Best of us all the best he be leic, go go, the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you

with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the

LEMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net. Today's episode

The Elements of Style, Rhetoric in Byzantium.

When was the last time you had to speak in public?

Plenty of people find it a stressful experience, hence the popular advice that you should soothe your nerves by imagining that the audience are clad in nothing but underwear.

I've never really understood that myself.

I don't know how I'd react if I walked into a lecture hall and found a hundred people waiting for me in their underwear,

but I doubt it would be to relax and think, okay, I got this.

More helpful to my mind would be a set of rules you could follow, a list of foolproof techniques

for winning over any audience no matter how large.

And apparently the Byzantine's agreed.

They set great store by manuals of rhetorical instruction that had been written in

antiquity by now largely forgotten authors such as Hermogenes and Dionysius of Hallicarnasis. These works were part of the Byzantine educational curriculum, so their

terminology and conceptual tools were familiar to a wide swath of the Byzantine elite.

Remember all those speeches of praise in honor of various emperors we talked about last time?

Their authors could have told you, evoking the classificatory schemes found in homogenies,

what type of speeches they were giving, what style they were adopting

in any given passage, and which rules lay behind the eloquence of every single sentence.

This presupposed a lot of training and from an early age.

Students began with grammar, where one first of all learned basic literacy and then moved on to

the study of classical texts.

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