokhazesthai does reach the unique particular in a way that goes beyond the perfecting of likenesses. 156 ‘to\ ga\r stoxa/zesqai tou=t’e0sti\ tuxei=n tou= p ra/gmatoj’. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 45 word that indicates success. In §140 Aristides says that the wisest people, those who have a large share in logos, are best at aiming (arista stokhazontai).157 This combination does not assert the identity of stokhazesthai and hitting the mark, but states a parallel between mastery of stokhazesthai and mastery of logos: neither the full possession of logos nor the full possession of stokhazesthai is involved. This claim effectively confirms the severance between art and artist: on the level of an art, stokhazesthai is the same as hitting the mark, but on the level of an individual artist, an attempt at stokhazesthai is not equivalent to success. The combinations of stokhazesthai with ‘luck’ words, therefore, after a juxtaposition at the beginning of the developing argument, are employed to state and explicate the equivalence of stokhazesthai with the achievement of an art’s aim: luck is incorporated into stokhazesthai.

This review of some linguistic constructions with stokhazesthai has made clear, then, that stokhazesthai is Aristides’s central concern in §§135-77; that the mechanism of stokhazesthai is an approach of the object of stokhazesthai in which the guess or representation becomes increasingly accurate; and that luck and success in specific situations are included in the notion of stokhazesthai. We may also note that this treatment of stokhazesthai insists on a continuity in the mechanism in the different contexts in which the word is used. Both in ‘figurative’ (where we would translate ‘conjecture’) and in ‘literal’ (where we would translate ‘aim’) contexts, Aristides asserts that the same method is active. The approach of the object applies both in a conceptual and in a physical way.

III.ii.A.e Stokhazesthai - epistasthai The last task of this section is to consider Aristides’s use of stokhazesthai in opposition to epistêmê. I first briefly survey the development of Aristides’s statements about epistasthai in relation to the different analogies. I then indicate in what way these different statements cohere and follow from one leading thought. The below includes uses of epistasthai in the context of eikazein; it takes for granted the conclusion I reach in III.ii.B.b, that the epistasthai of S3 is not used in the same way as other epistasthai or epistêmê.

Let us first survey the different claims about epistasthai. The navigator knows (oiden kai akêkoen) all that is taught him in his training, but this is not sufficient for successful completion of his function. In addition, he needs to be able (know in a different sense) to arrange the particulars of a given situation in a satisfactory way. Only in that way does he save his ship and its crew from the sea (N2). These particulars include what he sees, as well as what he is about to see (to mellon ophthêsesthai, §146). In addition to epistêmê, it is made clear, stokhazesthai is called for (N3). Stokhazesthai and epistêmê are complementary. However, this use of epistêmê differs from later uses: here a ‘soft’ kind is used, which does not meet strict demands – Plato’s demands – for knowledge. Aristides responds to the objection that a perfect navigator would not have to stokhazesthai by the remark that such perfection is not humanly possible (§147).158 The gods enter the argument here and will come back a number of times. They are opposed to human artists; the latter’s distinguishing trait is their need for stokhazesthai – at least insofar they did not receive private communication from Zeus on Ida. In gymnastics, foreknowledge is opposed to learning from experience (G2-3).159 It is declared impossible that a trainer know (exepistatai), like Apollo, what is about to happen (to

157 ‘oi9 fronimw /tatoi tw =n a0nqrw /p w n kai\ lo/gou p lei/stou mete/xontej a1rista stoxa/zontai.’ 158 ‘ti/j d’a0nqrw /p w n a0kribh\j h2 diarkh/j;’ 159 ‘h)\ p ro/oiden o( gumnasth\j eu)qu\j kai\ e)c a)rxh=j o(/p w j h(mw =n e(/kastoj e)/xei sw /matoj, ou) p ara\ th=j p ei/raj manqa/nei;’ Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 46 mellon) and can make firm assertions (diiskhurizetai) about it (§150 and G5). Likewise, the doctor learns from experience and cannot predict results – or he would not be much less than Asclepius (M2, M3, M5). He cannot predict because each man is unique (M7). Discussing the mantic art Aristides elaborates on the contrast between gods and humans by ascribing different activities to them. The gods know the things about to happen (isasin ta mellonta) because they make those things happen. The phrase used here to describe the gods’ activity, ha mellousi poiein epistantai (S6), contrasts with the phrase used in S3 to describe the mantic activity, ton mantin auto touto epistasthai eikasai. The fundamental contrast is poiein – eikazein. These things which the gods control – for do – lie, as it were, before their eyes, while they are hidden in the dark for human observers, who must fallibly represent them to themselves and their inquirers (§166-7). As a result they cannot predict (proeipein) details, which Aristides adduces as supplementary proof that seers eikazousin. At the end of the passage §§135-177 Aristides suggests that Plato recognise that humans cannot make firm assertions (diiskhurisasthai) about the future, while perfection/accuracy (akribes) is for the gods; eikasai is left to humans, while epistêmê is reserved for the gods (§177).

Two seemingly different aspects of the epistemic position of an artist underlie the different statements Aristides makes. Firstly, only the gods know what is about to happen, because they determine it; humans can only conjecture about this. The essential property of future events, i.e. that they are still to happen, entails artistic incapacity to possess the full epistêmê necessary for their arts. From the point of view of human artists (epistemically), the future is contingent.160 The second aspect is the uniqueness of particular objects of the different arts. For gymnastics, the unique constitution of pupils’ bodies makes full epistemic mastery of the gymnastic art impossible. A trainer can only make educated guesses, based on his experience: he has trained others who were like this particular pupil, therefore he selects the training methods that seem appropriate to him. Both these aspects entail that artists cannot make firm predictions, and that what one has been taught is insufficient for successfully handling one’s art. There is in fact close coherence between these two aspects, the contingency of the future and the uniqueness of particulars. The coherence between the uniqueness of particulars and the contingency of the future emerges when we consider the activity of the artist. The uniqueness of the particular manifests itself in a different response to artistic action (applying treatment, using one’s sails in a particular way) from the responses of earlier particulars. This different response becomes visible in the near future: that which is about to happen will show what the nature of this particular is. If one had only the present – if time stood still – nothing would change and therefore there would be no difference between particulars. Vice versa the contingency of the future has its roots in the unique nature of particulars. If particulars were not unique, one could classify them in groups that match exactly the general characteristics of that group; this would enable one to apply general principles of change and response to these particulars, and thus calculate their future behaviour. The result of non-unique particulars is a future that human calculation can predict and control.161 Particular uniqueness and the contingency of the future thus prove two sides of one coin. Together, these aspects clarify the difference between the epistemic state of the gods and the epistemic state of humans. Aristides makes explicit that the gods’ control of the future implies their knowledge of it. The gods’ knowledge also extends to knowledge of particulars, as emerges from the remark about medicine, that a doctor with complete certainty about a particular patient would be like Asclepius, and also from the contrast between fallible human navigators and Poseidon (cf. III.i.C). Human artists, on the contrary, always grope in the dark, because they

160 I add ‘(epistemically)’ because the question whether everything in the future is ontologically determined (by the gods) is not relevant for our purposes and does not concern Aristides either. 161 This sounds like a dictator’s sweetest dream. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 47 do not know the exact nature of particulars they meet and have to handle, and because they are uncertain what the near future will bring. The gods’ epistemic state, then, is complete control of particulars and future. The word ‘epistêmê’ can be properly applied only to them. Human beings must make do with stokhazesthai because they lack this control; theirs is a dependent epistemic state. We should note that the contrast between gods and humans does not involve the possibility of being right. Humans start from a radically different – worse – epistemic condition from the gods, but that does not prevent them from hitting the mark, making a right conjecture, achieving perfect likeness between original and representation (mental or material). The significant consequence of their different epistemic positions for Aristides’s purposes is that gods and humans use different methods; human conjecture is potentially equally accurate as divine knowledge. When Aristides denies akribes to humans (§177), we should not take this to mean that accurate conjecture is impossible – this would contradict the whole of this passage – but that guaranteed accuracy in all relevant cases is not humanly possible; this is indeed the decisive difference between gods and humans.162

162 Read as an argument about the faculties of knowledge and opinion, Republic 477a-478e makes this same point: knowledge is always of what is, i.e. for all things one knows, they are the way one knows them to be, whereas opinion is of what can be or can be not, i.e. for the things one opines, some are the way one opines them to be, while others are not the way one opines them to be. Aristides, as I will also say in III.iii, operates within a Platonic framework, but consistently rejects the possibility of Platonic knowledge. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 48

III.ii.B EIKAZEIN

The second word to be examined more elaborately is eikazein. This section is organised as follows. I first indicate in what contexts the word is used (it being many uses I will not discuss them all). Secondly, I discuss the passage in the section on painting that details the mechanism of eikazein and relate that to the use of eikazein in the section on mantic art. The final points of attention will be the relation between eikazein and stokhazesthai, and the relation between eikazein and eikos.

III.ii.B.a Contexts of eikazein The two most important contexts with eikazein are the analogies of the mantic art and painting. To a lesser extent eikazein figures in medicine and navigation as well. In navigation eikazein provides help for sailors whose destination is not physically visible. An unseen destination can be eikasai via calculation.163 This use of eikasai seems very close to ‘imagine’. In medicine, a doctor uses his experience, which he has acquired through tending to many individual patients and through what is generally the case for patients, to treat a new individual. The doctor eikazei the state of this new individual (M4). This ‘eikazei’ has an element of comparison; the doctor infers from similarities or dissimilarities what should be done for this particular patient. ‘Eikazein’ has a special relation with painting, as it originates from the products of this art, eikones (says Aristides at first). It is, then, the core activity of painting. In this process, it uses logos as a means and a guiding principle (Pa2 and Pa4). One aspect of the production of eikones is highlighted: the mixing of colours approximates the image to the truth (Pa6), and differentiates painting from sculpture. The mantic art is identified with eikazein (S1);164 more specifically it is termed the knowledge of (how to) eikazein (S3). The mantic art’s eikazein is inferred from its use of signs (sêmeioi), which seers need because they do not control the future, as the gods do. On the basis of these signs, a seer can make a general picture of what will happen (i.e. he eikazei).

