Chapter Five

chapter five STRATEGIES OF PERSUASION IN SOLON’S ELEGIES Maria Noussia As recent works on early or “pre-rhetorical”/“pre-conceptual” rhetoric have shown,1 there is good reason to believe that a practical under- standing of the means of persuasion existed long before the advent of formal rhetoric in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BC. In this paper I will explore the concept of “pre-rhetorical rhetoric” in the elegies of Solon.2 There is still no widespread recognition of the rhetorical dimension of Solon’s poetry, despite a certain number of recent studies.3 In order to uncover Solon’s argumentative operation and strategies of persuasion I will rely heavily on Aristotle (and to a much lesser degree, on the late fourth century BC treatise On Rhetoric dedicated to Alexander, which has been transmitted among Aristotle’s works but is generally attributed to the sophist Anaximenes of Lampsacus, and which cen- tres on quick, concise instruction about convincing an audience). As a systematic tract, Aristotle’s Rhetoric allows us to identify a number of effects and devices in earlier texts, even if the writers of those texts did not use Aristotle’s terminology or method of reasoning, and even if not everything is explicable in Aristotle’s terms. Of course Aristotle’s 1 E.g. Walker (2000); Karp (1977); Enos (1993); Cole (1991); Kennedy (1963) 26–51. There is still, however, no textbook on “pre-rhetorical” rhetoric. I am most grateful to C. Carey, M. Fantuzzi, R. Hunter and M. Vetta for stimulating criticism of an earlier draft of this paper as well as to the organizers and the participants of the Nijmegen Conference for much help and criticism before, during and since that occasion. Warm thanks are also due to J. Hanink for improving the English of the text. 2 The paper focuses exclusively on the elegiac fragments and on the strategies which concern the advertisement of Solon’s political project; the iambics which centre on Solon’s apology, and involve therefore different strategies, are not discussed here. 3 Adkins (1985) 31 legitimized a rhetorical approach to the body of the early elegiac poetry with the following phrase: ‘That the last of the poets discussed in this book laid down his pen more than a generation before the appearance of the first rhetorical handbook is irrelevant to the existence in their works either of general rhetorical skills or of particular rhetorical figures. There are rhetorical figures in Homer. … Rhetorical figures antedate rhetorical theorists as grammar antedates grammarians’. Walker (2000) has some pages on Solon (250–273). As far as I know, the only other works on Solon’s rhetoric are two articles by Magurano (1992)and(1999), which are not concerned with the elegiac fragments. strategies of persuasion in solon’s elegies 135 (or Anaximenes’) texts systematize the practice of rhetoric in fourth- century Greece, but this fourth-century practice was very much the result of the practices of archaic Greece; in any case they certainly give us a glimpse of how later Greeks might have evaluated what they encountered in Solon (or, for that matter, in other discourse practices of archaic Greek society). I am not, however, arguing what no one who has read e.g. the lliad and Odyssey could possibly doubt, i.e. that archaic poets knew and employed ‘strategies of persuasion’; nor am I arguing that in Solon we encounter strategies that cannot be found elsewhere in other elegiac poetry. What I wish to emphasise, instead, is the value of treating Solon’s text as rhetorical. The paper is divided in two main sections. The first addresses Solon’s image in secondary sources which (anachronistically) present him as an Athenian rhêtôr who debates proposals and argues cases in public.4 The second closely examines the “pre- or proto-rhetorical” technique of Solon’s argumentative elegies. The secondary sources on Solon as rhêtôr The role that classical Athens ascribed to Solon in the history of rhetorical activity is splendidly illustrated by Plutarch’s account of the Spar- tan arbitration between Athens and Megara over the island of Salamis. According to that account (Solon 10), during the Spartan arbitration Solon persuasively argued the Athenian claim to the island by citing Homer: at the arbitration he read aloud two verses from the Catalogue of Ships (Il. 2.557–558) where it was said that Ajax led twelve ships from Salamis to Troy, and stationed them where the Athenian forces were based. Solon is also reported to have used another argument from “authority”, namely a Delphic oracle that called Salamis ‘Ionian’.5 ThesecondverseoftheIliad-couplet which mentioned the Athenians prompted debate already in antiquity, and was even athetised as inter- polation by the Athenians or by Solon himself. With the Delphic oracle, the Iliad-couplet, and another, quite different sort of argument that 4 On the terms rhêtôr, rhêtoreia see the discussion by Walker (2000) 30–41 with bibliography. 5 As David (1985) 10 notes: ‘Solon must have solicited the support of the Pythian Apollo by asking him the proper question’. On the Delphic oracle see also Plato, Leg. 738C, 914 A, and Higbie (2004) 301–303. On the whole episode cf. also Higbie (1997)..

Load more