Re-Performing Aristotle: Understanding an Orator’s Song

Sean M. Wharton (University of Missouri)

This paper examines oratory and Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric with the understanding that oratory is primarily an oral performance medium. Though the context of these performances has been lost, it is still possible to review the textual remains and to discover some remnants of the oral performances. It explores the textual remnants of a thriving tradition through the orator’s texts, and in particular, employs Performance Theory to demonstrate Aristotle’s mastery of oratory. Using this theory, Aristotle’s guidance, and comparisons living traditions, one can easily see the traditional elements in oratory.

To carry out this textual archaeology, this paper draws on two guides. First I shall draw on Richard Bauman’s Performance Theory, which provides a context and tool for understanding the ritual of an oral event. This approach searches for certain “keys” to unlock a performance and holds that only by understanding these keys can one understand the event in its cultural context. Performance theory provides a useful framework for observing and understanding the performance of oratory because some of the most common keys, denial of performance and direct address, and appeal to tradition, are all common to oratory.[1] This paper also considers Aristotle’s comments on oratory to be pertinent to performance rather than to texts as they inform the context in which the orations were performed. They are invaluable for understanding Greek oratory on its own terms and for challenging modern or textual biases.

Every speech writer and performer exercised the same rules for performance, which governed not only how to perform, but determined what constituted a “good performance.” Aristotle recognized these rules and conceptualized them as a technê. The Rhetoric explains the unwritten rules of performance. These rules are the foundation of an oral tradition. Aristotle not only shows signs of “oral footprints,”[2] to borrow Melia’s term, but, in fact, is completely fluent in the tradition of oratory. In this way, then, Aristotle could be said to have conducted the first fieldwork in oral tradition.