Stephanie Whitehead - Aristotle’s “The Art of Rheotric”

One of the books I was reading for my paper for this class was Aristotle’s “The Art of Rhetoric”. This was considered a “handbook” in Ancient Greece, one of the two manners in which to teach Rhetoric (the other being imitation). In this handbook Aristotle, the student of Plato, outlines how to properly write a decent rhetorical speech after explaining the differences between the three forms and their purposes. As I was reading “The Art of Rhetoric” I found it peculiar how Aristotle used the basic outline formula to write his handbook. We talked in class about how oral cultures used stories and examples to explain and tell other peoples certain things and to communicate and how in modern days in the literate cultures we like to make lists to describe and explain. However, Aristotle forms his book in an outline manner and within his sections he lists examples such as when he is explaining how to properly provide a characterization or evoke a certain emotion. He lists the descriptions, which is very uncharacteristic for a oral culture, which Greece was not long past. In fact Plato was the one who first wrote on philosophy denouncing writing as a technology that was going to destroy the human mind and memory. His teacher was Socrates who didn’t even write anything. Thus I find it odd that Aristotle, coming from such lineage of philosophers, was listing in his literature.