Introduction: Rhetoric and the British Way of Politics

Abstract

In Ancient Greece, in the 5th century BCE, the people we now call Sophists began to reflect on the power of speech to rouse people to anger and move them to tears. They were the first (in Europe) to try to understand how language works, and to grasp the strangeness of its relationship to the reality it describes yet of which it is also a part. Such concerns had particular importance in the democratic city of Athens. It was a noisy place in which civic life revolved around arenas of public speaking and disputation — from the public political assembly to private (and drunken) philosophical symposia by way of a noisy agora. In these places the ability to speak well — to instruct, to move and to persuade — was a vital skill for citizens of all kinds. As teachers of that skill, the Sophists were offering to train others in something thought to be as important as soldiering or manufacturing, essential for personal self-defence and for the maintenance of the self-government of the polis.