According to George Kennedy, ethos was much more important to Roman rhetoric than it was to Hellenistic rhetoric: “The egotistical element seems stronger among Latin than in Greek orators. . . a Greek orator tends to argue his audience into believing something; a Roman by his authority convinces the audience that something should be believed because he says so” (The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World 42), to such an extent where “The lack of modesty which we sometimes think of as a peculiar weakness of Cicero was a permanent feature of Roman oratory” (101). Consider Quintilian’s privileging of the vir bonus, the good man speaking well: the Romans were much more bothered than the Greeks by the supposed ability of an orator to “make the weaker cause appear the stronger”.
One wonders where such concerns have gone today. Contemporary political discourse seems suffused with concerns about character, perhaps because of our own worries about the misuses of language (“It depends on what the meaning of the word is is”) and rhetoric, and despite our apparent post-ironic acuity about such misuses.
Perhaps I’m simply mistaken in attempting to use a comparison between Quintilian and Isocrates as a metaphor for contemporary thought about rhetoric. Tacitus and Seneca the Elder may be far more appropriate figures for thinking about the world of Roland Barthes and Donald Rumsfeld.
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