Department of Ancient Classics | Conference programme
This paper aims to present a definition of peitho (persuasion) as a 'female' rhetoric, that is an uncodified, untaught, version of persuasive speech, in tragedy. This will include a consideration of how female tragic charaters present their own speech and how that speech relates to the formalised discourse of 'male' world of the polis. In addition the paper will investigate the link between clever female speakers and the use of pharmaka (drugs) and compare this with the philosophical image of rhetoric itself as a pharmaceutical: a tool for good or evil which depends upon the wielder.
Richard Buxton defines peitho (persuasion) as separate from bia (force; a term which carries a suggestion of falsehood in fifth century philosophy) and dolos (trickery). He also defines peitho as having a role as:
'a healer of bia, cosmic, erotic and moral'but that
'it is either ruinous peitho [Ate] which leads to destruction or it is deception [i.e. dolos] masquerading as peitho'.1Buxton also takes the view that female speakers can only utilise deception, not persuasion (peitho). This is due to the assumption that the only process by which the weaker (women) can overcome the stronger (men) is deception: persuasion, for Buxton, does not perform this role.
However, in fifth century Athens the Sophists taught a process by which the weaker could overcome the stronger, which was not deception, although it could come close to it: the amoral technique of rhetoric; defined in the Gorgias as the technique whose special quality is the ability to persuade others.2 In Athenian tragedy it can be seen that, in contexts where a male character would be expected to use rhetoric, female characters display a comparable technical approach, which is called peitho and is described in the same terms with which philosophy refers to rhetoric. Thus I have not subdivided peitho in the same way as Buxton, but have chosen to view it as an amoral technique, which participates in, and partakes of, both bia and dolos. Peitho, in tragedy, is the means by which female characters persuade others (or in Medea's case, themselves) to adopt courses of action which are ruinous.
Froma Zeitlin's statement that
'the categories of Greek thought... associate the feminine with mimesis'is one which can be seen from Hesiod onwards.3 In Works and Days the association can be seen in his portrayal of the first woman, Pandora, who is a duplicitous product of Zeus' power of substitution. Pandora speaks 'falsehoods' (pseudea) and 'wily words' (aimulioi logoi) and 'weaves a web of artifice in order to deceive'.4 In order to be successful while speaking falsehoods with the intent to deceive it is necessary to utilise all the resources of logos (words/argumentation): both linguistic (the use of homonymous terms) and logical (false reasoning, sophistry) and what is called rationale proper which includes calculated ineptitude and strategy.5 Logos itself, despite being defined as a 'male' system of argumentation (like dialectic), is nevertheless feminine because its purpose is to imitate truth through skill.6
Accordingly the chorus of Medea identify deceit (dolos, 412) as 'men's device'. Yet, following Medea's statement of her plans, which show that, in the context of the polis, women can be as multiplicitous as men, women are stated to be:
'unable to perform noble/good deeds,It is Medea's success in the polis context of contracts (marriage) and legalities (her banishment by Creon) which provides the answer to the question posed by Andromache (Andromache 353-4), which is itself a reaction to the lying words of Menelaus. These words which had persuaded her from her refuge but whose promise of safety for her son was empty:
but the most skilful/clever (sophotatai) architects of every sort of evil.' (408-9).
'Why, if we women are a ruinous evil, do you men imitate our nature?'Men imitate women by adopting their duplicitous speech, their peitho, because, by using it in the political arena, they can manipulate others and engineer personal success. The same result as Gorgias 454b-e claims for rhetoric, which provides a speaker with the key to success in the Athenian courts and Assembly. Ian Worthington identifies Athenian politicians as orators and orators as
'…practitioners of rhetoric, the art of persuasion, and as such facts, persons and events were exploited, manipulated and even, if necessary, created to persuade the audience. In the Assembly the aim of symbouleutic oratory was to influence the people to vote for or against a policy; in the lawcourts, forensic oratory aimed to convict or to acquit the accused party; and at official state gatherings epideitic oratory attempted to move and exhort the people emotionally and psychologically.'7
The effect that rhetoric has on its audience leads Plato to defines rhetoric (Phaedrus 261a) as 'the seduction of the soul', because it is the process of ensuring that others act as the seducer wishes - often through the offer of a real, or imagined, pleasure or benefit and the master rhetorician Gorgias describes his ability, as the speaker, to seduce the listener into the belief that he is speaking the truth, as being due to the power of logos (Encomium 11).
