Haunted by a Peacock: Discovering, Testing, and Generating Rhetoric in Untimely Ways

Abstract

In this essay, a peacock represents an “untimely” agent of transformation in an Aristotelian-based rhetoric. The peacock refers to a fragment attributed to Antiphon. This essay identifies and develops two untimely historiographical ways for pursuing an answer to the question, how can sophistical fragments in general and Antiphon’s fragment in particular be employed to generate attractive spaces for the future of rhetoric as an art of civic discourse? The essay is divided into four parts. It begins with a methodological introduction to untimely ways of doing historiography followed by a discussion of the fragment about the peacocks. The third part situates the fragment in a “laboratory” where “equipment” is set up to explore the fragment with untimely ways. The last part of the essay describes how if the peacock’s wing were left alone, rhetoric would be better prepared to look outside of itself into new forms for new functions.

Notes

1. ¹Peacocks are rare, but they do make several appearances in myth, as well as in some of Aristotle’s writings. Peacocks also occur in a teaching exercise, on a tombstone, and, as I mentioned earlier, in a sophistical fragment. Peacocks, unlike the owl, the eagle, the crow, the dove, or the vulture are not commonly associated with cities or deities or mortals in ancient times. When they are associated with a goddess, as in the case of Hera, the association is never equivalent. A pair of peacocks pulls her chariot. So in other words, while one can substitute the owl for Athena, the substitution does not hold for Hera and a peacock. Unlike the crow and other birds, images of peacocks painted on vases are rare, if not inexistent. The same holds for the plastic arts. Nevertheless, the presence of the peacock in the context of rhetoric cannot be ignored. Aristotle mentions the peacock and peahen in several works on animals, noting their color, their breeding season, and the length of their lives (Generation of Animals 785b.23; History of Animals 564a.31), but also in the same passages, he mentions the peacock as a foil to “man.” Man, not peacocks and animals, has a deliberative capacity. Libanius, the Greek sophist and rhetorician, includes in his model exercises in Greek prose composition and rhetoric a description of a peacock (485–6).

2. ²For the identity of Antiphon, I follow Michael Gagarin’s lead: There is one Antiphon. His “interests were so wide ranging that many scholars (including some in antiquity) have divided him into two (or even three) Antiphons, an orator and a Sophist (and sometimes a dream interpreter)” (“Antiphon” 29). See also Gagarin, Antiphon the Athenian. Gerald Pendrick argues for two Antiphons.