Ein Plädoyer für die Redekunst

Abstract

The article focuses on two selected instances that reveal in an especially poignant manner the methods employed by Aristides to tackle Plato’s attack on oratory in his speech In Defence of Rhetoric. First, it looks at how Aristides is at pains to turn Plato’s reproach in the Gorgias that rhetoric is not an art into an advantage by trying to transfer to oratory the idea of divine inspiration that in Platonic dialogues such as Phaedrus and Ion is connected with poetry. A self-admonitory passage that Aristides uses to finish up an excursus on his experience of divine intervention during his numerous stays at the sanctuaries of Asclepius and Serapis is subject to special scrutiny: it turns out that a sufficiently early manuscript, which has been dated to the 11th c. AD, viz. Parisinus graecus 2950, yields a useful variante (unfortunately misread by Behr in his critical apparatus) that vividly depicts Plato’s role as the driving force behind the previous iatromantic excursus. Second, Aristides’ idea of two kinds of rhetoric is explored, with a special focus on a passage where two hitherto neglected manuscripts, viz. Marc. graec. 424 and Ath. Iv. 163 (both 14th c. AD) alongside two other textual witnesses yield a variante that brings out to the full the meaning of an otherwise rather pointless remark: Aristides states that Plato justly slandered rhetoric (κακῶς instead of καλῶς εἰρήκει), if one takes into account that he slandered not the true, but the apparent one. Overall, the article shows that the scope of In Defence of Rhetoric is not destructive criticism. In harmony with a general tendency of the Second Sophistic, Aristides rather aims at claiming Plato, “the father and teacher of the rhetoricians”, as a representative of his own discipline.