c. 335 BC 2026
This is an AI modernization of Rhetoric into contemporary English. The original is available from Perseus Digital Library. Also available as an epub.
Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira, in the north of Greece, and at seventeen went to Athens to study with Plato, staying twenty years. After Plato's death he left, spent some years tutoring the young Alexander of Macedon, and in 335 BC came back to Athens and opened a school of his own at the Lyceum. The Rhetoric took its final form there. It is not a book written for the public but the notes of a course, which is why it is terse, why it lists where it might explain, and why it assumes the listener knows the poems, speeches and politicians it cites.
The course was practical, because Athens ran on speeches. Any citizen could stand up in the Assembly and argue for or against war, a treaty or a law. In the courts there were no professional lawyers: a man accused of a crime or sued over a debt spoke for himself, often from a speech bought from a professional writer, to a jury of hundreds of ordinary citizens who voted at the end of the day. Teachers of speaking were paid well, and Plato had attacked them as flatterers who taught people to make the worse case look the better. Aristotle's answer, in the first chapter, is that rhetoric is an art like any other, with its own method, and that its job is to find in each case the means of persuasion the case offers.
He says there are three such means. One is the argument itself, and for Aristotle that comes first: an argument built from what people generally believe, which he calls the enthymeme. The second is the speaker's character, as the speech makes it appear, and the third is the state of mind the speech puts the hearers in. That third part is why Book Two contains the most famous pages of the book, his short studies of anger, fear, shame, pity, envy and the rest, and his portraits of the young, the old and men in their prime. Book Three turns to style and to the order of a speech, and is full of sentences from real speeches held up as good or bad examples.
Some of it belongs to its own world. He treats evidence taken from slaves under torture as one more kind of proof, writes of women and slaves as the Greece of his day saw them, and assumes an audience of male citizens. These are his views and they stand as he gives them.
This edition is translated from the Greek, with J. H. Freese's English translation of 1926 alongside as a check. Aristotle's shorthand has been opened out: where he names a speech, a poem or a person and trusts his students to know it, a few words say who or what it was. Every clause of the Greek is here, and the verse he quotes is set as verse. The chapter titles are new, since Aristotle gave his chapters none.
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic: the partner that answers it, as the second half of a choral song answers the first. By dialectic I mean the art of argument by question and answer. The two belong together because both deal with matters that everyone is, in a way, able to know about, and that belong to no one special science. That is why everyone has some share of both. Up to a point, all of us try to test an argument and to stand up for one, to defend ourselves and to accuse others.
Most people do these things either at random or by a knack they have picked up through practice. But since they can be done both ways, it is clear that they could also be done by method. For we can look into the reason why some people succeed through practice and others succeed by luck, and everyone would agree that looking into the reason why something works is the business of an art.
Now, the people who have written handbooks on the art of speaking have supplied almost no part of it. Proofs (the means of persuasion) are the only thing in it that belongs to the art; everything else is an extra. Yet these writers say nothing about the enthymeme, the argument of rhetoric, a kind of syllogism, which is the very body of proof. Instead they spend nearly all their effort on things that lie outside the subject.
Slander, pity, anger and the other emotions of that kind have nothing to do with the facts of the case; they are aimed at the juror, who in an Athenian court was judge and jury at once. So if every trial were conducted the way trials are now conducted in some cities, and especially in the well-governed ones, these writers would have nothing left to say.
For all people either think that the laws ought to forbid this sort of thing, or actually have such laws and forbid speaking outside the subject, as the ancient court of the Areopagus in Athens does. And they are right to think so. You should not warp the juror by stirring him up to anger or envy or pity. That would be like bending the ruler you are about to measure with.
Further, it is obvious that a person on one side of a dispute has no business except to show that the fact in question is so or is not so, that it happened or did not happen. Whether the matter is important or trivial, just or unjust, is a question the juror has to decide for himself, wherever the lawgiver has not already settled it; it is not something he should be taught by the people arguing in front of him.
Above all, then, it is right that laws which have been properly made should themselves settle everything they possibly can, and should leave as little as possible to the people who judge. There are three reasons. First, it is easier to find one man, or a few, with good sense and the ability to make laws and give judgements than to find many. Second, laws are made after long thought, but judgements are given on the spot, so it is hard for those who judge to decide well what is just and what is in the public interest. Third, and most important of all, the lawgiver's judgement is not about a particular case: it is about the future and about cases in general. The member of the assembly and the juror, by contrast, are deciding about things that are here in front of them and definite, and with those things love and hatred and their own private interest are often bound up. The result is that they can no longer see the truth clearly enough, and their own pleasure or pain casts a shadow over their judgement.
So on everything else, as we say, the judge should be given the final word on as little as possible. But whether something happened or did not happen, will happen or will not happen, is or is not so, must be left to those who judge, because the lawgiver cannot possibly foresee these things.
If this is right, it is clear that anyone who lays down rules on the other matters, such as what the introduction of a speech ought to contain, or the statement of the facts, or each of the other parts, is making an art out of what lies outside the subject. In all those rules their only concern is how to put the judge into a certain frame of mind. About the proofs the art itself supplies they have nothing to show, and those proofs are exactly what make a person good at enthymemes.
That is why, although the method is the same for speeches to the assembly and for speeches in the courts, and although political speaking is a finer thing and more worthy of a citizen than speaking about private dealings between one person and another, these writers say nothing about political speaking, and every one of them tries to make an art of pleading in court. The reason is that in a speech to the assembly it pays less to talk about things outside the subject, and political speaking gives less room for trickery than pleading in court does, because it concerns everyone. In the assembly the person judging is judging his own affairs, so the speaker who gives advice needs only to show that things are as he says. In the courts that is not enough, and it pays to win the listener over. There the decision is about other people's affairs, so the jurors, thinking of their own pleasure and listening to be gratified, simply hand the case to whichever side pleases them; they are not really judging at all. That is why, as I said before, in many places the law forbids speaking outside the subject in court, while in the assembly the people judging take care of this well enough themselves.
It is clear, then, that the method of the art is concerned with proofs. A proof is a kind of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded of something when we think it has been demonstrated. The demonstration that belongs to rhetoric is the enthymeme, and this is, broadly speaking, the most powerful of all the proofs. And the enthymeme is a kind of syllogism, a chain of reasoning from premises. Now, it is the business of dialectic, either the whole of it or one of its parts, to study every kind of syllogism alike. So it is plain that the person best able to see what a syllogism is made from and how it is put together will also be the best at enthymemes, once he has learned in addition what matters the enthymeme deals with and how it differs from the syllogisms of logic. For it is the same ability that sees the truth and sees what looks like the truth. And human beings are, in any case, well enough made for the truth, and most of the time they reach it. That is why someone who has a good eye for the truth will also have a good eye for what people generally believe.
So it is clear that the other writers make an art out of what lies outside the subject, and clear too why they have leaned so heavily towards pleading in court.
Rhetoric is useful, for several reasons. First, what is true and what is just are by nature stronger than their opposites. So if verdicts go the wrong way, the true and the just must have been beaten through the fault of the people speaking for them, and that deserves blame. Second, there are some audiences we could not easily persuade even if we had the most exact knowledge of a subject, and spoke from it. A speech that follows knowledge is teaching, and teaching these people is impossible. We have to build our proofs and arguments out of ideas that everyone shares, as I said in the Topics, my book on dialectic, when I was discussing how to talk with ordinary people. Third, we must be able to argue persuasively for either side of a question, just as we can in syllogisms. This is not so that we may actually do both, since we must not persuade people of what is wrong, but so that we understand how the case really stands, and so that when someone else uses arguments unfairly we are able to take them apart ourselves. None of the other arts draws conclusions on both sides of a question; only dialectic and rhetoric do that, since both are equally at home with either side. The facts they deal with, however, are not equally balanced: what is true and what is better are, broadly speaking, always by nature easier to reason for and more persuasive. Last, it would be strange if it were a disgrace to be unable to defend yourself with your body, but not a disgrace to be unable to defend yourself with speech, when speech is more distinctively human than the use of the body.
Someone may object that a person who uses this power of speech unjustly could do great harm. But that is true of every good thing except virtue, and most of all of the most useful things, such as strength, health, wealth and generalship. Used justly, these can do the greatest good; used unjustly, the greatest harm.
It is clear, then, that rhetoric is not confined to any one definite class of subjects but, like dialectic, ranges over all of them, and that it is useful. It is clear also that its task is not to persuade, but to see, in each case, the means of persuasion that the case offers. The same is true of all the other arts. It is not the task of medicine to make a patient healthy, but to bring him as far towards health as he can go, since even people who can never get well can still be treated well. It is clear, besides, that the same art sees both what is persuasive and what only seems persuasive, just as in dialectic the same art sees both a real syllogism and one that only seems to be a syllogism. What makes a man a sophist is not his ability but his choice: he chooses to use arguments he knows are false. There is one difference, though. In rhetoric, one man is called a speaker because of his knowledge and another because of his choice, and both get the same name. In dialectic, a man is a sophist because of his choice, but a dialectician because of his ability, not his choice.
Now let us try to talk about the method itself: how, and from what materials, we shall be able to reach the goals we have set. So let us go back, as it were, to the beginning, define rhetoric again, and then say what remains.
Let rhetoric, then, be defined as the ability to see, in any given case, whatever means of persuasion it offers. That is the task of no other art. Every other art teaches and persuades about its own subject matter: medicine about what makes people healthy or sick, geometry about the properties of shapes and sizes, arithmetic about numbers, and the same with all the rest of the arts and sciences. Rhetoric, by contrast, seems able to see what is persuasive about more or less any subject that is put in front of it. That is why we say that, as an art, it does not have its rules fixed to any one special class of things.
Of the proofs, some are outside the art and some are supplied by the art itself. By proofs outside the art I mean all those that we did not provide ourselves but that were there already: witnesses, evidence given under torture by slaves, written contracts, and anything of that kind. By proofs the art itself supplies I mean all those that can be built by method and by our own efforts. So the first kind we only have to use, but the second kind we have to find.
Of the proofs that are provided by the speech, there are three kinds. The first lies in the speaker's character; the second in putting the listener into a certain frame of mind; the third in the argument itself, in so far as it proves something, or seems to.
A speaker persuades through his character when the speech is delivered in such a way as to make him seem worth believing. We believe good and fair-minded people more, and sooner, about everything in general; and where there is no exact knowledge but room for two opinions, we believe them completely. But this too must come about through the speech itself, not through what people already thought of the speaker before he began. Some writers of handbooks leave the speaker's goodness out of the art altogether, as though it did nothing to make him persuasive. We do not. On the contrary, character is, you might almost say, the most powerful of the proofs.
A speaker persuades through his listeners when the speech moves them to emotion. We do not give the same verdict when we are grieved as when we are glad, or when we love as when we hate. And this, as we said, is the one thing that today's writers of handbooks try to deal with. We shall explain these things one by one when we come to discuss the emotions.
Finally, people are persuaded through the argument itself when we show that something is true, or seems true, from whatever is persuasive about the particular matter in hand.
Since these are the three means by which proofs come about, it is clear that to master them a person must be able to reason, able to study characters and the virtues, and, third, able to study the emotions: what each emotion is, what it is like, what causes it and how it arises. So it turns out that rhetoric is a kind of offshoot of dialectic, and also of the study of character, which it is fair to call politics. That is why rhetoric slips on the costume of politics, like an actor putting on a mask, and so do the people who lay claim to it, partly through lack of education, partly through boastfulness, and partly for other all too human reasons. In fact rhetoric is a branch of dialectic and resembles it, as we said at the start. Neither of them is a science of how things stand in any one definite subject; both are simply abilities to supply arguments.
About their abilities, then, and how they are related to each other, enough has been said. Now for the proofs that work by proving something, or seeming to. In dialectic there is induction, which argues from particular cases; there is the syllogism; and there is the apparent syllogism, which only looks like one. It is the same in rhetoric. The example is an induction, the enthymeme is a syllogism, and the apparent enthymeme is an apparent syllogism. I call the enthymeme a rhetorical syllogism, and the example a rhetorical induction. Everyone who produces proofs by proving something does it either by giving examples or by using enthymemes, and by nothing besides. So, since in general anything whatever must be proved either by syllogism or by induction (and this is clear to us from the Analytics, my books on logic), it follows that each of these two in rhetoric must be the same as one of those two in logic: the example as induction, the enthymeme as syllogism.
What the difference is between an example and an enthymeme is clear from the Topics, where syllogism and induction have already been discussed. When something is shown to be so on the basis of many similar cases, that is called induction in dialectic and an example in rhetoric. When certain things are granted, and something else follows from them, beyond them, simply because they are so, whether always or usually, that is called a syllogism in dialectic and an enthymeme in rhetoric.
It is clear, too, that each of the two kinds of rhetorical speaking has its own merit. What was said in the Methodics, a work of mine on method, holds good here as well. Some speeches are rich in examples and others in enthymemes, and in the same way some speakers are fond of examples and others of enthymemes. Speeches that rely on examples are no less persuasive, but the ones that rely on enthymemes get the louder applause. The reason for this, and how to use each of them, we shall discuss later. For now, let us define these proofs themselves more clearly.
What is persuasive is persuasive to somebody. Some things are persuasive and believable straight away, in themselves; others because they seem to be proved by things that are persuasive and believable. Now no art looks at the individual case. Medicine does not ask what is healthy for Socrates or for Callias, but what is healthy for a person of this kind or for people of that kind. That is the part that belongs to an art, whereas individual cases are endless and cannot be known scientifically. In the same way rhetoric will not study what seems believable to this or that individual, to Socrates or to Hippias, but what seems believable to people of a certain kind. Dialectic does the same. It does not reason from any premises that happen to come along, for even people talking nonsense have certain things that seem true to them. Dialectic reasons from questions that need argument, and rhetoric from the matters people are already in the habit of deliberating about.
Rhetoric's work, then, is concerned with the kind of things we deliberate about but have no art or system for, and it is done in front of listeners who cannot take in an argument with many steps, or follow a chain of reasoning from far back. And we deliberate only about things that seem capable of turning out either way. Nobody deliberates about things that could not have been, could not be, or could not become otherwise, if he believes that is how they are, since there would be nothing to gain by it.
It is possible to reason and draw conclusions in two ways: from premises that have already been reached by reasoning, or from premises that have not, but that need reasoning because they are not what people generally believe. The first way is bound to be hard to follow because of its length, since the judge is assumed to be a simple person. The second is bound to be unpersuasive, because it starts from things that are neither agreed nor generally believed. So the enthymeme and the example must deal with things that can, for the most part, be otherwise than they are. The example is an induction and the enthymeme a syllogism, and the enthymeme is built from few premises, often fewer than the ones a full syllogism needs. If one of the premises is well known, there is no need to state it, because the listener adds it himself. Suppose you want to show that Dorieus, the famous athlete from Rhodes, has won a contest whose prize is a crown. It is enough to say that he has won at the Olympic Games. There is no need to add that the prize at Olympia is a crown, because everybody knows it.
Only a few of the premises from which rhetorical syllogisms are made are necessary. Most of the things we judge and consider could be otherwise than they are. People deliberate and think hard about what they are going to do, and all human actions are of that kind: practically none of them happens out of necessity. And what happens usually, or only possibly, can be reached by reasoning only from other premises of the same kind, just as what is necessary can be reached only from what is necessary; this too is clear to us from the Analytics. It is clear, then, that of the premises enthymemes are drawn from, a few will be necessary but most will hold only usually. And since enthymemes are drawn from what is likely and from signs, each of these must correspond to one of those two kinds of premise.
What is likely is what happens for the most part. It is not simply that, as some people define it, but what happens for the most part among things that could be otherwise; and it stands to the thing it makes likely as the general stands to the particular.
Of signs, some stand as a particular stands to the general, others as the general stands to a particular. A sign that is necessary is called a sure sign; a sign that is not necessary has no special name to mark the difference.
By necessary signs I mean those from which a valid syllogism can be made. That is why this kind of sign is called a tekmêrion, a sure sign. When people think that what they have said cannot be refuted, they think they are offering a tekmêrion, something proved and finished, since in the old language tekmar, the root of the word, means the same as peras, a limit or end.
Here is how a sign stands as a particular to the general. Suppose someone said that it is a sign that wise people are just, because Socrates was wise and just. This is a sign, but it can be refuted even if what is said about Socrates is true, because no valid syllogism can be made from it. But suppose someone said that it is a sign that a man is ill because he has a fever, or that a woman has given birth because she has milk. That sign is necessary. It is the only kind of sign that is a sure sign, because it is the only kind that, if the fact is true, cannot be refuted. Here, finally, is how a sign stands as the general to a particular. Suppose someone said that it is a sign that a man has a fever because he is breathing fast. This too can be refuted, even if it is true that he is breathing fast, since it is possible to breathe hard without having a fever.
So we have now said what the likely is, what a sign and a sure sign are, and how they differ. But these things, and the reason why some of them cannot make a valid syllogism while others can, are laid out more clearly in the Analytics.
We have said that the example is an induction, and what kind of material it works on. It is not the relation of part to whole, nor of whole to part, nor of whole to whole, but of part to part, like to like. When two cases come under the same general kind, but one is better known than the other, the better-known one is an example. Take the argument that Dionysius of Syracuse is plotting to make himself tyrant, because he is asking for a bodyguard. Pisistratus, earlier, when he was plotting a tyranny in Athens, asked for a bodyguard, got one, and made himself tyrant; so did Theagenes in Megara. All these, and any others the listeners know of, become examples for the case of Dionysius, about whom they do not yet know whether this is why he is asking. All of them fall under the same general rule: someone plotting a tyranny asks for a bodyguard.
That, then, is what the proofs that seem to prove things are made from.
But there is a very great difference between enthymemes, one that has escaped almost everybody, and it is the same difference that exists among syllogisms in the method of dialectic. Some enthymemes belong to rhetoric, just as some syllogisms belong to the method of dialectic; others belong to other arts and abilities, some of which already exist while others have not yet been worked out. That is why they slip past the listeners unnoticed; and the more properly a speaker gets hold of them, the further he moves away from rhetoric and dialectic without realising it. What I mean will be clearer if I say it at greater length.
By dialectical and rhetorical syllogisms I mean those that deal with what we call topics, the stock lines of argument. These are the common ones, which apply alike to questions of justice, of nature, of politics, and of many other subjects that differ in kind. An example is the line of argument from more and less: it will be no easier to build a syllogism or an enthymeme from it about justice than about nature, or about anything else, even though these subjects differ in kind. Special arguments, on the other hand, are those drawn from premises that belong to one particular species and kind of thing. There are premises about nature, for instance, from which you cannot build an enthymeme or a syllogism about ethics, and premises about ethics from which you cannot build one about nature; and the same holds in every field. The common lines of argument will not make anyone knowledgeable about any particular kind of thing, because they are not about any particular subject. But with the special ones, the better a person chooses his premises, the more he will find, without noticing, that he has made a science other than dialectic and rhetoric. For if he hits upon first principles, what he is doing will no longer be dialectic or rhetoric, but the science whose first principles he has got hold of.
Most enthymemes are drawn from these special and particular kinds, and fewer from the common ones. So here, as in the Topics, we must distinguish the kinds of enthymeme and the lines of argument they are to be taken from. By kinds I mean the premises that belong to each particular class of things; by lines of argument, the ones common to all alike. Let us talk about the kinds first. But first of all let us pin down the kinds of rhetoric, so that once we have divided them and know how many there are, we can take up the elements and premises of each one separately.
There are three kinds of rhetoric, neither more nor less, because there are three kinds of people who listen to speeches. Every speech is made up of three things: the speaker, the subject he speaks about, and the person he speaks to. And the purpose of the speech is directed at this last one, I mean the listener.
The listener must be either a spectator or a judge, and if a judge, then a judge either of what has happened or of what is going to happen. The member of the assembly judges what is going to happen; the juror judges what has happened; and the spectator judges the speaker's skill.
So there must be three kinds of rhetorical speech: political speech, the kind usually called deliberative, which is made to the assembly and advises for or against; courtroom speech; and ceremonial speech, the speech made for an occasion or a show, which praises or blames.
Advice either urges people to do something or urges them not to. Everyone who gives advice, whether privately to one person or publicly to the people in the assembly, always does one or the other. A lawsuit is either an accusation or a defence, since the people on either side of a dispute must do one or the other. Ceremonial speech is either praise or blame.
Each of these has its own time. For the person giving political advice it is the future: whether he urges or dissuades, he advises about things that are still to come. For the person in a lawsuit it is the past, since it is always about things that have been done that one side accuses and the other defends. For ceremonial speech the chief time is the present, since everyone who praises or blames does so on the basis of how things stand now; but speakers of this kind also often make use of the past, by reminding the audience of it, and of the future, by guessing at it in advance.
Each of these kinds also has a different goal, and since there are three kinds there are three goals. For the person giving political advice, the goal is what is advantageous or harmful. The one who urges a course of action recommends it as better, and the one who dissuades warns against it as worse, and he brings in everything else as an extra that bears on this: whether the course is just or unjust, noble or shameful. For people in a lawsuit, the goal is what is just and unjust, and they too bring in everything else as an extra that bears on it. For people who praise and blame, the goal is what is noble and what is shameful, and they too refer everything else back to that.
Here is a sign that each kind has the goal I have given it. On the other points the speakers sometimes do not argue at all. The man on trial will sometimes not dispute that the thing happened, or that he did harm, but he will never admit that he did wrong, since otherwise there would be no need for a trial. In the same way people giving political advice will often give up every other point, but they will never admit that what they are advising is not to our advantage, or that what they are warning us against is actually useful. Yet very often they do not care in the least about showing that it is not unjust to enslave their neighbours, even neighbours who have done them no wrong. In the same way people who praise or blame do not ask whether a man's actions were advantageous or harmful to him. On the contrary, they often count it in his praise that he did something noble with no thought for his own interest. So they praise Achilles because he went to the help of his friend Patroclus, knowing that he himself must die for it when he could have lived. For Achilles such a death was the nobler thing, while staying alive would have been the advantageous one.
It is clear from what has been said that the speaker must first have ready a stock of premises on these subjects. Sure signs, what is likely, and signs are the premises of rhetoric. A syllogism in general is made out of premises, and the enthymeme is a syllogism made out of the premises just mentioned.
Next, what is impossible cannot be done and cannot have been done; only what is possible can. Likewise, nothing that never happened can have been done, and nothing that never will happen can be done in the future. So the person giving political advice, the person in a lawsuit and the ceremonial speaker must all have premises ready about what is possible and what is impossible, about whether something has happened or not, and about whether something will happen or not.
Further, everyone, whether praising or blaming, urging or dissuading, accusing or defending, tries to show not only the things we have mentioned, but also that the good or the bad, the noble or the shameful, the just or the unjust in question is great or small. They do this either by speaking of the things in themselves or by setting them side by side and comparing them. So it is clear that the speaker must also have premises ready about greatness and smallness, and about the greater and the less, both in general and in each particular case: which good is greater or less, for instance, or which wrong, or which just act; and the same with the rest.
We have now said what the subjects are about which the speaker must, of necessity, have his premises ready. After this we must take each kind separately and set out its subjects: first what political advice is about, next what ceremonial speeches are about, and third what lawsuits are about.
First, then, we must grasp what kinds of good and bad things the person giving political advice advises about. He does not advise about everything, but only about things that may either happen or not happen.
About whatever necessarily is or will be, or cannot possibly be or come about, there is no advising.
Nor, in fact, is there advice about everything that may or may not happen. Among such things there are some goods that come about by nature and some that come by chance, and there is no point in giving advice about those. Clearly, advice is about the things we deliberate about, and those are the things that are naturally up to us, whose starting point lies in our own power. We go on looking into a course of action only until we have found out whether it is possible or impossible for us to do.
Now, to count up and sort into kinds, one by one and exactly, all the matters that people usually do business about in public, and further to define them, as far as possible, as they truly are, is not what we should be attempting at present. That is not the work of the art of rhetoric, but of an art that is wiser and closer to the truth; and rhetoric has already been given far more to study than properly belongs to it.
What we said earlier is true: rhetoric is made up of the science of logic, which I call analytics, and of the part of politics that deals with character, and it resembles dialectic in some ways and the arguments of the sophists, the paid teachers of clever talk, in others.
But the more anyone tries to make dialectic or rhetoric into sciences, rather than the abilities they are, the more he will blot out their nature without noticing it. He will be building them over into sciences of certain definite subjects, and not simply of arguments, and crossing into those sciences as he does so.
All the same, let us say even now as much about these matters as is worth sorting out, while still leaving room for the science of politics to look into them.
The subjects people deliberate about, and on which those who give political advice address the assembly, are pretty well five in number, if we take the most important ones. They are finance, war and peace, the defence of the country, imports and exports, and the making of laws.
So, on finance, the person who means to give advice should know what the city's sources of income are and how large they are, so that if any has been left out it may be added, and if any is too small it may be increased. He should also know all the city's expenses, so that if any is unnecessary it may be cut, and if any is too large it may be made smaller. For people grow richer not only by adding to what they already have but also by cutting down what they spend. And it is not enough to take in these things from experience of one's own city's affairs. To give advice on them a person must also be well informed about what has been found out elsewhere.
On war and peace, he should know the strength of the city: how great it is already and how great it could become, what kind of force it has now and what could be added to it, and also what wars it has fought and how it fought them. He must know these things not only about his own city but also about its neighbours, and above all about those with whom war is to be expected. The point is that the city should keep the peace with those stronger than itself, and keep in its own hands the choice of whether to go to war with those who are weaker. He must also know whether their forces are like or unlike ours, since here too one side may have the advantage or come off worse. And for this purpose he must have studied not only his own city's wars but also other people's wars, and how they turned out, because like causes naturally produce like results.
On the defence of the country, he must not be ignorant of how it is defended. He should know the size of the garrison, what kind of force it is, and where the guard-posts are, which is impossible unless he knows the country, so that if the garrison is too small it may be added to, if any part of it is unnecessary it may be withdrawn, and the places that matter may be watched more closely.
Next, on the food supply, he should know how much it costs to feed the city, and what kind of food it needs, both what is grown at home and what is imported; and which goods the city needs to export and which it needs to import, and from whom, so that treaties and trade agreements can be made with those people. For there are two kinds of people towards whom the citizens must be kept from giving any cause of complaint: those who are stronger than they are, and those who are useful to them in trade.
For the city's safety a speaker must be able to understand all these things, and not least he must have an understanding of the making of laws, since the city's security lies in its laws. So he must know how many forms of constitution there are, what is good for each, and what naturally destroys each of them, both the things that belong to that constitution itself and the things opposed to it. By being destroyed by things that belong to itself I mean this. Apart from the best constitution, all the others are destroyed both by being slackened and by being tightened too far, like the string of a lyre. Democracy, for instance, becomes weaker not only when it is slackened, until in the end it turns into an oligarchy, the rule of the few; it also becomes weaker when it is tightened too hard. It is like a hooked nose or a snub nose. When the curve is relaxed, the nose moves towards the ordinary shape in between; but when it becomes extremely hooked or extremely snub, it ends up so far gone that it does not even look like a nose.
For making laws it is useful not only to understand which constitution is good for us by looking at our own past, but also to know the constitutions of other peoples and which kinds suit which kinds of people. So it is clear that, for the making of laws, accounts of travels around the world are useful, since from them we can learn the laws of other nations; and for political debate, the histories written by people who record what men have done. But all this is the work of politics, not of rhetoric.
These, then, are the most important subjects on which the person who means to give political advice must have his premises ready. Now let us go back and say what we must draw on to urge people towards a course of action, or to warn them against it, both on these subjects and on the others.
Nearly every one of us, on his own, and all of us together as a community, has some target that we aim at in everything we choose and everything we avoid. Put in a word, that target is happiness and the things that make it up.
So, by way of illustration, let us take what happiness is, speaking in general terms, and what its parts are made of. Every speech that urges people to do something, and every speech that urges them not to, is about happiness, about the things that lead towards it, and about the things that work against it. The rule is simple. We ought to do whatever produces happiness or one of its parts, or makes it greater instead of less; and we ought not to do whatever destroys it, or gets in its way, or produces its opposite.
Let us say, then, that happiness is one of these four things. It is doing well, combined with virtue. Or it is a life that is sufficient in itself and needs nothing from outside. Or it is the pleasantest life, lived in safety. Or it is an abundance of property and of slaves, together with the power to keep them safe and to make use of them. Nearly everyone agrees that happiness is one or more of these things.
If happiness is something of this kind, then its parts must be these: good birth; many friends; good friends; wealth; good children; many children; a good old age. Then there are the excellences of the body, such as health, beauty, strength, size and the ability to compete in the games. Then a good reputation, honour, good luck, and virtue, or else the parts of virtue: practical wisdom, courage, justice and self-control. For a man would be as completely sufficient in himself as it is possible to be if he had both the goods that are inside him and the goods that are outside him, since there are no other goods besides these. The goods inside him are the goods of the mind and the goods of the body. The goods outside him are good birth, friends, money and honour. We also think it right that he should have power and good fortune as well, because that is how his life will be most secure. So let us take each of these in the same way and say what it is.
Good birth, for a nation or a city, means that its people sprang from the soil they live on, as the Athenians like to boast of themselves, or else that they are very old; that its first ancestors were famous as leaders; and that many of their descendants have been famous for the things people admire. For a private person, good birth may come from the father's side or from the mother's, and it requires legitimate birth on both sides. And, as with a city, it means that the founders of the family were distinguished for virtue, or wealth, or some other thing that people honour, and that the family has produced many famous people, men and women, young and old.
What it means to have good children and many children is plain enough. For the community, it means having a large number of young people who are also good: good in the excellences of the body, such as size, beauty, strength and the ability to compete in the games, and good in the excellences of the mind, which for a young man are self-control and courage. For a private person, it means that his own children are many and of this sort, daughters as well as sons. The excellences of a woman's body are beauty and size; the excellences of her mind are self-control and a love of work that has nothing slavish about it. In private life and in public alike, for men and for women alike, we should look for each of these qualities to be present. Where things are bad among the women, as they are among the Spartans, a people is only about half happy.
The parts of wealth are these: plenty of money and land; the ownership of estates that stand out for their number, their size and their beauty; and the ownership of household goods, of slaves and of livestock that stand out for their number and their beauty. All of these should belong to you securely, should be fit for a free man, and should be useful. The more useful kind of property is the kind that bears fruit; the kind more fitting for a free man is the kind you enjoy. By property that bears fruit I mean the kind that brings in an income; by property you enjoy I mean the kind that yields nothing worth mentioning beyond the use of it. The test of security is to own things in such a place and in such a way that the use of them is in your own hands. The test of whether they are really yours is whether you have the power to part with them, and by parting with them I mean giving them away or selling them. On the whole, being rich lies in using things rather than in owning them, since what wealth actually is, is the putting of such things to work and the use of them.
A good reputation means being taken by everyone to be a person of worth, or having something of the kind that everyone wants, or most people, or the good, or the wise.
Honour is the sign of a reputation for doing good to others. The people honoured most, and most justly, are the ones who have already done good; but a man who is able to do good is honoured too. The good done may be a matter of saving someone's life, and whatever keeps people alive; or a matter of wealth; or of any of the other goods that are hard to come by, whether hard in general, or hard in that place, or hard at that time. Many people are honoured for what look like small things, but the place and the moment are what make them count. The parts of honour are these: sacrifices; memorials in verse and in prose; privileges; grants of sacred land; seats of honour at the front; tombs; statues; meals at the public expense; the honours that barbarians pay, such as bowing down to the ground and stepping aside to make way; and the gifts that each people prizes. For a gift is both the giving of a possession and a sign of honour. That is why gifts are wanted both by people who love money and by people who love honour: each gets what he is after. The lover of money gets a possession, which is what he wants, and the lover of honour gets honour.
The excellence of the body is health, and health of the kind that lets you use your body without falling ill. For many people are healthy in the way Herodicus is said to have been. He was a physician who taught his patients a regime of exercise, and nobody would call such people happy in their health, since they have to keep away from all, or nearly all, of the things human beings enjoy.
Beauty is different at each age of life. In a young man, beauty means having a body fit for hard exertion, both in running and in feats of strength, while being pleasant to look at and a delight to see. That is why the athletes of the pentathlon, the five events of the games, are the most beautiful: they are built by nature for strength and speed at once. In a man in his prime, beauty means a body fit for the hardships of war, and a look that is pleasant but at the same time frightening. In an old man, it means being strong enough for the work he cannot avoid, and being free from pain because he has none of the things with which old age disfigures a body.
Strength is the power to move something else as you wish. To move something else you must pull it, or push it, or lift it, or press it down, or crush it. So the strong man is strong in all of these ways or in some of them.
The excellence of size is to be bigger than most people in height, in depth and in breadth, but only so much bigger that the excess does not make your movements slower.
The excellence of the body for competing in the games is made up of size, strength and speed; and the fast man is a kind of strong man too. A man who can fling his legs out in a certain way and move them fast and far is a runner. One who can grip and hold is a wrestler. One who can drive a man back with a blow is a boxer. One who can do both of these last two is a fighter in the pancratium, the contest that combines boxing and wrestling. One who can do all of them is a pentathlete.
A good old age is one that comes on slowly and without pain. A man who grows old quickly does not have a good old age, and neither does one who grows old slowly but painfully. A good old age depends both on the excellences of the body and on luck. Unless a man is free from illness and strong, he will not be free from suffering and pain; and he could not go on living a long time without luck. There is also, it is true, another capacity for long life that has nothing to do with strength and health, since many people live long without any of the excellences of the body. But a precise account of these matters is of no use for our present purpose.
What it means to have many friends and good friends is plain enough, once we have defined a friend. A friend is someone who, whatever he thinks is good for the other person, sets about doing it for that person's sake. A man who has many people like this has many friends, and a man whose friends are also decent men has good friends.
Good fortune means that the goods of which luck is the cause come to you and stay with you: all of them, or most of them, or the greatest of them. Luck is the cause of some of the things that the arts also produce, but of many things too that have nothing to do with any art, such as the things nature produces; though what luck brings may also go against nature. For health is produced by an art, the art of medicine, while beauty and size are produced by nature. In general, the goods that come from luck are the ones people envy. Luck is also the cause of goods that no one could have reckoned on. For example, when all a man's brothers are ugly and he alone is handsome; or when the others did not see the treasure and he found it; or when the arrow hit the man next to him and missed him; or when he was the only one who stayed away from a place he always went to, while the others, who went there that one time, were killed. All things of this sort are counted as strokes of good fortune.
As for virtue, since it belongs most closely with the subject of praise, we shall define it when we come to speak about praise.
It is clear, then, what a speaker should aim at when he is urging people to do something, whether it lies in the future or already exists, and what he should aim at when he is urging them not to: the one is the opposite of the other. But the target set before the person giving advice is what is useful. People do not deliberate about the end itself; they deliberate about the means to the end, and these are the things that are useful where our actions are concerned. And what is useful is good. So we must get hold of the basic elements of the good and the useful in general.
Let us say that a thing is good in each of the following senses. It is good if it is worth choosing for its own sake. It is good if it is the thing for the sake of which we choose something else. It is good if it is what all things aim at, or all things that have feeling, or all things that have intelligence, or would have it if they could. It is good if it is what intelligence would assign to each thing, and what intelligence, applied to each particular case, actually does assign to it, since that is what is good for each. It is good if its presence puts a person in a good condition and makes him sufficient in himself. Being sufficient in oneself is itself good. So is whatever produces or preserves such things; so is whatever such things follow from; and so is whatever prevents or destroys their opposites.