III.ii.B.b M ethod of eikazein Aristides explicitly states the method of eikazein in the analogy of painting; in the analogy of the mantic art some more features of eikazein become clear. In this section I analyse this method. After his initial venture that ‘eikazein’ derives from the products of painting, eikones, Aristides entertains the possibility that ‘eikazein’ preceded the art of painting; if so, Aristides argues, there is even better testimony that there is an art of eikazein, a core of eikazein isolated from its application in painting. The core of this primordial art is eikazein,165 the production of an eikôn – where this need not be a physical image, but merely a mental representation.166 An assumption in this argument is that the word ‘eikazein’ refers to a specific activity; if this is not painting, there should be some different activity which ‘eikazein’ describes correctly. This shows,

163 ‘kai\ o3 to/t’h0=n p ara\ tw =n o0fqalmw =n, tou=t’ei0ka/sai tw =| logismw ’|= 164 The aorist ei0ka/sai is used. 165 As noted, I follow Behr in thinking that Aristides introduces an art besides painting, see note 140. 166 I think this is the meaning of the obscure addition ‘ei1p er to\ e1rgon au0th=j ei0kw \n ei0=nai kratei’= (§159): a mental image does not have the power to be an ei0kw /n properly so called. On the subject of ei0kw \n as product of ei0ka/zein, it may be found interesting to note that Isocrates calls his Antidosis (§7) an ei0kw /n of his thought and life; the lo/goj must, if it is to meet the purpose of providing an explanation and apology of Isocrates’s life and teaching, be a proper depiction of that life and teaching. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 49 it is important to note, that Aristides is concerned with the activity underlying the word ‘eikazein’ and is not engaged in mere wordplay. This activity of eikazein is logos-guided. Logos is explicitly mentioned as the means (di’hotou; Pa3) and the object of eikazein. It is mentioned as a necessary means of eikazein: not only painting eikazei only with logos (Pa2), but all eikazein involves logos, for without it, the art eikazei not at all.167 The sentence adds, immediately after calling logos a means, that the art eikazei towards (pros) the logos of the nature of the thing depicted (Pa4). This immediacy suggests that Pa4 is the way in which logos is a means. However, Pa4 itself suggests that the logos of the (nature of the) thing is the imitated object, as if it is more correct to say that a painter represents the logos of a horse than that a painter represents a horse. We have, therefore, two roles for logos: means and object. If Pa2, Pa3 and Pa4 did not recall earlier statements in our passage, one might choose to treat Pa3 as a mere formulation: Aristides does not mean to say that logos is a means, but merely uses the expression di’hotou to refer to the role of logos as an object of imitation. One would thus reduce the role of logos as means to the role of logos as object of imitation – in a sense every object of imitation is a means, for without them one would not be able to imitate. However, in view of this same distinction of roles of logos in earlier statements about stokhazesthai (A1-A5; see ii.A), it is right to treat these two roles as formally distinct here as well. One could therefore formulate the role of logos thus: the art eikazei dia logou pros ton tês phuseôs logon. The object role of logos is elaborated upon in the sequel. In Pa6 Aristides says that the process of mixing colours brings the image closer to the truth. For ‘image’ Aristides uses eikasthen (instead of e.g. eikôn), preserving, via this passive form, the connection with the verb ‘eikazein’. The mixing in the right proportions of different colours of dye – a typical stokhazesthai activity (Pa5) – brings the image closer to how the original object truly is; it becomes a truer copy of the original. Put differently: the logos of the mixture approaches the logos of the original. Pa6 and Pa4 thus mutually explain each other: a copy becomes truer because the process of representation is aimed towards the logos of the nature of the object; reversely, in obtaining the same logos as the original object, a copy becomes true to that original.

The role of logos is also important in understanding the way Aristides handles the contrast between his view and – we can call it – a Platonist view of the mantic art. The section on the mantic art opens with this contrast between S1 and S2. Aristides submits that a seer eikazei, and only eikazei; the objection says that eikazein is for laymen, but that seers know (epistantai). The solution to this contrast, as Aristides advances it, S3, is an integration of the two key terms of each of S1 and S2: a seer knows how to eikasai. S3 might seem to embrace a Platonist understanding of epistêmê and, thus, effectively concede that for this art, at least, what makes it an art is its possession of epistêmê – precisely Plato’s condition for arts which made him reject rhetoric in the Gorgias, the condition which Aristides set out to refute. However, S3 cannot be a denial of the opposition between epistêmê and eikazein (and stokhazesthai); not only would a denial conflict with the whole of Aristides’s project in these pages, but this opposition is also affirmed once more in the immediate sequel, when Aristides says that the gods know (epistantai), but the seers only eikazousin (§§166-7). Two things should therefore be observed about the meaning of ‘epistasthai’ in S3. Firstly, Aristides evidently allows himself to employ the term ‘epistêmê’ and its cognates in a looser sense than only for the thing epistêmê, properly speaking – which in fact Plato himself does frequently. As observed above, Aristides’s interest lies in the matters, not only the words, he discusses. (We may note that all but the most hardcore Platonist would allow for a looser use of ‘epistastai’ and thus consider S3, if properly explained, a valid response to S2.) Secondly, ‘epistasthai’ cannot mean nothing; S3 makes a theoretical point. It is clear that it divides seers from laymen, agreeing in this with the objection, S2. The criterion for this division is less clear from S3 alone. It emerges, however, that S3 implicitly introduces logos: seers see with

167 See for the text note 140. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 50 logos, laymen see without logos. Let us see why this is the case. Immediately following S3, Aristides cites a passage from the Phaedrus (244c) which he claims is testimony for the truth of S3. The main point of this passage for Aristides’s purposes, as he states himself, is that Plato admits that the mantic art uses signs (sêmeioi; S4).168 That admission, Aristides argues, is enough to conclude that the mantic art eikazei. Since Aristides adduced the Phaedrus passage as proof for S3, we may add that this admission (that the mantic art uses signs) is enough to conclude that, and explains in what sense, a seer knows how to eikasai. One more addition helps us to arrive at the right picture. In contrast to the gods, whose control of the future provides them perfect knowledge of that future, seers have to handle an unclear future; a seer guides requests to the signs and in that way eikazei towards the logos (S5). The art of a seer consists in the combining of signs and requests; this is what it is to eikasai. The right signs must be looked for and found, which must be connected in the right way to the right requests. The seer does not imagine things at random, but forms a representation according to the real way of things, according to the logos of what is about to happen (ta mellonta), thus forming a representation that has that same logos. As I observed in III.i.G, a relation obtains between the representation of a successful seer and the things about to happen that is the same relation as obtains between the requests of the seer’s clients and the signs the seer observes. The signs are thus an indication of what will happen, somewhat like the way the features of an original predict the features of a successful copy. The distinction between an expert seer and a layman, it may be clear, is the right relation between signs and requests. S3, I submit, is equivalent to S5: that a seer knows how to eikasai means that he eikazei pros ton logon.

Painting and the mantic art, therefore, are methodical arts; their method is logos. Eikazein, their core activity, is the creation of a representation or image according to the logos of the original (the object to be imitated, or that which is about to happen). It thus becomes clear that S3 is a pleonasm: Aristides agrees that eikazein must be understood in a strict sense, for else the distinction between expert and layman disappears. Put differently, an eikazein that is not according to logos is not eikazein at all, just like a missing stokhazesthai is not stokhazesthai at all (A6).

III.ii.B.c eikazein vs. stokhazesthai Aristides’s use of eikazein is surprising. A few seemingly incidental uses aside, eikazein has not entered the argument, which focused on stokhazesthai – reasonably so, since this was the word Plato used to attack rhetoric. In the analogy of painting, however, Aristides uses eikazein at the very moment he claims to provide the etymological source of ‘stokhazesthai’.169 The English ‘to conjecture’ can, depending on context, be a correct translation of both ‘stokhazesthai’ and ‘eikazein’. Aristides uses this continuity of meaning consciously both as a constructive part of his argumentative strategy and as an element of surprise for his audience, a surprise perhaps badly needed in long speeches like the current one. The surprise depends on the audience’s recognition that the gap between stokhazesthai and painting has been bridged by Aristides’s introduction of eikazein. The constructive role of eikazein I have already discussed in ii.B.b; the new word signals a continuity of meaning and practice (the practice of stokhazesthai) beyond the bounds of the use of the word ‘stokhazesthai’. As observed above about ‘eikazein’, Aristides is concerned with the matter, not only the word, of ‘stokhazesthai’.

