The Art of Rhetoric · Part 5 · The three kinds of speech · B2–C1
Deliberative Speech: The Future and the Advantageous
Part 5 of The Art of Rhetoric: Aristotle divided speeches into three kinds by their listeners and their time. The first, deliberative speech, advises an assembly about the future: what will help, and what will harm. Modals and phrases of advice (should, ought to, had better, should have, it would be wise to, I would advise, if I were you), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Every speech, says Aristotle, has a listener who must decide something.
What to do, in an assembly. What happened, in a court. Or whom to praise, at a festival or a funeral.
Exactly. Tonight, the future: deliberative speech.
Aristotle says that the deliberative speaker either urges an assembly to do something or warns it not to. His time is the future, and his question is what is advantageous and what is harmful. Nobody deliberates about the past, which cannot be changed, or about things that happen by necessity.
The main subjects, he says, are five: money (the city’s income and spending), war and peace, the defence of the country, food supplies, and laws. A good adviser must know the facts: how much the city has, how strong its army is, and where its grain comes from. Advice without facts is only noise.
The story below comes from the historian Herodotus, who wrote about fifty years after the events. Some of the details, like the exact words of the oracle, may have been shaped by what happened afterwards.
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