A thing can follow from another in two ways: at the same time, or later. Knowing, for example, comes after learning, while being alive comes along with being healthy at the same moment. And a thing can produce another in three ways. Being healthy produces health in one way; food produces health in another; and exercise produces it in a third, in the sense that it usually does.
With this laid down, it must follow that getting good things is good, and that getting rid of bad things is good. When you get rid of a bad thing, not having it follows at once; when you get a good thing, having it follows afterwards.
So too, getting a greater good in place of a lesser one is good, and so is getting a lesser evil in place of a greater one. By as much as the greater exceeds the lesser, by so much you have gained the one and lost the other.
The virtues, too, must be good. Those who have them are in a good condition because of them, and the virtues produce good things and put them into practice. What each virtue is, and of what kind, must be discussed separately. Pleasure, too, must be good, since all living creatures by nature reach out for it. So pleasant things and noble things must be good as well: pleasant things because they produce pleasure, and noble things because some of them are pleasant and the rest are worth choosing for their own sake.
To go through them one by one, then, the following things must be good.
Happiness: it is worth choosing for its own sake, it is sufficient in itself, and we choose everything else for the sake of it.
Justice, courage, self-control, greatness of soul, magnificence in spending, and the other settled states of character like them: they are virtues of the soul.
Health, beauty and the like: they are virtues of the body, and they produce many other goods. Health, for instance, produces both pleasure and life itself. That is why it is thought to be the best thing of all, because it is the cause of the two things most people prize most highly, pleasure and being alive.
Wealth: it is the excellence of owning things, and it produces many other goods.
A friend and friendship: a friend is worth choosing for his own sake, and he produces many other goods.
Honour and reputation: they are pleasant, they produce many other goods, and they are usually accompanied by actually having the qualities for which people are honoured.
The ability to speak and the ability to act: all abilities of this kind produce good things.
Then there are natural talent, a good memory, quickness at learning, sharpness of mind and everything of that kind: these abilities produce good things. So, in the same way, do all the sciences and all the arts. And life itself: even if no other good followed from it, it is worth choosing for its own sake. And justice: it is a kind of usefulness to the community as a whole.
These, more or less, are the things everyone agrees are good. Where the good is disputed, the arguments come from the following lines.
A thing is good if its opposite is bad.
A thing is good if its opposite is useful to our enemies. For instance, if it is especially useful to our enemies that we should be cowards, then plainly courage is especially valuable to the citizens.
And in general, whatever our enemies want, or whatever they would be glad of, its opposite looks useful to us. That is why Nestor, begging Achilles and Agamemnon to stop quarrelling, says in Homer:
Priam would surely be glad.
This is not always true, though; it is only true for the most part. There is nothing to stop the same thing from sometimes being useful to both of two opposing sides. That is why people say that misfortune brings people together, when the same thing threatens harm to both.
A thing is good if there is no such thing as too much of it; whatever is greater than it should be is bad.
A thing is good if much labour or much money has been spent on it. It already looks like a good, and it is taken to be an end, and the end of many efforts; and an end is a good. That is why Homer has Hera say, when the Greeks are about to sail home from Troy and leave Helen behind:
And they would leave Priam a thing to boast of,
and why Odysseus, urging the army to hold on, says:
It is a disgrace to stay so long, and go home empty-handed.
It is also the point of the proverb about breaking the water jar at the door, which is said of labour lost at the very last moment.
A thing is good if many people aim at it and it is plainly something people fight over. What everyone aims at was, as we saw, a good, and the many look very like everyone.
A thing is good if it is praised, since no one praises what is not good. It is good, too, if our enemies and worthless people praise it. For then, as it were, everyone already agrees, if even those who have suffered from it do; they would agree only because its goodness is too obvious to deny. In the same way, a man is worthless if his own friends find fault with him, and good if his enemies do not. That is why the Corinthians thought they had been insulted by Simonides when he wrote the line below. Corinthians had fought for Troy, and if their enemy Troy did not blame them, it seemed to follow that they had done Troy no harm:
Ilium does not blame the Corinthians.
A thing is good if one of the wise, or one of the good, whether a man or a woman, has singled it out in preference to others: as Athena chose Odysseus, as Theseus chose Helen, as the goddesses chose Alexander, that is, Paris, to judge their beauty, and as Homer chose Achilles.
And in general, the things people deliberately choose are good. People choose to do the things already mentioned; things that are bad for their enemies; things that are good for their friends; and things that are possible.
Possible things are of two kinds: things that could happen, and things that happen easily. Easy things are those that happen either without pain or in a short time, since difficulty is defined either by pain or by length of time. People also choose things that turn out as they wish; and what they wish for is either nothing bad at all, or a bad that is smaller than the good that comes with it. That will be the case if the wrong goes unnoticed or the punishment is small.
People choose things that are their own, things that no one else has, and things out of the ordinary, since that way the honour is greater. They choose things that suit them, meaning things that befit their birth and their power, and things they think they are lacking, even if these are small, since they choose to do these no less for that.
People choose things that are easily accomplished, since these are possible and easy. Things are easily accomplished if everyone has managed them, or most people, or people like ourselves, or people worse than ourselves. They choose things that will please their friends, or make their enemies hate them. They choose to do whatever the people they admire choose to do. They choose things they have a natural gift for or experience in, since they think they will succeed at them more easily. They choose things no worthless person would do, since such things are more praiseworthy. And they choose things they happen to be longing for, since these seem not only pleasant but better.
Above all, each kind of person chooses the thing he is especially fond of. People who love victory choose what brings victory; people who love honour, what brings honour; people who love money, what brings money; and so on with the rest. These, then, are the sources from which we must draw our proofs about the good and the useful.
People often agree that two courses are both useful but dispute which is more useful. So the next thing to discuss is the greater good and the more useful.
First, some definitions. One thing exceeds another when it is as much as the other and something more; the thing exceeded is the one contained in it. "Greater" and "more" are always said in relation to something less. "Great" and "small", "much" and "little", are said in relation to the size of most things: the great is what exceeds that ordinary size, and the small is what falls short of it; and the same holds for much and little.
Now, we call a thing good if it is worth choosing for its own sake and not for the sake of something else; if it is what all things aim at; if it is what anything would choose if it had intelligence and practical wisdom; and if it produces or preserves such things, or if such things follow from it. That for the sake of which we act is the end, and the end is that for the sake of which everything else is done; and a thing is good for a particular person if it stands in these relations to him. It follows, then, that several goods are a greater good than one, or than a smaller number, provided that the one, or the smaller number, is counted in among the several. For then the several exceed it, and what is contained in something is exceeded by it.
Next: if the greatest member of one class exceeds the greatest member of another, then the first class exceeds the second; and whenever one class exceeds another, the greatest member of the first exceeds the greatest member of the second. For example, if the biggest man is bigger than the biggest woman, then men in general are bigger than women; and if men in general are bigger than women, then the biggest man is bigger than the biggest woman. The margins by which classes exceed one another match the margins by which their greatest members do.
Next: when one thing follows from a second, but the second does not follow from the first, the second is the greater good, because the benefit of what follows is already contained in the benefit of what it follows from. A thing may follow from another at the same time, or later, or potentially. Being alive follows from being healthy at the same time, but being healthy does not follow from being alive. Knowing follows from learning, later. And robbery follows from robbing a temple potentially, since a man who has robbed a temple would also rob a person.
Things that exceed the same thing by a larger amount are greater, since they must also exceed the larger of the two amounts.
Things that produce a greater good are greater, since that is what we meant by producing something greater. The same goes for a thing produced by something greater. If what makes us healthy is more worth choosing than what gives us pleasure, and a greater good, then health is a greater good than pleasure.
What is worth choosing for its own sake is more worth choosing than what is not. Strength, for example, is a greater good than what is good for your health, since the second is not chosen for its own sake while the first is, and being chosen for its own sake was what we meant by a good.
If one thing is an end and the other is not, the end is greater: the other is chosen for the sake of something else, the end for its own sake. Exercise, for instance, is chosen for the sake of a body in good condition.
What has less need of some other thing or things is greater, since it is more sufficient in itself; and a thing has less need when it needs fewer things, or easier ones.
When one thing cannot exist, or cannot come into existence, without a second, while the second can do without the first, the one that needs nothing is more sufficient in itself, and so it looks like the greater good.
If one thing is a starting point and the other is not, or one is a cause and the other is not, the first is greater for the same reason: without a cause and a starting point, nothing can exist or come to be. And of two starting points, what comes from the greater starting point is greater; of two causes, what comes from the greater cause is greater. Conversely, of two starting points, the starting point of the greater thing is greater; and of two causes, the cause of the greater thing is greater.
It is clear from all this that a thing can be made to look greater in both of two opposite ways. If it is a starting point and the other is not, it will seem greater; and if it is not a starting point and the other is, it will also seem greater, because the end is greater than the starting point. That is how Leodamas argued in two trials over the affair of Oropus, a border town that the Athenian statesman Callistratus had advised leaving in Theban hands for the time being, a plan the general Chabrias carried out. Accusing Callistratus, Leodamas said that the man who gave the advice was more guilty than the man who carried it out, because the thing would never have been done if he had not advised it. Accusing Chabrias, he said the opposite: that the man who carried it out was more guilty than the man who advised it, because it would never have happened without someone to do it, and the whole reason people plot is so that someone will carry the plot out.
What is rarer is greater than what is plentiful: gold, for example, than iron, though gold is less useful, because getting hold of it is harder and so a greater thing. From another angle, though, the plentiful is greater than the rare, because we get more use out of it: "often" beats "seldom". That is why the poet Pindar begins an ode by saying:
Best of all things is water.
In general, what is harder is greater than what is easier, because it is rarer. From another angle, what is easier is greater than what is harder, because it is as we would like it to be.
A thing is greater if its opposite is greater, or if the loss of it is greater. And virtue is greater than the absence of vice, and vice is greater than the absence of virtue, since virtue and vice are ends and the mere absences are not.
Things whose works are nobler or more shameful are themselves greater. And where the virtues or the vices are greater, the works are greater too. For as causes and starting points are to each other, so are their results, and as results are to each other, so are their causes and starting points.
Things are greater if excelling in them is more worth choosing or nobler. Seeing sharply, for example, is more worth choosing than smelling sharply, since sight is more worth choosing than smell. And since caring more for your friends is nobler than caring more for money, the love of friends is nobler than the love of money. Conversely, excelling in better things is better, and excelling in nobler things is nobler.
Things are greater if the desire for them is nobler or better, since greater longings are longings for greater things. And for the same reason, the desires for nobler or better things are themselves better and nobler.
Where the sciences are nobler or more serious, their subject matter is nobler and more serious too, since as the knowledge stands, so stands the truth it knows, and each science lays down what belongs to its own field. And for the same reason, the sciences of more serious and nobler things are correspondingly more serious and nobler.
Whatever the wise would judge, or have judged, to be the greater good, whether it is all of them, or most of them, or the greater number, or the best of them, must be so, either without qualification or insofar as they judged it by their wisdom. This rule holds for everything else as well: what a thing is, how much of it there is and what kind it is are all as knowledge and wisdom would say. But we have stated it for goods, since we defined the good as what anything would choose if it had wisdom. So it is clear that the greater good is the one that wisdom rates higher.
What belongs to better people is greater, either without qualification or insofar as they are better: courage, for example, is greater than strength. So is what a better person would choose, either without qualification or insofar as he is better: to suffer wrong, for example, rather than to do it, since that is what the juster man would choose.
What is more pleasant is greater than what is less pleasant, since everything pursues pleasure and people long for the feeling of pleasure for its own sake, and these are the marks by which we defined the good and the end. And a pleasure is greater when it has less pain mixed in and when it lasts longer.
What is nobler is greater than what is less noble, since the noble is either what is pleasant or what is worth choosing for its own sake.
Things that people would more like to bring about for themselves or for their friends are greater goods; and things they would least like to bring about are greater evils.
Things that last longer are greater than things that last a shorter time, and things that are secure are greater than things that are not. With the first we get more use out of them in time; with the second, our use of them depends on our wishes, since a secure possession is there whenever we want it.
Whatever holds of one word in a family of related words holds of the others, and of the other grammatical forms of the same word. If acting bravely, for example, is nobler and more worth choosing than acting with self-control, then courage is more worth choosing than self-control, and being brave than being self-controlled.
What everyone chooses is greater than what not everyone chooses, and what more people choose is greater than what fewer people choose. For the good was what everyone aims at, so the greater good is what people aim at more. So too with what is preferred by our opponents, or our enemies, or by the judges, or by the people the judges themselves think well of. In the first case it is as if everyone were saying it; in the second, it is the people who have the authority and who know.
Sometimes what everyone has a share in is greater, since not having a share in it is a disgrace. Sometimes what no one, or only a few, have a share in is greater, since it is rarer.
Things more worthy of praise are greater, since they are nobler. Likewise things for which the honours are greater, since honour is a kind of measure of worth. And likewise things for which the penalties are greater.
Things greater than what everyone agrees, or it seems, is great are greater still. And the same thing, divided into its parts, looks greater, since it seems to exceed in more respects. That is why Homer says that Meleager, who was sitting out the fighting in a rage, was persuaded to rise up by his wife listing everything that happens to a captured city:
All the evils that fall on people whose city is taken: the men are killed, and fire levels the city to dust, and strangers carry off the children.
Putting things together and building one on top of another, as the comic poet Epicharmus did, works the same way, and for the same reason as dividing: putting things together displays a great superiority, and it looks like the starting point and the cause of great things.
Since what is harder and rarer is greater, the right moment, a person's age, the place, the time and a person's power all make things great. If a man does something beyond his power, beyond his age, or beyond what people like him could do, or if he does it in a particular way, or in a particular place, or at a particular time, it will take on greatness, whether it is a noble, good or just act, or the opposite. That is the point of Simonides' epigram on the Olympic victor:
Once I carried a rough yoke across my shoulders and brought fish from Argos down to Tegea.
And it is why Iphicrates, the general who had risen from a cobbler's son, used to praise himself by pointing to what he had started from.
What is natural is greater than what is acquired, since it is harder. That is why Homer has the singer Phemius, pleading for his life before Odysseus, say:
I taught myself.
The greatest part of something great is greater. So Pericles, in his funeral speech for the war dead, said that the city's loss of its young men was as if the spring had been taken out of the year.
Things useful in greater need are greater, such as the things useful in old age and in illness. Of two things, the one nearer the end is greater. What is good for a particular person is greater than what is good without qualification. What is possible is greater than what is impossible, since the possible is good for us and the impossible is not. And things that come at the end of life are greater, since what comes near the end is more of an end.
Things aimed at the truth are greater than things aimed at appearances. The test of a thing aimed at appearances is that you would not choose it if no one were ever going to find out. That is why receiving a kindness might seem more worth choosing than doing one: you would choose to receive it even if no one ever knew, but it does not seem that anyone would choose to do a kindness in secret.
So too, things that people would rather have in reality than in appearance are greater, since they are more a matter of truth. That is why people say that justice is a small thing, because it is more worth choosing to seem just than to be just. That is not so with being healthy.
What is useful for more purposes is greater: for example, what helps us to live, and to live well, and to enjoy ourselves, and to do noble things. That is why wealth and health are thought to be the greatest goods, since they have all of these in them.
What brings less pain and comes with pleasure is greater, since that is more than one good: pleasure is a good, and so is freedom from pain. And of two goods, the greater is the one that, added to the same thing, makes the whole greater.
Things that do not go unnoticed when we have them are greater than things that do, since they tend towards the truth. That is why being rich would seem a greater good than seeming rich.
Last, a thing is greater if it is held dear, and it is held dearer by someone who has only that one than by someone who has others besides. That is why the damage is not equal if someone blinds a man who has only one eye and a man who has two: the one-eyed man has lost the one thing he held dear.
These, more or less, are the sources from which we must bring our proofs when we urge people to do something and when we urge them not to.
The greatest and most decisive thing of all, if you want to be able to persuade people and to give them good advice, is to have a grasp of every kind of constitution, and to be able to tell apart the characters, the customs and the interests of each one.
There are two reasons. First, everyone is persuaded by what is in their interest, and what is in a city's interest is whatever keeps its constitution safe. Second, the word of whoever holds power in a city is final, and who holds power differs from one constitution to another: there are as many kinds of sovereign power as there are kinds of constitution.
Now, there are four constitutions: democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy and monarchy. So the power that has the final say and does the judging will always be some part of one of these, or the whole of it.
A democracy is a constitution in which the offices are shared out by lot. An oligarchy is one in which they go to those who own a certain amount of property. An aristocracy is one in which they go according to education, and by education I mean the education laid down by the law. For in an aristocracy the people who rule are those who have stayed faithful all their lives to what the law lays down, and such people are bound to seem the best, which is where this constitution got its name, since aristos is Greek for "best". A monarchy, as its name says, is the constitution in which one man has power over everyone. Of monarchies, the kind that runs according to some settled order is kingship; the kind that has no limits is tyranny.
Nor should the speaker lose sight of the goal of each constitution, because people choose the things that lead to their goal. The goal of democracy is freedom; of oligarchy, wealth; of aristocracy, education and what the law lays down; of tyranny, the tyrant's own protection. So it is clear that we have to tell apart the characters, the customs and the interests that serve the goal of each, since this goal is what people have in mind when they choose.
Proofs, though, come about not only through argument that demonstrates but also through character. We trust a speaker because he seems to be a certain kind of man, and that means because he seems good, or well disposed to us, or both. So we ought to know the character of each constitution as well, since the character that belongs to a constitution is bound to be the most persuasive to the people who live under it. We shall learn these characters by the same means as before: a character shows itself in what a person chooses, and what a person chooses is directed towards his goal.
We have now said what things a speaker should urge people to aim at, as things that will come about or already exist; from what sources he should draw his proofs about what is in their interest; and, further, by what means and in what way he can be well supplied with material about the characters and customs of each constitution, so far as suits the present occasion. These matters have been worked out in detail in my Politics.
After this, let us talk about virtue and vice, and about the noble and the disgraceful, because these are what a speaker aims at when he praises or blames. And while we are talking about them, we shall at the same time be showing how we can make our audience think of us as people of a certain character, which, as I said, is the second kind of proof. For the same things that let us make other people seem worthy of trust where virtue is concerned will let us do the same for ourselves.
People often praise, sometimes seriously and sometimes in fun, not only a human being or a god but lifeless things too, and any animal that comes to hand. So we need to have the premises for these subjects ready in the same way. Let us, then, say something about them as well, as far as is needed by way of illustration.
The noble, then, is whatever is worth choosing for its own sake and also deserves praise; or whatever is good and is pleasant because it is good. If that is what the noble is, virtue must be noble, since virtue is good and deserves praise.
Virtue, as it is generally thought of, is a power of getting good things and of keeping them; a power of doing many great services to others; in fact, of doing every kind of service in every case.
The parts of virtue are justice, courage, self-control, magnificence, greatness of soul, generosity, practical wisdom and wisdom.
If virtue is a power of doing good to others, then the greatest virtues must be the ones most useful to other people. That is why people honour the just and the brave above everyone else: courage is useful to others in war, and justice both in war and in peace. Next comes generosity. The generous give their money away freely and do not compete for it, and money is the thing other people want most.
Justice is the virtue through which each person has what is his own, and has it in the way the law lays down. Injustice is the vice through which a person has what belongs to others, against the law.
Courage is the virtue that makes people do noble deeds in the midst of danger, as the law commands, and makes them obedient to the law. Cowardice is the opposite.
Self-control is the virtue that makes people stand towards the pleasures of the body as the law commands. Lack of self-control is the opposite.
Generosity is the readiness to do good to others with money. Meanness is the opposite.
Greatness of soul is the virtue that does others great services. Smallness of soul is the opposite.
Magnificence is the virtue that produces something on a grand scale when money is spent, as when a rich citizen pays for a festival or a warship in style. Smallness of soul and shabbiness are its opposites.
Practical wisdom is a virtue of the mind that lets people take good counsel about the good things and the bad things we have already spoken of as bearing on happiness.
That is enough, for the present occasion, about virtue and vice in general and about their parts. The rest is not hard to see. It is plain that whatever produces virtue must be noble, since it leads to virtue; and so must whatever comes from virtue. Of that kind are the signs of virtue and its works.
Now, the signs of virtue, and all the things that are the deeds of a good man or the things done to him, are noble. It follows that whatever is a deed of courage, or a sign of courage, or has been done courageously, is noble. The same goes for just things and for deeds done justly. It does not go, however, for what is done to a person justly. Justice is the only one of the virtues in which "justly" is not always noble: when it comes to being punished, to be punished justly is more disgraceful than to be punished unjustly. And the same holds, in the same way, for the other virtues.
Next, things are noble when the prize for them is honour, and when they are done for honour rather than for money. So too are the things worth choosing that a person does not do for his own sake.
So are things that are good without qualification; whatever a man has done for his country while neglecting his own interests; and things that are good by nature, and good, but not good for the man himself, since the things that are good for him he does for his own sake.
So are the things a man can have when he is dead rather than while he is alive, since what belongs to a man while he lives has more of self-interest in it.
So are all deeds done for the sake of others, since they are less for oneself. So is every success won for other people and not for oneself, and every success won for those who have done one good, since that is just. So are acts of kindness, since they are not aimed at oneself.
So are the opposites of the things people are ashamed of. People are ashamed of what is disgraceful, whether they are saying it, doing it or about to do it. Sappho's poem shows this. The poet Alcaeus said to her:
I want to say something, but I am held back by shame.
And she answered him:
If what you longed for were good and noble, and your tongue were not stirring up some evil to say, shame would not have hidden your eyes; you would have spoken out about what is right.
Things are noble, too, when people strive for them anxiously but without fear, because that is how people feel about the goods that lead to a good name.
The virtues and the deeds of those who are better by nature are nobler: a man's, for instance, rather than a woman's.
So are the virtues that give enjoyment to others rather than to oneself. That is why justice, and what is just, are noble.
It is noble, too, to take revenge on your enemies and not to make peace with them. Paying back what you have received is just, what is just is noble, and not to be beaten is the mark of a brave man.
Victory and honour are among the noble things. They are worth choosing even when they bring in nothing, and they show that a man excels in virtue. So are things worth remembering, and the more they are remembered, the nobler they are. Nobler still are the things that follow a man when he is no longer alive, the things that honour attends, the things that are out of the ordinary, and the things that belong to one person alone, because all of these are better remembered.
So are possessions that bring in no profit, since they are more fitting for a free man. So are the things peculiar to a particular people, and whatever marks what that people admire. In Sparta, for instance, it is noble to wear your hair long. Long hair is the mark of a free man, since with long hair it is not easy to do any work of the kind a hired labourer does.
It is noble, too, not to work at any mechanical trade, since the mark of a free man is that he does not live at another man's beck and call.
For praise and for blame alike, we should also treat the qualities that lie close to a man's real ones as if they were the same thing. To blame him, call the cautious man cold and scheming; to praise, call the simpleton good-natured and the man who feels nothing calm.
In every case take your word from the neighbouring qualities, always choosing the best of them. Call the quick-tempered man and the man who flies into a frenzy straightforward; call the stubborn man grand and dignified. Speak of those who go to an extreme as though they had the matching virtue: the rash man is brave, and the spendthrift is generous. Most people will think so, and at the same time a false inference can be drawn from the man's motive. If he runs risks where there is no need to, people will think that he would all the more run them where it is noble to do so; and if he lavishes money on anyone who comes along, that he will do the same all the more for his friends. For to do good to everyone is virtue carried to excess.
Consider also who the audience is in front of whom you are giving the praise. As Socrates used to say, in Plato's Menexenus, it is not hard to praise Athenians in front of Athenians. You should speak of whatever a particular audience values, whether they are Scythians, Spartans or philosophers, as though the man you are praising had it. And in general, treat what is valued as though it were noble, since the two seem to lie close together.
Actions are noble, too, when they are fitting: when, for instance, they are worthy of a man's ancestors or of what he has already achieved, since winning further honour both makes for happiness and is noble. They are noble also when they go beyond what could be expected, but in the direction of the better and the nobler: when, for instance, a man is modest in good fortune and great of soul in bad, or grows better and more ready to be reconciled as he grows greater. Of this kind is the saying of Iphicrates, the general who had risen from being a cobbler's son: "Look what I started from, and look what I have become." Of this kind too is the line about the Olympic victor, who remembered carrying fish from Argos to Tegea:
Once, with a rough basket across my shoulders...
and the epitaph Simonides wrote for Archedice, the daughter of Hippias, the tyrant of Athens, which says that her mind was never lifted up to arrogance, though she was
daughter and wife and sister of tyrants.
Since praise is based on actions, and acting by choice is the mark of a good man, we must try to show that the man we praise acted by choice. It helps if he appears to have done so many times. That is why we should treat even coincidences and strokes of luck as if they were chosen, because if many similar things are brought forward, they will be taken as a sign of virtue and of choice.
Praise is a speech that brings out the greatness of a man's virtue, so we must show that his actions are of that kind. An encomium, the speech that celebrates a man, deals with his achievements. Everything that surrounds them, such as noble birth and education, serves only to make us believe in them: it is likely that good parents will have good children, and that a man brought up in a certain way will turn out to be that kind of man. That is why we give an encomium to people who have actually done something. But achievements are signs of a settled character, since we would praise a man even if he had done nothing, if we believed he was the sort of man who would.
Calling a man blessed and calling him happy are the same thing as each other, but they are not the same as praise and encomium. Just as happiness contains virtue, calling a man happy contains praise and encomium.
Praise and advice have a shape in common. What you would put forward as advice becomes an encomium when you change the wording.
So, since we know what a man ought to do and what sort of man he ought to be, we should take these things, which we would say as advice, and change the wording and turn them around. Take, for instance, the advice that a man ought not to be proud of what he owes to luck, but only of what he owes to himself. Put that way, it works as advice. Put this way, it works as praise: "He was proud, not of what came to him by luck, but of what he owed to himself." So when you want to praise someone, look at what advice you would give; and when you want to give advice, look at what you would praise.
The wording will necessarily be turned the opposite way when you change the form that forbids into the form that does not forbid: "one ought not to be proud of luck" forbids, while "he was not proud of luck" simply states.
We should also use many of the ways of making a thing greater, which is called amplification. For instance, say that a man did something alone, or first, or with only a few others, or that he was the one mainly responsible; all these make the deed noble. Use also the circumstances of time and occasion, that is, whether he did it when nobody could have expected it. Say that he has succeeded at the same thing many times, since that is a great thing and will look as though it came from the man himself and not from luck. Say that rewards meant to encourage and honour such deeds were invented and set up because of him; or that he was the first to have an encomium written about him, as Hippolochus was; or the first to have a statue set up in the market-place, as Harmodius and Aristogiton were, the two men who killed Hipparchus, the brother of the tyrant of Athens. And do the same, the other way round, for blame. If you do not have enough to say about the man himself, set him beside others, which is what Isocrates used to do, because he was not used to pleading in court. And you should compare him with men who are famous, since it makes him greater, and it is noble, if he is better than men of worth.
Amplification falls naturally among the forms of praise, and with good reason. It consists in superiority, and superiority is one of the noble things. That is why, even if you cannot compare him with the famous, you should compare him with other people, since superiority is thought to point to virtue.
Speaking generally, of the kinds of argument common to all speeches, amplification is best suited to ceremonial speeches. There the actions are taken as agreed, so what is left is to clothe them with greatness and beauty. Examples are best suited to political speeches, since it is from what has happened before that we foretell and judge what will happen. Enthymemes are best suited to courtroom speeches, since what has happened, because it is unclear, most of all calls for causes and demonstration.
These, then, are nearly all the sources from which praise and blame are drawn, the things a speaker should keep his eye on when he praises or blames, and the materials of encomium and of reproach. Once we have these, their opposites are plain, since blame is drawn from the opposites.
The next thing to discuss is accusation and defence: how many premises, and of what kinds, we should build our syllogisms from when we accuse someone or defend ourselves in court.
We need to grasp three things. First, for what purposes people do wrong, and how many such purposes there are. Second, what state of mind people are in when they do it. Third, what sort of people they wrong, and what condition those victims are in.
So let us first define what doing wrong is, and then take these questions in order.
Let doing wrong be defined as harming someone deliberately and against the law. Law is of two kinds: particular and common. By particular law I mean the written law under which each city governs itself; by common law I mean the unwritten rules that seem to be agreed on everywhere, among all peoples. People act deliberately when they know what they are doing and are not forced to do it. Not everything done knowingly is done by choice; but everything done by choice is done knowingly, since no one is ignorant of what he chooses.
What makes people choose to do harm and to do bad things against the law is vice, and lack of self-control. If someone has a vice, one or several, then it is in the matter his vice concerns that he is also unjust. The mean man is unjust about money; the self-indulgent man about the pleasures of the body; the soft man about his comfort; the coward about danger, since fear makes him abandon the comrades who are sharing the danger with him. The ambitious man does wrong for the sake of honour, the hot-tempered man out of anger, the man who must always win for the sake of victory, the bitter man for the sake of revenge. The fool does wrong because he is mistaken about what is just and what is unjust, and the shameless man because he does not care what people think of him. And the same goes for each of the others, each in the matter his own failing concerns.
All this is clear enough, partly from what has been said about the virtues and partly from what will be said later about the emotions. What remains is to say for what purposes people do wrong, in what state of mind, and to whom.
First, then, let us set out what people are after, and what they are trying to escape, when they set about doing wrong. It is obvious why this matters. The accuser has to look at how many of these motives, and which ones, are present in his opponent, since these are the things everyone is after when he wrongs his neighbours. The defendant has to look at which of them, and how many, are not present in him.
Now, everything that anyone does is done either not because of himself or because of himself. Of the things not done because of himself, some are done by chance and some by necessity; and of those done by necessity, some are done by force and some by nature. So everything people do not do because of themselves is done by chance, by nature or by force. Of the things they do because of themselves, the things they themselves are the cause of, some are done by habit and some from desire in the broad sense, from wanting something; and of these, some come from a reasoned wanting and some from an unreasoned one.
A wish is a reasoned wanting of something good, since no one wishes for a thing unless he thinks it is good. The unreasoned wantings are anger and appetite. So everything people do must be done for one of seven causes: chance, nature, force, habit, reasoning, anger and appetite.
To divide people's actions further, by their age, or by their settled dispositions, or anything of that kind, is wasted effort. If the young happen to be quick to anger or full of appetites, it is not because they are young that they act as they do, but because of anger and appetite. Nor do people act because of wealth or poverty. It happens that the poor want money because they lack it, and that the rich want pleasures they do not need because they can afford them; but in their case too they will act not because of wealth or poverty but because of appetite. In the same way the just and the unjust, and all the others who are said to act according to their dispositions, will act for these same causes: either from reasoning or from emotion. The difference is that some act from good characters and good emotions, and others from the opposite.
It is true, all the same, that certain dispositions tend to be followed by certain results, and other dispositions by others. Perhaps from the very start the self-controlled man, because he is self-controlled, has good opinions and good appetites about pleasant things, and the self-indulgent man has the opposite ones about those same things.
So we should leave divisions of that kind aside, and look instead at which qualities usually go along with which. Whether a man is fair or dark, tall or short, no particular result is laid down to follow. But whether he is young or old, just or unjust, does make a difference. In general, anything that happens to people and makes their characters differ will count: whether a man thinks himself rich or poor, for instance, will make some difference, and so will whether he is lucky or unlucky. We shall come to these things later, in the second book. For now, let us first deal with what remains here.
Things that come about by chance are those whose cause cannot be pinned down, that happen for no purpose, and that happen neither always, nor usually, nor in any regular way. The definition of chance makes this clear.
Things that come about by nature are those whose cause lies in the things themselves and works in a regular way, since they turn out the same way either always or usually. As for things that happen against nature, there is no need to go into fine detail about whether they happen according to some kind of nature or from some other cause. It would seem, though, that chance too is the cause of things like these.
Things come about by force when they are done by the people themselves who do them, but against their own appetite or their own reasoning.
Things come about by habit when people do them because they have often done them before.
Things are done from reasoning when they seem to be to our advantage, on the basis of the goods we have already described, either as an end in themselves or as a means to an end, and when they are done because they are to our advantage. That last condition matters, since even self-indulgent people sometimes do things that are to their advantage, but they do them not for the advantage but for the pleasure. Things are done from passion and anger when they are acts of revenge.
Revenge and punishment are different. Punishment is for the sake of the one who suffers it; revenge is for the sake of the one who inflicts it, so that he may get his satisfaction.
What anger is will become clear when we discuss the emotions. Things are done from appetite when they seem pleasant. What is familiar, and what we have grown used to, counts among pleasant things, since people do many things with pleasure that are not naturally pleasant, once they have grown used to doing them.
To sum up, then: everything that people do because of themselves either is good or seems good, or is pleasant or seems pleasant. And since what they do because of themselves they do willingly, and what they do not do because of themselves they do unwillingly, everything people do willingly will be either good or apparently good, or pleasant or apparently pleasant. For I count among good things the getting rid of what is bad or seems bad, and the exchange of a greater evil for a lesser one, since these are in a way worth choosing. In the same way I count among pleasant things the getting rid of what is painful or seems painful, and the exchange of a greater pain for a lesser one. So we must get a grasp of what things are to our advantage and what things are pleasant, how many of them there are and of what kinds.
What is to our advantage has already been discussed, in the account of political speech. Let us now discuss what is pleasant. And we should consider our definitions good enough, on each point, if they are neither unclear nor more exact than the subject needs.
Let us take it as settled that pleasure is a kind of movement of the soul: a settling down, sudden and felt, into its own natural state. Pain is the opposite.
If that is what pleasure is, then clearly whatever produces the state just described is pleasant, and whatever destroys it, or produces the opposite settling, is painful.
It follows that, as a rule, it must be pleasant to move towards one's natural state, and most of all when the things that happen in keeping with that nature have got their own nature back again after being disturbed. Habits are pleasant too. What has become habitual has by now become almost natural, since habit is something like nature. "Often" is not far from "always": nature belongs to what happens always, habit to what happens often.
What is not forced on us is pleasant too, since force is against nature. That is why what we are compelled to do is painful, and why it was rightly said, by the poet Evenus of Paros,
Everything we are forced to do is a misery by nature.
Taking pains, working hard and straining at a task are painful for the same reason: these things are compulsion and force, unless we have grown used to them, and then it is habit that makes them pleasant. Their opposites are pleasant. So taking it easy, freedom from toil, carelessness, games, rest and sleep all count among pleasant things, because none of them is done under compulsion.
Anything we have an appetite for is pleasant, since appetite is a wanting of what is pleasant. Some appetites are unreasoned and some go with reason. By unreasoned I mean those we feel without having formed any opinion about the thing. These are the ones called natural, such as the appetites that come through the body: the appetite for food, which is thirst and hunger, with a particular appetite for each particular kind of food; the appetites to do with taste and sex and, in general, touch; and those to do with pleasant smells, with hearing and with sight. The appetites that go with reason are those we feel because we have been persuaded. There are many things we want to see or to get because we have heard about them and been persuaded that they are pleasant.
Now, feeling pleasure lies in perceiving some feeling, and imagination is a kind of weakened perception. So a person who remembers something, or hopes for something, will always have with him an image of what he remembers or hopes for. If so, it is clear that people who remember and people who hope also feel pleasure, since they too are perceiving something.
It follows that everything pleasant must lie either in perceiving what is present, or in remembering what is past, or in hoping for what is to come. We perceive the present, remember the past and hope for the future.
