Given the volume’s orientation toward archaeological rhetoric, we would do well to review the starting points of this approach by discussing the inherent limitations of traditional research methods in classical rhetoric. No arguments need to be advanced (again) that warrant the benefits of historical research in rhetoric. Rhetoric has already been clearly established as a social, political and educational force in Antiquity. What does need to be argued are the ways that we try to advance sensitive understandings of the nature and impact of rhetoric. Current insights from work in postmodern and critical theory have called to question the presumptions that drive conventional research methods and even what is considered “rhetoric.” If, as mentioned in the earlier example, we consider rhetoric to be only overtly agonistic acts of persuasion that occur in civic centers, then we constrain our view to only one (predominantly male) dimension of rhetoric in social interaction and, by default, exclude others, such as women (see, e.g., Bizzell passim). However, because women were normally not given equal access to civic functions, should we presume that they had no “rhetoric” of their own, or that they never used their rhetoric to social ends? Postmodern work has caused us to reflect on our own starting points and, in this instance, cautions not to exclude “rhetorics” that do not conform to the hegemonic rhetoric of the period and within the culture being examined.
If we are to consider archaeological rhetoric as important to the research methods of historical rhetoric, and that the validity of our methods (as well as the theory driving those methods) is adjudicated by our academic community, then the evidence that we use to marshal our “argument” is of paramount importance. Research in historical rhetoric involves more than what is printed on a page. Rhetoric, to be sure, may have been recorded on a page, but the rhetoric itself came to life in a real, dynamic situation occurring at a moment in time. Understanding the context that initially prompted the rhetoric is critical if we are to advance meaning beyond what appears on a page. To attain knowledge of that context, we must try to reproduce the environment within which that piece of discourse was created. To re-create that scene we must look to any and all artifacts that offer insight to the cultural context of the rhetoric under examination.
The same myopic constraints that have traditionally limited our research methods in classical rhetoric could also be applied to self-imposed cultural constraints. Athens was a dominant site for rhetoric. So dominant, in fact, that we both tend to generalize Athenian rhetoric as (Pan-)Hellenic and to use Athenian rhetoric as a standard for judgment of other contemporary rhetoric(s) of the Hellenic world. Yet, postmodern work has shown that every society has a rhetoric, but not all of these rhetorics are manifested in a similar fashion, as is convincingly revealed in the edited volume of Carol S. Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley, Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks (2004). For example, because Athenian and Spartan societies are so dramatically different, a Spartan rhetoric would understandably appear to be far different than an Athenian rhetoric because their respective rhetorics would be fashioned to meet the needs of their own respective cultures. That being the case, it would make sense to first determine the features of the rhetoric under study—whether by indigenous gender or polity—and then design historiographical methods that would be most sensitive to analyzing the rhetoric of that culture. In short, if every ancient rhetoric was judged by the standards of Athenian-based rhetoric, each (non-Athenian rhetoric) would be found wanting because each polis was different, and features that were important in Athens may not be relevant in the civic practices of another Greece city-state.
Archaeological rhetoric seeks not only to discover physical artifacts, but also to reconstruct the mentalities of the time and within the situation. It is this point that Bronislaw Malinowski made when he wrote: “What I have tried to make clear by analysis of a primitive linguistic text is that language is essentially rooted in the reality of the culture, the tribal life and customs of a people, and that it cannot be explained without constant reference to these broader contexts of verbal utterance” (305). Such a task necessitates going beyond the physical evidence of extant literature and reconstructing the epistemic nature upon which the discourse is grounded. Unlike Malinowski’s work in anthropology, historians of rhetoric cannot perform ethnographies. That is, anthropologies can observe discourse as a living activity during the dynamic of the social situation. This edition of Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle reconstructs the social context as best as possible in order to make inferences about the situatedness of the discourse. These methodological constraints that historians of rhetoric have when compared to anthropologists can be reduced by including such (non-traditional) archaeological evidence as part of their historical work. That is, incorporating the findings of archaeology and other such related disciplines as epigraphy and architecture can provide invaluable information that can be used by historians of rhetoric to reconstruct the dynamics of the situation within which rhetoric occurs (see Enos, “Rhetorical”). If we take rhetoric to mean a process of choosing and selecting discourse as a means of constructing reality, then rhetorical methods must account and include archaeological and epigraphical evidence in their research methods.
To be sure, scholars of philology have told us much about oral and written discourse in the ancient world based upon only the remains of these documents. While other such documents are still being discovered, such observations that are predicated upon textual analysis, particularly in studies which rely on “content analysis,” permit only a restricted inquiry into the study of Hellenic discourse and, as I. J. Gelb has revealed, offer little attention to the relationship of writing and language (64). In brief, considering rhetoric as a conceptual, generating process in Hellenic discourse is outside the traditional methodologies used for such historical research. Yet, knowing the epistemological basis and social situations upon which discourse is predicated is essential to understanding the contextual meaning—and the process used to help create that shared meaning—of the discourse itself. Furthermore, the most sensitive way to understand the epistemological basis of discourse is to recognize that the process of rhetoric is inherent in the conceptual structuring of discourse, and that this process must be accounted for by theories of rhetoric and employed in analysis by their attendant methodological heuristics.
If research on rhetoric’s past is to be sensitive to historical mentalities, then a sensitive theory of rhetoric ought to account for all relevant, contextual phenomena—even those which can be classified as “unobservable” notions outside the parameters of content-analytic methodologies but instrumental in the process of language development. Yet, as Jerrold Katz wrote, “An assumption about the existence of an unobservable system puts a weight on our credulity that can only be supported by proportionally strong evidence, by evidence strong enough to bear the strain” (18). This sort of “evidence” clearly is not traditional, but neither is it empirical or even analytical, although both of the latter play a part in its formulation. Rather, this formulation is best understood as a synthesized argument for an interpretation of the notions, presumptions, and presuppositions that reveal the conceptual idea that grounds the discourse (Lane 17). Noam Chomsky has been one of the strongest proponents for inquiry into mental processes for the study of language and believes “that a rather convincing argument can be made for the view that principles intrinsic to the mind provide invariant structures that are a precondition for linguistic experience” (243). In other words, methods are needed in historical research in rhetoric that provide a sensitive explanation of psychological and epistemological presumptions upon which language-constructs are developed and generated. This explanation cannot come from the traditional methods of philological research indicated above, but rather must consider a rhetorical vector, since what is being examined is an epistemic process of grounding articulation and expression.
In the last several decades, rhetoricians (most notably Robert L. Scott) have argued that epistemic processes can be considered rhetorical both in generating discourse and constructing cognitive processes for the transformation of meaning (Scott, “On Viewing” 9–17; Scott, “Ten Years Later” 258–66; cf. Cherwitz, 207–19). Considering the epistemic capacity of discourse as rhetorical and advancing theories that account for this generative