Gorgias' Encomium of Helen was written to show listeners that the correct choice of logos could exonerate Helen from all blame for the Trojan War. To this end he puts forward four reasons why Helen, herself, is not responsible:
The latter three reasons appear in Helen's defence of her conduct in Euripides' Trojan Women under circumstances which resemble a law court, where we would expect rhetoric to be used. Hecabe speaks for the prosecution, Helen for the defence and Menelaus judges whether to kill Helen then and there, or to take her back to Greece where he intends to have her stoned to death (the sentence of death having already been passed by the Greek army, as reported at 874-5).
Helen, necessarily, is at her most persuasive, in appearance as well as speech and much is made of the way she has managed to maintain her appearance (she is described as having a golden mirror at 1107-9 and being beautifully dressed and groomed at 1025-7), in sharp contrast to the other captives who are possessionless and dishevelled. She is the embodiment of peitho linked with erotic inducement (pothos) and both Peitho and Pothos are attendants of Aphrodite.8 The chorus, therefore, urge Hecabe to counter Helen's peitho because they fear she may overwhelm Menelaus through pothos (967) and Hecabe warns Menelaus (891-2):
'When you see her [Helen] run, lest you be trapped by desire [pothos].Hecabe and Helen both proceed to argue from probabilities (a technique of the rhetorician) and both possess peitho, but only Helen also possesses pothos, which is required to persuade her husband; had this not been present the contest would have been more even.
For she can captivate the eyes of men.'
In her readiness to appropriate the conventions of a lawcourt in her speaking the Hecabe of Trojan Woman is very different from the Hecabe of the Hecabe, performed about eight years previously. That Hecabe attempts to persuade Agamemnon to help her effect the lawful punishment of Polymestor for oath-breaking, murder and theft. When it becomes apparent to her that her arguments are having no effect she rues the fact that she never had the chance to learn to persuade:
'My words, my tears, will achieve nothing - I despair!
Why have I not learnt to persuade? What fools we are -
Men learn other skills, take pains, devote themselves
To study - but Peitho, queen of human arts,
Which should be sought after, and paid fees for, if one hopes
Ever to sway a man's mind, and get what is desired -
This sovereign knowledge is neglected. How can we hope,
Then for achievement or success?' (816-9).
Hecabe wishes she had learnt the art of Peitho (which is neglected by men) in order to make her arguments, that the punishment which she proposes is a just course of action, taken in accordance with the law as it is conceived in the polis, succeed in the face of considerations of political expediency and public image. At 1190-4, however, Hecabe condemns the fact that men's words speak louder than their deeds, that the bad man can cloak evil deeds in beautiful, and convincing, arguments. She claims that there are men who make this practice an art but that their cleverness is neither infinite nor durable and they will meet with bad ends. Hecabe speaks in response to Polymestor's speech which seeks to justify his murder as motivated by concern for the Greeks, but ignores the fact of his theft and she refers to the art of persuasion being utilised in the wrong way: making bad deeds appear good.9
Peitho is the winning power of persuasion and conviction and rhetoric can be seen as codified peitho: female peitho under the influence of 'male' logos: because it is only by speaking rationally that an argument is made strong and sure and in political life, whether fictional or actual, and it is this persuasive rationality that enables the manipulation of others. To take the example of Herodotus 8.111:
'But Themistocles gave them to understand that since the Athenians had come with two great deities, both Peitho and Ananke [Necessity or Compulsion], the Andrians must assuredly give the money.'and Eupolis, in fragment 94.5, describes Peitho sitting on Pericles' lips, doubtless contributing to his political success and power. Similarly, Clytemnestra (Agamemnon 943) regards her peitho as the assertion of her kratos (power/rule).
Peitho is indeed a powerful being, she is the eldest daughter of Tethys and Ocean and has charge of young men all over the earth (Hesiod, Theogony 346-8). She is traditionally an attendant of Aphrodite and can win over her victims without recourse to speech, which implies that argued resistance is impossible - Gorgias' fourth argument and Helen's in Trojan Women. In addition, in Gorgias' Encomium, logos and eros (erotic love/desire) both operate to persuade, seduce and deceive the soul and Stesichorus' Palinode also suggests that Eros/Aphrodite is not divided from poetics and that Helen herself, as an embodiment of poetic discourse, has, like Hesiod's Muses, a true and a false form.
