Renaissance and later, treatises on music, painting, and other arts borrowed the structure and categories of classical rhetoric. Rhetorical techniques are also evident in political propaganda throughout history, in which forms of speech, writing (inscriptions, for example), drama, ritual, art, architecture, and public works and largess were combined to strengthen or impose the power of the regime.

Traditional rhetoric is rhetorical practice as found in traditional cultures that do not use writing and have been relatively untouched by western civilization. The forms and functions of rhetoric in societies without writing are discussed in a recent book by George A. Kennedy, entitled Comparative Rhetoric, published by Oxford University Press. Among the themes of that book are that rhetoric in traditional societies is primarily a means of attaining consensus, and the existence all over the world of levels of formal language required for serious discourse. The book also discusses rhetoric in ancient societies in the Near East, India, and China where writing was introduced. Although oral societies generally have words for an “orator,” for various speech genres, and sometimes for rhetorical devices, and many accord high honor to eloquence, conceptualized theories of rhetoric are found only in societies that use writing, and even there full conceptualization is slow to emerge. Speakers cannot explain well how they do what they do, and skill is learned by imitation, not by rule. This includes the early history of rhetoric in Greece. In The Apology (21e) Plato makes Socrates ridicule the inability of fifth-century Athenian politicians and poets to describe what they were nevertheless often able to do well.

Conceptualization of rhetorical techniques, the synthesis of a metarhetoric, as it is sometimes now called, has taken place in sophisticated, literate societies in varying degrees depending on the practical need for rhetorical instruction, the extent to which the society is introspective, and the rhetorical values the society holds. The Instruction of Ptahhotep, written in Egypt in the early second millennium B.C., is sometimes regarded as the earliest handbook of public speaking. ³ In third-century B.C. China, Han Fei-tzu wrote a work on power politics that includes discussion of ways to persuade, ⁴ and about the same time Kautilya in India wrote an extensive discussion of politics and rhetoric that has features in common with Greek rhetorical theory. ⁵ A major difference between metarhetoric in Greece and in other literate cultures is that in

-4-