Who Wrote the Rhetoric? A Response to Brad McAdon

Abstract

In several recent essays, Brad McAdon has argued that Aristotle's Rhetoric is such a fractured, inconsistent text that it is reasonable to conclude it is not the work of a single author, “Aristotle,” but the work of an editor who combined sections of treatises by several authors. This article challenges McAdon's thesis by reexamining the historical transmission of the Rhetoric and analyzing a central passage in the work—namely Rhetoric 1.4–14 (on the idia or special topics)—that McAdon believes Aristotle could not have written.

Acknowledgments

We thank members of the Aristotle group at the University of Minnesota, particularly Betty Belfiore, for help with Greek philological points, Richard Graff, for numerous leads and insights, and especially Robert Gaines for his generous help of many kinds. We remain responsible for any errors or omissions.

Notes

1. For details on the history of the developmental theory of Aristotle's thought, which received its impetus from Werner Jaeger's (1948) famous study in 1923 (translated into English in 1934), see Wians (1996); for applications of the developmental theory to the Rhetoric, see Solmsen (1954, xiv–xxii), Rist (1989, 85–86; 135–159), and Fortenbaugh (2006a, 383; 2006b); for a convenient summary of the consensus view, see the introduction to Kennedy's edition (Aristotle 2007, 3–5).

2. Kennedy summarizes the accounts of Strabo and Plutarch in his edition, Aristotle: On Rhetoric (Aristotle 2007, 306–308). For fuller summaries and assessments of the sources, see Barnes (1997, 1–17), McAdon (2006b, 81–87), and Moraux (1973, 3–31). Although this is the conventional and accepted history of the library, a second account, that of Athenaeus (1969) in his Deipnosophists, is preferred as more credible by some scholars, for example, Gottschalk (1927, 339–340) and Lord (1986, 143). Also, it is something of a misnomer to call Andronicus' edition the first edition since Apellicon published an earlier edition, although Strabo reports that it was “full of errors.” Andronicus is, however, credited as the editor of the first authoritative edition of the corpus.

3. See, for example, Greek Literature, edited by Easterling and Knox (1985, 530), volume 1 of the Cambridge History of Classical Literature, quoted in Barnes (1997, 65–66), which accepts this account.

4. We follow Barnes (1997). McAdon maintains that Barnes “is both missing the point and mistaken” because he underestimates the effect of Porphyry's interventions on the meaning of the Plotinus' work. McAdon also points out that while Porphyry had only Plotinus' manuscripts, Andronicus had works by both Theophrastus and Aristotle (2006b, 91).

5. We cite the revised Oxford translation throughout this article. We do not prefer it to Kennedy's translation, but because McAdon takes issue with Kennedy especially, we use what many think is the best alternative.

6. Foucault cites Jerome's (1999) De Viris Illustribus (On the lives of illustrious men) as the source for his claim that Jerome did not regard the author's name as a sufficient proof of authenticity of authorship (Foucault 1984, 110). He probably has in mind Jerome's effort to distinguish John the apostle from John the presbyter in a catalog of works attributed to John. See De Viris Illustribus, XVIII, the life of Papias the Bishop. Foucault does not cite a reference for the broader criteria of exclusion he attributes to Jerome. The principles he lists appear to be a compilation from remarks Jerome makes in passing throughout his work. Karl Kelchner Hulley (1944, 105–109) locates similar principles in his search for Jerome's editing principles as they appear throughout Jerome's corpus.

7. While Foucault emphasizes the importance of the author function for hermeneutic practice, he ultimately posits that we need to go beyond it, to move from the question of who wrote the work to questions about the ideology that produced it and the affordances and exclusions it makes for the construction of certain subjectivities (Foucault 1984, 117–120).