Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece

Poetry has power to excite emotions and to charm. The relation of this spell of words to divine inspiration, witchcraft, and magic is the starting point of Jacqueline de Romilly’s Carl Newell Jackson Lectures. She studies the influence of this idea on the origin and development of rhetoric, showing how the sophist Gorgias used poetic rhythms and style to lend prose speech the power of poetry to capture and to move an audience, and how he emulated the power of the magicians in casting spells. It was this use of speech to beguile that was the focus of Plato’s attacks on the sophists and orators. Mme. de Romilly examines Plato’s hostility toward the arts of illusion, and discusses his classification of the arts and the spurious arts, among which he included rhetoric. In challenging Plato’s views, Isocrates and Aristotle attempted to isolate non-poetic speech from inspiration and magic, but the result was to turn the art of speech into a science. The reaction of later writers to their approach and the reappearance of the irrational in literature are treated in the final chapter. In this fresh reading of familiar texts, the author is able to explore a fundamental conception.