The Art of Rhetoric · Part 2 · The three means of persuasion · B2–C1
Ethos: The Character of the Speaker
Part 2 of The Art of Rhetoric: we believe good people more readily, and on almost every subject. Aristotle names three things that make a speaker worth trusting: good sense, good character and goodwill. The language of trust and credibility (trust, take someone’s word for it, credible, reliable, have a reputation for), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Aristotle names three means of persuasion. Tonight, the first: ethos.
The character of the speaker, as the audience sees it. Would you buy a horse from a man you did not trust?
Aristotle wrote that we believe good people more fully and more readily than others, on almost every subject, and completely when certainty is impossible. He thought that the speaker’s character was perhaps the most powerful means of persuasion of all.
He named three things that make an audience trust a speaker: phronesis, practical wisdom or good sense; arete, virtue or good character; and eunoia, goodwill towards the audience. A speaker may be wise and good, but if he does not care about us, he may not tell us the best course. Aristotle added something surprising: the trust should be created by the speech itself, not by what the audience thought of the speaker beforehand.
In Rome, Cato the Elder, who died in 149 BCE, defined the orator as “a good man skilled in speaking”. Things to come: about a century after Philo, the Roman teacher Quintilian will build his great work on the training of orators around that phrase.
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