Socrates' Versatile Rhetoric and the Soul of the Crowd
Journal
Rhetorica - A Journal of the History of Rhetoric
ISSN
0734-8584
1533-8541
Publisher
University of California Press
Date Issued
2020
Author(s)
Lévystone, David
Type
Resource Types::text::journal::journal article
Abstract
In Plato's early dialogues, the impossibility of talking to the crowd appears as a constitutive element of the opposition between rhetoric and dialectic and raises the understudied question of the role of the audience in Socratic thought. However, Xenophon's Socrates constantly identifies public and private speech. But this likening is also found in the Alcibiades Major, which gives a key to understand the true meaning of this assimilation: one can convince an audience, by talking to each individual in the crowd. The need to address each one implies an adaptation of language that can be found in the texts of different disciples of Socrates. The rhetorical aspects of the Phaedrus' psychagogia should then be understood, not as a new Platonic concept which allows the good orator to address the many, but rather as a new formulation of a well-known and shared Socratic ideal. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.
License
Acceso Abierto
How to cite
Lévystone, D. (2020). Socrates’ Versatile Rhetoric and the Soul of the Crowd. In Rhetorica (Vol. 38, Issue 2, pp. 135–155). Project MUSE. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.135