168 §166: ‘kai\ mh\n o3ti kai\ dia\ tw =n a1llw n shmei/w n p rosti/qhj au0to/j. T ou=to d’o3tan p rosqh|=j, a3p asan di/dw j th]n mantikh\n ei0kasi/an ei0=nai’. The sentence preceding this one, which is the first to follow the Phaedrus citation, cannot be a conclusion or direct exegesis on Aristides’s part: ‘ou0kou=n o3te th\n oi0w nistikh\n ei0kazo/ntw n ei0=nai fh|\j tw =n a0nqrw /p w n, ou0k e0kfeu/gei mantikh\ to\ mh\ ei0ka/zein kata\ tou=to, ei1p er me/roj oi0w nistikh\ mantikh=j.’ (§165) The claim of this sentence that Plato says that oi0w nistikh\ ei0kazei depends argumentatively on the following sentence, which I cited. The statement that the mantic art uses signs is therefore pivotal. 169 See notes 138 & 139. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 51

This continuity of meaning between ‘stokhazesthai’ and ‘eikazein’ is evident in the text. For painting eikazein fulfils the role that stokhazesthai had in the earlier analogies. The parallels between eikazein and stokhazesthai, as used in the texts, are strong. There are, firstly, verbal parallels. Introducing eikazein, Aristides says ‘ou mên … logou khôris eikazei, arkhên oud’an eikazen’ (§160); compare ‘ou gar … mê logôi khrômenon stokhazesthai’, without logos ‘arkhên oude stokhazontai’ (§139). Stokhazesthai happens ‘anapherontes pros tên phusin … kai toutôi khrômenoi tôi logôi’ (§139), while painting ‘eikazei pros ton tês phuseôs logon’ (§160). Secondly, these are not merely verbal parallels. A similar mechanism is described for eikazein as for stokhazesthai. The artist finds himself in a position of epistemic uncertainty, of non- possession of the thing on which he must form a judgment. The gods have need of stokhazesthai nor eikazein, because they possess and control the things that will happen. Stokhazesthai and eikazein alike are the alternatives open to the artist who lacks epistêmê. Yet he does not form his judgment without logos; insofar he masters his art, he stokhazetai or eikazei according to the logos of the object of his judgment, so that he ‘hits’ or ‘captures’ the object. The image of mixing colours, the process that precedes the result (the right combination of different dyes), emphasises once more the approach to the end result, similar to the increasing accuracy involved in stokhazesthai pros something, discussed in ii.A.d. In using both ‘eikazein’ and ‘stokhazesthai’, therefore, Aristides takes advantage of the different shades of meaning of these two words, while insisting on their continuity of meaning and method; eikazein is stokhazesthai, even if ‘eikazein’ may prompt other associations than ‘stokhazesthai’. One such association is the term ‘eikos’, to which we now turn.

III.ii.B.d eikos A few words must be said about ‘eikos’. I first note how the text shows Aristides consciously incorporating this term in his defence. I then indicate how the concept of eikos agrees with the view of rhetoric we have so far seen Aristides deploy. Thirdly, I note that Aristides emulates Plato in using a strict understanding of eikos. All this, I submit, shows Aristides’s virtuosic, yet not empty, play with rhetoric-theoretical notions and Platonic terminology. In the analogy of medicine two words with the root eik- occur: eikos in §152, M2, and eikazousin in §153, M4. M2 and M4 apply to similar situations. In the text they occur closely together. M4 even seems a restatement of M2: M2 is followed by a possible situation that, if applicable, would be incompatible with M2 (can a doctor predict the future?), which is followed by the rejection of this possibility (no, he is not Aesclepius!), which is followed by M4. M2 says that a doctor who knows nothing about a particular body guides his treatment by reference to to eikos. M4 says that a doctor eikazei the particular on the basis of the many and general things. When we note that the period that includes M2 specifies, about this doctor, that he has gained experience (peira), the agreement between M2 and M4 is almost complete.170 Considering these are the only eik- words in this section of the text, their proximity, and their great similarity of context, I think Aristides suggests a conceptual and etymological connection between eikos and eikazein.171 Both words can be used in a sense that is distant from the original, physical image, meaning of these words, a sense that would be preferred for either of

170 §§152-3: ‘o9 de\ dh\ th=j me\n p ei/raj ei0j p i/stin i0sxu/saj kai\ toi=j farma/koij kai\ tai=j diai/taij h1dh xrw /menoj tou/toij i0atro/j, o3p w j d’e3kastoj h9mw =n e1xei fu/sew j h2 sugkri/sew j a0gnow =n, a0=r’ou0 stoxazo/menoj p rosa/gei p a/nq’o3sa a1n p oih=| p eri\ to\n ka/mnonta a0nafe/rw n ei0j to\ ei0ko/j; e0gw \ me\n oi0=mai. h2 du/nait’a1n tij au0tw =n a0p oto/mw j ei0p ei=n o3ti tou/toij ou9tosi\ xrw /menoj e1cw p anto\j e1stai kindu/nou kai\ dusxere\j ou0d’o9tiou=n p ei/setai; ou0 me/nta2n tosou=ton e0lei/p onto tou= th\n 0Ep i/dauron e1xontoj qeou=, fai/hj a1n, kai\ ma/la e0moi\ gou=n kata\ nou=n. a0ll’a0p o\ tw =n p ollw =n kai\ koinw =n, oi0=mai, kai\ ta\ i1dia ei0ka/zousin.’ 171 And he would be right, as far as we know (see note 139). Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 52 them in this passage, if only the other was not present. Their combination, however, suggests a connection via that original meaning.

Eikos has an illustrious history as a concept in rhetorical theory and practice. Arguments from plausibility are useful and often successful in a courtroom, for instance, because an audience ignorant of the real course of events of a case under trial will accept the arguments that seem most probable. In combination with eikazein, and in view of the use Aristides makes of eikazein in the following (the analogies of painting and mantic art), however, a different meaning for eikos suggests itself: the eikos becomes a product of the activity eikazein, meaning eikôn – a meaning that is in itself possible for eikos: an image of the truth, verisimile. The eikos Aristides is after in his subsequent explorations of eikazein – the absence of ‘eikos’ is not an absence of eikos – is a representation of an original that is not merely roughly like the original, but that is as much like the original as possible. This eikos leaves no margin for mistakes, for slight differences between general and particular situations that make the generally eikos fail to be like the truth in a particular situation; it is a perfectionist eikos. We may briefly consider two alternative construals of eikos, in order to illustrate the two ways in which Aristides’s eikos is infallible. The first construal is in Aristotle’s discussion of eikos in his Rhetoric. According to Aristotle, eikos is ‘that which is true for the most part – though not without qualification’.172 One way to refute an opponent’s claim that something is eikos is to advance an eikos statement that has more general validity than the opponent’s claim.173 In this situation it seems that two statements cannot both be eikos; if the one is eikos, it follows that the other cannot be eikos. A different way to controvert a claim that something is eikos is to show that the case at hand belongs to a more specific group for which a contrasting statement is eikos – while the original statement is no less eikos for the more general group as a whole.174 Now the notion that Aristides uses is eikos for a very specific group, i.e. the particular the artist has to deal with; while Aristotle’s eikos may be a matter of 90%-10%, Aristides’s eikos is one case, and must therefore have 100%. The fallibility that Aristotle’s phrase ‘for the most part’ implies is excluded in Aristides’s eikos. The second construal of eikos is more recent. Paul Woodruff has developed the notion of being eikos relative to circumstance. Two things can be equally eikos to two different observers, if these observers include different ‘background considerations’.175 In this view, what the observer finds eikos (this depends on the background considerations he happens to include) may be different from what is, as it were, objectively eikos. In Aristides’s construal, however, eikos, as the product of eikazein, is always infallible. What seems eikos to the observer is also eikos in truth of fact. The phrase ‘relativity to circumstance’,176 incidentally, is useful to underline the importance of kairos, which I will discuss in III.ii.D; Aristides’s artist arrives at a perfect eikos because he takes into account all pertinent circumstances, including the kairoi, which are decisive for whether the artist adopts the right course of action.

As we saw near the end of II.ii.B.a, this perfectionist understanding of eikos figures in the Phaedrus as well. Socrates dismisses rhetoric teachers who teach their pupils to reason on the basis of eikos. For, Socrates argues, in order to know what is eikos, you must know what is true, because what is like the truth is determined on the basis of similarity to the truth – which is

172 Rhetoric 1357a35. 173 Ibid. 1402b36-7. 174 This I take to be the gist of Rhetoric II.24, 1401a3-02a29, but see my next note. 175 Woodruff 134; the conception is described in 134-7. Note that Woodruff contrasts this conception of eikos, which he attempts to attribute to Protagoras via Thucydides, to what he says is Aristotle’s conception. This Aristotelian conception admits of no other kind of eikos than the one I characterised in the first way of refutation in the text: no two conflicting things can be eikos. See also the response to Woodruff’s paper by Witkin, esp. 146-9. 176 Woodruff 137. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 53 impossible if one does not know what is true.177 Aristides argues what is effectively the same point, albeit in a significantly different way. For Aristides, eikazein pros ton logon of an object is forming a picture that agrees with the logos of this particular object one now eikazei; the product of this eikazein is the same perfectionist eikos as Plato uses in his argument. Without referring explicitly to this passage in the Phaedrus, then – nor is it a theoretically insignificant passage, advocating, as it does, a very particular understanding of a central rhetorical term – Aristides incorporates Plato’s understanding of eikos into his argument and employs it to show that a stokhazomenos, that is an eikazôn, art produces perfect eikoi, truth-like conjectures about reality, so that the accusation of the Gorgias stands refuted.

177 Phaedrus 273d2-4. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 54

III.ii.C LOGOS

In the introduction I have already mentioned that logos is a semantically broad concept, allowing for translations in English from ‘word’ to ‘tale’ to ‘reason’. In this section I discuss Aristides’s use of logos. My focus is on the first, argumentative section §§138-140. In this section logos occurs eleven times. I will briefly describe all occurrences in this section (C.a), then say a few things about occurrences of logos in the rest of the oration (C.b), thirdly argue that the argument depends on the identity of all different ‘kinds’ of logos (C.c) and finally state that logos is situation- specific (C.d). The importance of ‘logos’ should be clear: not only is it a central concept in Plato’s philosophy and the defining feature of epistêmê as Plato construes it, but the absence of logos in rhetoric is the reason Plato adduces for his rejection of rhetoric. Socrates says: ‘I deny that [rhetoric] is an art, but say it is experience, because it does not have any logos by which it proceeds[…]’.178 By supplying rhetoric with a logos, therefore, Aristides attacks Plato’s accusation head-on.