The things that are pleasant to remember are not only those that were pleasant at the time, when they were happening, but also some that were not pleasant then, if what came after them was fine and good. Hence the line from Euripides' Andromeda,
Yes, it is sweet, once safe, to remember one's troubles,
and the words of Eumaeus the swineherd to Odysseus in Homer,
For even in his sufferings, later, a man takes pleasure, remembering them, if he has suffered much and done much.
The reason is that it is pleasant, too, to be free of something bad. The things we hope for are pleasant when it seems that having them will give us great delight or great benefit, and benefit without pain. In general, whatever delights us when it is present will, as a rule, delight us also when we hope for it or remember it. That is why even being angry is pleasant, as Homer made Achilles say of his rage, that it is
far sweeter than honey dripping from the comb.
For no one gets angry with someone he plainly cannot hope to be revenged on, and people are not angry, or less angry, with those far more powerful than themselves. Anger carries the hope of revenge, and that hope is the sweetness.
Some pleasure also goes along with most of our appetites. People enjoy a certain pleasure either in remembering how they got what they wanted or in hoping that they will get it. People in a fever, for instance, tormented by thirst, enjoy remembering how they drank and hoping that they will drink again.
Lovers, too, always enjoy talking or writing or making something about the person they love, because in all such things they remember, and they feel as if they were perceiving the one they love. This is how love begins for everyone: when they not only enjoy the loved one's company but, remembering him while he is away, love him, and feel the pain of his not being there. In the same way a kind of pleasure comes even in grief and mourning.
The pain is at his being gone, but the pleasure is in remembering him and, as it were, seeing him, what he used to do and what he was like. So it was well said, by Homer of the mourners,
So he spoke, and stirred in them all the longing to weep.
Revenge is pleasant too. Where failing to get something is painful, getting it is pleasant; and angry people are pained beyond measure when they do not get their revenge, and delighted when they hope to.
Winning is pleasant, not only to people who love to win but to everyone, because it gives an image of being superior, and that is something everyone has an appetite for, some mildly and some fiercely.
Since winning is pleasant, games of combat and games of argument must be pleasant too, since people often win in them; and so must knucklebones, ball games, dice and draughts. It is the same with serious sports. Some become pleasant once we are used to them; others are pleasant at once, such as hunting with hounds and every kind of chase. Where there is a contest there is also victory. That is why pleading in court and disputing are pleasant to people who are practised at them and good at them.
Honour and a good reputation are among the most pleasant things of all, because each of us gets the image of being the sort of person a good man is, and all the more when the people saying so are people he believes to be telling the truth. Such people are those close at hand rather than those far off; friends and fellow citizens rather than strangers; people alive now rather than people not yet born; the sensible rather than the foolish; and the many rather than the few. These are more likely to be telling the truth than their opposites. For if we look down on someone a great deal, as we do on children or animals, we do not care in the least about his respect or his opinion of us, at least not for the sake of the opinion itself; if we care at all, it is for some other reason.
A friend is one of the pleasant things too. Loving is pleasant, since no one is a lover of wine unless he enjoys wine. And being loved is pleasant, since here too a person gets the image that there is good in him, which is something everyone who can perceive it has an appetite for. Being loved means being cherished for your own sake.
Being admired is pleasant, for the same reason as being honoured. Flattery and the flatterer are pleasant too, since the flatterer looks like an admirer and looks like a friend.
Doing the same things often is pleasant, since what is familiar, as we said, is pleasant.
Change is pleasant too, since change is a move towards nature: the same thing all the time produces too much of our settled condition. Hence the line from Euripides' Orestes,
Change in everything is sweet.
It is for this reason, too, that things we meet only now and then are pleasant, whether people or things: there is a change from what we have now, and at the same time what comes only now and then is rare.
Learning and wondering are, as a rule, pleasant. In wondering there is the desire to learn, so what makes us wonder is something we desire; and in learning, the mind is settling into its natural state.
Doing good and receiving good are among pleasant things. To receive good is to get what we want; to do good is to have enough, and more than enough. Both of these are things people are after. And because doing good is pleasant, people find it pleasant to set their neighbours on their feet again, and to make up what is lacking in things that are unfinished.
Since learning and wondering are pleasant, things of the following kind must be pleasant too: works of imitation, such as painting, sculpture and poetry, and everything that is a good imitation of something, even if the thing imitated is not pleasant in itself. What we enjoy is not the thing, but the reasoning that says "this is that", so that we find ourselves learning something.
Sudden reversals of fortune, and narrow escapes from danger, are pleasant too, since all these make us wonder.
And since what is natural is pleasant, and things that are akin are natural to one another, things that are akin and alike are, as a rule, pleasant to one another: man to man, horse to horse, young to young. This is where the proverbs come from: "age delights in its own age", "like always to like", "beast knows beast", "jackdaw to jackdaw", which is our "birds of a feather", and all the others like them.
Since whatever is like and akin to oneself is always pleasant, and since each person stands in this relation to himself above all, everyone must be a lover of himself, some more and some less. All these likenesses and kinships belong to a man most of all in relation to himself. And since everyone loves himself, everyone must find pleasure in what is his own, such as his own deeds and his own words. That is why people are, as a rule, fond of flatterers, of lovers, of honour, and of their children, since their children are their own work. And it is pleasant to finish what is unfinished, for then it becomes our own work.
And since ruling is the most pleasant thing of all, it is also pleasant to be thought wise, since good sense is the quality that fits a man to rule, and wisdom is knowledge of many things that make us wonder. Again, since most people love honour, it must also be pleasant to find fault with one's neighbours, and to be in charge of them.
It is pleasant, too, to spend one's time on whatever one seems to be best at, as the poet Euripides says in his Antiope: a man presses eagerly towards it,
giving the greatest part of every day to that in which he happens to be at his very best.
In the same way, since play and every kind of relaxation are pleasant, and laughter is pleasant, it follows that laughable things must be pleasant too: laughable people, laughable words and laughable deeds. The laughable has been treated separately, in my Poetics. That is enough about what is pleasant. What is painful will be obvious from the opposites of these things.
Those, then, are the purposes for which people do wrong. Let us now say in what state of mind they do it, and whom they wrong. They do wrong, first, when they think the thing can be done, and can be done by them; and then when they think they can do it without being found out, or that if they are found out they will not be punished, or that if they are punished the penalty will be smaller than the gain, either to themselves or to the people they care about.
What sorts of things seem possible and what sorts impossible will be discussed later, since these lines of argument are common to every kind of speech. But the people who think themselves most able to do wrong and get away with it are those who are good speakers, those who are practical men of affairs, those who have been through many lawsuits, and those who have plenty of friends or plenty of money.
They think themselves most able to do it if they have these advantages themselves; but if not, then if they have friends or helpers or partners who have them. With these to rely on, they can do the deed, escape notice and avoid being punished.
Also if they are friends of the people they are wronging, or of the judges. Friends are not on their guard against being wronged by a friend, and besides, they would rather make it up than go to law. And judges do favours for their friends, and either let them off altogether or give them a light penalty.
People are likely to escape notice when they are the very opposite of the kind of person the charge suggests: a weakling charged with assault, say, or a poor man or an ugly man charged with adultery. The same goes for things done quite openly, in full view of everyone. No one guards against them, because no one would ever imagine anyone doing them.
The same goes for crimes so great and of such a kind that no one else would ever have done them. These too are not guarded against. Everyone guards against the usual wrongs, as against the usual illnesses, but no one takes precautions against a disease that nobody has ever yet had.
Also people who have no enemies, or a great many. Those with none expect to escape notice because no one is watching them. Those with many do escape notice, because no one thinks they would ever attack when everyone is watching them, and because they have a ready defence: that they would never have tried it.
Also people who have some means of hiding what they have taken, whether in some trick or in some place, or who have plenty of ways to get rid of it. And people who, if they are found out, can get the trial thrown out or put off, or can bribe the judges. And people who, if a penalty is imposed, can get out of paying it or put off paying it for a long time; or who are so poor that they have nothing to lose.
Also people whose gains are plain to see, or large, or close at hand, while the penalties are small, or uncertain, or far off. And people for whom there is no punishment as great as the advantage, as seems to be the case with tyranny.
Also people whose wrongdoing brings them real profit, while the only penalty is disgrace. And, the other way round, people whose wrongdoing brings them some praise, as when a man happens at the same stroke to avenge his father or mother, as Zeno did, while the penalty is only a fine, or exile, or something of that kind. People do wrong for both these reasons and in both these states of mind; but they are not the same people. They are opposite in character: the first sacrifices his good name for gain, the second his gain for a good name.
Also people who have often escaped notice or escaped punishment; and people who have often failed. In this kind of thing, as in war, there are people who always come back to fight again.
Also people for whom the pleasure comes at once and the pain afterwards, or the gain at once and the loss afterwards. People who lack self-control are like this, and lack of self-control covers everything that people want.
And also, the other way round, people for whom the pain or the loss comes at once, while the pleasure and the benefit come later and last longer. People with self-control, and people with more sense, go after things like that.
Also people who can make it seem that they acted by chance, or under compulsion, or from nature, or from habit: in short, that they made a mistake rather than did a wrong.
Also people who can expect to be treated with fairness. And people who are in need. There are two ways of being in need: people need what is necessary, as the poor do, or they need more than enough, as the rich do.
Also people with an excellent reputation, and people with a very bad one: the first because they will not be suspected, the second because they can hardly be thought worse of than they are already.
That is the state of mind in which people set about doing wrong. The people they wrong, and the things they do wrong in, are these. First, people who have what the wrongdoers themselves lack, whether it is something they need to live, or something that will set them above others, or something to enjoy.
Both people far away and people close at hand: with those close by, the taking is quick; with those far away, the revenge is slow, as with those who raid the Carthaginians, who are too far off to strike back.
People who are not cautious and not watchful but trusting, since it is easy to take all of them unawares. People who are easy-going, since it takes a man who bothers to go to law. And people who are shy, since they are not the fighting kind where money is concerned.
People who have been wronged by many and have never gone to law: they are, as the proverb says, "Mysian plunder", the easiest prey there is.
Both people who have never been wronged and people who have often been wronged. Both are off their guard: the first because it has never happened, the second because they think it could not happen again.
People who have been slandered, or are easy to slander. They neither choose to go to law, because they are afraid of the judges, nor can they persuade the judges if they do, since they are hated and envied.
People against whom the wrongdoer has an excuse: that their ancestors, or they themselves, or their friends, did harm, or meant to do harm, to the wrongdoer himself, or to his ancestors, or to people he cares about. As the proverb says, wickedness needs only an excuse.
Both enemies and friends: it is easy to wrong friends, and pleasant to wrong enemies. People with no friends. And people who are no good at speaking or at getting things done. They either never try to go to law, or they settle, or they get nowhere.
People who gain nothing by wasting time waiting for a verdict or for damages, such as foreigners and small farmers who work their own land. They settle for little and are easily talked into dropping the case.
People who have done many wrongs themselves, or the same kind of wrong that is now being done to them. It seems almost not to be a wrong at all when someone suffers the very kind of wrong he used to do to others. I mean, for instance, if someone were to beat up a man who made a habit of outrageous violence against others.
People who have done us harm, or wanted to, or want to now, or are going to. Doing wrong to them is both pleasant and honourable, and seems almost not to be a wrong at all.
People whose being wronged will please our friends, or people we admire, or people we love, or our masters: in short, the people on whom our own lives depend.
People from whom we can expect to be treated with fairness. People we have a complaint against, or have already fallen out with, as Callippus did in the matter of Dion. Callippus, Dion's own friend, plotted his death after Dion had freed Syracuse from its tyrant, and excused himself on the ground that Dion would otherwise have struck first. Such things too seem almost not to be a wrong.
People who are about to be wronged by others if we do not wrong them first, since there is no longer any time to deliberate. So, it is said, Aenesidemus, tyrant of Leontini, sent Gelon of Syracuse the prize for the game of cottabus, a drinking game of flicking wine at a target, when Gelon had enslaved a town, because Gelon had got there first, and Aenesidemus himself had been meaning to do the same.
People we can wrong and then make up for it by doing many just things, on the view that the harm will be easy to heal. So Jason, the ruler of Thessaly, said that one must do some wrongs in order to be able to do many just things as well.
As for the things people do wrong in: first, the wrongs that everyone, or many people, are in the habit of doing, since they expect to be forgiven.
Things that are easy to hide. These are things that are quickly used up, such as food; or things that are easy to change in shape or colour or by mixing; or things that are easy to make disappear in many places.
That means things that are easy to carry, and that can be hidden in small spaces.
Things of which the wrongdoer already had plenty that looked just the same and could not be told apart. Wrongs the victims are ashamed to speak of, such as outrages against the women of their household, or against themselves or their sons. And wrongs where the person who goes to law would look as if he loved lawsuits: these are the small wrongs, and those that people forgive.
That is more or less everything about the state of mind in which people do wrong, the kinds of wrongs they do, the people they do them to, and the reasons why.
Let us now sort out all wrongs and all just acts, and start from this point. What is just and what is unjust has been defined in relation to two kinds of law, and in relation to two kinds of people it is done to.
By two kinds of law I mean particular law and common law. Particular law is the law that each people has laid down for itself, and it comes in two forms, one unwritten and one written. Common law is the law of nature. For there really is something that all people sense, as if by a kind of instinct: a justice and an injustice that are common to everyone by nature, even where people have no dealings with each other and have made no agreement. This is plainly what Antigone means in Sophocles' play, when she says that it is just to bury her brother Polynices even though the burial has been forbidden, because it is just by nature:
For this is not a thing of now or yesterday, but always it lives, and no one knows when it first appeared.
It is also what Empedocles means when he speaks against killing any living creature, since that is not just for some people and unjust for others:
But the law for all stretches on without a break through the wide-ruling sky, and on through the boundless light.
And it is what Alcidamas, the pupil of Gorgias, says in his speech on the Messenians, the people who had risen against Sparta: "God has left all people free; nature has made no one a slave."
The division by the people a wrong is done to is also twofold. What we ought to do and ought not to do is laid down either with regard to the community or with regard to one of its members. So there are two ways of doing wrong and two ways of doing right: towards one particular person, or towards the community. A man who commits adultery or assault wrongs a particular person; a man who refuses to serve in the army wrongs the community.
Now that we have divided all wrongs, and seen that some are against the community and others against one person or several, let us go back over what it is to be wronged, and then say the rest.
To be wronged is to suffer unjust treatment at the hands of someone who does it willingly, since we have already defined doing wrong as something done willingly.
Since the person wronged must be harmed, and harmed against his will, what the harms are is clear from what has been said already. Good things and bad things have been discussed in themselves, and we have said that a willing act is any act done knowingly. It follows that every charge brought in court concerns either the community or a private person, and that the accused acted either in ignorance and against his will, or willingly and knowingly; and that of the acts done willingly, some are done by choice and others under the pressure of an emotion.
Anger will be discussed when we come to the emotions. What sort of things people choose to do, and in what state of mind, has been said already.
Very often a man admits that he did the act, but does not admit the name of the charge, or does not admit the point on which that name turns. He admits that he took something, but says he did not steal it; that he struck the first blow, but did not commit outrage; that he slept with a woman, but did not commit adultery; that he stole, but did not commit sacrilege, since what he took did not belong to a god; that he farmed land that was not his, but not public land; that he had talks with the enemy, but did not betray his city. For this reason we need definitions of these things too, of what theft is, what outrage is, what adultery is, so that whether we want to show that the charge applies or that it does not, we can bring out clearly where justice lies.
In every case of this kind the dispute is over whether the man is unjust and a bad man, or not unjust. For wickedness and wrongdoing lie in a man's choice, and names like outrage and theft carry a reference to the choice along with them. Striking a man is not in every case outrage; it is outrage only if it was done for a purpose, for example to disgrace the other man or for the striker's own pleasure. Nor is taking something secretly in every case theft; it is theft only if it was done to harm the person it was taken from and to make the thing one's own. The other charges work in the same way as these.
We said that there are two kinds of just and unjust acts, the written and the unwritten. The ones the laws speak about have been dealt with. Of the unwritten, there are two kinds.
The first kind concerns an excess of virtue or of vice, which earns reproach and praise, disgrace, and honours and rewards. Examples are being grateful to someone who has done you a good turn, doing good in return to someone who has done good to you, being ready to help your friends, and all the other things of that sort. The second kind makes up for what the particular, written law leaves out.
For what is fair seems to be just. And fairness, which older books call equity, is justice that goes beyond the written law. The law leaves things out sometimes because the lawgivers meant to and sometimes because they did not mean to. They did not mean to when a case escaped their notice. They meant to when they could not define every case exactly and had to speak in general terms, when what they said holds not for every case but only for most. They also meant to where a thing is hard to define because the cases are endless: for instance, if the law forbids wounding with iron, how big a piece of iron, and of what kind? A lifetime would not be long enough to count up all the possibilities.
So if a thing cannot be defined, but a law has to be made, the law must be stated in plain general terms. The result is that if a man with a ring on his finger raises his hand against another, or strikes him, he is guilty under the written law and has done wrong; but in truth he has done no wrong. And that is where fairness comes in.
If fairness is what we have said, it is clear what kinds of acts are fair and what are not, and what kinds of people are not fair.
It is fair to show leniency in the cases that deserve it. It is fair not to treat mistakes and wrongs as deserving the same penalty, or mistakes and misfortunes either. Misfortunes are things that could not have been foreseen and do not come from wickedness. Mistakes are things that could have been foreseen but do not come from wickedness. Wrongs are things that could have been foreseen and do come from wickedness, since whatever is done out of desire comes from wickedness.
It is fair to forgive what is only human. It is fair to look not at the law but at the lawgiver; not at the words of the law but at what the lawgiver had in mind; not at the act but at the choice behind it; not at the part but at the whole; not at what sort of man someone is now, but at what sort of man he has always been, or has been for the most part. It is fair to remember the good you have received rather than the harm, and the good you have received rather than the good you have done. It is fair to bear being wronged with patience. It is fair to be willing to settle a dispute by talking rather than by force, and to prefer going to arbitration rather than to court. For the arbitrator looks to what is fair, while the juror looks to the law; indeed, the reason arbitration was invented was so that fairness could prevail.
So much, then, for our account of what is fair.
A wrong is greater the greater the injustice it comes from. That is why the smallest wrongs are sometimes the greatest. Take the charge that the orator Callistratus brought against his rival Melanopus: that he had cheated the temple-builders, the officials in charge of building the temples, out of three sacred half-obols, a trifling sum of coins. With just acts it is the other way round. The reason is that the greater wrong is there in the smaller one as a possibility: a man who would steal three sacred half-obols would do any wrong at all. So sometimes a wrong is judged greater in this way, and sometimes by the size of the harm it does.
A wrong is also greater when there is no punishment equal to it, and every punishment falls short. It is greater when there is no remedy for it, because a remedy is hard, or impossible. It is greater when the victim cannot get justice through the courts, since then it cannot be put right; for a trial and a punishment are themselves a kind of remedy.
It is greater if the victim, after being wronged, has punished himself severely, since then the man who did it deserves an even greater punishment. So when the orator Sophocles (not the poet) spoke on behalf of Euctemon, who had cut his own throat after the outrage done to him, he said he would not set the penalty any lower than the victim had set it for himself.
It is greater if a man is the only one to have done it, or the first, or one of only a few. It is a great wrong, too, to commit the same offence many times. And a wrong is great if it has made people look for and find new ways to prevent and to punish it. At Argos, for example, a man is punished if a new law had to be made because of him, and so are the men on whose account the prison had to be built.
A more brutal wrong is greater. So is one planned in advance. So is one that fills the people who hear of it with fear rather than with pity. And there are rhetorical points of this sort to make: that the accused has swept aside or broken many things at once, such as oaths, handshakes, pledges of good faith, and the rights of marriage between two peoples. For that is a heap of many wrongs on top of one another.
A wrong is greater if it is done in the very place where wrongdoers are punished, which is what false witnesses do: where would a man not do wrong, if he will do it even in a court of law? It is greater when it carries the most shame. It is greater if it is done to someone who has done the wrongdoer a good turn, since then he does more than one wrong: he does harm, and he fails to do good in return.
A wrong is greater if it breaks the unwritten rules of justice, for it is the better man who is just without being forced to be, and the written laws use force while the unwritten ones do not. Looked at another way, it is greater if it breaks the written laws, since a man who will do the wrongs that are frightening and carry penalties will certainly do the ones that carry none.
So much, then, for greater and lesser wrongs.
Next after what we have just discussed, we should run briefly through the proofs that are called proofs outside the art: the ones the speaker does not invent but finds already there. They belong especially to speeches in the courts.
There are five of them: laws, witnesses, contracts, evidence given under torture, and oaths.
Let us speak first about laws, and about how to use them when urging a course of action or warning against one, and when accusing or defending.
Clearly, if the written law is against our case, we must appeal to the common law, and to what is fairer and more just.
We must say that the juror's oath, to judge "to the best of my judgement", means exactly this: that he will not follow the written laws to the letter in every case.
We must say that fairness always stays the same and never changes, and neither does the common law, since it is the law of nature, while the written laws change often. That is the point of the lines in Sophocles' Antigone, where Antigone defends herself by saying that she buried her brother against Creon's law, but not against the unwritten law. She says of the unwritten law that it is not of now or yesterday, and then, a few lines further on, that she would not break it:
For this is not a thing of now or yesterday, but always ... So I was not going to break these laws for fear of any man.
We must say that justice is something real and useful, not something that merely seems so; and so the written law, in a case like this, is not really law, because it does not do the work a law is for. We must say that the judge is like an assayer who tests silver coins, and that his job is to tell counterfeit justice from the true.
We must say that it is the mark of a better man to follow the unwritten law and to abide by it, rather than the written.
We must look to see whether the law contradicts another law that is well thought of, or even contradicts itself. For instance, sometimes one law says that any agreement people make shall be binding, while another forbids making agreements that go against the law.
If the law is ambiguous, we must turn it this way and that, see which way of taking it fits what is just or what is useful, and then use that meaning.
If the circumstances for which the law was made no longer exist, but the law still does, we must try to make this clear, and fight the law on that ground.
But if the written law is on our side, we must say that the juror's oath "to the best of my judgement" is not there so that he can judge against the law. It is there so that he does not break his oath if he happens not to know what the law says. We must say that no one chooses what is good in general, but only what is good for himself. We must say that there is no difference between having no law and not using the law you have. We must say that in the other arts it does not pay to try to outsmart the doctor, since a doctor's mistake does less harm than growing used to disobeying the one in charge. And we must say that trying to be wiser than the laws is exactly what the most admired laws forbid. So much for laws.
As for witnesses, there are two kinds, the ancient and the recent. Of the recent, some share the risk of the trial and others stand outside it. By ancient witnesses I mean the poets, and any other well-known people whose judgements are on public record. For example, the Athenians used Homer as a witness in their quarrel over the island of Salamis, pointing to the lines in the Iliad where Ajax brings his ships from Salamis and stations them beside the Athenians. The people of Tenedos recently used Periander of Corinth as a witness against the people of Sigeum. And Cleophon, in his attack on Critias, used the verses of Solon to show that the family had been an insolent one from long ago; otherwise, he argued, Solon would never have written:
Tell red-haired Critias to listen to his father.
Witnesses of this kind speak about the past. About the future, the interpreters of oracles are witnesses too. So Themistocles, when the oracle told the Athenians to trust in a wooden wall, took it as evidence that they must fight at sea, the wooden wall being their ships. Proverbs, too, as I have said, count as evidence. If someone is advising you not to make a friend of an old man, the proverb bears him out:
Never do a good turn to an old man.
And if he is advising you to do away with the sons of men whose fathers you have already killed:
A fool is he who kills the father and leaves the sons alive.
Recent witnesses are the well-known people who have given a judgement on some question, since their judgements are useful to anyone arguing about the same things. For example, Eubulus, prosecuting the general Chares in the courts, used what Plato, probably the comic poet, had said against Archibius: that it had become common in the city for people to admit openly that they were wicked.
Then there are the witnesses who share the risk of the trial, since they can be prosecuted themselves if they are thought to be lying. Witnesses like these can only testify about whether a thing happened or not, whether a thing is so or not. They are not witnesses about what kind of act it was, for example whether it was just or unjust, useful or harmful. On those questions witnesses from outside the case are more to be trusted, and the ancient witnesses most of all, since they cannot be bribed.
Here are the arguments to make about testimony. If you have no witnesses, you can say that the jurors must judge from what is likely, and that this is what "to the best of my judgement" means. You can say that what is likely cannot be bribed to deceive, and that what is likely can never be convicted of giving false evidence. If you have witnesses and your opponent has none, you can say that what is likely cannot be put on trial for what it says, and that there would be no need for evidence at all if it were enough to look into the matter by argument.
Some testimony is about ourselves and some about our opponent; some is about the facts and some about character. So it is clear that we need never be short of useful testimony. If we have none about the facts, either agreeing with our own side or going against our opponent, we can at least have testimony about character, showing that we are decent people or that our opponent is a bad one.
Everything else about a witness, whether he is a friend of ours, an enemy, or neither, whether he is well thought of, badly thought of, or neither, and all the other differences of this kind, must be argued from the same lines of argument we use for enthymemes.
As for contracts, argument is useful to the extent of making them seem more or less important, and more or less to be trusted. If they are on our side, we must make them trustworthy and binding; if they are on our opponent's side, the opposite.
To make a contract seem trustworthy or untrustworthy, the method is exactly the same as for witnesses, since a contract is just as trustworthy as the people whose names are written on it or who have it in their keeping. If it is agreed that the contract exists, and it is in our favour, we must build it up. A contract, we can say, is a private law, a law for one particular case. Contracts do not give the law its force; it is the laws that give force to contracts made in keeping with them. And in general the law is itself a kind of contract, so that anyone who refuses to trust a contract, or sets it aside, is setting aside the laws.
Besides, most business between people, and all of it that is entered into willingly, is done by contract; so if contracts lose their force, people can no longer deal with one another at all. The other arguments that fit here are easy to see.
If the contract is against us and on our opponent's side, then first of all the arguments that suit are the ones we would use to fight a law that was against us. It would be strange, we can say, if we thought we need not obey laws that were badly made, where the lawmakers had gone wrong, but thought we had no choice but to obey contracts.
Next, we can say that the juror is the umpire of what is just, so he should not be looking at what the contract says, but at what is more just.
We can say that justice cannot be twisted by trickery or by force, because it is part of nature, whereas contracts are often made by people who have been tricked or forced. Besides this, we must look to see whether the contract goes against any law, written or common; and among written laws, whether it goes against our own or those of another city. Then we must see whether it goes against other contracts, made later or earlier. Either the later ones are binding and the earlier ones void, or the earlier ones were right and the later ones were a trick; we can argue it whichever way is useful. We must also look at what is in the jurors' interest, in case the contract somehow works against them, and at all the other things of this kind, which are just as easy to see.
Evidence under torture is a kind of testimony. At Athens it meant the evidence of slaves, which the courts would take only when it had been got from them by torture. It seems to carry conviction because a kind of force is applied. Here too it is not hard to say what can be said. If the evidence is on our side, we can make much of it, saying that this is the only true kind of testimony. If it goes against us and is on our opponent's side, we can demolish it by telling the truth about every kind of evidence under torture: that people under force tell lies just as readily as the truth. Some hold out and refuse to tell the truth; others readily tell lies against someone else, thinking they will be let off sooner. We should be able to point to cases of this sort that have really happened and that the jurors know about. We should say that evidence under torture is not true. For many people who are thick-witted, with skins as tough as stone, and strong in spirit, bear up nobly under the force, while cowards and cautious people speak out boldly against others before they have even seen the instruments. So there is nothing to be trusted in evidence under torture.
As for oaths, we can divide them four ways. In an Athenian lawsuit one side could challenge the other to settle the point by an oath: he offered the oath, and the other side either took it or refused it. So a man either offers an oath and takes one, or does neither, or does one and not the other; and in that last case, either he offers but does not take, or he takes but does not offer. Besides these, there is the question of whether an oath has already been sworn, either by him or by his opponent.
If you do not offer the oath, you can say that people swear falsely without a second thought; that once your opponent has sworn he will not pay back the money, whereas if he does not swear you think the jurors will find against him; and that the risk you run with the jurors is the better one, since you trust them and not him.
If you do not take the oath, you can say that an oath is a thing people take for money; that if you were a scoundrel you would have sworn at once, since it is better to be a scoundrel for something than for nothing; that by swearing you would win, and by not swearing you will not; so your refusal comes from virtue, not from fear of swearing falsely. And the saying of the philosopher Xenophanes fits here: that this challenge is not a fair one when an impious man puts it to a pious one, but is like a strong man challenging a weak one to hit or be hit.
If you take the oath, you can say that you trust yourself and not your opponent. And you can turn Xenophanes' saying round: the fair way is for the impious man to offer the oath and the pious man to swear it. And you can say it would be outrageous for you to refuse to swear yourself about matters on which you ask the jurors to swear before they give judgement.
If you offer the oath, you can say that it is a pious thing to be willing to leave the matter to the gods; that your opponent has no need of other judges, since you are giving the decision to him and his side; and that it is absurd for them to refuse to swear about matters on which they ask others to swear.
Since it is clear how to argue each of these on its own, it is also clear how to argue them in pairs: for instance, if you are willing to take the oath but not to offer it, or to offer it but not to take it, or to take it and offer it both, or to do neither. These positions are bound to be made up from the ones already described, so the arguments too will be made up from the arguments already given.
If you yourself have sworn an earlier oath that contradicts the present one, you can say that it was not false swearing. Doing wrong is something done willingly, and swearing falsely is doing wrong, but what is done under force or through being tricked is not done willingly. This is the place, then, to draw the conclusion that false swearing is a matter of the mind and not of the mouth. But if it is your opponent who has sworn an oath that contradicts his present one, you can say that a man who does not stand by what he has sworn overturns everything, since that is exactly why the jurors swear an oath before they apply the laws. "They ask you to stand by the oath you swore as jurors," you can say, "but they do not stand by their own." And there is all the rest that a speaker might say to make the point bigger.
So much, then, for the proofs outside the art.
These, then, are the materials we must draw on when we urge people to do something or to hold back from it, when we praise and when we blame, and when we accuse and defend; and these are the beliefs and premises that are useful for building proofs (the means of persuasion) in each of those cases. For these are what enthymemes are about and what they are made from, taking each kind of speech, so to speak, on its own.
But rhetoric exists for the sake of a judgement. People judge the advice they are given in the assembly, and a trial is itself a judgement. So the speaker must not only look to the argument, to make it prove its point and win belief. He must also present himself as a certain kind of person, and put the one who judges into a certain frame of mind.
It makes a great difference to persuasion, most of all in political speech and next in the courts, that the speaker should seem to be a certain kind of person, and that his hearers should suppose him to be disposed in a certain way towards them; and, besides this, that they themselves should happen to be disposed in a certain way.
How the speaker seems is more useful in political speech; how the hearer is disposed matters more in the courts. For things do not look the same to people who love and to people who hate, or to people who are angry and to people who are calm. They look either entirely different or different in size. When a man feels friendly towards the person he is judging, he thinks that person has done no wrong, or only a small one; when he hates him, he thinks the opposite. And when a man wants something and is hopeful about it, then if what is coming would be pleasant, it seems to him both that it will happen and that it will be good; to a man who feels nothing, or who is out of sorts, it seems the opposite.
There are three reasons why speakers themselves are believed, because apart from demonstrations there are exactly three things that make us trust anyone. They are good sense, virtue and goodwill. When speakers go wrong in what they say or in the advice they give, it is through lacking all three of these, or one of them.
Either through lack of sense they form wrong opinions; or they form right opinions but, being bad men, do not say what they think; or they are sensible and decent but do not wish their hearers well, so that it is possible for them not to give the best advice even though they know what it is. There is no fourth possibility. It follows that a speaker who seems to have all three will be believed by those who hear him.
How a speaker can be made to seem sensible and good must be worked out from what we said when we classified the virtues, since a man would use the same means to make himself seem that kind of person as he would use to make someone else seem so. Goodwill and friendship we must discuss when we come to the emotions.
The emotions are those feelings that change people so that they judge differently, and that bring pain and pleasure with them: anger, pity, fear and all the others of that kind, together with their opposites.
For each emotion we must divide the subject into three. Take anger: we must ask what state people are in when they are angry, whom they usually get angry with, and over what kind of things. If we had one or two of these but not all three, it would be impossible to rouse anger in anyone; and the same goes for the other emotions. So, just as we set out the premises for the subjects we discussed before, let us do the same for these, and divide each of them in the way I have described.
Let us define anger as a desire, accompanied by pain, for apparent revenge for an apparent slight: a slight against oneself or against someone who belongs to one, when the slight was uncalled for.
If that is what anger is, then three things follow. First, the angry man is always angry with some particular person, with Cleon, say, and not with mankind in general. Second, he is angry because that person has done something, or was about to do something, to him or to one of his own. Third, every anger is followed by a certain pleasure, the pleasure that comes from the hope of revenge. For it is pleasant to think that you will get what you are aiming at, and nobody aims at things that look impossible for him to get, whereas the angry man aims at what he can get. That is why Homer put it well when he said of rage that it is
much sweeter than honey as it trickles down, and swells up in the hearts of men.
A kind of pleasure goes with anger, both for this reason and because the angry man lingers over his revenge in his mind; and the picture that rises before him at those moments gives him pleasure, as the pictures in dreams do.
A slight is an opinion put into action about something that seems to be worth nothing. We think that bad things and good things are worth taking seriously, and so are things that lead towards them; but things that amount to nothing, or very little, we regard as worth nothing. There are three kinds of slight: contempt, spite and insolence.
The man who feels contempt slights, because people feel contempt for whatever they think is worth nothing, and it is things worth nothing that they slight. The spiteful man, too, is plainly slighting. Spite is getting in the way of what someone else wants, not in order to gain something for yourself but in order that he should not gain it. Since the spiteful man is not doing it to gain anything for himself, he is slighting the other. It is clear that he does not suppose the other can harm him, for then he would be afraid of him and would not slight him; nor that the other could do him any good worth mentioning, for then he would be thinking about how to become his friend.
The insolent man slights too. Insolence is doing and saying things that bring shame on the person who suffers them, not in order to get anything for yourself beyond what has been done, but for the pleasure of it. People who pay back an injury are not being insolent; they are taking revenge.
The reason insolence gives pleasure to the insolent is that they think that by treating others badly they show themselves all the more superior. That is why the young and the rich are insolent: they think insolence proves their superiority. Dishonour is part of insolence, and a man who dishonours another slights him, since what is worth nothing has no value at all, whether as a good or as a bad. That is why Achilles, in his anger, says of Agamemnon,
He has dishonoured me: he has taken my prize and keeps it,
and, complaining that Agamemnon has treated him
like some drifter with no honour to his name,
as though these were the reasons he is angry. People think they have a right to be treated with great regard by those who are beneath them in birth, in power, in virtue, and in general in anything in which they themselves stand far above others: the rich man above the poor man in money, the good speaker above the man who cannot speak, the ruler above the ruled, and the man who thinks himself fit to rule above the man he thinks fit only to be ruled. That is why Homer says,
Great is the rage of kings whom Zeus has nurtured,
and, as the prophet Calchas warns Achilles about Agamemnon,
even afterwards he keeps his grudge.
For kings resent a slight because of the rank they stand at.
They also think they have a right to be treated well by certain people: those they have done good to, or are doing good to, whether they did it themselves or someone did it for them or one of their own people did it; and those they want, or once wanted, to do good to.
