Rhetoric

What It Is

Three books, about two hundred pages, from roughly 330 BC. Aristotle defines rhetoric as the ability to see, in any situation, the available means of persuasion, and then catalogues them with the same cold thoroughness he brought to the anatomy of shellfish.

Like the Ethics and the Politics, this is lecture material rather than a polished book: terse, ordered, without charm. Book 1 covers the three kinds of public speech and the arguments proper to each. Book 2 is about the audience and its emotions. Book 3 is on style and arrangement.

Its context is a city where every free man argued in public, and where a bad speech in court could cost you your property or your life. Rhetoric was not a soft skill in Athens; it was the operating system.

Why It Matters

Every serious account of persuasion since is a gloss on this book. Cicero and Quintilian built Roman education on it, and it was one of the three pillars of the medieval curriculum. The terms in which we still discuss influence come from Book 1, and you will recognise them the moment you meet them.

Plato had argued in the Gorgias that rhetoric was a knack for flattery, morally worthless, the cookery of the soul. Aristotle's reply is the calm one: persuasion is a fact of collective life, true things do not defend themselves, and a good man who cannot make a case is of no use to anybody. He then teaches the techniques to whoever is reading, including the people who will misuse them, and his reason, that a citizen who does not understand persuasion is at the mercy of those who do, is the best defence of the study anyone has made.

Book 2 is the reason to read it now. It is the earliest systematic psychology of the emotions and still one of the sharpest: what precisely makes a person angry, what conditions leave them open to fear, why pity requires you to believe the same thing could happen to you. Read it and the machinery of a political campaign or an advertisement becomes visible.

Before You Read

Eight to ten hours. The prose is dry and the structure is a list, which makes this the most skimmable Aristotle and the most immediately useful.

You do not need to read it front to back. The middle of Book 1, cataloguing the topics available in deliberative, forensic and ceremonial speech, reads exactly like the catalogue it is. Move through it and come back when you have a speech to write.

Which Translation to Read

• George A. Kennedy (Oxford University Press, second edition 2007), published as On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse — recommended. The most faithful English version and the most usable. Kennedy does what no other translator does: he divides the text into sections, prefaces each with a heading and a summary, and explains the technical vocabulary as it arrives instead of smoothing it away. For a book most people consult as much as read, that is right. The cost: it is frankly a textbook. The headings interrupt, and the English is functional rather than pleasurable. View on Amazon →
• Robin Waterfield, with introduction and notes by Harvey Yunis (Oxford World's Classics, 2018), published as The Art of Rhetoric. The most readable continuous text, and Yunis is superb on why the Rhetoric mattered in Athens and why it still does. Take it if you want to read the book rather than use it. The cost: no section summaries, so a first-time reader can lose the thread of a long list.
• C. D. C. Reeve (Hackett, 2018). The philosophers' edition, tying the Rhetoric to Aristotle's logic, psychology and ethics through heavy annotation. The right one if you are reading the corpus as a system. The cost: the notes dominate, and they assume you care about Aristotle in general rather than persuasion in particular.

Take Kennedy. It is the version that will still be on your desk in a year. Take Waterfield for a straight read, Reeve if you are working through Aristotle whole. The free 1924 Rhys Roberts translation is everywhere online and shows its age.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it with something in front of you: a speech, a campaign advertisement, a fundraising email, a memo from your own organisation. Aristotle's categories are diagnostic tools, and they sharpen only when you use them on live material.

Take the emotions in Book 2 one at a time and stop after each. Ask when you were last made to feel that, and by whom, and how.

Read the introduction first: Kennedy's is orientation rather than commentary, and it will save you an hour of confusion over the technical terms.

The commonest mistake is to read this as a book of tricks. It is the clearest account ever written of how human beings are actually moved, and the first thing it changes is not how you speak but how you listen.