Content area
Full Text
From the advisors of Mayan kings to storytellers among Siberian tribes, people who are skilled with language have been valued in every society on earth, but only one society has invented methods for both analyzing and teaching skilled speech. According to what we know, which hardly rises above the level of legend, the study of rhetoric arose among the Greeks sometime in the fifth century BCE. This supposedly happened first with a man named Corax and his student Tisias on the island of Sicily, which at that time was part of the Greek world, after several centuries of colonization around the Mediterranean.
The early Greeks understood what all people know, that language is power. A man can sit on a throne and just by speaking set an army in motion. Because they understood this, the Greeks embraced the study of rhetoric. But why did the study of rhetoric-of learning to be skilled with words-originate in this time and place? What was it about ancient Greek culture that allowed them to create such study? Part of the intellectual foundation for such a discovery lies in something possibly unique in Greek culture. They admired liars, at least at a symbolic level. Rhetoric is not actually about lying, though plenty of people don't seem to know that. Rhetoric is, however, about manipulating language, which may manipulate other people, and while we all do this instinctively, a very rigid moral code will surely exist uneasily with conscious manipulation. In daily life an ancient Greek probably hated a liar as much as we do, yet in their religion as well as among some of their cultural heroes, there were many instances of lying that were not only tolerated, but celebrated as quite clever. If your moral code is able to make cultural heroes of liars, then intellectually a foundation is laid for discovering more effective ways to manipulate language, and thus the study of rhetoric.
I intend to illustrate aspects of ancient Greek culture as fodder for the birth of rhetoric by contrasting them with another culture which is known to have influenced the Greeks- ancient Egypt. In particular, I will contrast the religious beliefs of both cultures and compare evidence from their literature.
EGYPTIAN RELIGION, MORALITY, AND JUDGEMENT
...