III.ii.C.a logos in §§138-140 The first use179 is in Pl1, which states that rhetoric stokhazetai and guides logoi according to how it stokhazetai. In this reported accusation of Plato’s, logoi primarily means words: words are to be arranged in a certain order. The accusation is part of a larger project (in the Gorgias) to deny rhetoric the rational justification that makes practices arts; logoi should therefore not be interpreted as rational arguments here. The second use,180 however, should be interpreted as ‘reason’. It occurs in Pl2: since rhetoric stokhazetai, it does not use logos. This claim represents Plato’s objection to rhetoric’s stochastic activity, based on which he denies rhetoric employment of reason. The dative is, furthermore, clearly instrumental: reason is presented as an instrument of rhetoric. The third use,181 in A1: Whoever stokhazetai uses logos to guide himself according to how he stokhazetai, should be interpreted in the same way as in Pl2. ‘Reason’, seemingly subjective reason, used instrumentally (another dative), agrees well with the phrase in which it is used, and moreover this phrase aims to provide a reason for Aristides’s disagreement with Pl2, so that logos must mean the same in both A1 and Pl2. It is interesting to note that Aristides has inversed the rhetor and his logos from Pl1 to A1: first logoi were guided by the rhetor, but now logos is used to guide the rhetor. We find the fourth use182 in A2: There is no stokhazesthai that does not use logos. This logos is best interpreted as (subjective) reason; nothing in the context indicates that Aristides is prepared to assert that there is only speech-related stokhazesthai. It is explicitly instrumental (‘khrômenon’ and dative). The fifth use,183 in A3: The logos of the thing is the doer of stokhazesthai, should be interpreted as (objective) ‘reason’, or perhaps even ‘proportion’. Formally, logos is here author of stokhazesthai, instead of a means for the rhetor, the author of stokhazesthai in Pl2, A1 and A2. This change, which is signalled in the change from ‘subjective’ to ‘objective’ reason, will be addressed below.

178 Gorg. 465a2-4: ‘te/xnhn de\ au0th\n ou1 fhmi ei]nai, a0ll’e0mp eiri/an, o3ti ou0k e1xei lo/gon ou0de/na w [| p rosfe/rei a4 p rosfe/rei o9p oi=’a1tta th\n fu/sin e0sti/n, w 3ste th\n ai0ti/an e9ka/stou mh e1xein ei0p ei=n’. After the first p rosfe/rei, where my translation in the text ends, the text in Aristides continues a little differently (without the second p rosfe/rei, notably) from the established Plato text. 179 ‘lo/gouj’, p. 186 l.8 in Behr and Lenz 1976 (line references in the following are also to this edition). 180 ‘lo/gw ’|, l.10 (§139). 181 ‘lo/gw ’|, l.11. 182 ‘lo/gw ’|, l.12. 183 ‘lo/goj’, l.12. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 55

The sixth use184 is, like in A2, explicitly instrumental, but can be interpreted, like in A3, as both (objective) ‘reason’ and ‘proportion’. It is in A5: (Those who stokhazontai and hit from afar) stokhazontai using this logos and, so to speak, this target. This logos and target are associated, via the preceding sentence in the text, with the nature of the thing that is being aimed at. Logos is here used in the dative case, and is identified – albeit comparison-wise – with a target, also in the dative case. This last move especially signals that Aristides attempts to merge the instrumental and target aspects of logos. This attempt also bears on A3, the statement that the logos of a thing is the author of stokhazesthai. I will elaborate on this below. The seventh use185 is part of A7: Nobody fails to hit (hamartanei) using logos. The phrase depends argumentatively on A9. Subjective reason seems to be meant, which saves the one who uses it (once more a dative + khrômenos) from failure. The eighth use,186 in A8, can apply to both vocal speech and reason, although in slightly different ways: Whenever someone fails, he has not preserved logos. This may mean that failure entails drowning of the speech – it cannot float by itself if one does not give it proper treatment – and it may mean that through (because of) not keeping (to) reason one has failed. In the latter case, reason can be both subjective and objective. In A9 is the ninth use187: logos does not miss. The statement is general. Logos is presented as an agent, and must mean ‘reason’ here. If one seeks for axioms in Aristides’s argument, this is a major one. Use ten188 occurs in the statement that the wisest men, who have the greatest share in logos, are best at stokhazesthai. This logos is something independent from people, of which they can partake: a universal capacity is meant, not of speech, but of calculation. The eleventh and final use189 is in A10: Rhetoric preserves logos at the most. This is the conclusion Aristides reaches at the end of the argumentative section, before turning to the first analogy. This conclusion applies to both subjective and objective reason; I will explain below that this is in fact an inappropriate distinction to use for this argument and especially its conclusion. Disconnected from the preceding argument, furthermore, this conclusion can also be read as a statement about speeches (albeit phrased in the singular).

After the plural form in Pl1, only A8 allows for ‘speech’ as a possible meaning of logos. All other cases are concerned with reason. However, if we understand speech, the product of the rhetor’s activity, not as its lexical arrangement or its vocal expression, but as its argumentative constitution, then this product is also relevant to the other cases, excepting A1, A2 and A3, the third through fifth uses.190

III.ii.C.b other instances Outside the argumentative section logos plays an argumentatively distinctive role in the context of imagining. Twice in the analogy of painting and once in the analogy of the mantic art, logos is connected to eikazein. I have touched on these uses in section III.ii.B.b. The two first instances are in the analogy of painting. The core of eikazein, Aristides argues, is the formation of a picture – not a picture in bronze, stone or paint, but a picture, in one’s head, if you will. This activity does not proceed without logos (Pa2), but in fact uses it as a means (di’hotou; Pa3): eikazein happens towards the logos of the nature of what is depicted (Pa4).

184 ‘lo/gw ’|, l.15. 185 ‘lo/gw ’|, l.19. 186 ‘lo/gon’, l.20. 187 ‘lo/goj’, l.20. 188 ‘lo/gou’, p. 187, l.2. 189 ‘lo/gon’, l.4. 190 In this sense it comes close to the ‘account’, logos, that Plato keeps insisting is necessary for knowledge (e.g. in the Meno and Theaetetus). Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 56

The instance of logos in the section on the mantic art is similar, in S5: a seer guides requests to the signs and thus eikazei towards the logos. I have already discussed the notion of an approach to logos in III.ii.B, and will only repeat here that the logos in Pa4 and S5 is internal to the object of eikazein (objective logos). Pa3 affirms, however, that logos is at the same time a means of eikazein and, by extension, of painting. That something is a means of an art means that it is a means that the artist uses in doing his art. In other words, logos also functions as subjective logos.

III.ii.C.c the identity of logos There thus seem three kinds of logos that play a role in this argument: objective logos, the inner reason or proportion of a thing; subjective logos, the rhetor’s capacity by which he calculates and stokhazetai; and the product logos, the rational, or argumentative, constitution of the speech that the rhetor produces. I argue that the key to Aristides’s defence is that these three kinds of logos, which I have distinguished for hermeneutic purposes, are one logos: in the agreement, even identity, of the logos operative in a rhetor, the logos present in his judgment and, as embodied judgment, in his speech, and the logos of a situation or object in reality, Aristides’s theoretical rhetor infallibly hits his target without possession of epistêmê. In order to show that the identity of logos in these different contexts is essential to understanding Aristides’s project, I discuss the notions of production and infallibility.

In understanding the relation between these different types of logos I think it is helpful to first consider the notion of production. An artist is perfect, or has perfectly mastered his art, when the product that he makes is a pure expression of the preconception that was in his head: an excellent carpenter makes a chair out of random bits of wood that corresponds exactly with what he had in mind; a master sculptor sees his statue in advance in his mind’s eye and subsequently produces that flawlessly from the block of marble in front of him.191 We have considered ‘eikos’ in III.ii.B.d: something really eikos is the result of fully accomplished eikazein. In terms of Pa6, accomplished eikazein or stokhazesthai is accomplished approximation of an image to the truth. If we put this in terms of logos, mastery (possession) of subjective logos entails realisation of product logos. An artist using logos in stokhazesthai and eikazein cannot fail to realise logos in what he produces. There is no gap between conception and enunciation on this model, for if one’s product does not embody logos, one did not master logos fully in the first place. Only an image (eikôn) that agrees with logos can be properly called an eikôn: only that image is eikos, like the truth. In rhetoric, therefore, we can understand a master rhetor’s activity as the flawless execution of a preconceived judgment in words. The subjective logos of the rhetor corresponds with the product logos, the argumentative aspect of his speech.

A second consideration is that logos is infallible. A9, as mentioned above, is an axiom of Aristides’s argument.192 In its instrumental role, as in A2, A5 and A7, logos is not equivalent to a man’s mind (for which, incidentally, the Greeks have words like nous). Using ‘logos’ suggests, and Aristides makes explicit that it implies, that one refers to an infallible capacity. A flawless rhetor, therefore, uses logos. And, reversely, insofar a rhetor uses logos he does not fail. Therefore, insofar a rhetor uses logos, he succeeds in producing a speech that preserves this logos: the speech will correspond to the correct calculation or judgment of the rhetor about the situation. This point of infallibility decides between two possible construals of the relation between subjective (instrumental) and objective logos. On one construal, the instrumental logos approaches

191 This may sound more like Plotinus than Aristides, but the import of A6 is precisely this infallibility of artistic action. 192 And we have noted (see note 121 in III.i.A), that Aristides has Platonic sanction for this. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 57 the objective logos relevant in a given case: an artist has possession of instrumental logos, but must now, with the guidance of this instrumental logos, reach agreement with objective logos. One can have instrumental logos without agreement with objective logos. The second construal demands equal degrees of possession of instrumental and objective logos at all times: the artist moves from partial to complete possession of instrumental-and-objective-logos, as a package deal. The grasp of logos as an instrument guarantees agreement with objective logos – the artist’s mission is to obtain this grasp of subjective, instrumental logos. Of these two construals, the infallibility of logos entails rejection of the former, because no discrepancy between subjective and objective logos can ever occur. The rhetor is thus left with a daunting task: a stokhazesthai that deserves the name must possess logos; only thus can the rhetor hit upon the logos of the object, and produce a conjecture or, in terms of eikazein, an eikos, an image, that agrees with the real thing, i.e. that has the same logos as the real thing. In successful stokhazesthai or eikazein the logos of the thing to be represented agrees with the logos of the representing (the representation as a process) and agrees with the logos of the representation (as a product). It is nothing or all three functions of the same logos: logos does not admit of degrees. I introduced the distinctions between subjective, objective, and, later, product logos as a hermeneutic device. By first distinguishing between different aspects or functions of logos it becomes clearer that Aristides’s argument requires, and builds on, an identity of these different aspects of logos. Only if we insist on a modern – perhaps even only Kantian – way of thinking about subject versus object and about mind versus world can we persist in separating these different ‘kinds’ of logos.

