The Art of Eloquence: History, Forms, and Notable Speakers

Forms of Speaking

Individual Speaking

When one person uses the word, without the involvement of another or others, it is said to be individual speaking. This is perhaps one of the longest-established elocutionary forms in the social field and is therefore mandatory for use in all measures and areas where man develops their physical, emotional, and work skills.

Group Speaking

It is characterized by the participation of two or more people talking about a topic.

History of Oratory

Though since time immemorial there have always been those who have spoken publicly, many consider the specialized art of oratory received particular attention in Sicily and was developed mainly in Greece, where it became regarded as a key tool to achieve political power and prestige. There were some professionals called logographers who were responsible for writing speeches for the courts. The most famous of these logographers was Lysias. However, Socrates created a famous school of oratory in Athens that had a larger and patriotic mission for the speaker, who should be well educated and driven by lofty ethical ideals to ensure the state’s progress. In this type of speech, Demosthenes came to be considered the best in his art.

Oratory from Greece came to the Roman Republic, where Cicero perfected it. His speeches and treatises on speech have been preserved almost in their entirety. During the empire, however, speech was in crisis given its limited use in policy in an environment dominated by the emperor, but there were still great experts in this art, such as Marcus Fabius Quintilian. The twelve books of his Institutio oratoria are considered the summit for gender theory. However, as shown by Ernst Robert Curtius in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, oratory strongly influenced the field of poetry and literature in general, passing on its resources, retorizándola expressive excess.

Genres of Oratory

Originally, speech was divided into several parts. Anaximenes of Lampsacus proposed a tripartite classification taking after Aristotle:

• Judicial. It addresses past actions and calls on a judge or court to establish conclusions, accepting what he presents as right and rejecting what is presented as unjust.
• Deliberative or Political. It deals with future actions and calls the trial a political assembly that accepts what he proposed as useful or helpful and rejects what he proposes as harmful or damaging.
• Demonstrative or Epideictic. It deals with past events and is aimed at an audience that has no ability to influence events but only to agree or disagree on how to submit that he is, praising or culpable. It focuses on beauty and its opposite, the ugly. Its poles are, therefore, praise and insult or blame.

Notable Speakers

Some of the great orators of history were:

• Among the Greeks: Lysias, Gorgias, Pythagoras, Pericles, Demosthenes, Aeschylus, and Isocrates.

Lysias made his living as a logographer, writing speeches for litigants profitably and becoming his most prominent figure in Attic judicial oratory. His biography is reflected in two aspects of his work: first, dedicated to the teaching of rhetoric and writing speeches on request, and, second, devoted to the political task of the restoration of democracy in Athens and persecution of tyrants through his speeches. He even wrote 233 speeches, of which only thirty have survived. His best-known speech is Against Eratosthenes.

Lysias’s Style

He had a unique talent to bring their speeches to the character of their customers. The salient features of his style, as evidenced by the works of him that are preserved, were purity, simplicity, and clarity.