Rhetoric Speaks in Her Own Defense
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Socrates — ἀγροικότερον λελοιδορήκαμεν τὴν τῶν λόγων τέχνην… ληρεῖτε… οὐδένʼ ἀγνοοῦντα τἀληθὲς ἀναγκάζω μανθάνειν λέγειν ἀλλʼ κτησάμενον οὕτως ἐμὲ λαμβάνειν… ἄνευ ἐμοῦ τὰ ὄντα εἰδότι μᾶλλον ἔσται πείθειν τέχνῃ.
Socrates does something wonderfully fair-minded here: having made rhetoric look like the demagogue's tool, he stops and lets Rhetoric answer for herself. He worries aloud that they have reviled 'the art of speeches' agroikoteron, 'too boorishly,' like country louts with no manners — and then he personifies her, giving Rhetoric a voice to reply. 'Why do you babble, you wonderful people?' she says, throwing the philosophers' own charge of nonsense back at them. Her defense is precise and disarming. She does not, she insists, force anyone who is ignorant of the truth to learn to speak; her own advice is exactly the reverse — 'acquire that first,' get hold of the truth, 'and then take me up.' She concedes the whole of Socrates's point about knowledge. But she makes one proud counter-claim in return: 'without me, even the one who knows the realities will be no better at persuading.' Knowledge alone, she says, does not make a person able to move others. For that, you still need her.
Having painted rhetoric at its worst, Socrates suddenly checks himself: have they abused 'the art of speeches' too crudely? He imagines Rhetoric herself answering back. She protests that she forces no one ignorant of the truth to learn to speak; on the contrary, her advice is to get hold of the truth first and only then take her up. But this much she claims proudly: without her, even the person who knows the realities will be no better at persuading.
This is the turn on which the entire second half of the dialogue pivots, and it is easy to miss because it is done so lightly. Up to now Socrates has seemed to be prosecuting rhetoric — exposing it as a truth-blind knack that leads cities to ruin. If that were his final position, the conclusion would be simple: abandon rhetoric, do philosophy. But here Plato refuses that easy answer. By giving Rhetoric a voice, he lets her make a concession and a claim that together define the real target of his critique. The concession: rhetoric properly understood does not oppose truth or replace it — 'get the truth first, then take me up.' The villain of the earlier passages was never rhetoric as such; it was rhetoric practiced by someone who skipped the first step, who tried to persuade without knowing. The claim is subtler and more important: knowledge by itself is not enough to persuade. The person who has done the hard philosophical work of coming to know the realities, ta onta, will still fail to move an audience unless he also masters the art of leading them there. This is Plato at his most honest. He could have pretended that truth is self-evidently persuasive, that to know the good is automatically to be able to convey it — but he knew better, having watched the wisest man he ever met be voted to death by a jury. Truth does not sell itself. It needs an advocate, and the art of advocacy is real and hard and cannot simply be scorned. So the position the dialogue is building toward is neither the sophists' (persuasion without truth) nor a naive philosopher's (truth without persuasion), but a synthesis: a true art of rhetoric that begins in knowledge of the realities and of the human soul, and then uses genuine skill to lead particular souls toward what is real. Rhetoric is not to be destroyed but redeemed — married to philosophy, made the instrument by which knowledge reaches others. And there is a lovely self-awareness in the device Plato uses to say all this. To personify Rhetoric and give her a persuasive speech in her own defense is itself a brilliant piece of rhetoric — Plato demonstrating, in the very act of the argument, that the art he is examining can serve the truth when a philosopher wields it.
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