Platonic Colors: Ancient and Renaissance Rhetoric
If the force of Platonism turns us toward an inner persona, after Plato it is left to the rhetorical traditions of subsequent times to confront the discursive persona of external public speech. Even in rhetorical theory—equally among the ancients as in the Renaissance—one feels Plato’s attempt to distinguish discursive and prediscursive identities.
In the Gorgias Socrates resists classifying rhetoric as a techne, preferring instead to call it a knack (ἐμπειρία). He thereby establishes the analogy that rhetoric impersonates (ὑπόκειται) philosophy, just as cooking impersonates medicine.26 Aristotle must have learned much from Plato about this matter, for he addresses the same question in his Rhetoric and gives a different answer while nonetheless following a logic similar to his teacher’s. His work begins: “Rhetoric is a counterpart of dialectic; for both have to do with matters that are in a manner common (ἃ κοινά) for the cognizance of all men and not confined to any special science.”27 He continues by stating that since rhetoric, like dialectic, does not deal with a particular class of subjects but argues about what is common, it must be able to persuade opposites.28 Like dialectic, one should add, rhetoric is also discursive. Already one notices that rhetoric for Aristotle is concerned with the instrumentalization of techniques for persuading others; in Plato’s terms, it deals with seeming. Likewise, it is with Aristotle’s analysis of character (ἦθος) that one notices how much he, like Plato, understands rhetoric as the construction of a discursive persona put on display in the public sphere: “The orator persuades by moral character (ἤθους) when his speech is delivered in such a manner as to render him worthy of confidence; for we feel confidence in a greater degree and more readily in persons of worth in regard to everything in general, but where there is no certainty and there is room for doubt, our confidence is absolute. But this confidence must be due to the speech itself, not to any preconceived idea of the speaker’s character.”29 Isocrates had postulated that in order for a speech to persuade there ought to be a correspondence between the orator’s speech (λόγος) and character (ἦθος). But for Aristotle, it is not the character of the prediscursive person that moves the members of his audience to emotion (πάθος) and persuades (πείθω; πιθανός) them to act. What matters for achieving these ends is the speech (λόγος), its style (λέξις), and the delivery or interpretation of the oratorical performance (ὑπόκρισς). Rhetoric is therefore the way in which one can discover these techniques of persuasion in order to perform them on the public stage. The sum total of these parts, when spoken and acted (including oratorical gestures, expressions, timing, and so on) assembles the orator’s traits and words into a discursive character.
Whereas in Athens speech was not so much a right as an obligation (and in Socrates’ case a mortal necessity), in Rome speech was reserved for privileged individuals who were legitimized for and recognized by public discourse, for example forensic oratory for legal advocates and deliberative oratory for patricians. Such a social and political order meant that charismatic authority first established the mechanisms for legitimacy in speech in the early republic. Beginning with the early Latin manuals, followed by the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and Cicero’s early De inventione, the place of personae in rhetoric was primarily set by its supposed correspondence with the prediscursive moral character, first of the client and then of the orator speaking on his behalf. In speech, the rhetorical persona was therefore less a question of style (elocutio) and delivery (pronuntiatio, actio) than of establishing the trustworthiness of the persona for the audience in the exordium, establishing the attention (attentus), the goodwill (benivolus, benivolentia), and the receptivity (docilis) in the relationship between speaker and audience. The good orator assembles his attributes as a premise in an argument, or as a fixed object in the narration of the speech. In his mature rhetorical writings, however (especially the De oratore, the Brutus, and the Orator), Cicero fully realized the importance of Greek rhetorical theory about character and theorized that an orator can craft his individual identity through a rhetorical persona. In these later works, Cicero does not conceive of the rhetorical persona in terms of correspondence to an orator or client’s supposed prediscursive identity but, what is most important, contends that the oratorical persona is fabricated from all parts of the discourse, including inventio, elocutio, and actio or pronuntiatio. It is in discourse itself that the Roman orator fashions a self-image that he projects in public. This is especially felt in the Orator where Cicero seems, on the one hand, to replace a single persona with the technical skill to utilize various stylistic personae and, on the other, to argue that one’s persona is strictly dependent on decorum (used like the Greek prepon); that is, one’s style and delivery must suit the situation.30
Cicero thus bolstered Latin rhetoric with the discursive persona of Greek rhetorical theory, and while he claims in his letter to Lentulus that he wrote the De oratore in the manner of Aristotle (Aristotelius mos), some have argued that Cicero is, broadly speaking, following an Isocratean tradition insofar as, unlike Aristotle and others, he never truly divorces the speaker’s persona in discourse from the speaker’s hypothetical prediscursive natural character.31 One immediately thinks of the famous passage in the De officiis where Cicero grounds the rhetorical persona in philosophy by employing the Stoic Panaetius’s fourfold schema of our personae: our common rational nature; what is particular to each individual person’s bodies and spirits; what befalls us by chance and circumstance (including social, civic, and familial character traits); and how we define ourselves by choosing to live in certain roles.32
Ideally, oratorical delivery serves as a culminating moment for the alignment of these four roles in self-fashioning. Yet in rhetoric the tone of voice may charm, the hand gestures may reassure, the gait may inspire confidence, an exordium may establish the audience’s goodwill by recalling a positive ancestry, clothes may suit the decorum of the occasion or imitate the sartorial fashions of the powerful, the right style may seize the crowd’s attention, but a dart of the eyes and a furtive glance to a few intimates in the audience may equally reveal different motives, even while the speech aims at being effective and pleasing, persuading and moving the whole crowd. In Cicero’s rhetorical writings the theoretical discursive persona agrees exceptionally well with the old Latin auditory etymology for persona, as not only a mask that one puts on public display but also a megaphone, as it were, through which the various stylistic registers and modes of delivery of speech are performed (per-sonare).
Traditions examining rhetorical personae are without a doubt of central importance to Italian humanism as a whole. For instance, looking back to the origins of the movement in the mid-fifteenth century, Flavio Biondo (1392–1463) indicated the rediscovery of ancient oratory as a boundary line that marked generational differences in humanism’s history: “First of all, Francesco Petrarch, a man of great talent and great industry, began to awaken poetry and eloquence, but in that age in which we blame the dearth and lack of books more than of genius, he did not attain the flower of Ciceronian eloquence that adorns many we see in this century. For he himself, although he boasted of having found the letters of Cicero written to Lentulus at Vercelli, did not know the three books of Cicero’s De oratore and Quintilian’s (c. 35–c. after 96 CE) Institutiones except in fragmentary form, and likewise Orator maior and Brutus de oratoribus claris, books of Cicero, had not come to his knowledge.”33 Although one should not diminish the resonance of Quintilian and other writers of rhetorical theory (and the imitation of good auctores in general) in the quattrocento, it is clear that for Biondo—who is probably inspired by Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) in this regard—Ciceronian oratory holds a preeminent place in the curriculum of the bonae artes.
In the generation after Petrarch (1304–74), the letters of