III.ii.C.d particular logos We must finally note that logos is situation-specific (or object-specific). I mention this here because its particularity is a significant aspect of logos in Aristides’s defence. I mention it only briefly because a detailed discussion leads us into the kairoi, which will occupy us in the next section. We have observed a very close connection between logos and stokhazesthai/eikazein. We have also seen (particularly in III.i.C), and will see in more detail in III.ii.D, that stokhazesthai/eikazein is necessitated by the kairoi: features that make particular situations particular and incompletely accessible to general knowledge. These observations suggest that logos must also deal with the kairoi. The logos Aristides has been employing and arguing about is indeed a very particular logos. A general-knowledge-only approach to particular situations, one that dispenses with stokhazesthai, does not only miss the kairoi, but also misses the logos of the pertinent situation or object. Two things are worth noting. Firstly, in order for the product of eikazein to be eikos, it must be truth-like to the particular object or situation at hand, not to some general object. We saw that Aristides agrees with Plato in using a perfectionist eikos, which is really like the truth; in Pa6, such truth is the result of mixing dyes to fit exactly the colours of the particular original. The logos of the object is object-specific, therefore the logos guiding the eikazein must be so too. Secondly, the expressions eikazein/stokhazesthai pros/eis ton logon refer to very concrete objects. Pa4 says that painting eikazei towards the tês phuseôs logos: this phusis is the nature of the particular object. In S5, particular signs are related to particular requests: the logos is particular. Modifying A8, we might say: whenever someone fails to account for the kairoi, he has not preserved logos. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 58

III.ii.D KAIROS

The fourth key term I wish to discuss is absent from this passage: kairos. This absence is surprising; the passage does deal with the concept normally indicated by kairos and Aristides does use kairos elsewhere. In the following I will first consider Aristides’s use of the word kairos. For reasons of space I will only analyse the ten occurrences of kairos in Oration II, with a brief glance at Oration III. We will see that Aristides uses kairos both in a very general sense of ‘time’ and in a more technical sense in passages reminiscent of the passage in the Phaedrus that discusses kairos. I will then discuss a number of places in §§135-177 which involve the concept, but not the word, kairos. I will subsequently discuss the possible significance of the absence of kairos from §§135- 177.

III.ii.D.a kairos – the word Contrary to what I stated above, there actually is one occurrence of kairos in the passage we have been considering, but it is insignificant and not used rhetoric-technically. In §173, Aristides says that generals stokhazontai, among other things, the locations (topoi) and kairoi.193 In this case kairoi seem to be the right moments for a general to act, given the enemy’s plans and the make-up of one’s own army. The kairoi represent the time conditions, just as the topoi represent the spatial conditions, that influence a general’s decisions. This use of kairos is entirely within the framework of strategy; the wider context of this passage also makes clear that no analogy between strategy and rhetoric is intended over and above the fact that strategy stokhazetai: while the earlier arts were offered as direct analogies to the art of rhetoric, the art of strategy serves only to substantiate the claim that all arts use stokhazesthai.

Three instances of kairos, in §§271, 321 and 422, use the word as a characterisation of particular times among the many times that pass in history and in human lives, during which it is possible or proper to do something. In these cases the context provides the particular qualitative character of the kairos. Aristides has just argued that when rhetoric is expelled from the cities, the laws will go with it, when he asks in §271, ‘pot’oun touto an genoito? tis ho kairos autou?’194 In this case kairos indicates a time (there can be multiple times) when it is possible to do something. In §321 Aristides introduces the four famous Athenians Plato had accused, Miltiades, Themistrocles, Cimon and Pericles, and has them say:

We, Plato, did nothing else useful for the city of Athens, for we were not knowledgeable of your excellence and wisdom – not all things to all do the gods give. But what we had gotten, kindness, zeal, trust, courage, such things we offered, so that no possibility of excelling was left to others, in such times (kairoi), Plato, when fame, deliverance and whatever we prayed for was in conquering, and not at all in losing.195

193 ‘au0toi\ de\ oi9 strathgoi\ ti/ p ra/ttousin, w 0= qauma/sie; oi0=mai me\n ou0de\n a1llo h2 stoxa/zontai oi3 ge/ p ou be/ltistoi kai\ fronimw /tatoi kai\ th=j tw =n p olemi/w n dianoi/aj kai\ fu/sew j tw =n sfete/rw n stratiw tw =n, kai\ to/p w n ge oi=0mai kai\ kairw =n.’ 194 ‘kai\ to/te r(htorikh\n e)kp e/my omen kai\ p rop hlakiou=men, o(/tan kai\ tou\j no/mouj sunekp e/myai kalw =j e)/xh|. p o/t’ou)=n tou=to a)\n ge/noito; ti/j o( kairo\j au)tou=; tw =n P la/tw noj e(tai/rw n a)p okrina/sqw tij, e)p eidh/p er au)to\n ou)k e)/xomen p arasth/sasqai.’ 195 ‘h(mei=j, w )= P la/tw n, a)/llo me\n ou)de\n xrhsto\n th\n 0A qhnai/w n p o/lin ei)rgasa/meqa: ou) ga\r h)=men th=j sh=j a)reth=j kai\ sofi/aj e)p isth/monej, p a/nta d’ ou) p a=sin oi( qeoi\ dido/asin: a(\ d’ei)j h(ma=j h(=ken, eu)/noia, p roqumi/a, p i/stij, a)ndrei/a, ta\ toiau=ta p aresxo/meqa, w (/sq’u(p erbolh\n e(te/rw | mh\ lip ei=n, e0n toi=j toiou&toij kairoi=j, w } P la&tw n, e0n oi[j h}n e0n me\n tw |~ kratei=n a3ma do&ca kai\ sw thri/a kai\ ta_ e0k tw ~n eu)xw ~n, h(tthqe/ntaj de\ mhd’ei)=nai to\ p ara/p an.’ Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 59

In this case as well, kairos is not the split-second in which one must turn a situation into one’s advantage; kairos is the time in which one must fight. It must be noted that the attention of this passage is turned towards the use of real virtues that is silently opposed to the ideals of Plato, and not towards kairos. In §422, Aristides compares being in arms and being able to speak, and concludes that the power of speech is more useful than arms, because it ‘often surpasses arms in the kairoi of arms’.196 Here kairos is almost equivalent to the earlier phrases ep’eirênês, or en tois polemois, and means little more than ‘in time of…’.

A slightly different use of kairos is when the features of a particular time itself make it advantageous or proper to do something. While in the previous three cases a word, a phrase or the context generally identified the particular character of a kairos, the kairos in §§322 signifies, besides the time it stands for, also the particular qualities of this time that make it impossible to listen. The imaginary speech of the four to Plato that we considered above continues, denying that they flattered anybody. As for the citizens of Athens, they say, they did not even have time to listen to flattery: oud’hopôs ti pros hêdonên akousontai paredidou toth’ho kairos.197 This instance of kairos is decidedly neutral with regard to advantage. At the same time, however, the word kairos itself already indicates the qualitative character of the time concerned, which makes listening for pleasure impossible.

A group of four instances of kairos has a much more technical ring to it. In §§383, 384 and 416, the meaning of kairos is not, or not primarily, ‘time’, but ‘proper’ or ‘fitting’. All four instances occur in contexts that remind one of the Phaedrus. In §§383 and 384 Aristides eulogises the powers of a rhetor, whom he qualifies as someone ‘having examined from all sides the fittingness of his logoi and knowing the kairos, and able, in the way he knows these things, so also to realise them, he is the only one’ who will in every way be successful, unlike whoever has not mastered all this. The rhetor not only knows when to speak, but also when to keep silent, ‘just as whoever knows when it is kairos to sail, is not ignorant of when to moor; but whoever knows the kairos of speech (logos) and silence, will not err in either of these.’198 The kairoi in this passage are much more like the kairoi in the Phaedrus than the ones considered above; indeed, this whole passage echoes the passage in which Plato speaks of mastering the kairoi, of when to speak and when to be silent. This echo becomes even more clear when we read the beginning of §383, where Aristides uses the same language as Plato, describing the rhetor’s ability to hopoious khrê kai hoposous kai pros hopoious kai houstinas dei poieisthai tous logous. These three instances of kairos in just one passage, then, can be considered technical uses. Aristides follows Plato in using kairos to refer to the particular features of a situation that determine whether to speak or not, and whether one’s words will be fitting or not.

