Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity Book

Walker begins his book by reworking conventional histories of rhetoric, suggesting "that 'rhetoric' (as broadly conceived in the sophistic/Isocratean tradition) does not depend on, rise, or fall with democratic institutions ... rather, 'rhetoric' (so conceived) may be democracy's condition of possibility" (x). His history also troubles the boundary dividing "poetry" from "rhetoric," with Walker arguing that "epideiktikon" is not a hypertrophied rhetoric derived from "pragmatikon," but that the latter "depends on and appeals to the beliefs/desires that epideictic cultivates" (10). Tracing a genealogy that begins with Hesiod, Walker claims "Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle all agree" that just eloquence "arises from a logon techne" based on an epideictic paradigm (41). Given these arguments, the rhetorical "peaks" achieved during the lifetimes of Demosthenes and Cicero appear not as the ideal results of democratic contexts, but "product[s] of ... dysfunctional sociopolitical conditions" necessitating dramatic rhetorical acts in political arenas (108). The so-called excesses of the traditionally denigrated "Second Sophistic," meanwhile, are products of the relatively stable political conditions and concept of "justice" afforded by imperial rule, with rhetoric as an "implicitly democratizing discourse art that mediates between the sovereign power and public judgment" (133). Extending his case for a rhetorical poetics, Walker positions the oft-devalued genre of "lyric" poetry as particularly rhetorical, considering Theognis, Pindar, Alcaeus, Solon, and Sappho as poets who "make the case for a minority position ... by ... connecting the 'new' or unconventional position ... to an existing set of values" (164). Their poems function rhetorically, each one culminating with an enthymematic "structural/stylistic turn that caps an exetasis" (184). Unfortunately, in a tradition Walker traces from Aristotle through "Plutarch," Augustine, and Sidney, poetry has largely been co-opted for aristocratic, "grammatical" ends that eschew agonism and, at best, "cleverly tell the knowing what they know and think already is" (330).