Reply #17: win the soul by discourse? [View All]

[stillcool]

Quintilian (95 CE)
I cannot imagine how the founders of cities would have made a homeless multitude come together to form a people, had they not moved them by their skilful speech, or how legislators would have succeeded in restraining mankind in the servitude of the law had they not had the highest gifts of oratory. The very guiding principles of life, however intrinsically honourable they are, nevertheless possess more power to shape men’s minds when the brilliance of eloquence illumines the beauty of the subject. And so, although the weapons of eloquence are powerful for good or ill, it is unfair to count as evil something which it is possible to use for good.
Source: Quintilian, The Orator’s Education. Ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. II.xvi.9-10


Ralph Waldo Emerson (1837)
The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions,—his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses,—until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers; that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself.
Source: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar.” Nature, Addresses, and Lectures. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1971. Vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Joseph Slater, et al. 6 vols. to date. 1971-. 63.
http://www.u.arizona.edu/%7Etkinney/pdf/handouts/defini...


Cicero (46 BCE)
The supreme orator, then, is the one whose speech instructs, delights, and moves the minds of his audience. The orator is in duty bound to instruct; giving pleasure is a free gift to the audience, to move them is indispensable.
Source: Cicero, De optimo genere oratorum. Trans. H. M. Hubbell. De inventione/De optimo genere oratorum/Topica. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1949. 1.3-4.
Plato: Rhetoric is "the art of winning the soul by discourse."