196 ‘kai\ h9 me\n e0n toi=j o3p loij e3cij a1xrhstoj e0p ’ei0rh/nhj, h9 d’e0n toi=j lo/goij du/namij e0n toi=j p ole/moij ou0k a1timoj, a0lla\ kai\ p oli/taij xrh/simoj kai\ p olemi/oij ai0de/simoj, kai\ tw =n o3p lw n p olla/kij e0n tw =| tw =n o3p lw n kairw =| p erigi/gnetai.’ 197 ‘ou0 ga\r h0=n, ei0 kolakeu/ein e0boulo/meqa, au)tou_j sw ~sai, ou)d' o3p w j ti p ro_j h(donh_n a)kou&sontai p aredi/dou to&q' o( kairo/j.’ 198 ‘ti/j a1meinon kai\ kaqarw /teron e0k tw =n ei0ko/tw n a0nqrw /p w | p rosfe/roit’a2n h2 o3stij du/naito o9p oi/ouj xrh\ kai\ o9p o/souj kai\ p ro\j o9p oi/ous kai\ ou3stinaj dei= p oiei=sqai tou\j lo/gouj[. …] o( ga_r to_ p rep on tw ~n lo&gw n e0chtakw _j p antaxou~ kai\ to_n kairo_n ei0dw _j kai\ duna&menoj tau~q' w 3sp er oi]de kai\ p erai/nein, ou9=to/j e0stin o9 mo/noj p a=sin oi9=j ei0=p on xrh=sqai duna/menoj, ou9=toj o9 nouqetw =n a0nu/tein, ou9=toj o9 kathgorw =n p isteu/esqai, ou9=toj o9 p antaxou= krei/ttw n tou= kata\ tau=ta a0p oleip ome/nou. [384] kai\ mh\n o3 ge ei0dw \j ti/ dei= le/gein oi0=den ti/ dei= siw p h=sai kai\ p o/te a1meinon ei0p ei=n kai\ p o/t’e0a=sai, w 3sp er kai\ o3stij oi]de p o&te p lei=n kairo_j, ou)k a)gnoei= kai\ p o&q' o(rmei=n: o3stij de\ logou kai\ siw p h~j kairo_n e0p i/statai, kat' ou)de/teron tou&tw n a(marth&setai, ei0 de\ mh&te le/gw n mh&te siw p w ~n ou)de/p ote e0k tw =n ei0ko/tw n kata\ gou=n th\n te/xnhn.’ Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 60

In the section which includes §416 Aristides describes the effects of a combination of particular arts with rhetoric. Thus he considers the superiority over ordinary navigation of a navigator who ‘has grasped, in addition, a part of this faculty [rhetoric], knowing both to terrify when it is proper (hênika kairos) and again (palin) to encourage’.199 The joint occurrence of hênika…palin and kairos implies that kairos here has a much more qualitative connotation than in the earlier cases we considered. Two elements in this passage, furthermore, suggest that this § is also meant to remind us of the Phaedrus. Firstly, Aristides uses the combination of proslabein (grasping in addition) with kairos, which also occurs in Phaedrus 272a3. Given Aristides great familiarity with Plato’s writing, this cannot be a coincidence. Furthermore, the instilling of fear and subsequent encouragement the helmsman is said to effect on his crew is a nautic version of the rousing and calming of his audience by Thrasymachus, which Socrates hails in Phaedrus 267c7-d1.

The last instance of kairos in Oration II is in §365; comparing the merits of a navigator and a rhetor, Aristides says that the navigator’s share in the kairoi is limited to giving the signal to set sail and to take the ship from off the beach when there is wind, giving this signal to those who have decided to sail somewhere.200 Navigation, then, is described as a subservient art in terms of the purposes that govern the employment of an art; the phrase ‘tôn kairôn tosouton autôi metestin’ should therefore also express this subservience. In this context, kairos, as it stands, cannot mean ‘time’ or even ‘proper time’. If we were to disregard the ordinary range of meaning of kairos completely, we could interpret this kairos as ‘responsibility’. A better reading, however, seems to me to be that this is an elliptical phrase. As is evident also from the sequel, which describes the navigator’s inability to advise about when and where to sail, the kairoi concern decisions that have to be made. We might therefore best understand tôn kairôn meteinai as ‘partaking of handling properly the kairoi,’ i.e. the particular features of a situation that call for one sort of action rather than another. This case thus becomes like the ones we have just considered: kairos concerns particular features of a situation that call for expertise in deciding on the right sort of response in this particular situation – because theoretically different types of response could be used situations generally like this one.201

The final instance is in Oration III, On the Four; I mention it because of the combination, in a speech-related context, of stokhazesthai and kairos. In §53 of that oration Aristides contrasts true rhetoric with nonsense speeches: serious speeches are said to be concerned with stokhazesthai the opportunities and matters (kairoi kai pragmata).202 This seems a clear technical use of kairos, considered as an object of stokhazesthai. The use of this expression in one of Aristides’s other orations presses the question why this expression is absent from §§135-177 of Oration II. I will return to this question in III.ii.D.c below.

199 ‘…r9htorikh/n. kubernh/thj d’au0= p roslabw \n mo/rion tau/thj th=j duna/mew j, ei0dw \j kai\ fobei=n h9ni/ka kairo\j kai\ p a/lin qarrei=n p araskeua/zein, p o/sw | p rofe/rei p ro\j au0ta\ ta\ th=j kubernhtikh=j p ra/gmata;’ 200 §364: the navigator ‘ga\r oi0=den kai\ ou0 dei=tai tou= dida/contoj, tosou=to/n ge nou= mete/xw n, o3ti au0to\j tw =n me\n nautw =n e0stin a1rxw n, tw =n de\ e0mp leo/ntw n dia/konoj kai\ u9p hre/thj. [365] kai\ tw =n ge kairw =n tosou=ton au0tw =| me/testin, o3son toi=j e0gnw ko/sin p lei=n shmh=nai, kai\ nh\ D i/a o9rmou=ntaj e0p ’a0kth=j a0nasth=sai p rosa’gontoj tou= p neu/matoj: to\ de\ o9p o/te p lei=n a1meinon kai\ o9p o/te oi1koi me/nein kai\ o1p oi kai\ u9p e\r w 9=n p lei=n ou0de\n ou1te i0dei=n w 2n e9te/rou ma=llon dunato\j ou1te sumbouleu=sai ku/rioj.’ 201 Is it reading too much into this passage to regard the o9p o/te … o9p o/te … o1p oi … u9p e\r w 9=n as another Phaedrus echo? 202 ‘skeyw /meqa ga\r ti/ th=j lalia=j e0sti kai\ ti/ tw =n lo/gw n tw =n e0mfro/nw n. lalia=j me\n oi]mai dia\ kenh=j lhrei=n kai\ ei0j mhde\n de/on kai\ diatri/bein thna/llw j, lo/gw n de\ a0lhqinw =n tw =n kairw =n kai= tw =n p ragma/tw n stoxa/zesqai kai\ to\ p re/p on sw |/zein p antaxou=.’ Worth noting is the similarity between this passage and a fragment of Isocrates’s Panathenaicus §30 (in my note 100). Interestingly, a scholion to this Aristides passage notes the agreement between Aristides’s views as expressed here and, mentioned explicitly, Isocrates’s views. The scholion is accessible via Thesaurus Lingua Graeca, www.tlg.ucsi.edu, in the Scholia in Aristidem at §130 of Oration 46 (Jebb’s oration and paragraph numbers). Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 61

III.ii.D.b kairos – the concept The absence of ‘kairos’ from §§135-177 does not imply that kairos is not discussed. In this section I first indicate what kairos means generally and what it typically means in rhetoric contexts. I then argue that this concept has a significant role in Aristides’s argument, by discussing a few places that speak of kairos without mentioning ‘kairos’ and by relating these places to the theoretical framework Aristides uses and constructs in §§135-177.

kairos in general and in rhetoric In a dictionary ‘kairos’ has three main meanings: the right measure, the right time (to do something), or the right place.203 The word seems to refer, in regardless what dimension (quantity, time, space), to an opportune part among many non-opportune parts.204 In the later development of ancient Greek, ‘kairos’ came to have a predominantly temporal aspect. It is worth noting, incidentally, that ‘kairos’ can be the right measure, right time, or right place itself, as an aspect of a situation in which action occurs, but that ‘kairos’ can also refer to actions that respond to these situational demands: an act at the right time is a kairos act, because it observes the kairos.205 Two contexts in which ‘kairos’ was originally used are archery and weaving. In archery, ‘kairos’ could mean the mark, or an aperture through which the arrow must pass. In weaving, the kairos was the opening in a cloth being woven through which the thread must be drawn.206 From these uses kairos comes to be the absence of excess, harmony; in this sense it is used in sculpture and in moral contexts.207 In the fifth century kairos is included in the project of many Greeks to control their activities by turning them into a science. It appears, however, that kairos cannot be controlled by a fixed art (tetagmenê tekhnê, in Isocrates’s phrase), but must remain dominion of opinion (doxa).208 In rhetoric, kairos refers on one hand to the appropriate thing to say, especially given the circumstances. A kairos utterance is to the point. In Isocrates, as we have seen in II.i, the meaning of ‘kairos’ extends even to the internal organisation of a speech, indicating that it is well- proportioned and structured. In other cases, saying something kairos is saying something that matters, or that is brief.209 On the other hand kairoi can also be the features of a rhetorical situation that determine whether a speech will be kairos or not. This is clear in both Isocrates’s and Plato’s statements on observing or grasping the kairoi.210 These kairoi can have a temporal aspect: some moments are suited to say particular things; once these kairoi have passed, it is too late – the most distinctive aspect of kairoi may well be that one can miss them, and then know full well that one has missed them.211 However, such temporal kairoi are not the only aspects of a rhetorical situation. kairoi may also be the emotional states of one’s audience, which must be adapted to and possibly offer unexpected opportunities; or the current political position of the

203 So in LSJ. 204 In ‘kairo/j’-studies Hesiod’s Op. 694: ‘me/tra fula/ssesqai: kairo\j d’e0p i\ p a=sin a1ristoj’ is justly popular: following a warning to avoid overloading one’s wagon, it demonstrates that ‘kairo/j’ can be entirely empty of temporal meaning. In the New Testament, in contrast, it is always temporal (see Sipiora 2002b). See for an overview of the classical uses of ‘kairo/j’ grounded in proper textual analysis Race 1981. 205 This ambiguity also burdens the uses of ‘kairo/j’ in this paper. 206 White 1987: 13, cited in Sipiora 2002a: 17. 207 Bons 1996: 66. 208 Bons 1996: 72-5. See for Isocrates’s tetagme/nh te/xnh my note 99 in II.i above. Cf. Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s report about Gorgias that kairo/j is not e0p isth/mh| but do/ch |(On literary composition 12,5). 209 For instances see Race 1981: 200-5. 210 Phaedrus 272a3-6, Against the Sophists §17. 211 This is vividly portrayed in the ancient representation of kairoi as a winged boy with a bald back of his head; one cannot grasp him by the hairs. The picture is printed in, among other places, in Sipiora and Baumlin 2002: xii. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 62 city; or indeed any concrete feature of the matter at hand that makes it different from previous cases and will influence the way the audience receives one’s words.

kairos in the argument Two passages speak directly of kairos; two more passages do involve kairos, but not in such a way that we can base the conclusion that kairos is present in our section on them alone. More importantly, however, the concept of kairos is bound up with what we identified as the main reasons why rhetoric cannot employ epistasthai, but must resort to stokhazesthai.

