The orientation toward speculative historiography and passive criticism affects students in other ways. By default, such an orientation reduces the time and emphasis of basic research so that students do not have adequate exposure to the activity of historical work in progress during their education. There is a danger that we could unwittingly be encouraging our students to be dilettantes; that is, to dabble in historical study and commentary without method and without basic knowledge (Etienne 146). What methods will avoid these concerns in the preparation for historical research? Studying the social and political history of the period will provide knowledge of the context of the rhetoric. Attention to the nature and general orthography of the primary language will further inform our contextual knowledge since language habits are often influenced by social and political forces as well as linguistic phenomena. Studying the material evidence of a culture by expanding our notion of “texts” to archaeological and epigraphical sources will further specify our understanding of the rhetoric and oratory that operated. Such an effort, however, will require students to learn techniques to assimilate data and procedures for fieldwork. Since all such evidence must be interpreted, it is essential that we emphasize and learn how to argue for interpretations of evidence that account for verifiable explanations and provide the source from which to advance theories.
Winning the Right to Research Rhetoric
Historians of rhetoric exist in a tacit community. The community participates in a dialectic in which research is offered and responded to primarily through journal essays, books and reviews. Not enough attention, however, is paid to the categories of evidence brought under analysis or to the creation of new methodologies. Some of us equate historical research with antiquated methods of scholarship. The two—topic and method—are not the same and do not have to co-exist. For the sake of the pristine and the venerable, a conservative orientation to what constitutes valid evidence in historiography has promoted a closed system that risks limited acquisition of evidence, and ultimately an imprecise understanding that fails to account adequately for forces shaping the subject under study. Here is an analogy that applies to research in the history of rhetoric. Heinrich Schliemann, the father of modern archaeology, was vilified because others believed that dirtying one’s hands through actually going to see what was at Troy was something scholars should not do. Rather, the accepted mode of scholarly operation was to make armchair explanations based solely upon the Iliad and the Odyssey. Schliemann had many faults, but one of them was not a lack of zeal for knowing. Dissatisfied with the wrangling and speculations of scholars whose weight of interpretation was often grounded more on personal authority than evidence, Schliemann literally went right to the source, and his innovative methods of archaeological research established new methods and insights into the Homeric world. Unfortunately, many researchers in the history of rhetoric and oratory have taken the prevailing disposition of our scholarly community with tacit acceptance. Our students are tempted to think that an argument is right based on the persona of the author and not the weight of the evidence. At the same time, non-experts outside our immediate community (but within the academy) are not swept away by ethos-posturing but await insights based on new discoveries that make sense to them. Many of us, however, have not learned from Schliemann and have been reluctant to “dirty our hands” in such a manner of research, but rather perpetuate and even glorify the armchair, venerated methods of analysis.
Would it be, for us, a question of “dirty hands,” for example, to actually go to Sicily and examine artifacts that may tell us more about Corax, Tisias, and Gorgias, than what literary fragments alone would yield? Would it be unthinkable to immerse oneself in the study of Greek archaeology and history in order to learn about cultural forces shaping Greek rhetoric and oratory? Why would we not, for example, wish to journey to the Clements Library at The University of Michigan and examine first-hand the arguments of the British side of the Revolutionary War? And lastly, would it be unthinkable for us, like our colleagues who have done such a good job in the social sciences, to develop new methodologies and new theories to try to account for the evidence that they present in the formulation of their theories? The truth is that the reaction to the words “rhetoric” and “oratory” on the part of those members of that SCA audience was the response of closed minds that had made a knee-jerk reaction. They were inappropriate. From our side, the type of primary scholarship that earned Professor Howell such praise had lost its growth and trajectory. We are lacking on that count. Excellent research will make not only the merits of the observation obvious but will underscore the worth of the subject itself. Recovering the lost art of researching the history of rhetoric means not going back but progressing forward by providing new basic research and sensitive methods for acquiring and assessing that information.
The development of new methods is of obvious importance if we hope to continue making sensitive explanations, but of shared, if not equally obvious, importance is the discipline’s openness to receiving new methods. The benefits of developing new methods for research apply to rhetoric that is both written and oral. Seeing relationships between orality and literacy, however, can come at great personal cost, especially if a community is resistant. The importance of seeing the relationship between orality and literacy is no better illustrated than in Kevin Robb’s Literacy & Paideia in Ancient Greece. Robb, often a critic of Eric Havelock’s pioneering work, is nonetheless convinced of the relationship of oral and written discourse. It may sound odd to say this, but arguing for the relationship of orality and literacy has taken considerable personal courage. We know the opposition that Eric Havelock received when he made the study of oral literature “scholarly.” Robb, however, shows how the initial scorn that Havelock received for his Preface to Plato is mild by comparison with another scholar who addressed similar claims a century earlier, Frank Byron Jevons.
According to Robb, Frank Byron Jevons, a little-known Greek historian, published A History of Greek Literature from the Earliest Period to the Death of Demosthenes in 1886. Jevons committed academic suicide when he argued, from inscriptional evidence and not conventional literary sources, that the development of Greek literacy was closely related with oralism. To his Victorian readership, who judged eloquence by the standards of what has been called white essayist prose and poetics, Jevons challenged the questionable dates inferred from “proper” literary sources, opting to examine the archaeological evidence of epigraphy or writing that came directly from such primary sources as marble inscriptions and pottery engravings. From the evidence, Jevons claimed that orality and literacy had a long and sustained relationship. In fact, Jevons asserted that Greek literature remained “classical” as long as it remained oral. That is, the Greek literature of the fifth century BCE was oral. Unwilling to tolerate his politically incorrect claims, and waving away the primary evidence Jevons presented, Victorian scholars snubbed Jevons’s research. They refused to give it a fair hearing. For Jevons, the route to understanding Greek literature was through her culture, and understanding that culture meant understanding the development of writing and its relationship to orality. Blinded by their own social views, scholars of Jevons’s era categorized “literature” in either-or terms: as something written rather than spoken, aesthetic rather than functional, and (above all) never in any way related to rhetoric. Because of such resistance, Jevons died unheralded for his achievements. Almost a century lapsed before the prejudice against orality and literacy, and rhetoric itself, began to dissolve.
In 1948 a work of scholarship too stellar to be ignored argued for the centrality of rhetoric in ancient Greece: H. I. Marrou’s A History of Education in Antiquity. Through exhaustive basic research from primary material, Marrou was able to claim that not only were orality and literacy related but also that rhetoric was the dominant discipline shaping Greek education. In fact, Marrou believed that rhetoric had such a pervasive influence on Greek culture that much of our confusion over Greek culture would be clarified if we more fully understood the nature of rhetoric and its impact. Ancient Greeks never separated reading and writing from speech; even when Greece was literate that “literature” was performed orally. Ancient Greeks, Marrou argued, believed that if one could speak