This concept is particularly applicable to the Helen of Odyssey 4. The Helen of the Iliad could have, but did not, play a double game between her Trojan and Greek husbands; the Helen of Odyssey 4 did (250-64, 270-89), or claims she did in the absence of the only witness, Odysseus. Helen tells of her loyalty to Odysseus, and hence the Greeks, and it is only Menelaus (235-46 and 276) who mentions her second Trojan husband. Helen invites her guests to:
'take joy in telling muthoi [stories]: for I will narratebut after Menelaus' statement her muthos is only an imitation of what is fitting. In order to control her audience and have her muthos persuade them, Helen pours her Egyptian drugs (pharmaka) into the wine and Homer describes how they can be good or evil, just as medical pharmaceuticals can cure disease, or end life.10 Interestingly her pharmaka are Egyptian and, according to Herodotus 2.104, the Colchians, including therefore Medea, are Egyptians and Medea also uses pharmaka which can kill and heal. Gorgias (Encomium 14) claims the same qualities for his logoi, that one causes pain or fear and another promotes courage, but the pharmakon which is the kairos logos (the principle which governs the choice of any one argument, the means used to prove it and the style adopted) can both reverse disease or cause death. Therefore, the success of Helen's muthos, like Gorgias' Encomium, depends on the right choice of actual, or metaphorical, pharmakon because rhetoric relies on the eloquence of the speaker and their sensitivity to their audience, just as a medical cure will depend on the diagnostic ability of the doctor and the patient's reaction to the prescribed treatment.
fitting/seemly things.' (239)
Aeschylus' Suppliant Women (286ff.) attributes the success of the curative pharmakon to the composition of the herbal mixture, just as Plato (Statesman 310-11a) describes harmony in the polis being brought about by the true statesman producing the correct mixture of elements: courage and action, moderation and caution. The philosophical analogy between the physician and the body and the statesman and the body politic is found throughout Plato's work, but is most developed in the Gorgias (521d-22e) where the physician/statesman is tried in a court of small boys on the indictment of a confectioner/Sophist on the charge of administering unpleasant pharmaka and prescribing abstinence from sweetmeats. The unpleasant pharmaka and the sweetmeats are the words spoken by the two, the useful and the merely pleasing (if not harmful). Rhetoricians (464b-66a and 520a) are false/unskilled physicians and as such are identical to Sophists, the teachers of rhetoric who forward their own interests - pleasing their audience and attracting custom - rather than those of others.
In this sense, too, Medea is sophistic, because she forwards her own interests by saying, not the double-edged statements of Aeschylus' Clytemnestra, but ones which are obviously false, to the audience, and exactly what the characters concerned hope to hear: hope itself being a pharmakon which was given to mankind by Prometheus to counter the fear induced in them by ignorance of the future.11 Creon hopes that Medea will not harm him or his daughter, and she states that she will not if he does not harm her children (she has already voiced her intentions to kill them at 278); Aegeus hopes that Medea can make him fertile (a condition for which she promises pharmaka, 717); and Jason hopes that Medea will go along with his plans for his family, which she ostensibly does. Thus it is as a result of her use of the metaphorical pharmakon of rhetoric she is able to commit her murders.12
In Agamemnon Cassandra describes Clytemnestra mixing metaphorical pharmaka (1260-1): adding a measure more of hate for Cassandra to her (public) reasons for killing Agamemnon (and Cassandra, as it immunises her against pleas): while she is really planning and acting to usurp the throne.13 Clytemnestra accomplishes regicide by means of physical action which has been made possible by peitho. Clytemnestra mixes her pharmaka to kill, not cure, and in officially becoming a tyrant she shows herself no true statesman, as her murder showed her to be no true physician.
Prometheus (Prometheus Bound 473-5) is explicitly compared to a false/unskilled physician, who is not able to identify the pharmakon to cure his own disease. The chorus say this after Prometheus has described his beneficence to civilisation: Aeschylus attributes to him not the invention of a single art (fire-lighting) but all the arts necessary to civic life (the combination of letters, numbers, the domestication of beasts, ship building and astronomy, 442-506). The combining of letters is the basis of communication, and it is logos which distinguishes men from beasts in Greek thought. Accordingly, the myth of Plato's Protagoras (318b ff.) attributes the origin of the sophistic skill of logos to Prometheus and Prometheus Bound identifies Prometheus with the Sophists as 1039 holds him to be the inventor of sophisma - sophistic thought.