One clear mention of the kairoi is in the section on navigation. Aristides observes that a navigator needs something over and above his training (paideia) in order to successfully fulfil his function, to successfully achieve the aim of his art. This something extra, it be noted, is therefore central to the art of navigation. This aim is to save people (N1), which is achieved in the perfect handling of present circumstances (N2: ‘sôzei hois tithetai to paron’). These present circumstances, it may be clear, are the very same things called kairoi in much other ancient rhetorical (and other) theory.212 The kairoi require a navigator who has been schooled in life, not only in school. The things present at each occasion require, in addition to textbook knowledge and fluency in nautic methods, the ability to judge what is needed at that very moment. The second clear case of kairoi is in the analogy of the doctor. Throughout this analogy the emphasis on situation, experience and probability has already made clear that the kairoi are on Aristides’s mind, but this is made explicit – albeit without use of the word – in the situation sketched in §155: ‘But indeed the art commands [the doctor] to treat whoever he has just met and is in need of treatment, also if someone has just come from far away.’213 Immediate treatment is required, so nothing else is left available but stokhazesthai, as Aristides adds. The doctor must treat this random person, relying on his experience, judging what treatment he should administer from probabilities. The crucial time of treatment and the right treatment to be given are evident instances of kairos. We may note that kairos is indeed used with high frequency in the Hippocratic corpus for precisely these aspects of medicine: the crucial time for interference and the rightness of the medicine to be administered (the consequences of missing the kairos can be lethal in cases like this one).214 These two cases explicitly involve kairos; furthermore, the kairoi are decisively present, constituting the need for stokhazesthai and causing the inadequacy of (human) episthastai. I mention two more cases of kairos that are not, unlike the above, in themselves sufficient to show that kairoi are on Aristides’s mind, but that do involve them in a significant way. Firstly, Aristides argues that navigation cannot abide by general maxims, but must stokhazesthai the things for every part (‘ta epi merous’, N4). The attitude of a navigator cannot be of a bookkeeper of the future, neatly arranging all necessary operations according to the time they should be undertaken. A navigator depends on what the future will bring, in order to decide in every situation what is the right thing to do and what is the right moment to act. Secondly, a painter mixes colours to hit upon the right colour, matching the colour of the original in order to make his painting a perfect mimesis of the original. This process significantly involves a balance between different elements. The right colour is like a tightrope: excess on any of two sides is fatal. Mixing colours, then,

212 We may (and will, in III.iii) compare Isocrates’s division between the two stages of rhetorical education. 213 ‘a0lla\ mh\n to/n ge suntuxo/nta kai\ dehqe/nta keleu/ei qerap eu/ein h9 te/xnh, ka2n e0k p era/tw n h3kh| tij a0rti/w j. [§156] T i/ ou]n dei= loip o\n h2 stoxa/zesqai;’. 214 See the useful article of Eskin 2002, especially p. 103 (: most instances of kairo/j in the Hippocratic corpus concern the right time for treatment). The Hippocratic Places of Man contrasts medicine to writing and argues in the same way we have seen Isocrates argue: writing is always the same, but medicine must do one thing at one kairo/j and another at another kairo/j (ibid.: 108). Also worth noting is the combination ‘kairo/j’-‘p ei/ra’ in the Aphorisms (ibid.: 99). Interestingly in relation to the situation mentioned in the text, there can also be an absence of kairo/j to escape treating a patient, as well as a kairo/j of treating a stranger as an opportunity to show hospitability/charity (ibid.: 105). Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 63 involves kairos both as the right moment in the mixing process when the right colour is reached, and as the right measure of constituent elements.215

The presence of kairos in §§135-177 is not, however, restricted to the passages adduced here; indeed, these passages bring out a more pervasive role for kairos in the argument. kairoi are involved in the unknowability of the future and the uniqueness of particulars, the reason why rhetoric – and the other arts – must rely on stokhazesthai. kairoi are at stake when unknown particulars must be handled and responded to with an eye to the near future. Rhetoric in particular concerns that which is impending – not so much an impending war or execution that a speech seeks to address, but the immediate response of the audience to one’s words. Words, for instance, can in such situations be considered particulars; the rhetor does not know them completely, especially as he does not know what they will do just after he has released them. A significant aspect of kairos is that one cannot predict its occurrence from a safe distance and prepare a kairos response when one is still in the harbour, so to speak. One must be in the situation of action for the kairoi to be apparent. This fact implies the need for proper judgment on the part of the artist, the need for successful stokhazesthai. We saw in III.ii.C.d that the logos that is the author, means and aim of stokhazesthai is situation-specific; one must, in other words, reckon with kairos to reach logos. Similarly, as I noted in III.ii.B.d, kairos is also connected to eikos. A perfect truth-likeness is reached only when the kairoi are perceived and accounted for, in word or deed. The example of mixing colours provides a good illustration of the way in which eikos depends on kairos: missing the right moment or the right proportion implies that the product of the painter is not eikos, but in fact unlike the original. It emerges, then, that the main aspects of a rhetorical situation that Aristides points to as the reason why rhetoric uses stokhazesthai can be alternatively described as the kairoi of that situation – or at least the kairoi are an essential element of them.

III.ii.D.c kairos – meaning of absence We have seen that Aristides uses ‘kairos’ both as meaning ‘a time of …’ generally and as referring to the features of a situation that give this situation its particular character and that call for expert handling. We found the latter meaning mostly, though not exclusively, in contexts that echo the Phaedrus. We have also seen that Aristides’s argument involves kairos in a fundamental way. The pressing question that this conclusion raises is why Aristides does not use ‘kairos’ in §§135-177, given that he does use the word with the rhetorically technical meaning that the word has in Plato. We have also seen in part II that the kairoi are not present in the Gorgias and not properly integrated in the account of the Phaedrus, in short, that the kairoi seem at heart incompatible with Plato’s rhetorical system. Why then does Aristides not use the advantage that employment of the word kairos would offer him? It is clear that Aristides was able to describe the use of kairos and its centrality in the art of rhetoric without using ‘kairos’. His motivation to do so is open to speculation, but to little more than that. It may be that Aristides wanted to show that he could talk about kairos without saying ‘kairos’. It may be that his sophisticated refutation of Plato attacked what second-century rhetors generally acknowledged to be the weak point of Plato’s discussion of rhetoric, the inevitability of kairoi in rhetorical practice, without explicitly referring to that weak point. Perhaps other motivations are imaginable. It seems most reasonable, however, to leave Aristides’s motive aside, and to tentatively conclude that in fact ‘kairos’ was not that central and technical a rhetorical term in the second century – and if so, probably before as well – as we might have thought. Aristides’s argument uses key terms of rhetorical theory (logos, eikos) and a key contrast in discussions about the status

215 Note that in this sense kairo/j and lo/goj can be almost identical. In the Hippocratic corpus, kairo/j can also be the right proportion in mixing medicine (ibid.: 103). Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 64 of rhetoric (stokhazesthai – epistasthai) and connects kairos in a significant way both to these key terms and to this key contrast. That he was able to do so without mentioning ‘kairos’ suggests that ‘kairos’ was not an indispensable term in a theoretical treatment of the art of rhetoric. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 65

III.iii The View

In this section I recapitulate the main conclusions of the previous sections, while aiming to provide a more rounded overall picture of the view on rhetoric as we have seen it being developed in §§135-77. Having done this, we can consider how this view relates to the views of Isocrates and, particularly, Plato.

III.iii.A RHETORIC AS STROKE OF LUCK

The view on rhetoric that we have been analysing has four main elements, which we may characterise as rhetoric’s approach, specificity, harmony, and infallibility. Rhetoric’s approach to the things it must do, the way it handles its affairs, is indeed an approach. Aristides regards both eikazein and stokhazesthai as the successful completion of an approximating movement towards the object of eikazein and stokhazesthai, also described as the truth. This object constitutes both the measure by means of which the success of stokhazesthai is determined and the target which stokhazesthai aims for. The concrete situation at hand, then, constitutes the criterion of success for the rhetor. One way in which this is elaborated is the quest for likeness between a particular case with which one must deal and general cases which one knows about through education or experience. Modifying the approach of the doctor, we can provide the following scheme for the activity of Aristides’s rhetor, who has learned the Platonic types of speech and character:

„likeness„ Circumstance CParticular CU1, CU2… CUx, CUx+1 … Speech SParticular SU1, SU2… SUx, SUx+1 … ‰likeness‰

In this scheme, ‘circumstance’ is the whole of the constitution of one’s audience, the mood of the day, recent events, etcetera, which the rhetor is familiar with after having completed the training programme prescribed in the Phaedrus. Of all universal types of circumstance (CUn), this rhetor knows what universal type of speech (SUn) is required. His activity, therefore, is eikazein: the inference from comparison what is applicable in the present case. As noted in the section on medicine, complete likeness between general and particular is not obtained, as each particular is unique. Stokhazesthai/eikazein is therefore both the careful approach to truth based on comparison and the bold conjecture in the face of unknown items and situations.

Rhetoric’s specificity concerns this very uniqueness of particular situations. General types do not correctly describe the particular; knowledge of general types is insufficient for successful artistry. The uniqueness of particulars – the kairoi – and, closely connected to it, the uncertainty of the impending future, imply that human knowledge, which is necessarily of general types, is not worth the name knowledge. Unlike the gods, human knowers are at a loss when faced with kairoi, because kairoi call for something extra in the artist. This extra is stokhazesthai/eikazein, the right response, from a position of ignorance, to the kairoi of a situation, which demand appropriate and timely action.

