This article presents a detailed study of an early section of the actual works and days of Hesiod's Works and Days. The treatment consistently eschews obsolete assumptions about this poem, in particular that it reduces to a didactic presentation to the early Greek farmer. A key principle of the method followed is to pay closer attention to the text's relation to epic forms than has been typical among the poem's commentators. The result is to find that a certain literary figure (...) gradually develops in the section discussed. Namely, the plowing nominally covered there stands for the section's portion on the human condition, a condition implicitly compared with that associated with traditional epic. The figure evokes a well-rounded person, aware of the divine and of the world's uncertainties, with a long-term sense of purpose involving good organization of one's life, as opposed to someone engaged in helter-skelter pursuit of transitory activities, perhaps war specifically. With this identification of virtual protagonist established by the end of the section, the ground is prepared for any further development of the figure as that entity's undertakings or adventures in the remainder of the poem. (shrink)

This paper explores in detail Gorgias' defense of rhetoric in Plato 's Gorgias, noting its connections to earlier and later texts such as Aristophanes' Clouds, Gorgias' Helen, Isocrates' Nicocles and Antidosis, and Aristotle's Rhetoric. The defense as Plato presents it is transparently inadequate; it reveals a deep inconsistency in Gorgias' conception of rhetoric and functions as a satirical precursor to his refutation by Socrates. Yet Gorgias' defense is appropriated, in a streamlined form, by later defenders of rhetoric such as Isocrates (...) and Aristotle. They present it as an effective reductio against a critique of rhetoric that depends on the "harm criterion." This is puzzling, since Plato 's own critique of rhetoric does not depend on the harm criterion. On the other hand, Plato does seem to embrace the harm criterion as a more general principle—as if pre-emptively embracing the reductio —in his arguments about the good in the Meno and Euthydemus. Nonetheless, Isocrates and Aristotle seem to be deliberately misreading Plato on rhetoric: where he intends to criticize its intrinsic nature, they respond as if he were merely complaining about its contingent effects. (shrink)