: This paper offers a new interpretation of the first chapter of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and of Aristotle’s understanding of rhetoric throughout the treatise. I defend the view that, for Aristotle, rhetoric was a skill in offering the listener ‘proofs’, that is, proper grounds for conviction. His arguments in the opening chapters of the treatise state and defend this controversial, epistemically normative view against the rival views of Gorgias, Thrasymachus and the rhetorical handbook writers, on the one hand, and against those (...) of Plato, on the other. Aristotle defends his view on the basis that rhetoric is a skill in discharging an important role in the state – the role of helping citizens to good publicly-deliberated judgements. (shrink)

This paper investigates the status that the genre of fable acquires when it is employed in literature. In particular, it surveys Horace's treatment of fables in the Satires and Epistles and the carefully controlled circumstances in which zoomorphic language is allowed to emerge during the banquet at Trimalchio's in Petronius' Satyrica. The analysis of the distribution of fables in Horace shows that for the Roman literary public the act of speaking through fables bore in itself a negative connotation, so much (...) that the moral discourse of the satirist needed at first to provide additional justification in order to incorporate them: from vindication of ingenuitas and shifts in narrative voice, to use of rhetorical misnomers and eventually of philosophical frankness. Petronius' text, in turn, suggests that what is wrong with fable is precisely its being reminiscent of a servile past. During the dinner at Trimalchio's allusions to recognizable fable plots and zoomorphic language are allowed to surface only during a momentary absence of the host. This circumstance suggests that fable is not just another literary genre among the many genres abused in Trimalchio's house: for both the host and his freedmen guests fables are an uncomfortable reminder of an enduring past inscribed in their language. (shrink)

The Rhetoric to Alexander (second half of the fourth century B.C.) is among the oldest contributions to the study of argumentation. From antiquity on, this treatise, which abounds in opportunistic advice, has come under heavy criticism on normative grounds. And yet, as I shall maintain here, it clearly takes into account the requirements of rational argumentation which are still in use today. Moreover, it contains the seeds of a whole series of doctrines found in modern normative argumentation theory. There are (...) reasonable grounds for maintaining that some of these modern doctrines stem indirectly from the tradition to which the Rhetoric to Alexander belongs. (shrink)