However, the universal art (Prometheus Bound 111), which teaches all arts to men (7) is fire; but fire was defined by Empedocles (c. 495-35 BC) as air at its hottest and driest, aether (Anaximander's pneuma), which he identified soul, as did other contemporary and later philosophers.14 Therefore, when Clytemnestra devised the beacons and used lulling, holy, oil-based pharmaka (Agamemnon 93-5) to persuade the torches to send forth their light, which is truth, but initially thought to be falsehood, Aeschylus mirrors her manipulation of the soul of men through her rhetoric, or peitho.
Euripides weaves together the threads of ability with actual pharmaka and words in several plays and in Medea and Hippolytus the interplay between disease, peitho and pharmaka is made particularly apparent. Medea's Nurse says (16) that, for Medea, all is hostility and love's bonds are now diseased and from the above reading of Aeschylus' Agamemnon the expectation is that the remedy will be both duplicitous words and actual pharmaka and this proves to be true. In Hippolytus, Phaedra strives to conquer a love which is a disease (40) and her own remedy for it is silence. Phaedra's Nurse uses words and both promises soothing words (478) and a pharmakon (479, a remedy, i.e. a love potion) for her affliction and voices a rhetorical justification: utilising myths of divine infidelity.15 Phaedra is persuaded to break her silence and tell the Nurse her trouble for three reasons:
'Why do you take this lofty tone and enter into a contest of words with me,and then accuses Andromache of being sophron, meaning clever, in a sophistic sense (237 and 245).16 Hermione also complains that Andromache has used pharmaka (157-60) to make her barren, which has caused her husband to hate her. Andromache retorts (205ff.) that Neoptolemos does not hate Hermione because of Andromache's pharmaka but because Hermione is unpleasant company and says unpleasant things. In this way Neoptolemos' lack of desire for Hermione's company is linked with her lack of control over her speech, her inability to convey the appearance of being a pleasant individual: her lack of peitho going hand in hand with lack of pothos and hence, lack of issue.
As if you were sophron [self-controlled/sensible/clever] while I am not?
The power of words is apparent in the play as Hermione complains (931ff., especially 937) that women are gossips and it was their whispered 'poison' which persuaded her to contemplate murder (just as the words of the slave and the chorus prompt Creousa to poison Ion).
In Ion the poison used is Gorgon's blood, which like Helen's, or Medea's, pharmaka and Gorgias' rhetorical argument, can kill or heal and it is the rhetorical argument of the pre-emptive strike which deceives Creousa into using Athena's gift to kill (Ion 747-1047). Deianaeira in Trachiniae is also deceived into using a poison because she believes that Nessus' blood, which he called a pharmakon (685), to be a love potion. For Deianaeira his pharmakon is the remedy to restore Heracles' love; for Nessus it is the remedy to prevent Heracles' continued possession of Deianaeira; for Heracles it proves to be the elixir of immortality, though he thinks it a murderous poison. Nessus is the only person who truly knows what his pharmakon is, because he named it, and it is the mention of the name of Nessus which reveals the truth of the matter to Heracles (1143-5).
Knowledge, then, is the key to using rhetoric and the antidote to being persuaded by it and in the Timaeus knowledge is the best pharmakon against the dangers of speaking out of tune or in inappropriate measure in any given situation. This holds true where knowledge is composed of definitions and true identities and being more knowledgeable than the audience is the best way to deceive.17 Clytemnestra, Medea and Phaedra's Nurse all use deliberate verbal ambiguity, fallacy, actual lies and introduce irrelevant material in order to create deceptive falsehoods which have the semblance of truth because of the potentiality of ill-defined words and concepts.18 All the techniques these characters utilise in their peitho are recommended by teachers of rhetoric, those in the above list by Euthydemus and Dionysidorus (Theaetetus 1667e3-6), because they ensure victory. The similarities between the constructs of female rhetorical characters and rhetoricians, including the use of metaphorical and actual pharmaka, imply that peitho is persuasive speech which does not rely on sophistic training, being restricted to members of the community to which Sophistic training is denied, and that Sophistic training seeks to reproduce this ability, calling it rhetoric. This is apparent from the definition of rhetoric offered by Aristotle at Rhetoric 1355b25-7:
'let rhetoric be defined as the mastery of seeing, with regard to each thing, what persuasion is possible, for this is the role of no other art.'In other words, rhetoric decides the type and quantity of persuasion and is, therefore, a means of packaging persuasion and as such can be considered codified peitho and conversely peitho, because it is the raw material of rhetoric, can be considered as 'female' rhetoric.
Department of Ancient Classics | Conference programme