Reflections of Women in Antiquity by Helene P. Foley;

Author:Helene P. Foley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136098260
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2004-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

This reading of Pandora is suggested by the implicit terms of the text, for rhetoric in Hesiod’s time (c. 700 b.c.) has not yet been invented. But his negative view of Pandora, which arises naturally from his peasant’s instrumental view of nature and culture, can still serve as a preview of the later philosophical thought which, in testing the world of physical appearances, finds it deceptive precisely in the spheres of physical eros and of artistic mimesis, and very specifically in the art of rhetoric itself.

It should therefore not surprise us that Gorgias, the historical figure most closely identified with the development of rhetorical theory in fifth-century Athens, should, in fact, have composed an encomium on Helen which is as much a defense of his art of the logos as it is a defense of Helen. I invoke this last example to return, after this long detour, to the text and context of Aristophanes, since Gorgias is very much present, I suspect, in the Thesmophoriazousae, and not only as the possible garbled reference to him by the barbarian policeman who confuses Gorgon with Gorgias. For the Palamedes and the Helen, while they serve, of course, as parodies of Euripides’ plays, are also titles of the two specimens of Gorgias’ epideictic oratory in which the rhetorician himself speaks for Helen and Palamedes speaks in his own defense. More broadly, Gorgias’ theories owe much to the theater — to the psychological effects which it produces in the spectators and in the aesthetic effects which it employs.

Gorgias, having accepted the premise that the phenomenal world cannot be grasped as real, is free to embrace the shifting world of appearances, of doxa (opinion), in its deceptions and its fictions, and hence is also in a position to embrace Helen. The mastery of that world can only come about through the installation of the logos as its master, which, through the techniques of persuasion, manipulates the sense impressions and emotions of its auditors. For Plato, who is to stand directly on the other side of the divide, Gorgias (as the other sophists) will, like a painter, “make imitations which have the same names as the real things and which can deceive … at a distance”. The sophists, who practice not the plastic arts, but those of the logos, can exhibit “spoken images (eidola) of all things, so as to make it seem that they are true and that the speaker is the wisest of all men in all things.” (PL Sophist 234b–c).

For Gorgias, the logos is real, akin to a physical substance and possessing the magico-medical quality of the pharmakon. Hence its power (dynamis), like that “of the incantation, mingles together with the doxa (opinion) of the psyche and charms it and persuades it and changes it by enchantment”. The force of persuasion, when added to the psyche, can make an impression, can stamp (typos) the psyche which responds, in turn, to its manipulation with the appropriate emotions. Persuasion of the logos affects the psyche

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