From all this it is now clear what state people are in when they get angry, whom they get angry with, and over what sort of things. They themselves get angry when they are in pain, because someone in pain is longing for something. So if anyone thwarts them in anything, whether directly, as when someone stops a thirsty man from drinking, or not directly, since that seems to come to the same thing; if anyone works against them, or fails to work with them, or bothers them in any other way while they are in that state, they get angry with all such people.
That is why the sick, the poor, men at war, people in love, the thirsty, and in a word anyone who wants something and is not getting it, are quick to anger and easily provoked. They are angriest with people who make light of their present trouble: the sick man with those who make light of his illness, the poor man with those who make light of his poverty, the man at war with those who make light of the war, the lover with those who make light of his love, and so on with the rest. And failing that, they are angry with anyone who slights them in anything else at all, because the feeling each of them already has paves the way for his anger. Again, a man is angry if he happens to have been expecting the opposite of what he gets.
For something far from what you expected hurts more, just as something far from what you expected delights you more, if it turns out to be what you wanted. From this it is also clear which seasons, times, moods and ages are easily moved to anger, and where and when; and the more people are in these conditions, the more easily they are moved.
Those, then, are the states in which people are easily roused to anger. As for whom they get angry with: they get angry with those who laugh at them, mock them and make fun of them, because that is insolence. And with those who harm them in the kinds of ways that are signs of insolence. Such harms must be neither in return for something nor of any use to the people who do them, because then they are taken to come from insolence.
They get angry with those who speak badly of, or show contempt for, the things they themselves care about most. For instance, people who take pride in philosophy get angry if anyone runs down philosophy, and people who take pride in their looks get angry if anyone runs down their looks; and so on with everything else.
They get far angrier over these things if they suspect that they do not really have the quality in question, either not at all, or not in any strength, or not so that other people think they have it. When they feel quite sure that they excel in whatever they are being mocked for, they do not care.
They get angrier with friends than with people who are not their friends, because they think it is more fitting to be treated well by friends than not.
They get angry with people who used to honour them and pay attention to them, if these people stop behaving towards them in that way. For they think such people now hold them in contempt, since otherwise they would still be doing it.
They get angry with those who do not return a kindness, or do not return as much as they received. And with those who work against them, if these people are beneath them. For all such people seem to show contempt: the first as though they were dealing with their inferiors, the second as though being opposed by inferiors did not count.
They get angrier still if the slight comes from people who count for nothing. For we assumed that anger at a slight is felt towards those who have no business slighting us, and those beneath us have no business doing it.
With friends, they get angry if the friends do not speak well of them or treat them well, and angrier still if the friends do the opposite; and also if the friends do not notice when they need something, as Plexippus is angry with his nephew Meleager in Antiphon's tragedy. For not noticing is a sign of a slight: we do not miss what goes on with the people we care about.
They get angry with those who are glad at their misfortunes, or in general are cheerful while they are having bad luck, since this is a sign either of an enemy or of someone who slights them. And with those who do not care if they cause them pain, which is why people get angry with those who bring bad news.
They get angry with those who listen to talk about their failings, or who watch those failings, because such people are like those who slight them, or like enemies.
For friends share each other's pain, and everyone is pained to see his own failings. Further, they get angry with those who slight them in front of five kinds of people: their rivals, the people they admire, the people they want to be admired by, the people they feel shame before, and the people who feel shame before them. If anyone slights them in front of these, they get angrier.
They get angry with those who slight people whom it would be shameful for them not to stand up for: parents, children, wives, those in their charge. And with those who do not repay a favour, because this slight goes against what is fitting.
And with those who answer them with irony when they are speaking in earnest;
for irony shows contempt. And with those who do good to others but not to them, because this too shows contempt: not to think a man worthy of what they think everyone else worthy of.
Forgetting also causes anger, even forgetting names, trivial as that is. For forgetting, too, seems to be a sign of a slight: it comes from not caring, and not caring is a kind of slight.
We have now said, all at once, whom people get angry with, what state they are in, and over what sort of things. It is clear that the speaker will need to use his speech to put his hearers into the state of mind of people who are angry, and to show that his opponents are guilty of the things that make people angry, and are the kind of people that people are angry with.
Since getting angry is the opposite of growing calm, and anger the opposite of calm, we must work out what state people are in when they are calm, whom they feel calm towards, and what makes them calm down.
Let us define calming down as the settling and quieting of anger.
If people get angry with those who slight them, and a slight is something done on purpose, then clearly they are calm towards those who do none of these things, or who do them without meaning to, or who at least seem to be like that.
They are calm towards those who meant to do the opposite of what they did. And towards those who treat themselves in the same way, since nobody is thought to slight himself.
They are calm towards those who admit what they did and are sorry for it. For people stop being angry as though they had received their due in the offender's pain at what he has done. You can see a sign of this in the way slaves are punished. We punish more severely the ones who answer back and deny what they did, but we stop being furious with the ones who admit that they deserve their punishment. The reason is that denying what is obvious is shamelessness, and shamelessness is a slight and a sign of contempt.
At any rate, we feel no shame in front of people we hold in deep contempt. People are also calm towards those who humble themselves before them and do not answer back, because such people seem to admit that they are the inferior, and inferiors are afraid, and nobody who is afraid slights anyone. Even dogs show that anger stops in the face of humility: they do not bite people who sit down, which is what Odysseus did when the swineherd's dogs rushed at him.
They are calm towards those who are serious with them when they are serious, because they think they are being taken seriously and not treated with contempt.
They are calm towards those who have done them greater kindnesses than the harm they have now done. And towards those who ask something of them and beg their pardon, since these people are humbling themselves.
They are calm towards those who are not insolent, not mockers, and not in the habit of slighting anyone, or at least not good people, or people like themselves.
In general, you can find what calms people by looking at the opposites of what angers them. People do not get angry with those they fear or feel shame before, so long as they feel that way, because it is impossible to be afraid and angry at the same time.
They are either not angry, or less angry, with those who did what they did in anger, because these people do not seem to have acted out of a wish to slight. Nobody slights anyone while he is angry, since a slight involves no pain, whereas anger comes with pain.
And they are calm towards those who feel shame before them.
It is clear too that people are calm when their state is the opposite of the state that makes them angry: when they are at play, laughing, at a festival, having a good day, succeeding, enjoying plenty, and in general when they are free from pain and enjoying a pleasure that is not insolent, and when they have a reasonable hope. Further, they are calm when time has passed and their anger is no longer fresh, because time puts an end to anger.
What also puts an end to even a greater anger against one man is revenge already taken on someone else. That is why Philocrates, the Athenian politician, answered well when the people were angry with him and someone asked, "Why don't you defend yourself?" "Not yet," he said. "When, then?" "When I see someone else accused." For people grow calm once they have used up their anger on someone else. That is what happened to Ergophilus, the general who had failed in his campaign in Thrace. The Athenians were more indignant with him than with Callisthenes, who had made an early peace with Macedonia, and yet they let Ergophilus off, because the day before they had condemned Callisthenes to death.
People also grow calm if they have convicted the offender. And if the offender has suffered a greater harm than they themselves would have done to him in their anger, because they feel as though they have already had their revenge.
And if they think that they themselves are in the wrong and are suffering justly, then no anger arises, because anger is not felt against what is just. They no longer think they are being treated in a way they should not be, and that, as we said, is what anger is. That is why you should punish in words first, before the punishment itself: even slaves resent being punished less when that is done.
People are also calmer if they think the one they punish will never know that the punishment came from them, and in return for what he did to them. For anger is directed at a particular person; that is clear from the definition. So the poet was right to have Odysseus shout to the blinded Cyclops,
Say it was Odysseus, the sacker of cities,
as though he would not have had his revenge unless the Cyclops knew both who had blinded him and why. It follows that people do not get angry with anyone else who cannot know about it, nor with the dead any longer, since the dead have suffered the worst there is and will feel neither pain nor anything else, and feeling is what the angry man wants for his enemy. That is why Homer did well, when he wanted to stop Achilles' anger against the dead Hector, to write,
it is the senseless earth he outrages in his fury.
It is clear, then, that when you want to calm your hearers, you must draw on these lines of argument. Put your hearers themselves into the state described; and make the people they are angry with seem either to be feared, or to deserve their respect, or to have done them kindnesses, or to have acted against their will, or to be deeply sorry for what they have done.
Whom do people love and hate, and why? Let us say, once we have defined friendship and loving.
Let us define loving someone as wishing for him what you think good, for his sake and not for your own, and being ready to bring those things about as far as you can. A friend is someone who loves and is loved in return; and people who think they stand in this relation to each other think of themselves as friends.
Given these definitions, it follows that your friend is the person who shares your pleasure in good things and your pain in bad ones, not for some other reason but for your sake. For everyone is glad when what he wishes for comes about, and pained when the opposite does, so that pains and pleasures are signs of what a man wishes.
So those are friends to whom the same things are good and bad, and who are friends to the same people and enemies to the same people. For they must wish for the same things; and so a man who wishes for someone else what he wishes for himself shows himself to be that person's friend.
We love, or like, those who have done good to us, or to people we care about, if the good was great, or done gladly, or done at a moment when it counted, and done for our sake; and we like those we think want to do us good.
We like our friends' friends, and those who like the people we like; and those who are liked by the people we like.
We like those who are enemies of our enemies, who hate the people we hate, and who are hated by the people we hate. For all these people think the same things good as we do, and so they wish for what is good for us, which, as we said, is the mark of a friend.
Further, we like those who are ready to help others with money or with their safety. That is why people honour the generous, the brave and the just.
And we take the just to be people who do not live off others: those who live by their own work, and among them farmers first of all, and of the rest, above all those who work with their own hands.
We like people of self-control, because they do not wrong anyone.
And people who mind their own business, for the same reason. And those we want to be friends with, if they seem to want it too. These are people who are good in point of virtue, and people well thought of, either by everyone, or by the best people, or by those we ourselves admire, or by those who admire us.
Further, we like people who are pleasant to live with and to spend the day with. These are the good-tempered: people who do not keep pointing out our mistakes, who are not argumentative or quarrelsome. People of that kind are always ready for a fight, and people who fight with us seem to want the opposite of what we want.
We like those who know how to make a joke and how to take one, since both are aiming at the same thing as the person they are with: they can stand being teased and they tease in good taste.
We like those who praise the good qualities we have, and especially the ones we are afraid we do not have.
We like those who are clean and neat in their appearance, in their dress, and in their whole way of living.
We like those who do not throw either our mistakes or their own kindnesses in our face, since both are ways of finding fault.
We like those who do not bear grudges or keep a record of their complaints, but are easily reconciled. For we think they will be to us just what we take them to be to others.
We like those who do not speak badly of others, and who take no interest in their neighbours' faults or in ours, only in the good things about us;
for that is what a good man does. We like those who do not stand up against us when we are angry or in earnest, because people like that are ready for a fight. And we like those who feel seriously about us in some way: who admire us, think us people of worth, and enjoy our company,
especially when they feel this way about the very things for which we most want to be admired, or thought worthy, or thought pleasant.
We like people who are like us and follow the same pursuits, so long as they do not get in our way and do not make their living from the same thing. For then it becomes a case of the old saying about trade rivals,
Potter against potter.
We like those who want the same things as we do, if it is possible for us both to have them; if not, the same thing happens again.
We like people with whom we are on such terms that we are not ashamed in front of them of things that are shameful only in the eyes of the world, provided this is not because we despise them.
And people in front of whom we are ashamed of things that are really shameful. And people we compete with for honour, or by whom we want to be emulated and not envied: these we either like or want to be friends with.
We like those we help to get good things, provided this does not mean greater harm for ourselves.
We like those who are equally fond of their friends whether the friends are absent or present, which is why everyone likes those who are loyal in this way to the dead. And in general, we like those who are deeply devoted to their friends and do not desert them, because of all good men, we like best those who are good at being friends.
We like those who do not put on an act with us. These are people who will even tell us their own failings. For we said that before friends we are not ashamed of things that are shameful only in the eyes of the world; so if a man who is ashamed in front of us is no friend, a man who is not ashamed seems like one. And we like those who are not frightening, and those we feel confident with, because nobody likes a man he is afraid of.
The kinds of friendship are companionship, close acquaintance, kinship and the like. What produces friendship is doing a kindness,
and doing it without being asked, and not making it known once it is done. For then it seems to have been done for the friend's own sake and not for any other reason.
As for enmity and hatred, it is clear that we can study them by looking at the opposites. What produces enmity is anger, spite and slander.
Anger comes from things done to oneself, but enmity can arise even without anything done to oneself, since if we suppose someone to be a certain kind of person, we hate him. Anger is always directed at particular people, at Callias or Socrates, say, whereas hatred is felt towards whole classes: everyone hates a thief or an informer, the man who brings prosecutions for gain. Anger can be cured by time, hatred cannot. Anger aims at causing pain, hatred at causing harm, for the angry man wants his victim to feel it, while to the man who hates it makes no difference. Now, painful things can all be felt, but the things that are most harmful are the least felt: injustice and folly, for instance, since the presence of vice causes no pain. Again, anger comes with pain, hatred does not: the angry man is in pain, the man who hates is not. And the angry man might feel pity if a great deal happened to the other, but the man who hates never would. For the one wants the man he is angry with to suffer in his turn; the other wants him not to exist.
It is clear from all this that it is possible to prove that people are enemies or friends when they are; to make them so when they are not; to break down the claims of those who say they are; and, when people are standing against us out of anger or enmity, to bring them round to whichever side we choose.
What things people fear, whom they fear, and in what state of mind they fear them, will become clear as follows. Let us define fear as a kind of pain or disturbance that comes from picturing some evil in the future that could destroy us or cause us pain. For people do not fear every evil. Nobody is afraid, for instance, of becoming unjust or slow-witted. They fear only the evils that can bring great pain or destruction, and even those only if they seem not far off but close by, so near that they are about to happen. Things that are very far away people do not much fear. Everyone knows that he is going to die, but because death is not near, nobody gives it a thought.
If that is what fear is, then the things that must be fearful are the things that seem to have great power to destroy us, or to do us harms that lead to great pain. That is why even the signs of such things are fearful: they make the fearful thing itself seem near. For that is what danger is: the coming near of something fearful.
Here are such signs. First, the enmity and anger of people who are able to do something to us. For it is clear that they both want to and are able to, so that they are close to doing it.
Next, injustice that has power behind it. For the unjust man is unjust by choice, and so the wish is already there.
Next, virtue that has been treated with insolence and has power behind it. For it is clear that virtue, whenever it is treated with insolence, always chooses to hit back, and now it is able to.
Next, fear felt by people who are able to do something to us. For a man like that, too, must be getting ready to act.
Next, since most people are rather bad than good, are slaves to gain, and are cowards in danger, it is generally a fearful thing to be at someone else's mercy. So if you have done something terrible, the people who share your secret are to be feared: they may give you away, or leave you in the lurch.
Next, people who are able to do wrong are to be feared by those who can be wronged, since as a rule people do wrong whenever they can. People who have been wronged, or who think they are being wronged, are to be feared too, because they are always watching for their chance. So are people who have done wrong, if they have power, because they are afraid of being paid back in kind,
and we assumed at the start that this sort of thing is fearful. So too are our rivals for the same things, wherever both sides cannot have them at once, because people are always at war with rivals like that.
Next, people who are feared by those stronger than ourselves. For if they could harm those stronger people, they could harm us all the more. And, for the same reason, the people whom those stronger than ourselves are afraid of.
Next, people who have brought down those stronger than themselves, and people who are attacking those weaker than themselves: either they are fearful already, or they will be once they have grown stronger. And among the people we have wronged, or our enemies or rivals, it is not the hot-tempered and outspoken who are to be feared, but the calm, the ironical and the cunning. With them you cannot tell whether they are about to strike, so you can never be sure that they are far from it.
Every fearful thing is more fearful when, once a mistake has been made, it cannot be put right: either it is altogether impossible, or putting it right is no longer in our hands but in our opponents'. Fearful things are more fearful, too, when there is no help to be had, or no easy help. To put it simply, fearful things are the things that move us to pity when they happen, or are about to happen, to other people.
These, then, are pretty well the chief things that are fearful and that people fear. Now let us say in what state of mind people themselves feel fear.
If fear goes with the expectation of suffering something destructive, then it is clear that nobody is afraid who thinks that nothing could happen to him. He does not fear things he does not think could happen to him, nor people he does not think could do them to him, nor at times when he does not think they could happen. So it must be the people who think something could happen to them who feel fear: fear of those particular people, over those particular things, and at those particular times.
Two kinds of people do not think anything could happen to them. The first are those who are, or seem to be, enjoying great good fortune. That is why they are insolent, contemptuous and rash; and what makes them so is wealth, strength, plenty of friends and power. The second are those who think they have already suffered every terrible thing there is, and have gone cold towards the future, like men already fastened to the plank to be put to death. For fear to be felt, some hope of being saved must remain underneath, something they are still struggling for. Here is a sign of it: fear makes people deliberate, and nobody deliberates about things that are past all hope.
So when it is better that your hearers should be afraid, you must put them in the state of mind of people to whom something could happen. Tell them that people greater than they are have suffered, and so they could too. Show them people like themselves who are suffering or have suffered, and at the hands of people they never expected it from, in ways they never expected, and at times they never expected.
Now that it is clear what fear is, what things are fearful, and in what state of mind each kind of person is afraid, it is also clear from all this what confidence is, what things people feel confident about, and in what state of mind they feel confident. For confidence is the opposite of fear, and what gives confidence is the opposite of what is fearful. So confidence is hope, together with a picture in the mind, that the things that will save us are close by, and that the fearful things are either not there at all or far away.
These things, then, give confidence: terrible things that are far off, and things that will save us that are near; the chance of putting things right, and help, whether plentiful or great or both; not having been wronged and not having done wrong; having no rivals at all, or none with any power, or rivals with power who are our friends, or who have done us good or had good from us; and having more people whose interests are the same as ours, or stronger people, or both.
As for the state of mind: people are confident if they think they have often succeeded and have not come to harm, or if they have often walked into danger and got away. For there are two ways in which people come to feel that nothing can touch them: either they have never been tested, or they have help to hand. So in dangers at sea, both the man who has never been in a storm and the man whose experience gives him the means to deal with one feel confident about what is coming.
People are also confident when a thing is not fearful to their equals, nor to those beneath them, nor to those they think they are better than.
And they think they are better than those they have beaten, whether they beat those men themselves, or men stronger than them, or their equals. They are also confident if they think they have more, and greater, of the advantages that make those who have them fearful: plenty of money, strength of body, of friends, of land and of the means of making war, either all of them or the most important. And they are confident if they have wronged nobody, or not many, or not the people they are afraid of;
and, in general, if things stand well between them and the gods, in the signs and oracles as well as in everything else. For anger gives confidence; and it is being wronged, not doing wrong, that makes people angry; and the gods are supposed to help those who have been wronged.
Last, people are confident when, as they set about something, they think they will suffer nothing, either now or later, or that they will succeed. So much, then, for what is fearful and what gives confidence.
What things people are ashamed of, and what they are shameless about, before whom they feel shame, and in what state of mind, will be clear from what follows.
Let us define shame as a kind of pain or disturbance over bad things, present, past or future, that seem likely to bring us into disrepute; and shamelessness as a kind of indifference and lack of feeling about those same things.
If shame is what we have defined it to be, then people must be ashamed of those bad things that seem disgraceful, either to themselves or to people they care about. Such are all the acts that come from vice. For instance, throwing away your shield in battle, or running away, since that comes from cowardice. Or keeping back money someone left in your safekeeping, or wronging someone, since that comes from injustice.
Or having sex with people you should not, or where you should not, or when you should not, since that comes from self-indulgence.
Or making a profit out of petty things, or disgraceful things, or out of people who cannot defend themselves, such as the poor or the dead. Hence the proverb about someone who "would steal from a corpse". That comes from greed for shameful gain and from meanness.
Or not helping someone with money when you are able to, or helping less than you could. Or accepting help from people less well off than yourself.
Or borrowing when it will look like begging; begging when it will look like demanding back what you are owed; demanding back what you are owed when it will look like begging; praising something in a way that will look like asking for it; and going on asking after you have been refused. All these are signs of meanness.
Praising people to their faces is a sign of flattery, and so is praising their good points too much and smoothing over their bad ones, and showing more grief than the grieving man himself when you are with him, and everything else of that kind. All these are signs of flattery.
Or not putting up with hardships that are borne by people older than you, or people living in luxury, or people in higher positions, or in general people less able to bear them than you are. All these are signs of softness.
Or accepting favours from someone else, and accepting them often, and then throwing in his face the good you did him yourself. All these are signs of smallness of soul and of a low spirit.
Or talking about yourself all the time and making great promises, and claiming what someone else did as your own, since that comes from boastfulness. And in the same way with each of the other vices of character: the acts that come from them, the signs of them, and the things that resemble them are all disgraceful, and things to be ashamed of.
On top of these, it is shameful not to have a share in the fine things that everyone has a share in, or that everyone like you has, or most of them. By "people like you" I mean people of the same nation, the same city, the same age, the same family, and in general people on an equal footing with you. For then it is already shameful not to have a share, for example, in education to the same degree as they do, and so with the rest. All these things are more shameful if the fault seems to be your own, because then they come more from vice, if you yourself are the cause of the way things were, or are, or will be.
People are also ashamed when they are suffering, have suffered, or are going to suffer the kinds of thing that lead to dishonour and reproach. These are the things that involve putting your body at someone else's service, or submitting to shameful acts, and being treated with insolence is one of them. Some of these things are done for self-indulgence, whether willingly or unwillingly; others are done unwillingly, under force. For putting up with them and not fighting back comes from unmanliness or cowardice.
Those, then, and things like them, are what people are ashamed of.
Shame is a picture in the mind of disrepute, and we feel it for the disrepute itself and not for its consequences; and nobody cares what is thought of him except because of the people who think it. So people must feel shame before those whose opinion counts with them.
And the opinion that counts with a man is the opinion of those who admire him, of those he admires, of those by whom he wants to be admired, of those he competes with for honour, and of those whose opinion he does not despise.
People want to be admired by, and themselves admire, those who have some good thing that is held in honour, or those from whom they badly need something that those people have in their power to give, as lovers do.
They compete for honour with their equals. And they care about the opinion of sensible people, because they take them to be telling the truth; such people are the older and the educated.
They are also more ashamed of what is done before their eyes and out in the open. Hence the proverb, drawn from a line of Euripides, that shame lives in the eyes. That is why people feel more shame before those who will always be around them and before those who are paying attention to them, since in both cases they are under someone's eyes.
They feel shame before people who are not guilty of the same faults, because it is clear that such people think the opposite. And before people who do not forgive those who seem to have done wrong. For it is said that nobody holds against his neighbours what he does himself, so it is clear that what a man does hold against them is what he does not do.
They feel shame before people who are likely to spread things about to many others, since there is no difference between not thinking a thing wrong and not passing it on. The people likely to spread things are those who have been wronged, because they are watching us, and slanderers, because if they speak badly even of people who have done nothing wrong, they will be all the more ready to speak badly of those who have. And they feel shame before people who spend their time on their neighbours' faults, such as mockers and the writers of comedies, since these are a kind of slanderer and gossip. And before people in whose eyes they have never yet failed, because they are in the position of someone who is admired. That is also why people feel shame before those who ask them for something for the first time, since in their eyes they have not yet lost any of their good name. Such are people who have only just begun to want to be their friends, because these have seen only the best of them. That is why the answer Euripides is said to have given the Syracusans is a good one: sent to ask for their friendship and refused, he told them they ought to respect the Athenians' admiration, if only because it was new. And, among old acquaintances, those who know nothing against them.
People are ashamed not only of the shameful things themselves that we have described, but also of the signs of them. For instance, not only of having sex but of the signs of it; and not only of doing
shameful things but of saying them. In the same way, they feel shame not only before the people we have described but also before those who will tell those people, such as their servants and friends.
In general, people do not feel shame before those whose opinion they greatly despise as a judge of the truth; nobody feels shame before small children or animals. Nor are they ashamed of the same things before people they know and before strangers: before people they know they are ashamed of what seems truly shameful, and before people far off, of what is shameful by convention.
As for the state of mind in which people would feel shame: first, if there are people who stand towards them in the relation we said belongs to those before whom people feel shame. These, we said, are the people they admire, or who admire them, or by whom they want to be admired, or from whom they need some service that they will not get if they lose their good name. And these people must be either looking on, as when Cydias, speaking to the assembly about the settlement of Athenian colonists on Samos, asked the Athenians to imagine that the Greeks were standing all round them, so that they would not only hear of whatever they decided but see it; or close by; or likely to find out. That is also why people who are down on their luck do not want to be seen by those who once envied them, for people who envy you admire you.
People also feel shame when they have deeds and circumstances that bring disgrace on them, whether their own, or their ancestors', or those of anyone else they are closely connected with. And in general they feel shame on behalf of those for whom they themselves feel shame. These are the people already mentioned, and those whose conduct reflects on them, such as people whose teachers or advisers they have been, and other people like themselves with whom they compete for honour.
For there are many things people do, and many they refrain from doing, out of shame before people like these.
And they are more prone to shame when they are going to be seen, and to live out in the open, among people who know what they have done. That is why the poet Antiphon, when he was about to be put to death on the plank by Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, saw the men who were to die with him covering their faces as they went out through the gates, and said, "Why do you hide your faces? Is it so that none of these people will see you tomorrow?"
So much for shame. As for shamelessness, it is clear that we shall have plenty to say about it from the opposites of all this.
Whom people feel kindly towards, for what, and in what state of mind, will be clear once we have defined kindness.
Let us say, then, that kindness, the quality in virtue of which someone is said to be kind, is helping someone who needs help, not in return for anything, and not so that the helper should get something out of it, but so that the other person should. The kindness is great if the person helped is in great need, or needs great and difficult things, or needs them at a moment like that; or if the helper is the only one, or the first, or the one who helps most.
By needs I mean wants, and above all the wants that bring pain when they go unsatisfied. Appetites are like this, love, for instance; and so are the wants that come with bodily suffering and with danger, for the man in danger wants something, and so does the man in pain. That is why people who stand by someone in poverty or in exile earn gratitude even if the help they give is small, because the need is so great and the moment so pressing: like the man who gave someone a mat in the Lyceum, the gymnasium outside Athens.
So the help must meet, above all, those very needs; failing that, needs as great or greater.
Since it is now clear to whom kindness is shown, for what, and in what state of mind, it is clear that this is what the speaker must work from. He must show that the one side is, or has been, in pain and need of this kind, and that the other has done, or is doing, some such service in a need of this kind.
It is also clear how it is possible to take away the kindness and make people ungrateful. You can say that the helpers are helping, or helped, for their own sake, and that, as we said, is not kindness. Or that it happened by chance, or that they were forced into it. Or that they were paying back, not giving, whether they knew it or not; for either way it was something in return for something, and so, in this case too, it would not be kindness.
And you should look at it under all the categories, the headings under which anything can be considered. For a kindness is a kindness because it is this particular thing, or this much, or of this sort, or at this time, or in this place. It is a sign against them, too, if they would not do us a smaller service; and if they have done the same, or as much, or more, for our enemies, since then it is clear that what they did for us was not for our sake either. Or if what they gave was worthless and they knew it, since nobody admits that he needs worthless things.
So much for doing a kindness and failing to show gratitude. Now let us say what things are pitiable, whom people pity, and in what state of mind they themselves feel pity.
Let us define pity as a kind of pain at an evil that we see, a destructive or painful evil, falling on someone who does not deserve it: the kind of evil that we might expect to suffer ourselves, or that someone who belongs to us might, and at a moment when it seems close. For it is clear that the man who is going to feel pity must be the sort of person who thinks that he himself, or someone who belongs to him, could suffer some evil, and an evil of the kind named in the definition, or like it, or near it.
That is why people who are utterly ruined do not feel pity: they think nothing more can happen to them, because it has all happened already. Nor do people who think themselves supremely happy; they are insolent instead. For if they think they have every good thing, then clearly they think they have this one too, that nothing bad can happen to them, since that too is one of the good things.
The people inclined to think that something could happen to them are these. Those who have already suffered and come through it. Older people, both because of their good sense and because of their experience. The weak. Those who are rather on the timid side. And the educated, because they reason well about what is likely.
Also people who have parents, or children, or wives, because these are part of themselves, and are the kind of people who could suffer the evils we have spoken of.
Also people who are not in one of the emotions of courage, such as anger or confidence, since these take no account of what is going to happen; nor in an insolent frame of mind, since such people, too, take no account of the chance of suffering anything. It is the people in between who pity. Nor again must they be terribly afraid, since people who are panic-stricken do not feel pity: they are taken up with what is happening to themselves.
People feel pity, too, if they think that there are some decent people in the world, because the man who thinks there is nobody decent will think that everyone deserves what he gets. And in general, a man feels pity when he is in a frame of mind to remember that things like this have happened to him or to one of his own, or to expect that they may happen to him or to one of his own.
So much for the state of mind in which people feel pity. What they pity is clear from the definition. All painful and distressing things that destroy are pitiable, and all that ruin; and all evils of any size that are caused by bad luck.
The distressing and destructive things are deaths, beatings and injuries to the body, ill treatment, old age, sickness and lack of food.
The evils caused by bad luck are having no friends, or few friends (which is why it is pitiable to be torn away from your friends and companions), ugliness, weakness, being crippled; and some evil coming from the very place where you had every right to expect something good;
and this happening again and again; and good fortune coming only after the suffering is over, as when the gifts from the King of Persia were sent down to Diopithes after he was already dead; and either never having had anything good happen at all, or, when it has happened, not being able to enjoy it.
These, then, and things like them are what people pity.
Whom do people pity? First, people they know, as long as they are not too closely connected with them. For those who are, they feel about as they would about themselves if they were about to suffer. That is why, so the story goes, Amasis, king of Egypt, did not weep when his son was led away to be put to death, but did weep over a friend reduced to begging. The second was pitiable, the first was terrible; and the terrible is something different from the pitiable. It drives pity out, and often works in favour of the opposite feeling.
For people no longer feel pity when the terrible thing is close to themselves. Next, people pity those who are like them in age, in character, in habits, in rank and in family, because in all these cases it seems more likely that the same thing could happen to them as well. For in general here too we may take it that whatever people fear for themselves, they pity when it happens to others.
Since sufferings are pitiable when they seem close, while people either do not pity at all, or do not pity as much, things that happened ten thousand years ago or will happen ten thousand years from now, since they neither expect the one nor remember the other, it follows that those who add to the effect with gesture, voice, dress and delivery in general are more pitiable. They make the evil seem close by setting it before our eyes, either as about to happen or as having happened.
And things that have just happened, or are about to happen soon, are more pitiable for the same reason.
For this reason too the signs of suffering are pitiable, such as the clothes of those who have suffered, and everything of that sort; and the actions and words and everything else of people who are in the midst of suffering, people who are dying, for instance. And most pitiable of all is when good men are in such straits. For all these things make pity greater because they make the suffering seem close; and because the man seems not to deserve it, and the suffering appears before our very eyes.
The feeling most directly opposed to pity is the one people call indignation. Being pained at someone's undeserved good fortune is, in a way, the opposite of being pained at someone's undeserved bad fortune, and both come from the same kind of character. Both feelings, in fact, belong to a good character.
For we ought to feel sorry for, and pity, those who suffer when they do not deserve it, and we ought to feel indignation at those who prosper when they do not deserve it. Whatever happens to a person against what he deserves is unjust. That is why we even say that the gods feel indignation.
It might seem that envy, too, is opposed to pity in the same way, being close to indignation or even the same thing. But it is different. Envy, too, is a disturbing pain, and it too is felt at someone's good fortune; but not the good fortune of someone who does not deserve it. It is felt at the good fortune of an equal, of someone like ourselves. What both feelings must have in common is this: the pain comes not from thinking that something bad will happen to us as a result, but purely from what is happening to our neighbour. For if the pain and the disturbance come from the thought that some harm will come to us from the other man's good fortune, it will no longer be envy in the one case or indignation in the other. It will be fear.
It is clear, too, that each of these feelings will bring with it the opposite feeling in the opposite case. The man who is pained at people suffering undeservedly will be glad, or at least not pained, at people suffering in the opposite way, that is, deservedly. When men who have murdered their fathers, or committed some other bloody murder, meet their punishment, no good man would be pained. We ought to be glad at things like that, and in the same way at people who prosper and deserve to. Both are just, and both make the decent man glad, since he cannot help hoping that what has come to someone like him might come to him as well.
All these feelings come from the same character, and their opposites from the opposite character. The man who is glad at other people's misfortunes is the same man who envies them. For if someone is pained when another man gets something or has it, he is bound to be glad when the other man loses it or it is destroyed. So all these feelings stand in the way of pity. They differ from one another for the reasons just given, but for the purpose of making things seem not pitiable, all of them are equally useful.
Let us speak first about indignation: whom people feel indignant with, over what, and in what state they themselves are; and after that about the others.
The answer is clear from what has been said. If indignation is being pained at someone who appears to be prospering undeservedly, then, first of all, it is plain that we cannot feel indignation at every kind of good thing.
If a man is just, or brave, or comes to have some virtue, nobody will feel indignant with him for it, just as nobody feels pity for a man who has the opposites of these qualities. People feel indignant over wealth and power and things of that sort: the things which, broadly speaking, good men deserve, and so do men who have the good things that come by nature, such as noble birth and beauty and the like.
Now, since what is old seems to come close to what is natural, it follows that when two people have the same good thing, we feel more indignant with the one who has only lately come by it and is prospering because of it. The newly rich annoy people more than those who have been rich a long time or were born to it. It is the same with holding office, with power, with having many friends or fine children, and with anything else of that kind. And if these things bring them some further good, the same holds: here too the newly rich who get into office because of their money annoy people more than the men whose families have always been rich. And so on in the other cases.
The reason is that the second sort seem to have what is their own, and the first sort do not. What has always looked a certain way seems to be true, and so the others seem to have what is not theirs.
Next, not every good thing suits just anybody: there is a certain proportion, a certain fit, between a good and the man who has it. Splendid armour, for instance, suits not the just man but the brave one, and a grand marriage suits not the newly rich but the well born. So if a good man fails to get what fits him, that is a matter for indignation. So is an inferior man competing with a better one, above all when they are in the same line. That is why the poet says of a Trojan warrior,
He kept away from battle with Ajax, son of Telamon; for Zeus was indignant with him whenever he fought a better man.
And if they are not in the same line, the inferior competing with the better in any way at all is still a matter for indignation: the musician with the just man, for example, since justice is better than music.
From this, then, it is clear whom people feel indignant with and why: these are the people and the reasons, or things like them. As for the people themselves, they are prone to indignation, first, if they happen to deserve the greatest goods and actually possess them. For it is not just that people who are not like them should be thought to deserve the same things.
Second, if they happen to be good men of real worth. For they judge soundly, and they hate what is unjust.
They are prone to it, too, if they are ambitious and want certain things, especially if their ambition is for the very things that others are getting without deserving them.
And, in general, people who think they themselves deserve things that they think others do not deserve are prone to feel indignant with those others, and over those things. That is why people with the souls of slaves, worthless people and people with no ambition are not prone to indignation: there is nothing they think they themselves deserve.
From all this it is clear over what kind of people's bad luck, misfortunes and failures we ought to be glad, or at least not pained, since the opposites follow plainly from what has been said. So if the speech puts the judges into this state of mind, and shows that the people who claim pity, and the things they claim it for, do not deserve to get it, and deserve not to get it, then pity is impossible.
