The Art of Rhetoric · Part 14 · Rhetoric in practice · C1–C2
Reading a Speech Rhetorically
Part 14 of The Art of Rhetoric: everything in this section becomes a way of reading. Two funeral speeches, two thousand three hundred years apart. The language of analysis (the speaker appeals to…, this suggests that…, by contrasting X with Y…, the repetition of… emphasises…, what is left out is…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Now we learn to read them. Every day, someone is trying to persuade you: in the agora, in the law court, in a letter, in a song. A good reader can see how it is done.
And then decide for yourself whether to be persuaded.
To read a speech rhetorically, ask the questions this section has taught. Who is speaking, to whom, when, and why? What kind of speech is it: advice about the future, judgement about the past, or praise and blame in the present?
Which appeals does it use: the speaker’s character (ethos), the audience’s feelings (pathos), the argument (logos)? How is it arranged? What style does it choose, and which figures: metaphors, antitheses, patterns of three?
And the hardest question of all: what is left out? Every speech chooses what to say, and so it chooses what not to say. We shall read two speeches given at public funerals in time of war: one from Athens in 431 BCE, and one from America in 1863. One warning first: the Athenian speech comes to us through the historian Thucydides, who says openly that he wrote the speeches in his history himself, keeping as close as he could…
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