Death and Eloquence

Abstract

The lesson of Homer’s Iliad is that eloquence arises out of a confrontation with death. Perhaps the most dramatic of these confrontations is the death of Patroclus, an event that elicits epideictic speech by three parties: immortal horses, Xanthos and Balios; an immortal god, Zeus; and a mortal human, Patroclus. However, although the reaction of the horses and of Zeus reflect the pathos and logos of eloquence, respectively, this essay argues that true eloquence grows out of an experience of a divided self that heroically judges its own life meaningful—thereby constituting ethos through speech—in the face of death.

Notes

1. We thank our RR reviewers, George Kennedy and Richard Leo Enos–and a special acknowledgment to John Poulakos and Odile Hobeika, whose insights were instrumental to this essay.

2. We follow Jeffrey Walker in rejecting the notion that rhetoric and poetics stem from different traditions. Walker writes that rhetoric is “centrally and fundamentally an art of epideictic argumentation/persuasion that derives originally from the poetic tradition and that extends, in ‘applied’ versions, to the practical discourses of public and private life” (viii). Likewise, we argue that genuine eloquence is an expression of this original poetic spirit.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nathan Crick

Nathan Crick is Associate Professor in the Communication Department at Texas A&M. When not writing books about Ancient Greeks, American Pragmatists, or nineteenth-century Transcendentalists, he likes reading Greek myths to his children and trying to explain why Zeus has so many wives.

Joseph Rhodes

Joseph Rhodes is Assistant Professor in Residence in the Honors College & Communication Studies Department at UNLV. His research interests include rhetorical theory, pragmatism, logology, political theology, and the rhetoric of science and religion. His published work appears in Rhetoric & Public Affairs and POROI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention. He is currently working on a monograph that offers a new theoretical approach to contemporary prophetic speech and a book-length manuscript on the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.