It is also clear what people envy, whom they envy, and in what state they are when they do it, if envy is a kind of pain at the apparent good fortune of people like ourselves in the good things we have mentioned: a pain felt not because we want something for ourselves, but because those others have it. People will feel envy if there are others who are like them, or seem to be.
By "like them" I mean alike in family, in kinship, in age, in character, in reputation, in possessions. People also feel envy when they fall only a little short of having everything. That is why people who are doing great things, and people who are lucky, are envious: they think everyone is carrying off what belongs to them.
People who are specially honoured for something are envious, above all those honoured for wisdom or for happiness. The ambitious are more envious than the unambitious. So are people who think themselves wise, because their ambition is to be thought wise. In general, anyone who wants to be famous for something is envious about that thing. And small-souled people are envious, because everything seems great to them.
As for the things people envy, the good things have already been described. Envy is felt over nearly everything that makes people long for fame and honour, whether deeds or possessions, and over whatever makes them hungry for reputation, and over all the gifts of good luck. It is felt most of all over the things people want for themselves, or think they ought to have, or the things whose possession puts them a little ahead of others, or a little behind.
It is clear, too, whom people envy, since we said it in the same breath. They envy those who are near them in time, in place, in age and in reputation. Hence the line, which the old commentators give to Aeschylus:
For kinship, too, knows how to envy.
They also envy the people they compete with; and they compete with the people just described. Nobody competes with people who lived ten thousand years ago, or who have not been born yet, or who are dead, nor with people who live out at the Pillars of Hercules, the rocks at the western end of the world. Nor do they compete with people they think, in their own eyes or in other people's, are far below them, or far above them; and the same goes for envy, both of such people and over such things.
Since people compete with their rivals in a contest, their rivals in love, and in general anyone who is after the same things as they are, it follows that these are the people they envy most. That is why the poet Hesiod says:
And potter against potter.
People also envy those whose possessions or successes are a reproach to them; and these, too, are people close to them and like them. For it is plain that it is their own fault they have not got the good thing in question, and this pains them, and the pain makes for envy.
They envy those who have, or have got, things that ought to have been theirs, or that they themselves once had. That is why older people envy younger ones.
And those who have spent a great deal on something envy those who got the same thing by spending little.
And those who got something only with difficulty, or never got it at all, envy those who got it quickly.
It is clear, too, over what things and what people such envious men are glad, and in what state they are when they are glad. For in the same state in which they are pained, they will be pleased at the opposite things. So if the judges themselves are brought into this state of mind, and the people who claim pity, or claim to deserve some good thing, are of the kinds we have described, it is clear that they will get no pity from the people with the power to decide.
In what state people feel emulation, over what things and with regard to whom, is clear from what follows. Let emulation be a kind of pain at the apparent presence, in people who are by nature like ourselves, of good things that are held in honour and that we could get ourselves: a pain felt not because someone else has them, but because we do not have them too. That is why emulation is a decent feeling and belongs to decent people, while envy is a base feeling and belongs to base people. The one, through emulation, gets himself ready to win the good things; the other, through envy, tries to stop his neighbour having them.
It follows that the people prone to emulation are those who think they deserve good things they do not have, when those things are within their reach. For nobody thinks he deserves what looks impossible. That is why the young and the great-souled are like this.
So are people who already have the kind of good things that are fit for men held in honour: wealth, many friends, public office, and the like. Since they feel it is fitting for them to be good men, because goodness is what fits people so well provided, they feel emulation for goods of that kind. So, too, are people whom others think deserving.
People whose ancestors, relatives, household, nation or city are held in honour feel emulation about those honours. For they think these things belong to them, and that they deserve them.
If the good things held in honour are what people feel emulation for, then the virtues must be such things, and so must everything that is useful to other people and does them good, since people honour those who do them good and those who are good. So must those good things that the people around us can share in and enjoy, such as wealth and beauty, rather than health.
It is clear, too, who the people are that others feel emulation for. They are the people who possess these things and things like them: the things already mentioned, such as courage, wisdom and office, since men in office can do good to many. So generals and orators are admired in this way, and everyone who has power of that kind.
So are the people many others want to be like, or want to know, or want as friends; the people many admire, or whom we ourselves admire.
So are those whose praises and tributes are told by the poets or by the prose writers.
People feel contempt for the opposite sort. For contempt is the opposite of emulation, and feeling contempt is the opposite of feeling emulation. People who are in a state to feel emulation for others, or to be the objects of it, are bound to feel contempt for those who have the bad things that are the opposites of the good things that excite emulation, and contempt on account of those bad things. That is why they often feel contempt for people who are lucky, when their luck comes to them without any of the goods held in honour.
We have now said what makes the emotions arise and what makes them go away, and so where the proofs that work through them come from.
Next, let us go through the different kinds of character, and see what people are like according to their emotions, their settled states, their time of life and their fortunes.
By emotions I mean anger, appetite and the like, which we have already discussed. By settled states I mean the virtues and the vices, which we have also discussed already, together with the sort of things each kind of person chooses and the sort of things he is inclined to do. The times of life are youth, the prime of life, and old age. By fortune I mean good birth, wealth and power, and their opposites, and in general good luck and bad luck.
To begin with the young. In character the young are full of appetites, and the kind of people who do whatever they have an appetite for. Of the bodily appetites, the one they follow most is the appetite for sex, and this is the one they cannot control.
They change their appetites easily and quickly tire of them. They want things violently, but they stop wanting them just as fast, because their wishes are sharp rather than large, like the hunger and thirst of sick people.
They are hot-blooded, quick-tempered, and the sort to follow wherever their anger leads. Their temper gets the better of them: because they love honour, they cannot bear to be slighted, and they are outraged if they think they are being wronged.
They love honour, but they love winning even more, because youth wants to be on top, and winning is a way of being on top. They love both of these more than money. Money they love least of all, because they have not yet learned what it is to go without, as the wise man Pittacus said in his remark about the prophet Amphiaraus.
They are not bad-natured but good-natured, because they have not yet seen much wickedness. They are trusting, because they have not yet been deceived very often.
They are full of hope. The young are warm by nature, the way people are warm with wine; and besides, they have not yet failed very often. They live mostly in hope, because hope is about the future and memory is about the past, and for the young the future is long and the past is short: on the first day of your life you can remember nothing at all, but you can hope for everything. For the same reason they are easy to deceive, since they hope so readily.
They are braver than other people, because they are full of temper and full of hope. The temper keeps them from being afraid, and the hope makes them confident: nobody feels fear while he is angry, and to hope for something good is to feel confident.
They are easily ashamed, because they do not yet imagine that anything else is noble besides what they have been taught; the rules of their own society are the only education they have had.
They have greatness of soul, because life has not yet humbled them and they have no experience of what it is to be forced by necessity. And thinking yourself worthy of great things is greatness of soul, and that belongs to someone full of hope.
They would rather do what is noble than what is useful, because they live by their character more than by calculation, and calculation aims at what is useful, while virtue aims at what is noble.
They are fonder of their friends and companions than people of any other age are, because they enjoy living in company, and they do not yet judge anything by whether it is useful, and so they do not judge their friends that way either.
Everything they get wrong, they get wrong by going too far and too hard, against the maxim of Chilon, the wise man who said "Nothing too much". They do everything too much: they love too much and hate too much, and the same with everything else. And they think they know everything, and insist on it; this, in fact, is the reason they do everything too much.
When they do wrong, they do it out of insolence and not out of malice. They are quick to pity, because they suppose that everyone is good, and better than he really is: they measure other people by their own innocence, and so they suppose that those others are suffering what they do not deserve.
And they are fond of laughter, and so fond of wit as well; for wit is insolence that has been educated.
Such, then, is the character of the young. Older men, the ones who are past their prime, have characters that are for the most part made up of the opposites of these. They have lived many years; they have been deceived more often and have made more mistakes; and most things in life turn out badly. So they are sure of nothing, and they are less keen about everything than they ought to be.
They "think"; they never "know". Being of two minds, they always add "perhaps" or "maybe". Everything they say is put that way, and nothing is said outright.
They are bad-natured, for being bad-natured means taking everything in the worse sense. They are suspicious, too, because they do not trust anyone, and they do not trust anyone because of what experience has taught them.
For the same reasons they neither love nor hate very strongly, but follow the advice of Bias, another of the wise men: they love as though they will one day hate, and hate as though they will one day love.
They are small of soul, because life has humbled them. They want nothing great or out of the ordinary, only what they need to live.
They are mean with money, because property is one of the things you need to live, and at the same time they know from experience how hard it is to get and how easy to lose.
They are cowardly, and afraid of everything in advance, because their condition is the opposite of the young man's. They have been chilled, where the young are warm, so that old age has paved the way for cowardice; and fear, in fact, is a kind of chill.
They love life, and love it most on their last day, because what we want is what we do not have, and what we lack is what we want most.
They love themselves more than they should, for this too is a kind of smallness of soul. And they live for what is useful rather than for what is noble, more than they should, because they love themselves: what is useful is good for oneself, while what is noble is good without qualification.
They are shameless rather than easily ashamed. Because they do not care about the noble as much as about the useful, they think little of what people will think of them.
They are slow to hope, because of their experience, since most of what happens is bad, and most things turn out for the worse; and also because of their cowardice.
They live by memory more than by hope, because what is left of their life is short and what is past is long, and hope is about the future while memory is about the past. This is also why they talk so much: they go on and on about what has happened, because remembering gives them pleasure.
Their fits of temper are sharp but weak. Of their appetites, some have gone altogether and the rest are weak, so that they neither feel strong appetites nor act on them; they act for gain instead. That is why men of this age seem to have self-control: their appetites have slackened, and they are slaves to gain.
They live by calculation more than by character, because calculation aims at what is useful, and character at virtue. When they do wrong, they do it out of malice and not out of insolence.
The old are quick to pity too, but not for the same reason as the young. The young pity out of love for their fellow men; the old pity out of weakness, because they think that everything bad is close at hand for them to suffer, and that, as we saw, is what makes people pity. That is why they are given to complaining, and are neither witty nor fond of laughter, since a complaining temper is the opposite of a love of laughter.
Those, then, are the characters of the young and the old. Since everyone welcomes speeches that are spoken in his own character, and speakers who are like himself, it is not hard to see how we should use our speeches so that both we and our words will seem to be of that kind.
As for men in the prime of life, it is clear that in character they will stand between the young and the old, with the excess of each taken away. They are neither too confident, for that is rashness, nor too much afraid, but they stand as they should towards both.
They neither trust everyone, as the young do, nor distrust everyone, as the old do, but judge rather by what is true. They live neither for the noble alone nor for the useful alone, but for both. They are neither tight-fisted nor wasteful with money, but spend as is fitting.
It is the same with temper and with appetite: they have self-control together with courage, and courage together with self-control. In the young and the old these two are divided, for the young are brave and self-indulgent, and the old have self-control and are cowardly. To put it generally: whatever advantages youth and old age have divided between them, the prime of life has both of; and wherever the young and the old go too far or fall short, the prime of life has the moderate amount, the amount that is fitting.
The body is in its prime from the age of thirty to thirty-five, and the soul at about forty-nine, a year short of fifty.
So much, then, for youth, old age and the prime of life, and for the kind of character that belongs to each of them.
Next let us speak of the good things that come to us by fortune: or rather of those among them that shape the characters of the people who have them, and of what sort of character each of them tends to produce.
The character that goes with good birth is that the man who has it is more eager for honour. For whenever people start out with something, they are in the habit of heaping more on top of it, and good birth is exactly that kind of starting stock: it is honour handed down from one's ancestors. The well-born also tend to look down even on men who have done as much as their own ancestors did. The reason is that the same distinctions are more highly honoured, and easier to boast about, when they lie far back in the past than when they are recent and close at hand.
Being well-born is a matter of the excellence of one's family; being of noble nature is a matter of not falling away from what one was born to be. And for the most part that second thing does not happen to the well-born: most of them are good for nothing. For there is a kind of harvest in the families of men, just as there is in what the land produces. Sometimes, if the stock is good, for a certain stretch of time exceptional men are born in it, and then it goes back again and yields less. Gifted families degenerate into wilder, half-mad characters, as the descendants of Alcibiades did, the brilliant and reckless Athenian general, and those of the elder Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse. Steady families degenerate into dullness and sluggishness, as the descendants of Cimon, of Pericles and of Socrates did.
The characters that go with wealth are there on the surface for anyone to see. The rich are insolent and arrogant, because owning wealth does something to them: they behave as though they possessed every good thing there is. For wealth is a kind of standard by which the worth of everything else is priced, and so it seems to them that everything can be bought with it.
They are soft and luxurious, and they are show-offs. Soft and luxurious, because of the way they live and because they like to put their prosperity on display. Show-offs, and vulgar with it, because they are used to seeing everyone busy himself about whatever they love and admire; and so they suppose that other people covet the very things they covet themselves. And it is not unreasonable of them to feel this way, since there are a great many people who need something from those who have money. That is the point of what the poet Simonides said about the wise and the rich, when the wife of Hiero, the tyrant of Syracuse, asked him which was better, to be rich or to be wise. "Rich," he told her, "for I see the wise spending their days at the doors of the rich."
The rich also think they deserve to rule, because they believe they have what makes a man worth putting in power. In a word, the character of wealth is the character of a fool who has had a stroke of luck.
There is a difference, though, between the characters of the newly rich and of those who have been rich for a long time. The newly rich have all these faults in greater measure and in a worse form, since being newly rich is, so to speak, being rich without having been taught how. The wrongs they commit are not the calculated wrongs of a villain. Some come from insolence and some from lack of self-control: assault, for instance, and adultery.
The same goes for power: most of the characters it produces are plain enough. Power has some of the same traits as wealth, and some that are better.
Men with power are more eager for honour and more manly in character than the rich, because they aim at the kind of deeds that their power gives them the freedom to do.
They are more serious and hard-working, because they are always having to take care of things: they are forced to keep watch over whatever concerns their power.
And they are dignified rather than heavy. For their rank makes them more dignified, and so they keep themselves within bounds; and dignity is simply heaviness made gentle and graceful. If they do wrong, they are not petty wrongdoers but wrongdoers on a grand scale.
Good fortune, taken part by part, has the characters of the things just described, since what are thought to be the greatest pieces of good fortune all come down to these: good birth, wealth and power. Beyond that, good fortune gives a man the advantage in having fine children and in the goods of the body.
People are more arrogant and more thoughtless because of good fortune. But one excellent trait goes with it: the fortunate love the gods, and stand in a kind of relationship with the divine, trusting in it because of what fortune has brought them.
So much, then, for the characters that go with age and with fortune. The opposite characters, such as those of the poor man, the unlucky man and the man without power, are clear from their opposites.
Persuasive speech is always used to bring about a judgement, since about things we already know and have already judged there is no longer any need for speaking. And this holds in every case. It holds when someone uses speech on a single person, urging him towards something or turning him away from it, as people do when they give someone a warning or try to talk him round; the single listener is a judge just as much as a crowd is, because, to put it simply, whoever has to be persuaded is a judge. It holds just the same when someone argues against an opponent, or against a thesis. For he has to use speech to knock down the opposing case, and he makes his speech against that case as if it were an opponent standing in front of him. It holds in the same way in ceremonial speeches, since there the speech is put together for the spectator as though he were a judge. Still, strictly speaking, the only person who is a judge in the full sense is the one who decides the questions under dispute in public contests, in the courts and the assembly: in the courts the question is how the facts stand, and in the assembly it is what the people are deliberating about. And the characters that belong to the different forms of government were discussed earlier, when we dealt with political speeches. So it may now be taken as settled how, and by what means, we should make our speeches express character.
Each kind of speech, as we saw, has its own separate end. For all of them we have collected the opinions and premises from which speakers draw their proofs when they advise, when they praise and blame, and when they dispute in court; and we have also settled the means by which it is possible to make a speech express character. What remains for us is to go through the things that all speeches share.
For every speaker is bound to make use, in his speeches, of the line of argument about the possible and the impossible, and to try to show, in some cases, that a thing will happen, and in others that it has happened.
Again, the line of argument about size is common to every kind of speech. For everyone makes things smaller or bigger, whether he is advising, praising or blaming, or accusing or defending.
Once these have been settled, we shall try to say what we can about enthymemes in general, and about examples, so that by adding what is left we may complete the plan we set out with at the start. Of these shared lines of argument, making things bigger, which is called amplification, belongs most properly to ceremonial speeches, as has been said already; what has happened in the past belongs to courtroom speeches, since that is what the court has to judge; and what is possible and what will happen belong to political speeches.
Let us begin with the possible and the impossible. If one of a pair of opposites can exist or come about, then it would seem that the other one can too. For instance, if a man can be cured, he can also fall ill, because the same capacity covers both of a pair of opposites, in so far as they are opposites. And if one of two similar things is possible, so is the other.
If the harder of two things is possible, so is the easier.
If it is possible for a thing to be made good and beautiful, then it is possible for it to be made at all, since it is harder to build a beautiful house than to build a house.
If the beginning of a thing can come about, so can the end, because nothing impossible ever comes about, or even begins to come about. For instance, it could never happen that the diagonal of a square is measured exactly by its side, and it could never even begin to happen. And where the end is possible, so is the beginning, since everything comes about from a beginning.
If what comes later, whether in its nature or in the order in which things come into being, can come about, then so can what comes earlier. For instance, if a man can come into being, so can a child, since the child comes first. And if a child can come into being, so can a man, since the child is the beginning of the man.
Things that people love or want by nature are possible, because as a rule nobody loves or wants the impossible.
Things that sciences and arts are about can exist and come about.
So can anything that has the starting point of its coming about in people we could force or persuade to act; and those are the people we are stronger than, or masters of, or friends of.
If the parts are possible, so is the whole; and if the whole is possible, so, as a rule, are the parts. If the front piece, the toe-cap and the upper of a shoe can be made, then shoes can be made; and if shoes can be made, so can the front piece, the toe-cap and the upper.
If the whole class of a thing is among the things that can be made, so is the particular kind; and if the particular kind can be made, so can the class. For instance, if a ship can be built, so can a trireme, the Greek warship; and if a trireme can be built, so can a ship.
If one of two things that are naturally paired with each other is possible, so is the other. For instance, if the double is possible, so is the half; and if the half is possible, so is the double.
If a thing can be done without art or preparation, then all the more can it be done with art and with care. That is the source of the lines by Agathon, the tragic poet:
What's more, some things we have to do by art, while others come to us by force and chance.
If a thing is possible for people who are worse, or weaker, or less intelligent, then it is all the more possible for people who are the opposite. Isocrates said as much: it would be a terrible thing if Euthynus had managed to learn something that he himself could not work out on his own.
As for the impossible, it is clear that the arguments for it come from the opposites of the ones we have just given.
Whether a thing has happened in the past is to be looked at in the following ways.
First, if what is naturally less likely to happen has happened, then what is more likely will have happened too. And if what usually comes afterwards has happened, then what comes before it has happened as well. For instance, if a man has forgotten something, then at some time he must have learned it.
If a man was able to do something and wanted to, he has done it, because everybody does what he wants to do when he is able to, since there is nothing in his way.
Again, a man has done a thing if he wanted to and nothing outside him prevented it; or if he was able to and was angry; or if he was able to and had an appetite for it. As a rule, people do the things they want whenever they can: bad people through lack of self-control, and decent people because what they want is decent.
If something was about to happen, it has probably been done, since it is likely that a man who was about to do something went on to do it.
A thing has happened if everything that naturally comes before it, or that is done for its sake, has happened. For instance, if there has been lightning, there has been thunder too; and if a man has attempted a thing, he has also done it. Again, if everything that naturally comes after a thing, or for whose sake it is done, has happened, then the earlier thing, and the thing done for its sake, have happened too. For instance, if it has thundered, there has been lightning; and if a man has done a thing, he has attempted it.
Of all these connections, some hold by necessity and some only as a rule. As for arguing that a thing has not happened, it is obvious that the arguments come from the opposites of the ones we have given.
About the future, it is clear that the same arguments apply. What we are able to do and want to do will happen; and things that appetite, anger and reasoning urge on us, when we have the power as well, will also happen once we are set on doing them or about to do them, since as a rule what is about to happen is more likely to happen than what is not.
A thing will happen if the things that naturally come before it have already happened. For instance, if the sky is clouding over, it is likely to rain.
And if something has been done for the sake of something else, it is likely that the other thing will come about as well. For instance, if a foundation has been laid, a house is likely to follow.
As for how big or small things are, which is greater and which is less, and greatness and smallness in general, all that is clear from what we have already said. We discussed the size of goods, and the greater and the less in general, when we were dealing with political speeches. Now, in each of the three kinds of speech, the end put before it is a good: what is advantageous, what is noble, or what is just. So it is plain that every speaker must take the material for making things bigger, which is called amplification, from those discussions.
To go looking beyond that for greatness and superiority in the abstract is to waste words, because for practical purposes the particular facts count for more than general statements.
That is enough, then, about the possible and the impossible, about whether a thing has happened or has not, and whether it will happen or will not, and also about how big or small things are.
We have discussed the proofs that belong to each kind of speech on its own. What remains is to speak of the proofs that are common to them all. These common proofs are of two general kinds, the example and the enthymeme; the maxim, after all, is a part of an enthymeme.
Let us take the example first, since the example is like induction, and induction is where knowledge begins.
There are two kinds of example. One consists in telling of things that have really happened before; the other in making something up yourself. The made-up kind divides again into the comparison and the fable, like the fables of Aesop and the Libyan fables, the animal stories that came out of Africa.
Here is the kind that tells of real events. Suppose someone said that we must prepare against the Great King of Persia and not let him get control of Egypt. After all, Darius, in the past, did not cross over into Greece until he had taken Egypt, but once he had taken it he crossed. And again Xerxes did not make his attempt until he had taken Egypt, but once he had taken it he crossed. So this king too, if he takes Egypt, will cross over, and therefore we must not let him.
The comparison is the kind of thing Socrates used to say. Suppose someone argued that public officials should not be chosen by lot. It would be just like choosing athletes by lot, sending not the men who are able to compete but the ones whose names happen to come up; or like choosing by lot which of the sailors on board is to steer the ship, as though it ought to be the man the lot falls on and not the man who knows how.
The fable is the kind of story Stesichorus, the poet, told about Phalaris, or Aesop told in defence of a popular leader.
The people of Himera, in Sicily, had chosen Phalaris as their general with absolute powers and were about to give him a bodyguard. Stesichorus argued with them at length, and then told them a fable. A horse, he said, had a meadow all to himself. Then a stag came along and began ruining the pasture. The horse wanted to take revenge on the stag, and asked a man whether he could help him punish it. The man said he could, if the horse would take a bit in his mouth and let the man climb on his back, holding javelins. The horse agreed, and the man got on; and instead of getting his revenge, the horse found himself the man's slave. "So you too," Stesichorus said, "take care that in your wish to take revenge on your enemies you do not end up like the horse. You already have the bit in your mouth, since you have chosen a general with absolute powers. If you give him a bodyguard and let him climb on your back, you will be the slaves of Phalaris from that moment on."
Aesop, speaking in the assembly at Samos in defence of a popular leader who was on trial for his life, told this story. A fox was crossing a river when she was swept into a gully. She could not get out, and for a long time she was in a bad way, with a crowd of dog-ticks clinging to her. A hedgehog came wandering by, saw her, felt sorry for her, and asked whether he should pull the ticks off. She would not let him. When he asked her why not, she said: "These ones are full of me already and are drawing very little blood. If you take them off, others will come along hungry and drink up the blood I have left." "So it is with you, men of Samos," Aesop said. "This man will do you no more harm, because he is rich. But if you put him to death, others will come who are poor, and they will steal from you and spend what you have left."
Fables are good for speeches to the assembly, and they have this advantage: it is hard to find real events that are similar to the case in hand, but fables are easier. You have to make them up, as you do comparisons, and all you need is to be able to see the likeness between things, which is easier if you have studied philosophy.
So the lessons of fables are easier to come by; but for political advice the lessons of real events are more useful, because as a rule what is going to happen is like what has happened already.
If you have no enthymemes, you should use examples as your demonstration, since they will produce conviction. If you do have enthymemes, you should use examples as evidence, bringing them in after the enthymemes as a kind of summing up. Put first, they look like induction, and induction does not suit speeches except in a very few cases. Put after, they look like evidence from witnesses, and a witness is persuasive everywhere. That is also why, if you put them first, you must give a lot of them, whereas if you put them after, even one is enough: a single good witness is useful.
So much, then, for how many kinds of example there are, and how and when they should be used.
As for the use of maxims, it will be easiest to see what subjects they suit, on what occasions, and in whose mouth, once we have said what a maxim is.
A maxim is a statement. It is not, however, a statement about a particular person or thing, such as what sort of man Iphicrates was, but a general one. Nor is it about everything general, such as that the straight is the opposite of the crooked, but only about the things that human actions are concerned with, and about what ought to be chosen or avoided when we act. Now the enthymeme is, more or less, the syllogism that deals with exactly these things. So maxims are the conclusions or the starting premises of enthymemes, with the reasoning taken away. Take these lines from Euripides' Medea:
No man who has been born with any sense should have his children taught to be too clever.
That is a maxim. Add the cause, the reason why, and the whole thing becomes an enthymeme, as Medea goes on to do:
For quite apart from being called idle, they earn the hatred and envy of their fellow citizens.
Again, take the line from Euripides' Stheneboea,
There is no man who is happy in everything;
or the line
There is no man alive who is truly free.
This last is a maxim; but together with the line that follows it in Euripides, it is an enthymeme:
For he is the slave of money or of chance.
If a maxim is what we have said, there must be four kinds of maxim. A maxim either comes with a reason attached, a supporting addition, or it does not; and each of these divides in two.
Maxims that say something surprising or disputed need proof. Those that say nothing surprising need no reason attached. Among these, some need no reason because the point is known already, like the line, from Simonides or Epicharmus,
For a man, to be healthy is the best of all, as I see it
(since that is what most people think). Others are clear the moment they are spoken, to anyone who stops to look at them, like the line from Euripides' Trojan Women,
No one is a lover who does not love for ever.
Of the maxims that come with a reason attached, some are part of an enthymeme, like the one we began with,
No man who has been born with any sense;
others have the character of an enthymeme without being part of one, and these are the ones most admired. They are the maxims in which the reason for what is said shows through, as in
Do not keep your anger immortal, since you are mortal.
To say that one should not keep one's anger for ever is the maxim; the added words "since you are mortal" give the reason why. It is the same with the line, said to be by Epicharmus,
A mortal should think mortal thoughts, not immortal ones.
It is clear, then, from what we have said, how many kinds of maxim there are, and what each kind suits. On a matter that is disputed or surprising, a maxim should not be used without its reason. Either you put the reason first and then use the conclusion as a maxim, as if someone were to say: "For my part, since a man ought neither to be envied nor to be idle, I say that children ought not to be educated." Or you state the maxim first and add the reason after it. On matters that are not surprising but are not obvious either, you should add the reason, as compactly as you can.
In such cases short, sharp Spartan sayings and riddling sayings fit well. An example is what Stesichorus said to the people of Locri: that they ought not to be insolent, or their cicadas would have to sing from the ground. He meant that an invader would cut down their trees.
Maxims suit older men, and suit subjects a man knows from experience. For someone who is not old enough to be using maxims is as unbecoming as telling tales; and to use them about things you have no experience of is foolish and shows a lack of education. There is a good enough sign of this: country people are the greatest coiners of maxims, and the readiest to hand out their opinions.
To state in general terms what is not really general fits best when you are complaining bitterly or making a thing sound as bad as possible; and then either at the start or once you have proved your point.
You should use even well-worn, commonplace maxims, if they are useful. Because they are common, they seem to be right, as though everybody agreed with them. For instance, a general urging his men into danger without having first made the sacrifices to see whether the omens are good can say, with Hector in the Iliad,
The one best omen is to fight for your country;
and if they are fewer than the enemy,
The War God is on both sides alike;
and if he is urging them to kill the enemy's children even though they have done no wrong,
A fool is he who kills the father and leaves the sons alive.
Some proverbs are maxims too. An example is the proverb "an Athenian for a neighbour", meaning a restless, meddling one.
You should also use maxims that go against the well-known sayings, by which I mean such sayings as "Know yourself" and "Nothing in excess". Do this when it will make your character look better, or when the maxim is spoken with emotion. An example of speaking with emotion would be a man in a rage saying: "It is not true that a man should know himself. At any rate, if this man had known himself, he would never have thought himself fit to be a general." Your character will look better if you say that we ought not to love people, as the saying goes, as though we were going to hate them one day, but should rather hate them as though we were going to love them.
Your choice, what you mean to do, should be made clear by your very words; and if it is not, you should add the reason. For instance, you could put it this way: "We ought to love, not as the saying goes, but as though we were going to love for ever, since the other way is the way of a man who plots against his friends." Or you could put it like this: "I do not like the saying. A true friend should love as though he were going to love for ever." Or again: "Nor do I like 'Nothing in excess', because the wicked, at least, we ought to hate to excess."
Maxims give a speech great help, for two reasons. One is the unsophistication of the listeners. They are delighted when a speaker, speaking in general terms, hits on the opinions they already hold about their own particular case. What I mean will be clear from what follows, and so will the way to hunt for maxims. A maxim, as we have said, is a general statement, and listeners are delighted to hear stated in general terms something they had already assumed about their own particular case. For instance, a man who happens to have bad neighbours or bad children will welcome it when someone says that nothing is more of a trial than neighbours, or that nothing is more foolish than having children. So the speaker must guess what sort of thing his listeners have already assumed, and then speak in general terms about just those things.
That is one use of maxims. There is another, and a greater one: they give a speech character. A speech has character when it makes the speaker's choice clear. All maxims do this, because the man who speaks a maxim is making a general statement about what is to be chosen; so if the maxims are good ones, they make the speaker seem a man of good character too.
So much, then, for the maxim: what it is, how many kinds of it there are, how it should be used, and what good it does.
Let us now speak about enthymemes in general, and how to look for them, and after that about their lines of argument, since these are two different kinds of thing.
We have said already that the enthymeme is a syllogism, in what way it is one, and how it differs from the syllogisms of dialectic. You must not draw the conclusion from too far back, and you must not put in every step. The first is unclear because it is so long; the second is mere chatter, because it states what is obvious. This is also why uneducated speakers are more persuasive in front of a crowd than educated ones; as the poets put it, the uneducated are the ones who speak "more musically" to a crowd. The educated talk in commonplaces and generalities; the uneducated talk about what they know, and about things close to their listeners. So a speaker should not argue from everything that anybody believes, but only from definite opinions: those held by the people who are judging, or by the people whose judgement they accept. And it should be clear that these opinions are held by all the listeners, or by most of them. Nor should he draw his conclusions only from what is necessary, but also from what holds as a rule.
The first thing to grasp, then, is this. Whatever subject you have to speak about and reason about, whether with a political syllogism or with any other kind, you must have the facts about it, either all of them or some. If you have none, you will have nothing to draw a conclusion from.
I mean, for instance: how could we advise the Athenians whether or not to go to war, if we did not know what their strength is, whether it lies in ships or in soldiers on land or both, and how great it is; what their revenues are; who their friends and their enemies are; and then what wars they have fought already, and how they fared, and everything else of that kind?
Or how could we praise them, if we did not have to hand the sea battle at Salamis, or the battle of Marathon, or what they did for the children of Heracles, when Athens took them in and defended them, or something else of the kind? Everyone bases his praise on the noble things that belong to a person, or seem to.
In the same way people blame from the opposite things, looking for anything of that kind that belongs to the people they are blaming, or seems to. They say, for instance, that the Athenians enslaved the Greeks; that they reduced to slavery the people of Aegina and Potidaea, who had fought alongside them against the barbarian, the Persian invader, and had distinguished themselves in the fighting; and they bring up everything else of this kind, and any other such wrong the Athenians may have done. It is the same for those who accuse and those who defend in the courts: they look at the facts of the case, and accuse or defend from those.
It makes no difference whether the subject is the Athenians or the Spartans, a man or a god: the method is the same. Whether we are advising Achilles, praising him or blaming him, or accusing him or defending him, we must take what belongs to him, or seems to, and speak from that. If we are praising or blaming, we look for anything noble or shameful about him; if we are accusing or defending, for anything just or unjust; if we are advising, for anything advantageous or harmful.
And the same holds for any subject whatever. Take justice, for instance, and the question whether it is good or not. We must argue from the things that belong to justice and to the good.
It is plain, then, that everybody proves his case in this way, whether his reasoning is strict or loose. Nobody draws his premises from everything in the world, only from the things that belong to the subject in hand; and reasoning itself makes it clear that there is no other way to prove anything. So it is evident that, as we said in the Topics, the first thing a speaker needs is a stock of premises picked out in advance on each subject, about what is possible and what is most to the point.
When something comes up on the spur of the moment, you must look for arguments in the same way. Keep your eyes not on vague generalities but on the facts that belong to the subject of the speech, and mark off as many of them as you can, and those as close to the subject as possible. The more facts you have that belong to the case, the easier it is to prove your point; and the closer they are to the subject, the more they belong to it and the less they are commonplaces anybody could use.
By commonplaces I mean praising Achilles for being a man, or one of the demigods, or for having gone on the expedition against Troy. These things are true of many others as well, so a speaker who praises him like that is praising Achilles no more than Diomedes. By what belongs to him I mean the things that happened to nobody but Achilles: that he killed Hector, the best of the Trojans, and Cycnus, who could not be wounded and who stopped the whole Greek army from landing; that he went to the war when he was very young, and though he was not bound by the oath that bound the other Greek chiefs; and everything else of that kind.
This, then, is one way of choosing premises, and the first: the way by lines of argument. Now let us speak of the elements of enthymemes. By the element of an enthymeme and a line of argument for an enthymeme I mean the same thing. But first let us say what has to be said first.
There are two kinds of enthymeme. One kind proves that something is so or is not so; the other refutes. They differ in the same way as refutation and syllogism differ in dialectic.
The proving enthymeme draws its conclusion from premises the other side agrees to; the refuting enthymeme draws a conclusion the other side does not agree to.
We have, more or less, the lines of argument for each of the special kinds of subject that are useful and necessary, since the premises on each have already been picked out. So the lines of argument from which to draw enthymemes about good and bad, noble and shameful, just and unjust, and in the same way about characters, emotions and settled states of mind, are already in our hands, taken up earlier.
But let us also take up the subject in another way, in general and for every case. We shall point out as we go which lines of argument refute and which prove, and also the lines of argument of apparent enthymemes, which are not really enthymemes, just as they are not really syllogisms either. Once all that has been made clear, we shall settle the matter of answers and objections: where to find them, to bring against enthymemes.
The first line of argument for enthymemes that prove something is the one from opposites. You look at whether the opposite quality belongs to the opposite thing. If it does not, that demolishes the argument; if it does, that builds it. For example: self-control is good, because its opposite, lack of self-control, is harmful. Or, as in the speech on the Messenians: "If the war is to blame for our present troubles, then it is with peace that we must put them right." Or these lines, whose author is unknown, where the argument runs from being wronged against your will to being helped against the helper's will:
For if it is not just to fly into a rage with those who did us wrong without meaning to, then if a man was forced to do somebody good, it is not right that he should be owed thanks for it.
Or this, from Euripides' Thyestes, where the opposite of a believable lie is an unbelievable truth:
But if among mortals it is possible to tell lies that win belief, you must hold the opposite as well: that many true things happen to mortals that nobody believes.
The second line of argument comes from the related forms of a word, such as "just" and "justly". What holds of one form must hold, or fail to hold, in the same way of the other. For example, someone might argue that not everything just is good: for then everything that happens justly would be good as well, and yet to be put to death justly is nobody's choice.
