Lawsuits and the Assembly
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Phaedrus — μάλιστα μέν περὶ τὰς δίκας λέγεταί τε καὶ γράφεται τέχνῃ λέγεται δὲ καὶ περὶ δημηγορίας.
Phaedrus gives the plain, textbook answer of his day, and it is worth pausing on because it defines the ordinary understanding of rhetoric that Socrates is about to burst open. Rhetoric, Phaedrus says, is chiefly 'spoken and written of as an art' — technē — in two settings: 'concerning lawsuits,' peri tas dikas, the speeches made in the law courts, and 'concerning public oratory,' peri dēmēgorias, the addresses made to the political assembly. These were in fact the two great arenas of speech in a Greek city. Forensic oratory won or lost cases before a jury; deliberative oratory (dēmēgoria — literally 'addressing the dēmos,' the people) swayed the assembly to vote for war or peace, this policy or that. To Phaedrus, and to the handbook-writers he has read, that is simply what rhetoric is: a practical craft for the two places where a citizen's words carried public weight. 'Beyond those,' he admits, 'I have not heard.'
Socrates asks Phaedrus what he actually understands rhetoric to be — and whether he has heard it described as an art that applies to everything, great and small alike. Phaedrus gives the ordinary, practical answer: not exactly that. Rhetoric is chiefly spoken and written of as an art concerning lawsuits, and also public speeches to the assembly. Beyond those two arenas, he says, he has not heard.
This modest exchange is doing quiet strategic work, because Socrates is about to argue that Phaedrus's whole picture of rhetoric is far too small. On the conventional view Phaedrus reports, rhetoric is a specialized professional skill, boxed into two public institutions — the courtroom and the assembly — where the stakes are lawsuits and policy. It is the sort of thing a young man pays a Gorgias or a Tisias to teach him so he can win in court or get ahead in politics. Socrates does not deny that rhetoric operates in those places, but he thinks the definition mistakes a couple of its arenas for its essence. His own view, which the coming pages will unfold, is that rhetoric is something far larger and more dangerous: it is psychagōgia, 'soul-leading,' the art of moving any soul in any direction by means of words — and it therefore operates not just in courts and assemblies but everywhere human beings speak to persuade, in private conversation as much as public debate, about small matters as much as great. That is why, just before this, Socrates pointedly asked whether being right about serious things is any more honored than about trivial ones: he is prying rhetoric loose from its narrow professional frame and revealing it as a universal power over the mind. And there is a joke coming that makes the point with a wink. In the lines that follow, Socrates asks whether Phaedrus has heard only of 'the arts of Nestor and Odysseus' — and is ignorant of 'Palamedes.' He means the celebrated rhetoric-teachers of the day, dressed up as Homeric heroes: Gorgias as old wise-speaking Nestor, some other master as wily Odysseus. The gag is that the famous teachers who claim to have invented the art of speech are latecomers; persuasion is as old as Homer, as old as human society, and far too vast to be owned by any handbook. Phaedrus thinks rhetoric is a courtroom skill. Socrates is about to show him it is one of the fundamental forces that move human beings — which is exactly why it matters so much whether it is tethered to truth.
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