Abstract

This paper explores a possible connection between Aristotle’s defence of rhetoric as an art and his claim that its three kinds, deliberative, forensic and epideictic, necessarily take place in sites where citizens appear to one another as citizens. The argument is that only in such sites, and hence only in poleis, can speakers and audiences distinguish the internal norms of this, and indeed any other, art from external effects that, although they may be called rhetorical, are not artful or technikos on Aristotle’s definition. That in making this argument Plato serves as Aristotle’s foil is suggested by allusions in the Rhetoric and other Aristotelian treatises to specific passages in Phaedrus and Statesman. The paper concludes by claiming that conditions for practising the art of rhetoric in the strict sense are as civic now as they were in classical antiquity. The media in which the art is practised may have multiplied, but when its civic nature is grasped the kinds into which Aristotle divides it appear not to have changed as much as might be thought