The third comes from things that are relative to each other. If it belongs to one party to have acted honourably or justly, then it belongs to the other to have been treated so; and if one gave the order, the other carried it out. So Diomedon, who had bought from the city the right to collect its taxes, said about the taxes: "If it is not shameful for you to sell, then it is not shameful for us to buy." And if the honourable or just belongs to the one who suffered, it belongs to the one who acted too. But there is room here for a false conclusion. If a man suffered justly, then he suffered justly; but perhaps not justly at your hands. That is why you must look separately at whether the sufferer deserved to suffer and whether the doer was the right person to do it, and then use whichever way of putting it suits. For sometimes the two come apart, and nothing stops them, as in the Alcmaeon of Theodectes, the tragic poet who was a pupil of Plato and Isocrates. Alcmaeon has killed his mother Eriphyle, and his wife Alphesiboea asks him:
And was your mother hated by nobody on earth?
He answers that the question has to be divided before it can be looked at; and when Alphesiboea asks how, he takes her up and says:
They judged that she should die; not that I should kill her.
Another example is the trial of Demosthenes and the men who killed Nicanor: since the court decided that they had killed him justly, it seemed that he had died justly. Another is the case of the man who was killed at Thebes, where the defendant demanded that the court decide whether the dead man had deserved to die, on the ground that it cannot be unjust to kill a man who died justly.
The fourth comes from more and less. For example: if not even the gods know everything, human beings hardly can. What this amounts to is that if a quality does not belong to the thing it is more likely to belong to, then plainly it does not belong to the thing it is less likely to belong to. On the other hand, the argument that a man who beats even his father will beat his neighbours comes from the rule that if the less likely thing is true, the more likely thing is true as well; for people beat their fathers less often than they beat their neighbours. So you can put it either way: that the quality does not belong where it is more likely, or that it does belong where it is less likely, whichever you need to show, whether that something is so or that it is not.
Under the same heading comes the case where it is neither more nor less, but equal. That is where these lines come from, in Antiphon's tragedy Meleager:
Your father is pitiable, you say, because he lost his children; and is Oeneus not, who lost the glorious son of Greece?
Oeneus was the father of Meleager, and his loss is at least as great. Other examples: if Theseus did no wrong when he carried off Helen, then neither did Paris when he carried her off; and if the sons of Tyndareus, Castor and Polydeuces, did no wrong, then neither did Paris; and if Hector did no wrong in killing Patroclus, neither did Paris in killing Achilles. And: if no other practitioners of a skill are worthless, then neither are philosophers. And: if generals are not worthless because they are often put to death, then neither are sophists. And: if a private citizen ought to care about your good opinion, then you ought to care about the good opinion of the Greeks.
The fifth comes from looking at the time. For example, Iphicrates, the general, in his speech against Harmodius, who opposed the statue the city had voted him for his victory over the Spartans: "If, before I did it, I had asked to be given the statue once I had done it, you would have given it. Now that I have done it, will you refuse? Do not, then, make promises while you are still hoping for something, and take them back once you have had it." And again, to persuade the Thebans to let Philip of Macedon march through their land into Attica: if he had asked this before he helped them against the Phocians, they would have promised it; so it would be absurd to refuse him passage now, just because he let that chance go and trusted them.
The sixth takes what has been said against yourself and turns it on the man who said it, as in Sophocles' Teucer. Iphicrates used it in a different way against Aristophon. He asked him whether he would betray the fleet for a bribe, and when Aristophon said no, he said: "So you, who are Aristophon, would not betray it; and would I, who am Iphicrates?" But for this to work, the opponent must be the man who seems more likely to have done wrong. Otherwise it would look ridiculous: suppose someone said it in answer to Aristides the Just when he was the accuser. It is a way of making people distrust the accuser. For in general the accuser sets himself up as a better man than the defendant, and that is what has to be exposed. And in general, it is absurd when someone blames others for what he does himself, or would do, or urges others to do what he does not do himself and would not.
The seventh comes from definition. For example: what is the divine sign, the voice that Socrates said warned him? Is it a god, or the work of a god? But anyone who thinks it is the work of a god must think that gods exist. So Socrates, accused of not believing in the gods, answered the charge by defining the thing he was accused over. Or take Iphicrates, arguing that the best man is the noblest, although the Greek word for noble means well-born: there was nothing noble about Harmodius and Aristogiton, the men who killed the tyrant, until they had done something noble. And he argued that he himself was more their kin than his opponent was: "At any rate my deeds are more akin to the deeds of Harmodius and Aristogiton than yours are." Or, as in Polycrates' speech in defence of Paris, the Alexander: everyone would agree that men who lack restraint are not content with enjoying one woman's body. So Paris, who was content with Helen, was not a man who lacked restraint. Or the reason Socrates gave for refusing to go to Archelaus, the king of Macedonia: he said it was insolence to be unable to pay back a benefit, just as it is to be unable to pay back an injury. All these speakers define the thing, take hold of what it is, and then reason from that about the matter they are discussing.
The eighth comes from the number of senses a word has, as in the Topics, where we discussed the word "rightly".
The ninth comes from division. For example: all men do wrong for one of three reasons, this, that or the other; two of them are impossible here; and as for the third, not even the accusers say it.
The tenth comes from induction. For example, from the case of the woman of Peparethus, someone argues that everywhere it is women who decide the truth about their children. At Athens, when Mantias the orator was in a dispute with his son, who claimed to be his, it was the mother who declared the truth. At Thebes, when Ismenias and Stilbon were in dispute over a child, Dodonis, the mother, showed that he was Ismenias' son, and for that reason Thettaliscus was taken to be the son of Ismenias. Again, from the Law of Theodectes: we do not hand over our own horses to men who have looked after other people's horses badly, nor our own ships to men who have capsized other people's; so if this holds in every case, we must not use men who have guarded other people's safety badly to keep our own safe. And Alcidamas argues in the same way that everyone honours the wise. The people of Paros honoured Archilochus, though he was a poet of abuse; the people of Chios honoured Homer, though he was not a citizen of theirs; the people of Mytilene honoured Sappho, though she was a woman; the Spartans made Chilon one of their council of elders, though they are the least bookish of people; the Greeks of Italy honoured Pythagoras; and the people of Lampsacus buried Anaxagoras, a foreigner, and still honour him to this day. The Athenians prospered under the laws of Solon and the Spartans under those of Lycurgus; and at Thebes, as soon as the men who led the city became philosophers, the city prospered.
The eleventh comes from a judgement already given on the same question, or a similar one, or its opposite. Best of all is a judgement given by everyone and at all times; failing that, by most people; or by the wise, all or most of them; or by the good; or by the judges themselves, or by people whose judgement they accept; or by people it is impossible to contradict, such as those in power; or by people it is not decent to contradict, such as the gods, a father, or one's teachers. So Autocles said in his attack on Mixidemides, who refused to stand trial before the court of the Areopagus: "The Awful Goddesses were content to accept that court's verdict, and is it not good enough for Mixidemides?" He meant the Furies, who in Aeschylus' play submit their case to the Areopagus. Or as Sappho argued that dying is an evil: the gods have judged it so, for otherwise they would die. Or as Aristippus did, when Plato, as he thought, had said something too much like a boast: "Well, our friend never said anything of the kind", meaning Socrates. And Hegesipolis, the Spartan king, having first consulted the oracle of Zeus at Olympia on whether he could refuse a holy truce the enemy claimed in bad faith, and been told he could, then asked Apollo at Delphi whether his opinion was the same as his father's, since it would be shameful for a son to contradict his father. And Isocrates wrote that Helen was a good woman, since Theseus had judged her so by choosing her; and that Paris was, since the goddesses chose him above all others to judge between them; and that Evagoras, the king of Cyprus, was a good man, as Isocrates says, because at any rate when Conon the Athenian general met with disaster, he passed over everybody else and went to Evagoras.
The twelfth comes from the parts, as in the Topics: what kind of motion is the soul? It must be this one or that one. There is an example in Theodectes' Socrates. The charge is impiety, so the defence takes impiety to pieces: "What temple has he violated? Which of the gods the city believes in has he failed to honour?"
The thirteenth: in most cases both something good and something bad follow from the same thing, so you can use what follows to urge or to dissuade, to accuse or to defend, to praise or to blame. For example, education brings envy, which is bad, and it brings wisdom, which is good. So: "We should not be educated, because we should not be envied." Or: "We should be educated, because we should be wise." This line of argument is the whole of Callippus' handbook, once you add the line of argument from what is possible and the others we have described.
The fourteenth is used when you must urge or dissuade about two opposite courses, and apply the method just described to both of them. The difference is that there any two things are set against each other, whereas here they are opposites. For example, a priestess would not let her son speak in the assembly. "If you say what is just," she said, "men will hate you; if you say what is unjust, the gods will." But it can be turned: "No, you should speak in the assembly; for if you say what is just, the gods will love you, and if you say what is unjust, men will." This is the same as the saying about buying the marsh along with the salt, since you cannot have the salt pans without the swamp that comes with them. And this is what is called blaisôsis, the bow-legged argument that bends back the other way: when each of two opposites has a good and a bad consequence, and the consequences are opposite to each other just as the two things are.
The fifteenth: people do not praise the same things in public as they do in private. In public they praise above all what is just and noble; in private they prefer what is to their advantage. So try to draw from one of these the conclusion that goes against the other. Of the lines of argument that lead to a paradox, this is the most powerful.
The sixteenth comes from things turning out in proportion. For example, when the Athenians tried to force Iphicrates' son to pay for a public service, a duty laid on rich citizens, because he was tall, though he was under age, Iphicrates said: "If you count tall boys as men, you will have to vote that short men are boys." And Theodectes in his Law: "You make mercenaries citizens, men like Strabax and Charidemus, because of their decent conduct. Will you not make exiles of those mercenaries who have done damage that cannot be undone?"
The seventeenth: if the result is the same, the things it results from are the same. For example, Xenophanes said that those who say the gods were born are as impious as those who say the gods die, since either way the result is that at some time there are no gods. And in general you may take the result of each of two things to be one and the same: "You are about to judge not Isocrates, but a whole way of life: whether one ought to study philosophy." Or: to give earth and water, the tokens a Persian king demanded of those who submitted to him, is to be a slave; and to have a share in the common peace is to do what you are told. You should take whichever of the two ways of putting it is useful.
The eighteenth comes from the fact that the same people do not always choose the same thing later as they did before, but the reverse. For example, this enthymeme: "When we were in exile we fought to come home; and now we have come home, shall we go into exile so as not to fight?" At one time, that is, they chose to stay in their city at the price of fighting; at another, to avoid fighting at the price of not staying.
The nineteenth is to say that the reason something might be, or might have come about, is the reason it is, or came about. For example, someone might give a person a gift in order to hurt him by taking it away. That is why it has been said, by a poet whose name is not known:
To many the god gives great good fortune, not because he wishes them well, but so that the disasters they meet may be the more striking.
And the lines from Antiphon's Meleager, about the heroes gathered for the hunt of the great boar:
Not so that they might kill the beast, but so that they might be witnesses to Greece of Meleager's courage.
And the passage from Theodectes' Ajax, that when Diomedes chose Odysseus as his companion for the raid by night, it was not to honour him, but so that the man who went with him would be the lesser man; for that could be why he did it.
The twentieth is common to courtroom speeches and political ones. You look at the things that urge people on and the things that hold them back, the reasons for which people act and for which they refrain. These are the things that, if they are present, mean we should act, and if they are absent, mean we should not. For instance: whether a thing is possible, easy, and beneficial to oneself or one's friends, or harmful to one's enemies; or, if it carries a penalty, whether the penalty is smaller than what is gained. People urge others on from these, and dissuade from their opposites. And from these same things they accuse and defend: they defend from the things that hold a man back, and accuse from the things that urge him on. This line of argument is the whole of the handbooks of Pamphilus and of Callippus.
The twenty-first comes from things that are believed to happen and yet are unbelievable. People would not have believed them, you argue, unless they were true or nearly true. And the argument can be pushed further: they are all the more likely to be true. For what people accept is either what is, or what is likely; so if a thing is unbelievable and not likely, it must be true, since it is certainly not because it is likely and believable that people think it so. For example, Androcles of Pitthus, the politician, was speaking against a law, and was shouted down when he said, "The laws need a law to correct them." So he went on: "And fish need salt, though it is neither likely nor believable that creatures raised in salt water should need salt; and pressed olives need oil, though it is unbelievable that the very thing oil is made from should need oil."
The twenty-second is suited to refutation. You look for what does not agree, whether in places, times, actions or words. First, in your opponent's case alone: "He says he loves you, and yet he was in the conspiracy of the Thirty", the oligarchs who ruled Athens by terror. Next, in your own case alone: "He says I love going to law, but he cannot show a single lawsuit I have ever brought." Last, in his case and yours together: "He has never lent anybody anything, while I have paid the ransom for many of you."
The twenty-third is for people or things that have been slandered beforehand, or seem to have been: state the reason why the thing looks so strange, since there is always something that makes it look that way. For example, a woman had passed off her own son as somebody else's child, and because she kept embracing the young man, people thought she was sleeping with him; but once the reason was told, the slander fell apart. And in Theodectes' Ajax, Odysseus explains to Ajax why, though he is braver than Ajax, he is not thought to be.
The twenty-fourth comes from the cause. If the cause is there, the thing is; if the cause is not there, the thing is not. For a cause and what it causes go together, and without a cause nothing exists. For example, Thrasybulus, the democrat, accused Leodamas of having been inscribed as a traitor on the pillar on the Acropolis, and of having had his name chiselled off in the time of the Thirty. Leodamas, in his defence, said this could not have happened, because the Thirty would have trusted him all the more if his hatred of the people had been carved there in stone.
The twenty-fifth is to look at whether it was, or is, possible to do better in some other way than what a man is advising, or doing, or has done. For plainly, if things were not so, he did not do it, since nobody willingly and knowingly chooses what is bad. But this argument is false, since it often becomes clear only afterwards how the thing could have been done better, when beforehand it was not clear at all.
The twenty-sixth: when something is about to be done that goes against what has been done already, look at the two together. For example, when the people of Elea asked Xenophanes whether they should sacrifice to Leucothea and sing laments for her, or not, he advised them: if they thought she was a goddess, they should not lament her; if they thought she was a human being, they should not sacrifice to her. Leucothea had been a mortal woman, Ino, who threw herself into the sea and became a goddess of it, so they were doing both.
The twenty-seventh is to accuse or defend on the basis of mistakes made. For example, in the Medea of Carcinus, the tragic poet, her accusers say that she has killed her children: at any rate the children are nowhere to be seen, because Medea made the mistake of sending them away. She defends herself by saying that it is not her children she would have killed, but Jason; for it would have been a mistake not to kill him, if she had done the other thing. This line of argument, and this kind of enthymeme, is the whole of Theodorus' earlier handbook.
The twenty-eighth comes from the name. So Sophocles, speaking to the cruel stepmother Sidero, whose name comes from sidêros, iron:
Iron plainly, and you carry it in your name.
People commonly do this in praising the gods, too. And so Conon called Thrasybulus "bold in counsel", which is what his name means; and Herodicus said to Thrasymachus, "You are always bold in battle", which is what his name means; and to Polus, whose name means a colt, "You are always a colt"; and of Draco the lawgiver, that his laws were not a man's but a dragon's, because they were so harsh. And so Hecuba in Euripides says of Aphrodite, whose name begins like the Greek for folly, aphrosunê:
And rightly the goddess's name begins with folly.
And so Chaeremon, of Pentheus, whose name echoes penthos, grief:
Pentheus, named for the grief that was to come.
Enthymemes that refute are better liked than enthymemes that prove, because an enthymeme that refutes brings opposites together in a small space, and things set side by side are clearer to the listener. But of all syllogisms, whether they refute or prove, the ones that are applauded most are these: the ones whose conclusion the listeners see coming from the very start, provided it is not because the argument is shallow (for the listeners are pleased with themselves for seeing it coming); and the ones they fall just far enough behind to understand the moment they are finished.
Some syllogisms are real, and others are not real but only look like syllogisms. So, since the enthymeme is a kind of syllogism, some enthymemes too must be real, and others not real enthymemes but only apparent ones.
Of the lines of argument that produce apparent enthymemes, the first comes from the wording, and it has two parts. The first part is the one we meet in dialectic too: stating the last step as if it were a conclusion, when no reasoning has taken place at all, with a "so it is not this and that" or a "so it must be this and that". In the same way, in enthymemes, something said compactly and in balanced opposites looks like an enthymeme, because that style of speaking is the natural home of the enthymeme. A fallacy of this kind seems to depend on the shape of the wording. And a useful trick for sounding as if you are reasoning is to string together the headings of several syllogisms: "He saved some, he avenged others, and he set the Greeks free." Each of these was proved from other premises, earlier; but once they are put side by side, it looks as though something new follows from them too.
The second part is the one that comes from words with two meanings. Say someone argued that the mouse is an important creature, since the most honoured of all religious rites takes its name from it: the Greek for the Mysteries sounds as though it came from mus, a mouse. Or say someone who was praising the dog threw in the Dog in the sky, the Dog Star; or threw in Pan, because Pindar wrote of him as the attendant of Cybele, the great goddess:
O blessed one, whom the Olympians call the dog of the great goddess, taking every shape.
Or say someone argued that since it is the lowest disgrace to be "not even a dog", as the saying goes, being a dog must plainly be an honour. Or that Hermes is the most sharing of the gods, because he is the only one people call "shared Hermes", which is what Greeks say when someone finds a lucky windfall and his companion claims half. Or that speech is the most excellent thing there is, because good men are said to be worth, not money, but logos; for "worth a word" does not have one simple meaning, since it can mean worth talking about, worth esteem.
Another line comes from putting together what is separate, or pulling apart what is put together. Since something often seems to be the same when it is not, you do whichever of the two suits you better. This is the argument of Euthydemus the sophist: for example, that a man knows there is a warship in the Piraeus, the harbour of Athens, because he knows each of the two things, the warship and the Piraeus. Or that someone who knows the letters knows the whole line of verse, since the line is the same thing as its letters. Or, since a double dose is bad for you, that not even a single dose can be called healthy; for it would be absurd if two good things made one bad thing. Put that way it refutes; put this way it proves: "For one good thing does not make two bad ones." But the whole line of argument is fallacious. Again, there is what Polycrates said of Thrasybulus, the democrat who overthrew the Thirty: that he had put down thirty tyrants. There the thirty men who made up one tyranny are counted one by one, and he adds them together. Or there is the passage in the Orestes of Theodectes, which works by division:
It is just, when a woman kills her husband,
that she should die, and just too for a son to avenge his father. So, the argument runs, what Orestes has done is just as well. But when the two are put together, perhaps it is no longer just. It could also count as a fallacy of leaving something out, since it leaves out by whose hand she should die.
Another line of argument is to build a case up, or knock it down, by making the thing sound terrible. This happens when a speaker, without having shown either that the man did it or that he did not, blows the act up to enormous size. When it is the defendant who does this, it makes it look as though he did not do it; when it is the accuser, it makes it look as though he did. So this is not an enthymeme at all: the listener concludes, falsely, that the man did it or did not do it, when nothing has been shown.
Another comes from a sign; for this too proves nothing. Suppose someone said that lovers are useful to cities, because the love between Harmodius and Aristogiton brought down the tyrant Hipparchus. Or suppose someone said that Dionysius is a thief, because he is a bad man. That is no proof at all: not every bad man is a thief, although every thief is a bad man.
Another comes from what is accidental. For example, what Polycrates says in his speech in praise of mice: that they came to the rescue by gnawing through the bowstrings of an invading army. Or suppose someone said that there is no greater honour than being invited to dinner, since it was because he was not invited that Achilles was furious with the Greeks at Tenedos. In fact he was furious because he was being treated with disrespect; it merely happened that this took the form of not being invited.
Another comes from what follows. For example, in the speech on Paris, the Alexander, it is argued that Paris had greatness of soul, because he despised the company of the crowd and spent his time on Mount Ida by himself. Since men with greatness of soul are like that, he too might seem to have greatness of soul. Or: since a man dresses with great care and wanders about at night, he is an adulterer, because adulterers are like that. It is the same with the argument that beggars sing and dance in the temples, and that exiles can live wherever they like. These things are true of people who seem to be happy, so the people they are true of might seem to be happy too. But the difference lies in how: the beggar and the exile do these things for other reasons than the happy man. So this line too falls under leaving something out.
Another comes from treating what is not a cause as the cause, because it happened at the same time as something, or before it. People take "after this" as "because of this", and politicians do it most of all. So Demades said that Demosthenes' policy was the cause of all the city's troubles, because the war with Philip came after it.
Another comes from leaving out when and how. For example, the argument that Paris took Helen justly, because her father had given her the choice of husband. But the choice was surely not for ever, only the first time, since a father's authority lasts only that long. Or suppose someone said that to strike a free man is insolence. That is not so in every case, but only when the one who strikes is the one who starts the fight.
Further, just as in the arguments people have for the sake of winning, an apparent syllogism comes from confusing what is so without qualification with what is not so without qualification, but only in some respect. So in dialectic people argue that what is not, is, because what is not is what-is-not; or that the unknown can be known, because it can be known that the unknown is unknown. In the same way, in rhetoric, an apparent enthymeme comes from confusing what is likely without qualification with what is likely only in some respect. But such likelihood does not hold in general, as Agathon, the tragic poet, says:
Perhaps one might say that this very thing is likely: that many things happen to mortals that are not likely.
For what is against likelihood does happen, so that what is against likelihood is likely too; and if so, what is unlikely will be likely. But not without qualification. In those arguments for the sake of winning, it is the leaving out of "in what respect", "in relation to what" and "in what way" that produces the swindle; and here too it comes from the fact that the unlikely is likely not without qualification, but only in some respect.
The handbook of Corax, one of the first writers on rhetoric, is built out of this line of argument. Suppose a man is not open to the charge: for instance, he is weak, and he is accused of assault. His defence is that it is not likely. Suppose he is open to it: he is strong. His defence is still that it is not likely, because it was bound to look likely. And the same in every other case: a man must either be open to the charge or not. Both defences look likely; but one of them really is likely, while the other is likely not without qualification, but only in the way just described. And this is what "making the weaker argument the stronger" means. That is why people were right to resent the promise Protagoras made to his pupils, to teach them exactly that. It is a lie: not a real likelihood but an apparent one, and it has no place in any art except rhetoric and the art of arguing to win.
So much for enthymemes, both the real ones and the apparent ones. The next thing to discuss is how to refute them. You can refute an argument in two ways: by reasoning to the opposite conclusion with a syllogism of your own, or by bringing an objection.
Reasoning to the opposite conclusion can clearly be done from the same lines of argument we have already set out. Syllogisms are drawn from what people generally believe, and many of the things people believe contradict one another.
Objections are brought in four ways, as in the Topics. They come either from the opponent's enthymeme itself, or from what is similar, or from what is opposite, or from what has already been judged.
By an objection from the enthymeme itself I mean something like this. Suppose the enthymeme were meant to show that love is a good thing. The objection can be made in two ways. One is to state a general rule: every kind of want, every lack of something, is bad, and love is a kind of want. The other is to point to a particular case: nobody would talk of "Caunian love", the proverbial name for love between brother and sister, unless there were bad kinds of love as well.
An objection from the opposite is brought like this. Suppose the enthymeme was that a good man does good to all his friends. The objection is: "But a bad man does not do harm to all his friends either."
An objection from what is similar: suppose the enthymeme was that people who have been badly treated always hate the people who did it. The objection is: "But people who have been well treated do not always love the people who did it either."
The judgements, finally, are the ones that come from well-known men. For instance, suppose someone argued in an enthymeme that we should forgive people who are drunk, since they do wrong without knowing what they are doing. The objection is: "Then Pittacus deserves no praise; otherwise he would not have laid down heavier penalties for anyone who does wrong when drunk." Pittacus was the wise lawgiver of Mytilene, and his law, which punished the drunk offender more heavily, is a judgement against the argument.
Enthymemes, as we said, are drawn from four sources: what is likely, examples, sure signs, and signs. Enthymemes drawn from what is likely are built from things that happen, or are thought to happen, for the most part. Those drawn from examples work by induction from something similar, one case or several, when the speaker takes the general rule and then reasons from it to the particular case. Those drawn from sure signs work through what is necessary and always so. Those drawn from signs work through something general or something particular, whether it is true or not. Now what is likely is not what always happens, but what happens for the most part. So it is clear that enthymemes of this kind can always be refuted by bringing an objection.
But the refutation is often only apparent, not real. For the man who brings the objection shows, not that the thing is not likely, but only that it is not necessary.
That is why this fallacy always gives the defence an advantage over the prosecution. The accuser proves his case from what is likely. But showing that something is not likely is not the same as showing that it is not necessary; and whatever happens only for the most part is always open to an objection, since otherwise it would not be merely likely but would always happen and be necessary. And when an argument is answered in that way, the judge thinks either that it is not likely after all or that it is not for him to decide, and he is misled, as we were saying. For he is not supposed to judge only from what is necessary, but also from what is likely: that is what judging "to the best of my judgement" means. So it is not enough to refute the argument by showing that it is not necessary; you must refute it by showing that it is not likely.
That will happen if the objection itself holds more often, for the most part, than the argument it answers. And there are two ways it can do that: through time, or through the facts. The strongest objection does both, for if a thing happens in more cases and more often, then it is the more likely.
Signs, too, and enthymemes drawn from signs, can be refuted even if the facts they rest on are true, as we said at the beginning; for it is clear to us from the Analytics that no sign by itself makes a valid syllogism.
Enthymemes drawn from examples are refuted in the same way as those drawn from what is likely. If we have one single case that goes the other way, the argument is refuted, on the ground that it is not necessary, even if most of the cases, or the most frequent ones, go the opponent's way. But if most of the cases, and the most frequent ones, go his way, then we must fight on other ground: that the present case is not similar, or did not happen in a similar way, or at least has some difference.
Sure signs, and enthymemes drawn from sure signs, cannot be refuted on the ground that they make no valid syllogism; this too is clear to us from the Analytics. All that is left is to show that the thing asserted is not so. But if it is plain both that it is so and that it is a sure sign, then the argument can no longer be refuted: it has become a demonstration, and everything in it is plain.
Making a thing out to be bigger, or smaller, than it is, is not an element of the enthymeme. By an element I mean the same as a line of argument: an element, or line of argument, is a heading under which many enthymemes fall. Making bigger and making smaller, by contrast, are themselves enthymemes, used to show that a thing is great or small, just as other enthymemes are used to show that it is good or bad, just or unjust, or anything else.
All these are simply the subjects that syllogisms and enthymemes are about. So if none of them is a line of argument for enthymemes, then neither is making bigger or making smaller.
Nor are the enthymemes that refute an argument a different kind of enthymeme from the ones that build one. It is clear that a speaker refutes either by proving something or by bringing an objection, and when he proves something, what he proves in reply is the opposite of what the other side proved. If his opponent showed that a thing happened, he shows that it did not; if his opponent showed that it did not happen, he shows that it did. So this could not be the difference between them, since both sides use the same means: each brings enthymemes to show that the thing is so, or that it is not.
And the objection is not an enthymeme at all. As we said in the Topics, it is stating some opinion that makes it plain that the other side has not reasoned validly, or has taken something false as a premise.
There are three things that have to be worked out about a speech. For examples, maxims and enthymemes, and in general for everything to do with the thinking in a speech, where we shall find plenty to say and how we shall refute it, let what we have said be enough. What remains is to go through style and arrangement.
There are three things a treatment of speaking has to deal with. The first is where the proofs (the means of persuasion) are to come from; the second is style; the third is how the parts of a speech ought to be arranged. The proofs have been dealt with already. We have said how many there are, namely three; what they are; and why there are only three. For everyone who is persuaded is persuaded in one of three ways: because the people judging have been put into some state of feeling themselves, or because they take the speakers to be people of a certain character, or because something has been demonstrated. We have also said where enthymemes are to be found, since some of them come from the special kinds of argument that belong to one subject, and others from the general lines of argument.
The next thing to speak about is style. It is not enough to have the right things to say; you must also say them in the right way, and this does a great deal to make a speech seem to be of a certain kind.
The first question we looked into was, naturally enough, the one that comes first by nature: what gives the facts themselves their power to persuade. The second is how to set those facts out in words, which is style. The third is delivery. Of the three it has the greatest power, and yet nobody has so far taken it up. Even in tragedy and in the recital of epic poems it came in late, because at first the poets acted their own tragedies, and the reciters of epic were at first the poets themselves, so nobody needed to be taught how to perform. It is clear, then, that there is something of this kind in rhetoric just as there is in poetry, and Glaucon of Teos, among others, has written about it where poetry is concerned.
Delivery lies in the voice: how it should be used for each emotion. When should it be loud, when soft, when in between? How should its pitch be used, high, low or middle? And what rhythms suit each subject? For there are three things that people who study delivery pay attention to: volume, pitch and rhythm. The people who handle these well carry off nearly all the prizes in the dramatic contests. And just as in the theatre the actors now count for more than the poets, so it is in the contests of public life, in the courts and the assembly, because of the poor quality of our citizens.
No art of delivery has yet been put together, since even the study of style was late in coming forward. And delivery is thought to be a vulgar business, and rightly so, if you look at it properly. But since the whole study of rhetoric is concerned with how things seem to people, we have to pay attention to delivery, not because it is right, but because it cannot be helped. What is right is that a speech should aim at nothing beyond neither hurting the listener nor charming him. It is only fair to fight the case on the facts alone, so that everything besides the demonstration is beside the point. All the same, as I have said, delivery has great power, because of the poor quality of the listener.
Style, at any rate, does have a small necessary place in every kind of teaching, since it does make some difference to how clear a thing is whether you say it this way or that. But the difference is not so very great. All these things are show, and are aimed at the listener. That is why nobody teaches geometry like this.
When an art of delivery does arrive, it will do the same for speaking as the art of acting does for the stage. A few writers have tried to say a little about it, such as Thrasymachus in his book on appeals to pity. Being good at delivery is a gift of nature and has less to do with art, but style is a matter of art. That is why people who are good at style win prizes in their turn, just as speakers who are good at delivery do; for speeches written to be read get their force more from their style than from their thinking.
It was the poets who first set the study of style going, as was natural. Words are imitations of things, and the voice, which of all our parts is the best at imitating, was there to hand. That is how the arts of reciting epic and of acting, and others besides, came into being.
The poets seemed to have won their fame by their style, even though what they said was simple-minded. So the first prose style was a poetic one, like that of Gorgias, the Sicilian teacher of rhetoric; and even now most uneducated people think that speakers of this kind talk most beautifully. They do not. The style of prose is one thing and the style of poetry another. What has happened proves it, for not even the people who write tragedies use the old manner any longer. They moved from the long trochaic line to the iambic, because the iambic is of all metres the most like ordinary speech; and in the same way they have dropped all the words that are out of the way of ordinary conversation, the words the early poets used to decorate their lines with and that the writers of hexameter verse still use today. So it is ridiculous to imitate people who no longer write that way themselves.
It is clear, then, that we need not go into every question about style in detail, but only into those that concern the kind of style we are discussing, the style of prose. The other kind, the style of poetry, has been dealt with in my Poetics.
Let us take those matters as settled, then, and let us define the excellence of style as being clear. A speech is a kind of sign, and if it does not make its meaning plain it will not do its own job. Style should also be neither flat nor above the dignity of its subject, but fitting. The style of poetry, perhaps, is not flat, but it is not fitting for prose.
Among nouns and verbs, it is the standard words, the ones in everyday use for a thing, that make style clear. The other kinds of word, the ones discussed in my Poetics, keep it from being flat and give it ornament. For stepping away from the ordinary makes language seem grander. People feel about style the way they feel about strangers compared with their fellow citizens: what comes from elsewhere impresses them.
That is why you should give your language an unfamiliar air, a touch of the strange, since people admire what is remote, and what is admired is pleasant. In verse there are many ways of doing this, and there it suits, because the things and the people a poem talks about are further removed from ordinary life. In plain prose there are far fewer, because the subject is humbler. Even in poetry, it would be rather unfitting if fine language came from a slave or a very young man, or were spent on very small matters. Even there, what is fitting draws in or swells out to match the subject.
So you must do it without being noticed, and must not seem to be speaking in an artificial way but in a natural one. The natural is persuasive and the artificial the opposite, because people take offence at a speaker they suspect of laying a trap for them, just as they do at wine that has been watered. It should be like the voice of the actor Theodorus compared with the voices of the other actors: his seemed to be the voice of the man he was playing, theirs the voices of somebody else.
The art is well hidden if you build your language out of words chosen from ordinary speech. Euripides does this, and he was the first to show how.
A speech is made up of nouns and verbs, and nouns come in all the kinds that were examined in my book on poetry. Of these, rare words (words from other dialects, or old words out of use), compound words and newly coined words should be used seldom and in few places. Where they should be used I shall say later; why, I have said already: they step too far from what is fitting, in the direction of the grand. The standard word, the word that properly belongs to the thing, and metaphor are the only kinds useful for the style of plain prose. The proof is that these are the only kinds everyone uses, for everyone talks in metaphors, in the words that belong to things and in standard words. So it is clear that if you do this well, your language will have an unfamiliar air, and yet the art can escape notice, and you will be clear. And that, as we said, is the excellence of the style of rhetoric.
Among words, the sophist finds most use in words with more than one meaning, since he plays his tricks with them; the poet finds most use in synonyms. By synonyms I mean words that are both standard and mean the same, such as poreuesthai and badizein, both of which mean "to go" or "to walk": each is a standard word, and each means the same as the other.
What each of these kinds of word is, how many kinds of metaphor there are, and that metaphor has the greatest power both in poetry and in prose, has been said, as I mentioned, in my Poetics. But in prose you have to take all the more trouble over metaphors, because prose has fewer resources to help it than verse has. Metaphor, more than anything, gives clearness, pleasure and an unfamiliar air, and it is something you cannot learn from anybody else.
Both epithets and metaphors must suit the thing. This will come from proportion, from making the metaphor answer to the thing as one thing answers to another. Otherwise it will look out of place, because opposites show up most sharply when they stand side by side. You have to ask: as a scarlet cloak suits a young man, what suits an old one? For the same clothes do not suit both.
If you want to dress a thing up, take your metaphor from the best thing of the same family; if you want to run it down, from the worst. I mean, for example, that since opposites belong to the same family, you can say that a man who begs is praying, or that a man who prays is begging, because both are ways of asking, and this is the method I am describing. So Iphicrates called Callias, whose family held the honoured office of torch-bearer at the Mysteries of Eleusis, a begging priest, one of the wandering priests of the Mother goddess who go round collecting alms, instead of a torch-bearer. Callias answered that Iphicrates could never have been initiated into the Mysteries, or he would not have called him a begging priest but a torch-bearer. Both titles have to do with the service of a god, but one is honoured and the other despised. In the same way some people call actors "hangers-on of Dionysus", while they call themselves "artists". Both are metaphors, one of them smearing the thing and the other the opposite. Pirates, too, nowadays call themselves "suppliers", poristai. That is why you can say that a man who has done a wrong has made a mistake, or that a man who has made a mistake has done a wrong; and why you can say of a thief that he "took" something, or that he "procured" it, porisasthai, the pirates' own word. But the line from the Telephus of Euripides,
ruling the oar, he stepped ashore in Mysia,
is unfitting, because "ruling", anassôn, the word for a king's rule, is grander than the thing deserves, and so the art is not hidden.
