Rhetoric

A treatise in three books that treats persuasion as a teachable art. Aristotle calls rhetoric the counterpart of dialectic and defines it as the ability to see, in each case, the available means of persuasion. Book I names three kinds of proof supplied by the speech itself: the character of the speaker (ethos), the emotions of the audience (pathos) and the argument (logos). Its main tools are the enthymeme, a rhetorical deduction, and the example. He divides speeches into three kinds: deliberative, about future policy; forensic, about past acts in court; and epideictic, praise and blame in the present. Book II gives detailed accounts of emotions such as anger, fear, shame, pity and envy, sketches the characters of the young, the old and those in their prime, and lists common lines of argument. Book III turns to style, praising clarity and apt metaphor, and to the arrangement of a speech.

Its account of ethos, pathos and logos is still the basic toolkit for teaching persuasion, and its analysis of the emotions is one of the best in ancient philosophy.