The right response to kairos establishes a harmony in two ways. Firstly, successful stokhazesthai – the only type properly so called – operates via the reasoning principle logos, which ensures that the logos of the product of stokhazesthai/eikazein agrees with the logos of the situation in which the rhetor must act. The same thing, stated vice versa, is that the inner logos of the object Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 66 of stokhazesthai is correctly gauged by the logos of the rhetor, so that the inner logos is expressed in the logos of the product, the speech. Secondly, a harmony is established between three key terms of rhetoric: the kairos response to a situation corresponds to the truth, is eikos, in expressing the logos of the situation. Nor is this a happy coincidence of words only: stokhazesthai proper achieves the unity of the correctness of action (kairos) with the judgment of the actor (eikos) and the true nature of the object of action (logos).

The fourth element of this view on rhetoric is the infallibility of rhetoric. Aristides takes from Plato the idea that stokhazesthai is the essential ingredient of the method of rhetoric. In designating logos as the means of stokhazesthai, he makes stokhazesthai, hence rhetoric, infallible; for logos never fails. The inclusion of logos in the procedure of stokhazesthai makes stokhazesthai/eikazein a proper candidate for art-status, for art (tekhnê) must be infallible in Plato’s view (reiterated once more by Aristides in §251). In this understanding of stokhazesthai, it is no exaggeration to state, as Aristides does (A3), that logos is the author of stokhazesthai. Not only does logos make stokhazesthai, as an activity, possible, but logos is also the only access of humans to the act of stokhazesthai, which governs the actions and words of the rhetor who would stokhazesthai – either he proceeds via logos, or he stokhazetai not at all. Correspondingly to the infallibility of stokhazesthai/eikazein, the product of this activity, eikos, is perfectly eikos: it is probable because it is verisimile, like the truth. Nevertheless eikos is all humans can reach, because humans do not have knowledge that something is the truth. Aristides remains, in other words, in the world of images; his rhetor is an image-maker, who elevates, as it were (cf. anapherein), his eikôn to the truly eikos. This infallibility of rhetoric entails, in Aristides’s view, a separation between art and artist. It is very well possible for an artist to be fallible; in fact, insofar all artists are human, all artists are fallible. Aristides’s position combines infallibility of art with fallibility of artist. Consequently, artists qua person are only incidentally artists qua artist, i.e. they only incidentally partake of art. Successful stokhazesthai – again, the only type worth the name – is only incidentally the share of humans. This incidental nature does not say anything about frequency, however; some artists are more often artist than others, but no one has guarantee of success.

In addition to these four elements of the view on rhetoric of §§135-77, two other conclusions must be mentioned here. Firstly, it is worth repeating that Aristides’s argument involves kairos in a fundamental way, but that he never in this passage uses ‘kairos’ in the pertinent technical way. As noted in III.ii.D, this fact calls into question the centrality of ‘kairos’ as a term of ancient rhetorical theory.

Secondly, I have repeatedly used the qualification ‘virtuoso’ for moves in or parts of Aristides’s oration. This virtuosity shows in various aspects. A first aspect is Aristides’s manoeuvring between Platonic and Isocratean theoretical positions. For this I refer to the next section. Furthermore, Aristides’s treatment of Plato specifically balances between insolence and worship. To the extent the reader is convinced, by the end of the treatise, that Plato is indeed in agreement with the vision of rhetoric Aristides has unfolded, Aristides’s skill has saved Plato for his cause. A second aspect that shows Aristides’s virtuosity is the almost playful use of theoretically significant words, and particularly the way Aristides draws attention to a particular meaning of a word used in rhetorical theory or in Plato’s attack. The most significant instance of such a word is ‘stokhazesthai’. Expand. A similar treatment is applied to ‘eikazein’. Expand. This reinterpretation of eikazein places ‘eikos’ in a different light. Finally, we may regard as virtuoso the avoidance of ‘kairos’ in an argument that gives pride of place to kairoi. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 67

Thirdly, the way Aristides imitates Plato in this treatise is also highly skilful. On the assumption that Plato’s ‘stokhazesthai’ parodies a Gorgianic or an Isocratean ‘doxazesthai’, Aristides’s reinterpretation of ‘stokhazesthai’ imitates that parody. The double treatment of rhetoric as a divine gift and as an art imitates that same approach in the Phaedrus.

III.iii.B ARISTIDES AND ISOCRATES AND PLATO

In a sense, Isocrates and Aristides fight the same battle, albeit with more than five hundred years between them. Their equal insistence on the virtuousness of the real – ideal – rhetor does therefore not come as a surprise. In relation to §§135-77, the central point of agreement between Aristides and Isocrates is their view of the rhetor as a judgment-able soul. Aristides expresses this by ‘stokhazesthai’ because Plato did so, while Isocrates writes ‘doxastikês’. Aristides follows Isocrates in regarding this the central activity of the rhetor because he agrees with Isocrates – defending this Isocratean viewpoint against Plato, as Boulanger has well seen – that epistêmê is not humanly obtainable. The epistemic playground of humans is restricted to doxa.216 While Aristides agrees with Isocrates that humans must make do with stokhazesthai, he disagrees about the status of art, and of rhetoric as an art. Isocrates is content to call those people wise who hit upon the best ‘in most cases’,217 but Aristides insists that an art does not fail. His inclusion of logos in stokhazesthai has assured this infallibility. Aristides’s position here disagrees also with other prominent ancient views. Some ancients even explicitly exclude the success from the art. Quintillian insists that rhetoric does not depend on its effect, in response to the charge that rhetoric does not have a clear aim (II.17.22-6). Quintillian says a navigator may remain proud of his acts in accordance with his art, even if a storm throws him off course; Aristides, however, sets as the aim of the art of navigation the (successful!) saving of ship or crew from the sea (N1). A doctor, likewise, fulfils his art, in Quintillians view, even if something unexpected happens that makes the expected result not happen. It is significant, by the way, that it is in the exclusion of kairos that Quintillian differs from Aristides and that this exclusion drives him to the acceptance of unsuccessful treatments as still in accordance with the art. The same position is represented in Aristotle’s famous definition of rhetoric.218 An important notion in Isocrates’s thought is the trias paedagogica (nature, learning, practice), and the way kairoi heighten the significance of the last stage, practice. Incidental passages reveal agreement with this view on Aristides’s part (see Pa5b), but the theory more generally underlies much of Aristides’s argument. The emphasis on the insufficiency of learning, owing to the prevalence of kairoi in rhetorical situations, is an Isocratean notion that Aristides puts to significant use in his refutation of Plato.

Perhaps the main point of agreement between Aristides and Plato results from the very fact that Aristides sets out to refute Plato: Aristides accepts Plato’s terminology and conceptual demands. The essential presence of logos in art, the infallibility demand on art, the opposition between stokhazesthai and epistêmê, these conditions of the argument Aristides acknowledges for the sake of his polemic. As noted, Aristides sides with Isocrates, against Plato, about the inattainability of knowledge. Only the gods know the future, is Aristides’s conviction; therefore Platonic

216 Other than ei0ko/j – even that only once – Aristides does not use a word for the product of stoxa/zesqai or ei0ka/zein. If he had, do/ca would have been a good candidate, qua content. Boulanger discusses Aristides and Isocrates at 215n.1. 217 See notes 95, 96. 218 Rhetoric 1355b25-6. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 68 knowledge is an unfair demand for artists. As also noted, Aristides subsequently parts company with Isocrates about the perfection Aristides demands of art. In Aristides’s view, a rhetor, or any artist, shares in logos only insofar he is successful. Correspondingly, and in agreement with Aristides’s statements, stokhazesthai and eikazein describe the activity of an artist only when he is successful; there is no failed stokhazesthai or eikazein. This is a high standard, and a hard condition; this Aristides shares with Plato. However, in Aristides’s construal it is possible for human beings to share in art, albeit intermittently: whenever an artist does his job just right, if only for a few seconds in a speech or in sculpting, he is properly called an artist. In Plato’s construal, however, no man is ever an artist. Only the gods possess epistêmê, which guarantees success at all times; only the gods are Platonic artists. One might object to Aristides’s inclusion of logos in stokhazesthai, noting that he does not provide a conclusive argument for that move. Aristides might respond that Plato does not do so either; that it is the experience of all people that rhetors do use logos and that the onus is on Plato to show that they do not; or that it is clear that the other arts use both stokhazesthai and logos, so that this assertion is justified in the case of rhetoric as well. Whatever the respective arguments on this inclusion, however, it is his conception of rhetoric as a whole that Aristides advances against Plato. The appeal of a view of a perfectionist art without perfect artists is brought to the fore against a perfectionist view of both art and artist.

What stands out in Aristides’s oration is the skilful way in which positions normally opposite are combined. Aristides achieves, in effect, a synthesis between the positions of Isocrates and Plato. He agrees with Plato that rhetoric stokhazetai but denies that therefore rhetoric is not an art. He agrees with Isocrates that rhetoric deals with kairoi, but denies that an art that deals with kairos must be fallible. He agrees with Plato that art must work with logos, but, dramatically, denies that logos can come only with epistêmê. He agrees with Isocrates against Plato that epistêmê is not humanly possible, but concurs with Plato, against Isocrates, that art is infallible. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 69

Conclusions

Aristides combats Plato with a theory of rhetoric that is in many respects like the theory it aims to refute, most notably in the belief that rhetoric, as an art, never fails. However, Aristides enlists kairos, the weak point of the Platonic, epistêmê-based view of rhetoric, to drive a wedge between epistêmê and logos. Discarding the one as incompatible with human capacity, but transforming the other as instrument, no longer of knowledge, but of stokhazesthai, Aristides arrives at a view that rhetoric is infallible precisely in its correct handling of these kairoi. In the specific situations a rhetor must handle kairos is respected when the logos of that situation corresponds with the logos of the speech, so that this speech is a true product of eikazein, an eikos which is not merely probable over a whole range of cases, but resembles the truth to the highest degree in each particular situation. The ease with which Aristides combines theoretical notions and navigates between Isocratean and Platonic positions shows the dexterity of a highly educated rhetor. It is not incompatible with an appreciation for the theoretical content of Aristides’s position to appreciate this rhetorical mastery of the word. Aelius Aristides: A View On Rhetoric Page 70

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