There can also be a fault in the very sounds of a word, if they are not signs of a pleasant sound. Dionysius, nicknamed the Brazen because he proposed a bronze coinage, calls poetry in his elegies "the scream of Calliope", the Muse of epic. Both poetry and a scream are sounds, so far the metaphor holds; but it is a bad metaphor, because a scream is a sound that means nothing.
Next, when you give a name by metaphor to something that has no name of its own, you must not fetch the metaphor from far off, but from things that are related to it and of the same kind, so that as soon as it is said it is clear that the two are related. So in the famous riddle,
I saw a man who glued bronze onto a man with fire,
the operation had no name, but both it and gluing are a kind of putting one thing onto another; so the riddle called the application of the cupping-glass, the heated bronze cup a doctor sets on the skin, "gluing". And in general you can get good metaphors out of well-made riddles, since metaphors are riddles of a kind; so it is clear that the transfer has been well made.
Metaphors should also come from beautiful things. The beauty of a word lies, as Licymnius says, in its sound or in its meaning, and its ugliness likewise. There is a third point, which answers the sophists' argument. It is not true, as Bryson said, that nobody ever uses foul language, on the ground that it means the same thing whether you use this word or that. That is false. One word is more standard than another, more like the thing, and better suited to putting the thing before our eyes. Besides, two words do not signify the thing in the same light, so for that reason too one must count one word more beautiful or more ugly than another. Both words may signify what is beautiful or what is ugly, but not as beautiful, or not as ugly; or, if they do, then more or less so. So metaphors should be drawn from what is beautiful in sound, or in its effect, or to the eye, or to some other sense. It makes a difference whether you say, as Homer does, "rosy-fingered dawn", rhododaktulos, rather than "crimson-fingered", phoinikodaktulos, or, worse still, "red-fingered", eruthrodaktulos. All three name a colour of the fingers, but only the first calls up something lovely.
With epithets too, you can take them from the bad or ugly side of a thing, as when Orestes is called "the man who killed his mother", or from the better side, as when he is called "his father's avenger": the same deed, seen from its two sides, as the two men argue it in Euripides' Orestes. And Simonides, when the winner of a mule race offered him a small fee, refused to write a poem, as if he found it beneath him to write about half-asses. But when the man paid him enough, he wrote,
Hail, daughters of storm-footed horses!
And yet they were the daughters of donkeys too.
Diminutives work the same way. A diminutive makes both the bad and the good smaller, as Aristophanes mocks in his Babylonians, where people say chrusidarion, "goldikins", instead of gold, himatidarion, "a little cloaklet", instead of cloak, loidorêmation, "a teeny insult", instead of an insult, and nosêmation, "a tiny illness", instead of an illness. But you must be careful, with epithets and diminutives alike, and keep to the mean.
Frigid style, the psuchros or "cold" style, which reaches for grandeur and falls flat, comes about in four ways.
The first is in compound words. Lycophron, for example, speaks of "the many-faced sky of the mighty-summited earth", polu-prosôpos and megalo-koruphos, and of "a narrow-passaged shore", steno-poros. Gorgias called people "beggar-muse-flatterers", ptôcho-mouso-kolakes, a single word welded out of three, and spoke of men "forsworn" against one "well-sworn", epi-orkêsantes against eu-orkêsas. And Alcidamas writes of "the soul filling with fury and the face becoming fire-coloured", puri-chrôs; he "thought their zeal would be end-accomplishing", telesphoros, and "established the persuasiveness of his words as end-accomplishing"; and he calls the floor of the sea "dark-blue-coloured", kuano-chrôs. All of these sound like poetry because they are compounds.
That is one cause. A second is the use of rare words, the old or outlandish words that poets use. So Lycophron calls Xerxes "a pelôr man", using Homer's word for a monster; and he calls Sciron, the robber Theseus killed, "a sinis man", turning the name of Sinis, another robber of the same legend, into an adjective meaning "ravaging". Alcidamas calls poetry a "plaything", athurma, speaks of "the atasthalia", the wanton recklessness, "of nature", and of a man "whetted with the unmixed wrath of his thought". These are poets' words, and in prose they stand out.
The third is in epithets, in using them long, or out of place, or packed too close together. In poetry it is fitting to say "white milk", but in prose such epithets are less fitting, and if they are overdone they give the game away and make it obvious that what you are writing is poetry. You must use some, since they lift the style out of the ordinary and give it an unfamiliar air. But you must aim at the mean, because overdoing it does more harm than speaking carelessly: careless speech merely lacks a good quality, while overdone speech has a bad one. That is why Alcidamas' style seems frigid. He uses epithets not as a seasoning but as the main dish, they come so thick, so large and so conspicuous. He does not say "sweat" but "the moist sweat", as if sweat could be anything else; not "to the Isthmian Games" but "to the solemn gathering of the Isthmian Games"; not "laws" but "the laws, the kings of cities"; not "at a run" but "with the racing impulse of the soul"; not "taking over a school of the Muses" but "taking over Nature's school of the Muses". He speaks of "the scowling care of the soul"; of a man who is the craftsman not of "favour" but of "favour with all the people"; of "the steward of his hearers' pleasure". A man hides "not with branches but with the branches of the forest"; he covers "not his body but his body's shame". He calls desire "counter-imitating", antimimos, "desire of the soul", and that word is a compound and an epithet at once, so that it becomes a poem all by itself. And he writes "so out-of-bounds", exedros, a poet's word, "the excess of his wickedness".
So people who talk like poets where it does not fit make their style ridiculous and frigid, and unclear too, because of all the chatter: when you pile more words on a listener who already understands, you destroy the clarity by darkening it. People use compound words in the ordinary way when a thing has no name and the compound is easily put together, as with chronotribein, "to time-spend", to waste time. But if you use many of them, the style becomes simply poetic. That is why compound words are most useful to the writers of dithyrambs, the choral songs to Dionysus, since those poets love a big noise; rare words to the writers of epic, since they have a grand and haughty air; and metaphor to the iambic verse of drama, since that is what it now uses, as I have said.
And the fourth place where frigidity arises is in metaphors. Some metaphors, too, are unfitting: some because they are ridiculous, for the comic poets use metaphors as well; others because they are too grand and tragic. And they are unclear if they are fetched from too far off. So Gorgias writes, "Matters green and bloodless", and "You sowed this shamefully and reaped it wretchedly". That is far too poetic. And Alcidamas calls philosophy "a fortress against the law", epiteichisma, the word for a fort an army builds inside enemy country to harry it; he calls the Odyssey "a beautiful mirror of human life"; and he speaks of "bringing no such plaything to poetry". None of these persuades, for the reasons given.
But what Gorgias said to the swallow is the best of the tragic sort. It flew over him and let its droppings fall on him, and he said, "Shame on you, Philomela!", naming the princess of legend who was turned into a swallow. For a bird it was not shameful to do that, but for a young girl it was. So he scolded her well, by calling her what she had been, and not what she is.
The simile is a metaphor too; the difference between them is small. When Homer says of Achilles
he sprang on them like a lion
that is a simile. When he says "a lion, he sprang on them", that is a metaphor: because both are brave, the poet has carried the name across and called Achilles a lion.
The simile is useful in prose as well, but only now and then, because it has the feel of poetry about it. Similes should be brought in the way metaphors are, since they are metaphors, differing only in the way I have just described: the word "like".
Here are some examples of similes. Androtion, the pupil of Isocrates, said of Idrieus, a Carian prince who had been held prisoner, that he was like a little dog let off its chain: the dogs fly at you and bite, and Idrieus, freed from his chains, was dangerous. Then there is Theodamas, who compared Archidamus to a Euxenus who did not know geometry. That is a simile by proportion, since it follows that Euxenus is an Archidamus who does know geometry: take the geometry away from the one and he is the other. In Plato's Republic, those who strip the dead are compared to little dogs that bite the stones thrown at them and never touch the person throwing them. Plato also says the people are like a ship's owner who is strong but a little deaf. And he says the verses of the poets are like young people who have the bloom of youth without real beauty: once the bloom has gone from the young, and once the verses have been broken up into prose, neither looks the same as it did. Pericles said the Samians were like children who take the mouthful you give them but cry while they take it. He said, too, that the Boeotians were like holm-oaks: holm-oaks are brought down by their own kind, and the Boeotians by fighting one another. Demosthenes compared the people to passengers who are seasick on board ship. Democrates compared the public speakers to nurses who swallow the morsel themselves and wipe the babies' lips with the spit. And Antisthenes compared Cephisodotus, a thin man, to frankincense, because he gives pleasure by wasting away.
All of these can be put either as similes or as metaphors. So any that do well when spoken as metaphors will plainly do as similes too, and similes are metaphors that need a word of explanation.
But a metaphor by proportion must always work in both directions, and must apply to either of the two things of the same kind. If the wine cup is "the shield of Dionysus", then it is fitting to call the shield "the wine cup of Ares": as the cup is to the god of wine, so the shield is to the god of war.
Those, then, are the materials a speech is put together from. The foundation of style is writing good Greek, hellênizein: speaking the language correctly. This comes down to five things.
The first is the connecting words. They must be made to answer each other in the order they naturally come, one before and one after. Some of them ask for a partner: men, "on the one hand", and "I, on the one hand" call for de, "on the other", and "he, on the other hand". The answering word must come while the listener still remembers the first. You must not leave the two hanging far apart, and you must not throw in another connecting word before the one the sentence needs, because that is seldom right. Take this sentence: "I, on the one hand, when he told me (for Cleon came begging and demanding), set off, taking them with me." Here a whole string of connecting words has been pushed in ahead of the one that was due to finish the sentence. And if the gap between "I" and "set off" grows long, the sentence becomes unclear.
So the first thing that makes good Greek is handling the connecting words well. The second is calling things by their own specific names, and not by the general words that take them in along with other things.
The third is avoiding words that can be taken two ways, unless you deliberately want the opposite effect. That is what people do when they have nothing to say but are pretending to say something. People like that put it into verse, as Empedocles, the philosopher who wrote his teaching as a poem, did. The long roundabout way of talking takes the audience in, and they end up in the state most people are in at a soothsayer's. When the soothsayer says something that can go either way, they nod along with it, as they did with the oracle given to Croesus, king of Lydia, when he asked whether to attack Persia:
Croesus, once he has crossed the Halys, will bring down a mighty empire.
He crossed the river and the empire he brought down was his own. And because a prophet is less likely to be wrong, on the whole, when he speaks in general terms about the matter, the prophets speak in general terms. In the game of odds and evens you are more likely to be right if you say "even" or "odd" than if you say how many a player is holding, and more likely to be right if you say that a thing will happen than if you say when. That is why those who sell oracles never pin down the when. All these ambiguities are the same kind of thing, and unless you have some such purpose as theirs, they should be avoided.
The fourth is to keep the genders of nouns the way Protagoras divided them: male, female, and objects. These too must be matched correctly. Greek words change their endings to agree with the gender of what they describe, so if the subject is a woman, the words describing her must take the feminine ending. For example: "She, having come and having talked with me, went away." In Greek, "having come" and "having talked" both carry the feminine ending, elthousa and dialechtheisa, to agree with "she".
The fifth is to name the many, the few and the one correctly, that is, to get the number right: "They, having come, began to beat me." In the Greek "having come" is plural, elthontes, to agree with "they", and so is "began to beat".
In general, what is written ought to be easy to read aloud and easy to speak, which is the same thing. That quality is missing where there are many connecting words, and also where the words are hard to punctuate, that is, where it is hard to tell where one phrase ends and the next begins. The writings of Heraclitus are like that. It is often unclear whether a word belongs with the one after it or the one before it. Take the very beginning of his book, where he says: "Of this account, which is always, men are without understanding." It is unclear whether "always" goes with what comes before it (the account that always is) or with what comes after (men are always without understanding), and so where the break should fall.
Next, this also produces a solecism, a mistake in grammar: failing to make the words answer each other, by not attaching to two things a word that fits them both. For instance, if you are talking about a sound and a colour, the word "seeing" is not shared by both, since you cannot see a sound, but the word "perceiving" is. You also become unclear if you are going to put a lot in the middle and do not say the main thing first. For instance: "I was going, after I had talked to him about this and that and in such and such a way, to set off." It should be: "I was going to set off after I had talked to him. Then this and that happened, in such and such a way."
Here are the things that give a style weight and dignity. First, use a description instead of a name: do not say "circle", but "a plane figure every point of which is the same distance from the centre". For brevity, do the opposite and use the name instead of the description.
If something is ugly or indecent, then when the ugliness lies in the description, use the name, and when it lies in the name, use the description.
Make things clear by metaphors and by descriptive epithets, but take care to avoid what sounds like poetry.
Make one thing into many, as the poets do. Though there is only one harbour, they still say
to the harbours of Achaea
and, of a single writing tablet,
here are the many-leaved folds of the tablet.
Do not join two words under one article, but give each its own. Greek can say tês gunaikos tês hêmeteras, "the wife, the one of ours", with "the" twice, and this is the weightier form. For brevity, do the opposite: tês hêmeteras gunaikos, "our wife".
Use a connecting word. For brevity, leave it out, but without leaving the thoughts disconnected: "having gone and having talked with him" is the fuller form, "having gone, I talked with him" the shorter.
The method of the poet Antimachus is useful too: describing a thing by what it does not have. He does this with the hill of Teumessus:
There is a little hill, swept by the wind;
and then he goes on to praise it for all the things it is not, since in this way a description can be swelled without limit. The method works for good things and bad alike, by saying what a thing is not, whichever way happens to be useful. This is where the poets get words like "stringless" and "lyreless" music, achordon and aluron: they build epithets out of what a thing lacks. This is well thought of when it is used in metaphors by proportion, as in saying that the sound of the trumpet is a lyreless music, a song without the lyre that songs are usually played on.
Style will be appropriate if it expresses emotion and character, and if it is in proportion to the subject it deals with.
It is in proportion if weighty matters are not spoken of in an offhand, slapdash way, nor trivial matters solemnly, and if no ornament is hung on an ordinary word. Otherwise the result looks like comedy. That is what Cleophon does: some of his expressions were like saying "Revered Lady Fig", potnia sukê. Potnia is the title of reverence you give a goddess, and to fix it to a fig tree is to dress a humble word in finery it cannot carry.
Style expresses emotion when, if the subject is insolence, it is the language of a man who is angry; if the subject is impious or shameful things, the language of a man who is disgusted by them and reluctant even to say them; if it is things worthy of praise, the language of admiration; if it is things that call for pity, the language of a man brought low. And so on with the rest.
Language suited to the subject also makes the facts believable. The listener's mind draws a false conclusion, that the speaker is telling the truth, because in circumstances like these people really do feel the way he seems to feel. So the listener thinks the facts are as the speaker says they are, even when they are not. And the listener always shares the feelings of someone who speaks with feeling, even if what he says amounts to nothing.
That is why many speakers stun their audiences simply by making a great noise.
This showing by signs also expresses character, when the language that goes with each class of person and each settled disposition is used. By class I mean a person's age, a boy, a man or an old man; a woman or a man; a Spartan or a Thessalian. By disposition I mean the settled states that make a man's life the kind of life it is, since not every disposition does that.
So if the speaker uses words that belong to the disposition, he will convey the character. A country bumpkin and an educated man would not say the same things, or say them in the same way. Listeners are also affected by a trick the professional speechwriters, who wrote speeches for others to deliver, use until everyone is sick of it: "Who does not know?", "Everybody knows." The listener agrees, out of embarrassment, so as to share in what everyone else supposedly knows.
Whether you use these things at the right moment or the wrong one is a question common to every kind of speech.
For any exaggeration there is a remedy, the one everybody repeats: you must get in first and rebuke yourself. Then what you say seems true, since it is clear that the speaker knows perfectly well what he is doing.
Next, do not use all your matching effects at once, because it is by not doing so that the listener is taken in without noticing. I mean, for example, that if the words are harsh, you should not make your voice, your face and everything else that goes with them harsh as well. Otherwise each of them is seen for what it is. But if you use one and not the other, you are doing the same thing without anyone noticing. So if gentle things are said harshly, and harsh things gently, the speech becomes persuasive.
Compound words, a crowd of epithets, and above all unusual words suit a speaker who is carried away by emotion. An angry man can be forgiven for calling a wrong ouranomêkes, "sky-high", or pelôrion, "monstrous". The same goes for a speaker who already has his audience in his grip, and has made them wild with enthusiasm by praise or blame, by anger or friendship. Isocrates does this at the end of his Panegyric, with "fame and memory", phêmê kai mnêmê, two words that rhyme in Greek, and with "those who dared to endure", in a grand word taken from poetry. People carried away by enthusiasm really do talk like that, and so, plainly, audiences in the same state accept it. That is why this kind of language has suited poetry, for poetry is inspired, a thing of the gods. It should be used, then, either in this way, or with irony, as Gorgias used to do, and as Socrates does in the Phaedrus, where he blames the nymphs of the place for the torrent of fine words pouring out of him.
The shape of a speaker's style should be neither in metre nor without rhythm. Metre is unpersuasive, because it looks artificial; and at the same time it distracts the listener, who starts attending to the pattern and waiting for it to come round again. It is like what happens with the public criers. When a freed slave, who was not a full citizen, had to name a citizen to act as his guardian, the crier would call out, "Whom does the freedman choose as his guardian?", and the children would shout "Cleon!" before anyone could answer, because Cleon, the leading politician of the day, was what everyone expected. A listener who has caught a metre jumps ahead in the same way.
On the other hand, what has no rhythm has no limit. A speech should have a limit, but not one set by metre, since what is unlimited is unpleasant and cannot be taken in. Now, everything is given its limit by number, and the number that belongs to the shape of a style is rhythm. The metres are simply pieces cut out of rhythm.
So a speech must have rhythm, but not metre, or it will be a poem. And not a strict rhythm either: it should have rhythm only up to a point.
Of the rhythms (in Greek every syllable is long or short, a long one taking twice as long to say, and a rhythm is a repeated pattern of them called a foot): the heroic rhythm of epic poetry, a long syllable and two short ones (DUM-da-da), is solemn, and lacks the tone of ordinary talk. The iambus, a short syllable followed by a long one (da-DUM), is the very way most people speak, which is why people fall into iambic lines in conversation more than into any other metre. But a speech needs dignity, and needs to lift the listener out of himself. The trochee, a long syllable followed by a short one (DUM-da), is too much like the cordax, the lewd, romping dance of comedy. The tetrameter, the long line built of trochees, shows it: its rhythm runs and trips.
That leaves the paean. Speakers have used it ever since Thrasymachus, the sophist from Chalcedon, though they could not say what it was. The paean is a third rhythm, and it lies next to the ones already named. Count a long syllable as two beats and a short as one, and split each foot in two. In the heroic foot the parts are equal, one to one: the long syllable against the two short ones. In the iambus and the trochee they are two to one: the long against the short. The paean is a long syllable and three short ones, five beats, and its parts are three to two. That is one and a half to one, between the other two proportions. This, then, is the paean.
The other rhythms, then, are to be set aside, both for the reasons given and because they are metrical. The paean is the one to take up, because it is the only one of the rhythms named from which no metre is made, and so it is the one most likely to go unnoticed.
At present speakers use just one kind of paean, at the beginning of a sentence and at the end alike. But the end ought to be different from the beginning. There are two kinds of paean, each the reverse of the other. One kind suits a beginning, and that is in fact where people use it. It starts with one long syllable and ends with three short ones, as in these lines, usually credited to the poet Simonides:
Delos-born, or else from Lycia,
whose first Greek word, Dālogenes, runs long, short, short, short, and
Golden-haired Far-Shooter, child of Zeus,
which opens the same way. The other kind is the opposite: three short syllables come first, and the long one comes last:
After the earth and the waters, night made the ocean vanish.
The Greek ends ēphanise nux, "night made vanish", on three short syllables and then the long nux. This is the kind that makes an ending. A short syllable, because it is incomplete, leaves the sentence looking docked, like a tail cut short.
A sentence should break off on a long syllable instead, and its end should be plain to hear: not because the copyist marks it, or because of his stroke in the margin, but because of the rhythm itself.
We have now said that style must have a good rhythm and not be without rhythm, and which rhythms give it one, and how they must be arranged. Next: a style must be one of two kinds. Either it is a running style, held together only by its connecting words, like the preludes of dithyrambs, the choral songs for Dionysus, which run on freely without any matching stanzas; or it is a compact style, turned back on itself, like the stanzas of the old poets, where each answers the one before in the same shape.
The running style is the old one: "This is the setting out of the inquiry of Herodotus of Thurii", which opens a history whose sentences go on adding clause to clause. Everyone used to write this way, though not many do now. By a running style I mean one that has no end in itself, and stops only when the matter being told has come to its end. It is unpleasant because it has no limit, since everybody wants to see the end ahead. That is why runners gasp and collapse only at the turning post: while they could see the finish in front of them, they did not tire.
That, then, is the running style. The compact style is the one built of periods. By a period I mean a sentence that has a beginning and an end in itself, and a length that can be taken in at a glance. A style like this is pleasant and easy to learn. It is pleasant because it is the opposite of the unlimited kind, and because the listener always feels he has got hold of something and that something has been finished for him, whereas it is unpleasant to be unable to see ahead or to get anywhere. It is easy to learn because it is easy to remember, and that is because the periodic style has number, which is the easiest thing of all to remember. This is why everyone remembers verse better than loose prose: verse has a number by which it is measured.
But the period must also be complete in its sense, and not be cut off in the middle, as happens in these iambic lines of Sophocles:
This land is Calydon; of Pelops' country,
If you pause at the end of the line, you can take it the wrong way round, since the division makes it sound as if Calydon were in the Peloponnese, Pelops' country. In fact "of Pelops' country" belongs to the line that follows, which places Calydon's plains across the strait from it.
A period is either made of clauses or simple. A period made of clauses is complete, is divided into its parts, and can be said in one breath; and it is divided not just anywhere, the way the line about Calydon was, but as a whole. A clause is one of the two parts of such a period. By a simple period I mean one that has only one clause.
Neither the clauses nor the periods should be stunted or too long. One that is too short often makes the listener stumble. He is still pressing forward towards the measure whose limit he already has in his head, and when the speaker stops and he is pulled back, he is bound to stumble at the sudden halt. Periods that are too long leave him behind, like people out walking together who go on past the usual turning point and leave their companions behind. In the same way, long periods become a speech in themselves and are like a dithyrambic prelude. The result is what Democritus of Chios, the musician, mocked in Melanippides, the dithyramb poet, for writing long preludes instead of matching stanzas. He took two lines of Hesiod, "A man does harm to himself in doing harm to another, and bad advice is worst for the one who gave it", and swapped the prelude, anabolê, into the place of the advice, boulê:
A man does harm to himself who does harm to another, and a long prelude is worst for the one who composed it.
The same can be said of speakers whose clauses go on too long. But when the clauses are much too short, the result is not a period at all, and it drags the listener along headlong.
A style made of clauses is either divided or antithetical. The divided kind is like this, from the opening of Isocrates' Festival Speech: "I have often wondered at those who first gathered the great festivals and set up the athletic contests." The two clauses sit side by side, but neither is set against the other. In the antithetical kind, each clause has one opposite set against another, or the same word is yoked to both opposites. For example, Isocrates says of the Athenians who sent out colonists: "They helped both kinds, both those who stayed behind and those who went with them. To the ones they gained more land than they had at home; to the others they left enough land at home." Here staying behind and going are opposites, and so are enough and more. Again: "both those who need money and those who want to enjoy it", where enjoying is set against getting. Again:
"In these matters it often happens that sensible men fail and foolish men succeed."
"At once they were judged worthy of the prize for valour, and not long afterwards they won the command of the sea."
Of Xerxes: "to sail across the mainland and march across the sea, by bridging the Hellespont and digging through Athos."
"And that men who were citizens by nature should be robbed of their city by law."
"For some of them died miserably, and others were saved shamefully."
"In private to use barbarians as household slaves, but in public to look on while many of their allies were made slaves."
"Either to have it while they live, or to leave it behind when they die."
And what somebody said in court against Pitholaus and Lycophron, the brothers who had murdered Alexander, the tyrant of Pherae: "These men sold you when they were at home; now they have come to you, they have bought you." Every one of these does what we have described.
This kind of style is pleasant because opposites are the easiest things to understand, and easier still when they are put side by side; and also because it is like a syllogism, since a refutation is precisely a bringing together of opposites.
That, then, is antithesis. There are two more figures. Parisôsis, "evenness", is when the two clauses are equal in length. Paromoiôsis, "likeness of sound", is when each of the two clauses has similar sounds at its extremities. These must come either at the beginning or at the end. At the beginning, it is always whole words that sound alike. At the end, it is the last syllables, or two forms of the same word, or the same word itself. At the beginning, for example, in a line from comedy: "For he got from him a field, a fallow field", where the Greek sets agron, "field", beside argon, "fallow", two words made of the same letters. Or in Homer:
they could be moved by gifts and be won over by words,
where the two halves open on the matching words dôrêtoi, "moved by gifts", and parrêtoi, "won over". At the end: "You would have thought he had not fathered a child, but become a child himself", where the two clauses end on the same paidion, "child", and on verbs with the same ending, tetokenai and gegonenai; and "in the greatest of worries and the smallest of hopes", where the clauses end phrontisi and elpisin, "worries" and "hopes", in matching sounds. Two forms of the same word: "Does he think he deserves a statue of bronze, when he is not worth a bronze coin?", where chalkous, "of bronze", answers chalkou, "a bronze coin". The same word itself: "While he lived you spoke badly of him, and now he is dead you write badly of him", where both clauses end on kakôs, "badly". A single syllable: "What terrible thing would have happened to you, if you had seen a man idle?", where deinon, "terrible", and argon, "idle", end on the same -on. It is possible for one sentence to have all of these at once: to be an antithesis, to have equal clauses, and to have like endings, homoioteleuton. The ways of beginning a period have been listed pretty fully in the Theodectea.
There are also false antitheses, which sound like a contrast while both halves say the same thing, so that nothing is set against anything, like this line of Epicharmus, the comic poet:
At one time I was in their house, at another I was at their place.
Now that these points are settled, we must say where wit comes from: the smart sayings that win applause. Actually producing them is a matter of natural talent or of practice; showing what they are is the business of this inquiry.
So let us describe them and count them up, and let this be our starting point. Learning something easily is naturally pleasant to everyone. Words mean something. It follows that the words which teach us something are the most pleasant words there are. Now, rare words are unknown to us, and ordinary words we know already; so it is metaphor above all that does this. When Homer has Odysseus, disguised as an old beggar, call his old age "stubble", he makes us learn and understand something through the class the two things share: both have lost their bloom. We see the old man and the cut field at once, and we see what they have in common.
The similes of the poets do the same thing, which is why a well-made simile comes across as witty. For a simile, as I said earlier, is a metaphor that differs only in the way it is put: it adds the word "like". That is why it is less pleasant. It is longer, and it does not say that this thing is that thing, so the mind does not go looking for how it is.
It follows that the style and the enthymemes that are witty are the ones that make us learn quickly. That is why superficial enthymemes are not popular (by superficial I mean the ones that are plain to everyone and need no searching out). Nor are the ones that we fail to understand even once they are said. What is popular is the kind we understand the moment it is spoken, even though we did not know it before, or the kind the mind catches up with a moment later. From these we get a kind of learning; from the other two we get none at all.
As far as the thought of what is said is concerned, then, these are the enthymemes that win applause. As far as the style is concerned, a saying succeeds by its shape, if it is put as an antithesis, two opposites set against each other. An example is: "counting the peace that everyone else shared as a war against their own private interests". Here war is set against peace.
It succeeds by its words if they contain a metaphor, and one that is neither far-fetched, since that is hard to take in at a glance, nor superficial, since that makes no impression on us at all. It succeeds, again, if it sets things before the eyes, since we ought to see things being done rather than things that are going to be done. So we should aim at three things: metaphor, antithesis and actuality, which means showing things in action.
There are four kinds of metaphor: from the general class to the particular, from the particular to the general, from one particular to another, and by proportion, where A is to B as C is to D. The kind that wins most applause is the one by proportion. Pericles, for example, said that the young men who had died in the war had vanished from the city "as if the spring had been taken out of the year". The spring is to the year what the young are to a city: the best part of it, and the part that holds its future. Leptines, speaking about the Spartans, said he would not stand by and watch Greece become one-eyed, since Athens and Sparta were her two eyes. When Chares, the Athenian general, was eager to have his accounts for the Olynthian war examined (every Athenian official had to submit to an audit of this kind when his term was over), his fellow general Cephisodotus was furious, and said that Chares was trying to hand in his accounts while he had the people by the throat and was choking it. On another occasion Cephisodotus urged the Athenians to take their food with them and set out for Euboea at once, "like the decree of Miltiades", a decree that seems to have been famous for being carried out without a moment's delay. When the Athenians made a truce with Epidaurus and the towns along its coast, Iphicrates complained bitterly that they had robbed themselves of their travelling money for the war, since those were the places they could have lived off by plunder. Pitholaus called the state galley the Paralus "the people's cudgel", and Sestos, the town that controlled the grain trade from the Black Sea, "the bread-bin of the Piraeus". Pericles told the Athenians to get rid of Aegina, the island that lies across the water from their harbour, calling it "the eyesore of the Piraeus". Moerocles named a man of good reputation and said that he himself was no worse a scoundrel than that man: the other played the scoundrel at thirty-three per cent interest, and Moerocles only at ten. And there is the line of iambic verse by the comic poet Anaxandrides about daughters who were slow to marry, where the word he uses, hyperêmeroi, is the one used for a debtor who has let the day of payment go by:
My girls have let the due date on their weddings pass.
Then there is what Polyeuctus said about a man named Speusippus, who was paralysed: that he could not keep still, although fortune had locked him in the five-holed stocks of disease, the kind that hold a man by the neck, both hands and both feet. Cephisodotus called the warships "painted mills", because they ground down the cities that paid Athens tribute, and Diogenes the Cynic called the taverns of Athens "the common messes of Attica", after the plain public dinners at which the Spartans ate together. Aesion said that the Athenians had "poured the city out into Sicily", meaning the disastrous expedition there. That is a metaphor, and it sets the thing before the eyes. So is his phrase "so that Greece cried aloud": that too is in a way a metaphor, and a vivid one. So is Cephisodotus' warning to the Athenians to take care that they did not make their assemblies into so many stampedes, and so is Isocrates' phrase about the people who "come running together" at the great festivals.
The Funeral Speech that goes under the name of Lysias says that at the tomb of the men who died at Salamis it would have been right for Greece to cut off her hair in mourning, "since her freedom was being buried along with their courage". If the speaker had said it was right to weep because their courage was being buried with them, that would have been a metaphor and a vivid one. But "her freedom along with their courage" adds a kind of antithesis as well. Iphicrates said, "The road of my speech runs right through the middle of what Chares has done": that is a metaphor by proportion, and the words "through the middle" set it before the eyes. To say that you are calling on dangers to come and rescue you from dangers is a vivid metaphor too. Lycoleon, speaking in defence of the general Chabrias, spoke of men "not even ashamed before his suppliant, the bronze statue". The statue, which stood in the market place in sight of the court, showed Chabrias kneeling, in the position he had ordered his soldiers to take as they waited for the enemy. That is a metaphor for the moment only, not for all time, but it is vivid: now that Chabrias is in danger, the statue itself begs for mercy on his behalf, the lifeless thing becomes a living one, the monument to what he has done for the city.
Or take "working hard in every way to be small-minded". To work hard at something is to make it grow, so the phrase has a man cultivating his own smallness. Or "God lit reason as a lamp in the soul", since reason and light both make something plain. Or "we do not end our wars; we put them off", since both are about the future, putting a thing off and a peace of that sort. Or to say that a treaty is a trophy far finer than any won in battle, since a battle trophy is set up over some small gain and a single stroke of luck, while a treaty stands for the whole war, and both are signs of victory. Or to say that cities pay a heavy account to the censure of mankind, since paying an account, in the sense of the official audit, is a kind of just penalty.
We have said, then, that wit comes from metaphor by proportion and from setting things before the eyes. Now we must say what we mean by "before the eyes", and what you have to do to make it happen.
By setting things before the eyes I mean using words that show things in action. For example, to call a good man "four-square", as the poet Simonides did, is a metaphor, since a good man and a square are both complete; but it does not show anything in action. On the other hand, "in the full flower of his prime" does show actuality, and so does Isocrates' "you, like a sacred animal left to range free", said to Philip of Macedon, since an animal dedicated to a god could wander where it pleased. And in the line
Then the Greeks, darting forward on their feet,
the word "darting" is both actuality and metaphor, because it tells you they moved fast.
Homer does this often, using metaphor to make lifeless things alive. In every case what wins him applause is that he shows the thing in action, as in these lines:
Back down to the plain rolled the shameless stone,
and
the arrow flew,
and
eager to fly on,
and
they stood in the earth, longing to glut themselves with flesh,
and
the spear-point sped raging through his chest.
In all of these, because the things are made alive, they seem to be in action: being shameless, raging and the rest are all forms of action. Homer fastened these words on by means of metaphor by proportion. The first line is about Sisyphus in the underworld, who must roll a stone up a hill for ever only to have it roll back down, and the stone is to Sisyphus what a shameless man is to the man he treats shamelessly.
He does the same with lifeless things in his famous similes. Of the waves of the sea he says:
Arching, crested with foam, some in front and others behind them.
He makes everything move and live, and actuality is movement.
Metaphors should be drawn, as I said before, from things that are related to the subject but not obviously so. In philosophy too, it takes a sharp eye to see the likeness in things that are far apart. Archytas, for instance, said that an arbitrator and an altar were the same thing, because the man who has been wronged runs to both for refuge. Or you might say that an anchor and a pot-hook are the same, since both are the same sort of thing, a hook that holds something steady, and differ only in that one holds from below and the other from above. And to say that cities have been "levelled" finds the same thing in things far apart: the equality of a flat surface, and equality in power.
Most witty sayings come from metaphor and from catching the hearer out besides. It becomes clearer to him that he has learned something when it turns out the opposite of what he expected, and his mind seems to say, "How true! And I got it wrong." Witty sayings of the pithy kind come from not meaning what you seem to say, like the saying of Stesichorus that the Locrians' cicadas would have to sing from the ground: he meant that an invader would cut down their trees. Well-made riddles are pleasant for the same reason, since there is learning in them, and they are put as metaphors. So is what Theodorus calls "saying something new". This happens when the thing said is unexpected and does not, as he puts it, fit with what you thought before, the way comedians twist a word into something else. Jokes made by changing a letter do the same, because they catch you out. It happens in verse, too, for the line does not end as the listener expected:
And on he strode, and underneath his feet he wore his chilblains,
where the listener thought he was going to say "sandals". But the point of this kind of joke has to be clear the moment it is said.
Jokes made by changing a letter work not by meaning what the word says but by twisting the word. When Theodorus said to Nicon the lyre-player, thraxei se, "it will rattle you", the phrase sounds like Thrax ei su, "you're a Thracian". He pretends to say one thing and catches you out, because he is saying something else. So the joke is pleasant to someone who sees it, but if you do not take Nicon to be a Thracian, it will not seem witty at all.
The same goes for "you want to sack him", where the word for "sack", persai, sounds like the word for Persians. Both kinds of joke must be said in the right way. Witty sayings of the other kind work like this too. You might tell the Athenians that their empire of the sea was not the beginning of their troubles, since they profited from it; or you might say, as Isocrates did, that the empire was the beginning of the city's troubles. The joke is that the Greek word archê means both "empire" and "beginning". Either way, what nobody expected to hear is said, and it is recognised as true. To say that the empire is an empire would be nothing clever; but that is not what he says. He means the word the other way. And in the first saying, the archê that is denied is not the one that was named, but the other.
