Trivium Home School · Language Games
The third art of the trivium: how to persuade honestly. Aristotle’s three means of persuasion, the three kinds of speech, and the five tasks of the speaker, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria in the Library of Alexandria, and the English that every part of a speech needs.
The section follows Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the rhetoric chapter of Sister Miriam Joseph’s The Trivium, in our own words and examples, with comparisons from China, India and Egypt. It picks up where the fallacies of The Art of Logic leave off.
What rhetoric is, and what it is not.
Gorgias, Plato and Aristotle: is rhetoric the art of speaking well, or of flattery?
The speaker, the audience and the argument.
Good sense, good character and goodwill: why we believe some speakers more than others.
When emotion fits the facts, and when it bends the ruler: the Mytilene debate.
The enthymeme and the example: Stesichorus’ horse and Aesop’s fox.
The future, the past and the present.
Advice to an assembly: Themistocles, the silver of Laurion and the wooden wall.
Accusation and defence: Lysias’ disabled man, and what counts as evidence.
Honest praise and flattery: Gorgias defends Helen.
The speaker’s five tasks, from finding the arguments to delivering them.
Where arguments live: Cicero writes his Topics from memory at sea.
“How long, Catiline…?”: Cicero breaks the rules, and the Eloquent Peasant.
Be clear, be fitting: Lysias, who made every client sound like himself, and the Egyptian vizier Ptahhotep. Formal and informal register.
Metaphor, metonymy, irony, hyperbole and litotes: Pericles and “the spring taken out of the year”.
Anaphora, antithesis, chiasmus and the rule of three: Caesar’s “I came, I saw, I conquered” and the Book of Proverbs. Parallel structure.
Simonides and the memory palace, and Demosthenes with pebbles in his mouth: delivery, delivery, delivery. Rhythm, stress and pausing.
Reading speeches, and making your own.
Pericles’ Funeral Oration beside Lincoln at Gettysburg: what each says, how, and what each leaves out. The language of analysis.
All five canons together: Hortensia in the Roman Forum, and Demetria before the city council.