Art of Rhetoric from Aristotle-Cicero

Rhetoric was the supreme technology of the Greco-Roman world, and the principal focus of formal schooling up to the end of antiquity and beyond.  The readings for the course show how the psychology of persuasion was reduced to a system, how the system was adapted to political structures of the very different societies in which it flourished, and how orators put it into practice: Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cicero’s On the Orator and Brutus, and selected speeches of Demosthenes, Cicero, and others.