In all these cases, the saying is good when the speaker applies the word fittingly, whether by a double meaning or by a metaphor. Take "Bearable is unbearable", said of a man called Anaschetos, a name that means Bearable. It denies what the name says, but fittingly, if he is an unpleasant man. Or take the line
Do not be more of a stranger than a stranger should.
"Not more of a stranger than you should" comes to the same as "the stranger must not be a stranger for ever", and here too the word is taken over from another sense, since a stranger is both a foreigner visiting the city and a man who keeps his distance. It is the same with the much-praised line of Anaxandrides:
It is fine to die before you do anything that deserves death.
This is the same as saying "it is worth dying when you do not deserve to die", or "it is worth dying when you are not worthy of death", or "when you are doing nothing worthy of death".
The form of the style in these sayings is the same. But the more briefly and the more antithetically such a thing is said, the more applause it wins. The reason is that the antithesis makes us learn more, and the brevity makes us learn faster.
If what is said is to be true and not superficial, it must always have one of two things added: either it is aimed at the person it is said about, or it is said correctly. You can have one of these without the other. "A man should die having done no wrong" is not witty. "The worthy man should marry the worthy woman" is not witty either. It is witty only when it has both at once: "it is worth dying when you are not worthy of death". And the more of these qualities it has, the wittier it seems: if, for example, the words are a metaphor, and a metaphor of the right sort, and there is antithesis and balance between the clauses, and actuality as well.
Similes too, as I said earlier, are in a way metaphors, the ones that win applause. For they are always put in two terms, like the metaphor by proportion. We say, for instance, that the shield is "the drinking cup of Ares", the god of war, and that the bow is "a lyre without strings". Said like this, the phrase is not simple; to call the bow a lyre, or the shield a cup, is simple.
This is also how people make comparisons: a pipe-player to a monkey, because of the way he hunches over his pipes, or a short-sighted man to a lamp with rain dripping on it, because both screw themselves up, the man his eyes and the lamp its flame.
A simile is good when there is a metaphor in it. You can compare a shield to the drinking cup of Ares, a ruin to the rags of a house, or say that Niceratus is "a Philoctetes bitten by Pratys". That was the comparison Thrasymachus made when he saw Niceratus after Pratys had beaten him in a contest of reciting Homer, still with his hair uncut and filthy, like Philoctetes left alone on his island after the snake bit him. This is where poets fail worst if they do it badly, and win most applause if they do it well: I mean when they make the second half answer the first, as in
He wears his legs as curly as the parsley, like Philammon the boxer sparring with the punchbag.
All things of this sort are similes, and similes, as has been said many times, are metaphors.
Proverbs, too, are metaphors from one particular to another. If someone brings something into his house expecting to profit from it, and then is harmed by it, people say he is "like the Carpathian with the hare". The man from Carpathus brought a pair of hares to his island, and they bred until they had eaten all the crops. Both men have suffered the thing the proverb describes. That is roughly all that needs saying about where witty sayings come from and why they are witty.
The exaggerations that win applause are metaphors as well. Of a man with a black eye, for example, you might say, "you would have taken him for a basket of mulberries", since a black eye is purplish, but "a whole basket" is the exaggeration. And the phrase "like this or that" is an exaggeration that differs only in its wording. So
like Philammon sparring with the punchbag
becomes "you would have taken him for Philammon fighting the punchbag", and
wearing his legs as curly as parsley
becomes "you would have thought he had not legs but parsley, they are so curly".
Exaggeration belongs to the young, because it shows vehemence. That is why people use it most when they are angry, like Achilles refusing Agamemnon's gifts:
Not if he gave me as many things as there are grains of sand and dust. The daughter of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, I will not marry, not if she rivalled golden Aphrodite in her beauty and Athena in her handiwork.
So it is unfitting for an older man to use it. The orators of Athens use it more than anyone.
We must not forget that each kind of speech has its own style. The style of writing is not the same as the style of debate, and within debate, the style of political speech is not the same as the style of the courts. A speaker needs to know both writing and debate. Knowing how to debate means knowing how to speak good Greek. Knowing how to write means not being forced to keep silent when you want to pass something on to other people, which is what happens to those who do not know how to write.
The written style is the most exact. The style of debate is the one best suited to delivery, and it comes in two kinds: one that expresses character and one that expresses emotion. That is why actors go looking for plays written this way, and poets go looking for actors who can play them. Yet poets written to be read are popular too, and people carry their books about: Chaeremon, for example, the tragic poet, who is as exact as a professional speechwriter, and Licymnius among the writers of dithyrambs, the choral songs to Dionysus. Put side by side, the speeches of the writers seem thin when they are heard in a debate, while the speeches of the orators, however well they were delivered, seem amateurish when you hold them in your hands and read them. The reason is that in debate what suits delivery is what fits. So when the delivery is taken away, things written for delivery cannot do their work and look foolish. Leaving out the connecting words, for example, and saying the same thing over and over again are rightly condemned in writing, but not in debate, and the orators use them, because they lend themselves to delivery.
When you repeat the same thing, though, you must change the way you say it, and this, as it were, clears the road for the delivery: "This is the man who robbed you. This is the man who deceived you. This is the man who in the end tried to betray you." This is what the actor Philemon used to do in Anaxandrides' play The Old Men's Battle, whenever he said "Rhadamanthus and Palamedes", and with the word "I" in the prologue of The Pious. If you do not act out lines like these, you become the man in the proverb who is carrying a beam: stiff as a plank.
The same goes for leaving out the connecting words: "I came, I met him, I begged him." These have to be acted out, and not spoken in one and the same character and tone of voice, as if they were a single thing. Leaving out the connecting words has a special effect of its own, too: many things seem to have been said in the same space of time. The word "and" turns many things into one, so if it is taken out, the opposite will plainly happen, and one thing will become many. So it makes things seem bigger: "I came, I talked with him, I pleaded with him" (it sounds like a great deal), "he looked down on everything I said." Homer is after the same effect in the lines
Nireus, again, from Syme, Nireus, son of Aglaia, Nireus, the most handsome man.
If a great deal is said about someone, his name is bound to be mentioned many times; so if his name is mentioned many times, it seems as if a great deal has been said about him. By this piece of false reasoning Homer has made Nireus seem important, although he mentions him in this one passage only, and he has made him memorable, although he never says a word about him anywhere again.
The style of political speech is exactly like scene-painting, which is made to be looked at from a distance: the bigger the crowd, the further away the viewer stands. That is why fine detail is wasted in both, and even looks worse. The style of the courts is more exact, and more exact still before a single judge. There is the least room there for rhetoric, since it is easier to see at a glance what belongs to the case and what lies outside it; the struggle of debate is absent, and so the judgement is clean. That is why the same orators do not win applause in all these kinds. Where delivery counts for most, there exactness counts for least; and that is wherever the voice matters, and above all where a big voice matters.
The style of ceremonial speech is the most like writing, since its purpose is to be read; next to it comes the style of the courts.
To add the further distinction that style must be pleasant and magnificent is a waste of effort. Why those, rather than self-controlled, or generous, or any other virtue of character? What has been said already will plainly make it pleasant, if we have defined the virtue of style correctly. Why else must it be clear, and not mean, but fitting? If it babbles on, it is not clear, and it is not clear if it is too brief either; plainly what fits is the middle way. And what has been said will make the style pleasant if there is a good mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar, and rhythm, and the persuasiveness that comes from being fitting.
That is all we have to say about style, both what is common to every kind of speech and what is special to each. It remains to speak of arrangement.
A speech has two parts. You have to state what the matter is, and then you have to prove it. That is why it is impossible to state something and not prove it, or to prove something without first stating it: whoever proves, proves something, and whoever states a thing in advance does so in order to prove it.
Of these two parts, the first is the statement of the case and the second is the proof, just as one might divide a piece of reasoning into the problem set and the demonstration of it.
The way people divide a speech nowadays is absurd. A narrative, the full account of what happened, belongs more or less to the courtroom speech alone. In a ceremonial speech, or a speech to the assembly, how can there be a narrative of the kind they describe? Or a reply to the opponent, or a conclusion of the kind that sums up the proofs? In speeches to the assembly, an introduction, a comparison of the two sides, and a recapitulation only come in when there is a dispute between speakers. Accusation and defence often turn up there too, but not in so far as the speech is advice. And the conclusion does not even belong to every courtroom speech: not when the speech is short, for instance, or the matter is easy to remember. For what a conclusion does is make up for length, by gathering up what has been said at length.
So the necessary parts are the statement of the case and the proof. These are the parts proper to every speech, and at the most there are four: introduction, statement, proof and conclusion. The reply to the opponent is part of the proofs, and so is the comparison, since it is a way of making one's own case look bigger, and anyone who does that is proving something. The introduction is not a proof, and neither is the conclusion; the conclusion only reminds.
If you go on dividing things this way, you end up doing what Theodorus of Byzantium and his school did: treating narrative as one thing, and supplementary narrative and preliminary narrative as others, and refutation as one thing and supplementary refutation as another. But you should give something a name of its own only when you are speaking of a real kind of thing with a real difference. Otherwise the name is empty and silly, like the names Licymnius makes up in his handbook on rhetoric, where he talks about "the fair wind", "the wandering off" and "the branches".
The introduction is the beginning of a speech. It is what the prologue is in a poem or a play, and what the prelude is in a piece of music for the pipes. All of these are beginnings, and each of them is a kind of road built for what is coming next.
The musical prelude is like the introduction of a ceremonial speech. A piper begins by playing whatever he can play well, and then joins it on to the opening note of the piece proper. Ceremonial speeches should be written the same way: say straight away whatever you like, then strike the keynote of your subject and join the two together. Everyone does this. An example is the introduction to Isocrates' Helen, a speech in praise of Helen of Troy that opens with an attack on the eristics, the professional wranglers who argue for the sake of winning; and the eristics have nothing whatever to do with Helen. At the same time, even if the speaker does wander from the point, that is fitting, and better than having the whole speech all of one piece.
The introductions of ceremonial speeches are drawn from praise or blame. Gorgias, for instance, in his Olympic speech, begins "Men of Greece, you deserve to be admired by many", and so praises the men who founded the great festival gatherings. Isocrates, on the other hand, in his Panegyricus, blames them, because they honoured the excellences of the body with prizes but set up no reward at all for people who think well.
They may also be drawn from advice. A speaker might say, for instance, that we ought to honour good men, and so he himself is praising Aristides, the Athenian who was called "the Just". Or that we ought to honour people who are neither famous nor worthless, but who are good and yet go unnoticed, like Alexander, Priam's son, better known as Paris. That is giving advice.
Again, they may be drawn from the introductions of courtroom speeches, that is, from appeals to the hearer, when the speech is about something that goes against what people expect, or something difficult, or something that everyone has already talked about, so as to win the audience's indulgence. Choerilus of Samos, the epic poet who wrote about the Persian War, did this: he complained that the poets of the old days had the whole field to themselves, while he, coming last, found it all taken, and he begins
But now, when everything has been shared out.
These, then, are the sources of the introductions to ceremonial speeches: praise, blame, urging people on, warning them off, and appeals to the hearer. And the opening notes of such a speech may be either foreign to the subject or closely connected with it.
As for the introductions of courtroom speeches, you have to grasp that they do the same work as the prologues of plays and the openings of epic poems. The openings of dithyrambs, the wild choral hymns to Dionysus, are different: they are like ceremonial introductions, as in "Because of you and your gifts, or your spoils".
But in prologues and in epics the opening is a sample of the story, so that the audience may know beforehand what it is about and their minds may not be left hanging, since what is left undefined makes the mind wander. So the poet who puts the beginning into the hearer's hand, as it were, lets him hold on to it and follow the story. That is why Homer begins the Iliad
Sing, goddess, of the wrath,
and why he begins the Odyssey
Tell me, Muse, about the man,
and why Choerilus begins his poem
Lead me on to another tale, how from the land of Asia a great war came across to Europe.
The tragic poets, too, make clear what the play is about. They may not do it at once, as Euripides does in his prologues, but they do it somewhere, as Sophocles does when Oedipus tells his story in Oedipus the King:
My father was Polybus.
Comedy is the same. So this is the most necessary job of the introduction, and the one that belongs to it alone: to make clear the end, the purpose for which the speech exists. That is why, if the matter is plain and small, you should not use an introduction at all.
All the other kinds of introduction that people use are remedies, and they are common to every kind of speech. They are drawn from the speaker, from the hearer, from the subject, and from the opponent. Those drawn from the speaker himself and from his opponent are whatever serves to clear away prejudice or to create it. These are not handled the same way by both sides. The defendant must deal with the prejudice against him first; the accuser must deal with it in his conclusion. The reason is obvious enough. When the defendant is about to bring himself before the court, he has to remove whatever stands in his way, so he must clear away the prejudice first. The accuser, who is creating the prejudice, must do it in his conclusion, so that the jurors remember it better.
Those drawn from the hearer aim at making him well disposed, or making him angry, and sometimes at making him attentive, or the opposite. For it is not always to your advantage to make him attentive, which is why many speakers try to get their audience laughing. Everything will serve to make the hearers ready to learn, if you want it to, including seeming to be a decent person, since people pay more attention to decent people. People pay attention to things that are important, that concern themselves, that are astonishing, and that are pleasant. So you should give them the impression that your speech is about things of that kind. If you want them not to pay attention, give the impression that the matter is small, that it has nothing to do with them, or that it is painful.
But we must not lose sight of the fact that all such things lie outside the speech proper. They are aimed at a poor sort of hearer, one who will listen to what lies outside the subject. If the hearer is not like that, there is no need for an introduction beyond stating the matter in a few words, so that the speech has a head, as a body does.
Besides, making the hearers attentive is something every part of the speech may need to do, if need be. Their attention flags everywhere else more than at the beginning, so it is ridiculous to put this at the start, when everyone is listening with the most attention. Instead, wherever the moment comes, you should say something like "And please give me your attention, for this is no more my business than yours", or "I will tell you something more terrible, or more astonishing, than anything you have ever heard". This is what Prodicus the sophist meant when he said that whenever his audience began to nod off, he would slip in a bit of his fifty-drachma lecture, the expensive one.
It is clear that such things are addressed to the hearer not in so far as he is a hearer. For everyone, in the introduction, is either creating prejudice or trying to get rid of his own fears. So the guard in Sophocles' Antigone, who has come to bring King Creon bad news and is afraid of what will happen to him for it, begins
My lord, I will not say that I have come in such a hurry,
and another character, faced with the same kind of speech, is asked
Why all this preamble?
People who have a bad case, or seem to have one, do the same, since it is better for them to dwell on anything rather than on the case itself. That is why slaves never answer the question they are asked, but go all round it, and make preambles.
I have already said how to make the hearers well disposed, and how to produce each of the other feelings of that kind. And since it has been well said, in the prayer Odysseus makes before he goes to the court of the Phaeacians,
Grant that I come to the Phaeacians as a friend and as one they pity,
these are the two things to aim at.
In ceremonial speeches you must make the hearer think that he shares in the praise, whether he himself, or his family, or his way of life, or in some way or other. For what Socrates says in the funeral speech is true: it is not hard to praise Athenians in front of Athenians, but it is hard in front of Spartans.
The introductions of political speeches are borrowed from those of courtroom speeches, but by its nature political speaking has the least need of them. The audience know what the subject is, and the matter needs no introduction, except for the speaker's own sake, or because of those who argue against him, or if the audience do not take the matter to be as important as you want them to, but think it more important or less. Then you must either create prejudice or get rid of it, and either make the matter bigger or make it smaller. It is for these reasons that a political speech needs an introduction, or else simply for ornament, because without one it looks thrown together on the spot. Gorgias' speech in praise of the people of Elis is like that: with no preliminary sparring, no warming up, like a boxer who does not even swing his arms before the bout, he starts at once, "Elis, happy city".
As for prejudice, the slander that a speaker has to clear away, one line of argument is to use whatever might dispel an ugly suspicion. It makes no difference whether anyone has actually voiced the suspicion or not, so this is a general rule.
Another line of argument is to meet the points in dispute head on. You can say that the thing did not happen; or that it did no harm, or at least no harm to this man; or that it was not as serious as they say; or that it was not unjust, or not very unjust; or that it was not disgraceful, or not of any real size. These are the things a dispute is about. Iphicrates, the general, answered Nausicrates this way: he admitted that he had done what Nausicrates said he had done, and that he had done him harm, but denied that he had done him wrong. Or, if you did do wrong, you can set something against it: it was harmful, yes, but it was noble; it was painful, but it was useful; or something else of the kind.
Another line of argument is to say that it was a mistake, or bad luck, or something you could not help. Sophocles, for instance, said that he trembled, not, as the man slandering him claimed, so as to seem an old man, but because he could not help it: it was not by his own choice that he was eighty years old. You can also set one motive against another. You can say that you did not mean to do harm but meant to do something else; that you did not do what you are slandered for; that the harm simply happened. "It would be right to hate me, if I had acted in order to bring this about."
Another, if the man slandering you has been involved in a charge of the same kind, now or before, whether he himself or someone close to him.
Another, if the charge would also take in other people whom everyone agrees are not open to it. For example, if the argument is that so-and-so is an adulterer because he is well groomed, then so-and-so, a man of spotless name who is well groomed too, must be one as well.
Another, if the accuser, or someone else, has slandered other people before; or if other people, without anyone slandering them, were suspected just as you are now, and have been shown to be innocent.
Another is to slander the slanderer in return. For it would be absurd if a man who cannot himself be trusted were to have his words trusted.
Another, if a judgement has already been given on the matter. Euripides did this against Hygiaenon in a case about an exchange of property, the Athenian procedure by which a man called on to pay for a public service could challenge a richer man either to pay for it himself or to swap estates with him. Hygiaenon accused Euripides of impiety, as the man who had written a line recommending perjury, the line Hippolytus speaks in his play:
My tongue has sworn, but my mind has taken no oath.
Euripides said that Hygiaenon was doing wrong in dragging into the law courts judgements that belonged to the contest at the festival of Dionysus. He had already given an account of his words there, before the judges of the theatre, or would give one there, if Hygiaenon wanted to accuse him.
Another is to attack slander itself: to show how great an evil it is, because it makes people judge on other issues than the real ones, and because it shows no confidence in the facts of the case.
One line of argument common to both sides is to point to tokens, small facts that seem to show something. So in Sophocles' play Teucer, Odysseus argues that Teucer is kin to Priam, the king of Troy, since Teucer's mother Hesione was Priam's sister: a token, he suggests, that Teucer is a traitor. Teucer answers with tokens of his own: his father, Telamon, was Priam's enemy, and he himself did not denounce the Greek spies when they were in Troy.
Another, for the slanderer: to praise some small thing at great length and then to blame some great thing in a few words; or to put forward many good things about his opponent, and then blame the one thing that bears on the case. People who do this are the most skilful of speakers and the most unjust, for they try to do harm by means of good things, mixing them in with the bad.
One thing common to the slanderer and to the man clearing himself: since the same act may have been done for more than one reason, the slanderer must be malicious and take it in the worse sense, and the man clearing himself must take it in the better. For example, when Diomedes chose Odysseus as his companion for the night raid on the Trojan camp, one side can say that he did so because he thought Odysseus the best of men; the other can say no, it was because Odysseus was the only man who would never be his rival, since he was worthless.
So much, then, for slander and the prejudice it creates. Next comes the narrative, the part of a speech that tells what happened. In ceremonial speeches the narrative should not run straight through from start to finish, but should come piece by piece. The speaker has to go through the actions the speech is about, and a speech of this kind is made up of two parts. One part lies outside the art, since the speaker is in no way responsible for the actions he describes. The other part comes from the art, and it consists in showing one of these things: that the action really happened, if it is hard to believe; or what kind of action it was; or how great it was; or all three at once.
That is why it is sometimes right not to tell all the facts in one continuous run. A demonstration given all in a row like that is hard to remember. Better to go piece by piece: from these facts the man is shown to be brave, from those facts wise or just. A speech built this way is also simpler, whereas the other is intricate and cluttered.
Deeds that are well known need only to be recalled. That is why most such speeches need no narrative at all. If you want to praise Achilles, for instance, there is nothing to tell, because everyone knows what he did; you only have to make use of it. But if you want to praise Critias, you do need a narrative, because not many people know what he did.
Nowadays people lay down, absurdly, that the narrative should be quick. But this is like the man who was asked by the baker whether he wanted his bread kneaded hard or soft, and answered, "What? Is it impossible to knead it well?" It is the same here. The narrative should not be long, any more than the introduction should be long, or the proofs either. Here too, what makes it good is not speed and not brevity, but the right measure. That means saying as much as will make the facts clear, or as much as will make the listener believe that the thing happened, or that it did harm, or that it was a wrong, or that it was as great as you want it to seem. And the other side must do the opposite.
Along the way you should work into the narrative anything that points to your own virtue: "I kept warning him, and always said what was right, that he must not abandon his children." Or anything that points to your opponent's wickedness: "But he answered me that wherever he found himself, there would be other children." That is the answer Herodotus says the Egyptian soldiers gave when they deserted their king, and he begged them not to leave behind their wives and children. Or work in anything that will please the jurors.
For the defendant the narrative is shorter. The points he disputes are that the thing did not happen, or that it did no harm, or that it was not a wrong, or that it was not as serious as claimed. So he should not waste time on what both sides agree about, unless something in it helps his case: if, for instance, he admits the act was done but argues that it was not a wrong.
Further, whatever would not stir pity or horror if you told it as though it were happening in front of the listeners, you should tell briefly, as done and finished. The model is the story Odysseus tells at length to King Alcinous, which Homer has him tell over again to Penelope in sixty lines; or the way Phayllus cut down the whole cycle of epic poems; or the prologue of Euripides' play the Oeneus.
The narrative should show character, and it will, if we know what it is that shows character. One thing is to make the speaker's choice plain. The character is of a certain kind because the choice is of that kind, and the choice is of that kind because of the end it aims at. That is why mathematical writings show no character: they show no choice, because they have no purpose that anything is done for. The Socratic dialogues do show character, because they talk about questions of this kind.
Other things show character too: the habits that go with each type of character. For instance, "As he talked, he kept walking along." This shows a brazen and boorish character. And do not speak as though from calculation, the way speakers do nowadays, but as though from choice: "But I wanted it; I chose it, too; and even if I gained nothing by it, it is better." Speaking from calculation marks the sensible man, and speaking from choice marks the good one, because the sensible man shows himself in going after what is useful, and the good man in going after what is noble. If something you say is hard to believe, then add the reason for it, as Sophocles does. The example is from the Antigone, where Antigone says she cared more for her brother than for a husband or for children, because those could be replaced if they died, but
with father and mother both gone down to Hades, no brother could ever be born to me again.
If you have no reason to give, at least say that you are well aware that what you are saying is hard to believe, but that this is simply how you are made. People do not believe that anyone ever does anything willingly except for his own advantage.
Further, draw on the emotions while you narrate. Tell the details that go along with them, the ones the listeners recognise, and the ones that are peculiar to you or to your opponent: "And he went off, glaring at me over his shoulder." Or the way Aeschines, the follower of Socrates, describes Cratylus as "hissing hard, and shaking his fists hard." Details like these are persuasive because the listeners know them, and so they become tokens of the things the listeners do not know. You can find a great many of them in Homer. When Eurycleia, the old nurse, speaks to the disguised Odysseus of the master she thinks is lost, Homer writes:
So she spoke, and the old woman covered her face with her hands.
That is what people do when they begin to cry: they put their hands to their eyes. Also, bring yourself on straight away as a certain kind of person, so that the listeners see you as that kind of person, and your opponent too; but do it without being noticed. You can see how easy this is from people who bring us news. We know nothing about what they are going to tell us, and yet we form some idea of it all the same. The narrative should come in many places, and sometimes not at the beginning.
In political speeches there is very little narrative, because nobody narrates what is still to come. If there is a narrative, let it be about the past, so that the listeners, once reminded of those things, may decide better about what comes after. The speaker may be using the past to slander someone or to praise him; but when he does that, he is not doing the adviser's work. If something is hard to believe, you must vouch for it, give the reason at once, and set it out in whatever way the listeners want. So Jocasta, in the Oedipus of Carcinus, the tragic poet, keeps making promises whenever the man searching for her son questions her; and so does Haemon in Sophocles.
The proofs (the means of persuasion) should demonstrate. And since there are four points on which a case can be disputed, the demonstration should be aimed at whichever point is in dispute. If the dispute is over whether the thing happened at all, then at the trial that above all is what you must prove. If it is over whether the act did any harm, prove that. And the same if the claim is that it was not as serious as alleged, or that it was done justly: each of these is disputed just as the question whether it happened is disputed.
Do not forget that only in this last kind of dispute, over whether the thing happened, must one of the two parties be a scoundrel. Ignorance cannot be the cause here, as it could be if people were disputing what is just. If one man says "You hit me" and the other says "I did not," one of them knows he is lying. So on this point it is worth spending time, but not on the others.
In ceremonial speeches, for the most part, amplification should be used to show that the actions were noble and useful. The facts themselves have to be taken on trust. Speakers seldom bring proofs of them, and only if they are hard to believe or if someone else is given the credit for them.
In political speeches a speaker may dispute that a thing will happen at all. Or he may grant that what his opponent urges will happen, but argue that it will not be just, or not advantageous, or not as important as claimed. You should also watch whether your opponent says anything false about matters outside the subject. Those falsehoods look like sure signs that he is lying about the rest as well.
Examples suit political speeches best, and enthymemes suit courtroom speeches best. Political speaking is about the future, so its examples must be drawn from what has already happened. Courtroom speaking is about whether things are so or are not so, and there demonstration and necessity have more place, because what is past has a kind of necessity: it cannot now be undone.
Do not deliver your enthymemes one after another in a row, but mix them in with other things. Otherwise they spoil one another. There is a limit to how many you should use. As Menelaus says to young Pisistratus in Homer:
Friend, since you have said as many things as a sensible man would say,
and notice that he says "as many things," not "such things." The limit he sets is one of amount.
And do not look for enthymemes about everything. If you do, you will be doing what some philosophers do: they reason their way to conclusions that are better known, and easier to believe, than the premises they start from.
When you are rousing emotion, do not use an enthymeme. Either it will knock the emotion out, or it will be wasted. Movements that happen at the same time knock each other out, and either wipe each other away or make each other weak. Nor, when you are giving the speech character, should you look for an enthymeme at the same moment, because a demonstration contains neither character nor choice.
Maxims, on the other hand, should be used both in the narrative and in the proofs, because they show character. For example: "I gave it to him, and I knew all the while that one should not trust." Or, to rouse emotion: "And I do not regret it, though I was wronged. The profit is his, but justice is mine."
Speaking in the assembly is harder than speaking in the courts, and naturally so, because it is about the future. The courts deal with what has happened, which even prophets can know, as Epimenides of Crete, the seer called in to purify Athens of a curse, used to say. He did not prophesy about the future, but about things that had happened and were hidden. Besides, in the courts the law is the starting point on which everything is built, and once you have a starting point it is easier to find a demonstration. Political speaking also gives little room to linger over things like attacks on your opponent, talk about yourself, or rousing emotion. Of all kinds of speaking it gives least room for these, unless the speaker leaves the subject. So when you are stuck for something to say, you must do what the speakers at Athens do, and Isocrates among them: even while giving advice, he accuses somebody. He accuses the Spartans, for instance, in his Panegyricus, and Chares, the Athenian general, in his speech on the alliance.
In ceremonial speeches you should vary the speech with passages of praise worked in along the way, as Isocrates does, who is always bringing somebody in. This is what Gorgias meant when he said he never ran out of things to say. If he is talking about Achilles, he praises Peleus, Achilles' father; then Aeacus, his grandfather; then the god, Zeus, who fathered Aeacus. In the same way, if he is talking about courage, he says that it does this and that, or that it is of such and such a kind.
If you have demonstrations, then, you should speak both so as to show character and so as to demonstrate. If you have no enthymemes, speak so as to show character alone. And in any case it suits a decent man better to show himself good than to show his argument exact.
Of enthymemes, the ones that refute are more popular than the ones that prove. When a refutation is made, it is clearer that a conclusion has been reached, because opposites are easier to recognise when they are set side by side.
Answering your opponent is not a separate kind of proof. It is part of the proofs to demolish some of his arguments by raising an objection and others by a counter-syllogism. In a political speech and in a courtroom speech alike, if you speak first you should state your own proofs first, and afterwards meet the arguments on the other side, taking them apart and tearing them down in advance. But if the arguments against you are many and various, deal with them first. That is what Callistratus did in the Messenian assembly: he first disposed of what his opponents were going to say, and only then made his own case.
If you speak second, you should first speak against your opponent's speech, taking it apart and reasoning against it, especially if it has been well received. The mind will not accept a man who has been slandered beforehand, and in just the same way it will not accept a speech if the opponent is thought to have spoken well. So you must make room in the listener for the speech you are about to give, and you will do that by demolishing the other one. Fight first against all of his arguments, or against the most important ones, or the ones that have gone down well, or the ones easiest to refute, and only then make your own case believable. So Hecuba, in Euripides' Trojan Women, answering Helen, who has blamed her own flight to Troy on the contest of beauty between three goddesses, begins:
First I will fight as the goddesses' ally, for I do not believe that Hera
In these lines she has seized first on the silliest of Helen's arguments: that goddesses would ever have held such a contest.
So much, then, for proofs. As for character: sometimes talking about yourself brings on envy, or looks long-winded, or invites contradiction, and talking about someone else looks abusive or boorish. So you should have someone else do the talking. Isocrates does this in the Philippus and in the Antidosis, where he puts praise of his own writings into the mouths of friends. Archilochus uses the same device for blame. He was the poet whose engagement to a girl was broken off by her father, Lycambes, and in his iambic poem he has the father himself speak about his daughter:
Nothing in the world is past expecting, nothing can be sworn impossible,
and he has Charon the carpenter speak in the iambic poem that begins
Not for me the wealth of Gyges,
Gyges being the Lydian king famous for his gold. And so Sophocles has Haemon, defending Antigone to his father, Creon, speak as though he were only repeating what others were saying.
You should also sometimes turn your enthymemes into maxims. For instance: "Sensible people should make peace while they are doing well, because that is how they will gain the most." Put as an enthymeme, this would be: "If we ought to make peace when peace is most useful and most to our advantage, then we ought to make peace while we are doing well."
As for questioning your opponent, there are four good moments for it. The best moment of all is when he has already said one thing, so that by asking just one more question you bring out an absurdity. Pericles, for instance, questioned Lampon, the seer, about the rites of initiation in the worship of the Saviour goddess. Lampon said that nobody who had not been initiated could be told about them. Pericles asked him whether he knew the rites himself, and when Lampon said he did, Pericles asked, "And how can that be, when you have not been initiated?" One answer had already been given, and one more question turned it into nonsense.
The second moment is when one of your two premises is obvious, and it is clear that your opponent will grant the other if you ask him. Once you have asked for that one premise and got it, you should not go on to ask about the obvious one as well; you should state the conclusion yourself. That is what Socrates did at his trial. Meletus was accusing him of not believing in the gods, but he had also said that Socrates spoke of a certain divine something, the inner divine sign Socrates claimed would warn him. So Socrates asked him whether spirits were not either children of the gods or in some way divine. Meletus said yes. "Is there anyone, then," Socrates said, "who believes that the children of the gods exist, but not the gods?"
The third moment is when you are about to show that your opponent is contradicting himself, or saying something against all common belief.
The fourth is when he has no way to meet your question except by an answer that sounds like a sophist's dodge. If he answers "It is and it is not," or "Some are and some are not," or "In one way yes and in another way no," the listeners jeer at him for being stuck.
At any other time, do not try it. If he raises an objection, you will look as though you have been beaten. You cannot ask a long string of questions, because the listener is too weak to follow them. That is also why enthymemes should be packed as tightly as possible.
When you are the one answering, meet an ambiguous question by drawing the distinction in words, and not too briefly. Where a question seems to be leading you into contradicting yourself, give the answer that clears it up in your very first reply, before your opponent can ask the next question or draw his conclusion. It is not hard to see in advance where his argument is going. This, and the ways of answering, are made clear in my Topics.
And if your opponent puts his conclusion to you in the form of a question, give the reason along with your answer. When Sophocles, the poet, was asked by Pisander whether he had agreed, like the other members of the board of special commissioners, to set up the oligarchy of the Four Hundred, he said that he had. "What?" said Pisander. "Did it not seem to you a wicked thing?" Sophocles said it did. "So you did this wicked thing?" "Yes," said Sophocles, "because there was nothing better to do." Or take the Spartan who was being called to account at the end of his year as ephor, one of the city's chief magistrates. He was asked whether he thought his fellow ephors had been justly put to death, and he said yes. "But did you not pass the same measures as they did?" He said yes. "Then would it not be just for you to be put to death as well?" "Certainly not," he said. "They did it because they had taken money. I did not; I did it because I believed in it."
That is why you should not ask any further question after the conclusion, nor put the conclusion itself as a question, unless the truth is overwhelmingly on your side. Otherwise, as these two answers show, the man you are questioning simply gives his reason and slips free.
As for jokes: they seem to have some use in debate, and Gorgias said, rightly, that you should spoil your opponents' seriousness with laughter and their laughter with seriousness. How many kinds of jokes there are I have set out in my Poetics. Some of them suit a free man and others do not, so the speaker should choose the kind that suits him. Irony suits a free man better than buffoonery. The man who uses irony makes the joke for his own sake, to amuse himself; the buffoon makes it for someone else's, to amuse the crowd.
The conclusion is made up of four things. First, putting the listener in a good frame of mind towards yourself and a bad one towards your opponent. Second, making things great or small. Third, putting the listener into the emotions. Fourth, reminding him of what has been said.
This order is the natural one. Once you have shown that you are telling the truth and your opponent is lying, the natural next step is to praise, to blame, and to hammer the point home. You should aim at one of two things: to show that you are good towards these listeners, or good without qualification; and that your opponent is bad towards these listeners, or bad without qualification. The lines of argument from which to show people good or bad have already been given.
After this, now that the facts have been shown, the natural thing is to make them greater or smaller. The facts have to be agreed on first if you mean to say how great they are, just as a body grows only out of what is already there. The lines of argument for making things great and small were set out earlier.
Next, once it is clear what kind of thing was done and how great it was, you should lead the listener into the emotions: pity and horror, anger and hatred, envy, emulation, and the urge to fight. The lines of argument for these, too, have been given earlier.
So what remains is to remind the listeners of what has been said before. It is right to do this here, and not, as some people wrongly say, in the introduction. They tell you to say things over and over in the introduction, so that the listeners may learn them easily. But in the introduction you should state the subject, so that the question to be decided does not escape anyone. Here, in the conclusion, you should give the points by which your case has been proved, in summary.
Begin by saying that you have done what you promised, and so you must say what you have shown and why. The way to say it is by setting your case beside your opponent's. You can compare what the two of you have said on the same point. Or you can compare them without setting them face to face: "He said this about that; I said this, and for these reasons." Or you can do it with irony: "He said this, and I said that. And what would he have done if he had proved this, and not merely that?" Or you can do it with a question: "So what has been proved?" or "What, then, has he proved?"
So you may sum up either in this way, by comparison, or in the natural order, going through your own points as they were made, and then again, if you wish, taking your opponent's speech separately.
For the very end of the speech the fitting style is the one without connecting words, so that it is a conclusion and not yet another speech: "I have spoken; you have heard; you have the facts; judge."