Creating the Ancient Rhetorical Tradition

This book explores the history of rhetorical thought and examines the
gradual association of different aspects of rhetorical theory with two outstanding
fourth-century BCE writers: Lysias and Isocrates. It highlights the
parallel development of the rhetorical tradition that became understood, on
the one hand, as a domain of style and persuasive speech, associated with the
figure of Lysias, and, on the other, as a kind of philosophical enterprise
which makes significant demands on moral and political education in
antiquity, epitomized in the work of Isocrates. There are two pivotal
moments in which the two rhetoricians were pitted against each other as
representatives of different modes of cultural discourse: Athens in the fourth
century BCE, as memorably portrayed in Plato’s Phaedrus, and Rome in the
first century BCE when Dionysius of Halicarnassus proposes to create from
the united Lysianic and Isocratean rhetoric the foundation for the ancient
rhetorical tradition.