shows how the initial scorn that Havelock received for his Preface to Plato is mild by comparison with another scholar who addressed similar claims a century earlier, Frank Byron Jevons.
According to Robb, Frank Byron Jevons, a little-known Greek historian, published A History of Greek Literature from the Earliest Period to the Death of Demosthenes in 1886. Jevons committed academic suicide when he argued, from inscriptional evidence and not conventional literary sources, that the development of Greek literacy was closely related with oralism. To his Victorian readership, who judged eloquence by the standards of what has been called white essayist prose and poetics, Jevons challenged the questionable dates inferred from “proper” literary sources, opting to examine the archaeological evidence of epigraphy or writing that came directly from such primary sources as marble inscriptions and pottery engravings. From the evidence, Jevons claimed that orality and literacy had a long and sustained relationship. In fact, Jevons asserted that Greek literature remained “classical” as long as it remained oral. That is, the Greek literature of the fifth century BCE was oral. Unwilling to tolerate his politically incorrect claims, and waving away the primary evidence Jevons presented, Victorian scholars snubbed Jevons’s research. They refused to give it a fair hearing. For Jevons, the route to understanding Greek literature was through her culture, and understanding that culture meant understanding the development of writing and its relationship to orality. Blinded by their own social views, scholars of Jevons’s era categorized “literature” in either-or terms: as something written rather than spoken, aesthetic rather than functional, and (above all) never in any way related to rhetoric. Because of such resistance, Jevons died unheralded for his achievements. Almost a century lapsed before the prejudice against orality and literacy, and rhetoric itself, began to dissolve.
In 1948 a work of scholarship too stellar to be ignored argued for the centrality of rhetoric in ancient Greece: H. I. Marrou’s A History of Education in Antiquity. Through exhaustive basic research from primary material, Marrou was able to claim that not only were orality and literacy related but also that rhetoric was the dominant discipline shaping Greek education. In fact, Marrou believed that rhetoric had such a pervasive influence on Greek culture that much of our confusion over Greek culture would be clarified if we more fully understood the nature of rhetoric and its impact. Ancient Greeks never separated reading and writing from speech; even when Greece was literate that “literature” was performed orally. Ancient Greeks, Marrou argued, believed that if one could speak and write properly, one could think properly and even live properly; rhetoric helped people learn how to argue well and make cogent judgments. For ancient Greeks this quest for intellectual excellence that would improve society was called paideia, for Romans it was called humanitas, for us it is called “culture.” While such ideas sound quaint they were nonetheless firmly believed in Antiquity, and it is impossible to understand sensitively Hellenic culture without grasping that mentality. It is no wonder, as Marrou asserted, that the rhetorical culture of Isocrates actually won out over the ontological culture of Plato. Thus, it is important both to retrieve this culture and to recognize its mentality in seeing an inseparable bonding of orality and literacy, as well as recognizing that cognitive processes affect society because they are the operations by which people make judgments. The route to such understanding, and the necessary starting point for any criticism, is basic historical research and a community of scholars open to non-conventional findings.
Conclusion
I would like to end by mentioning recent incidents that I find personally uplifting because they address the needs I have outlined. First, three scholars whom I respect very much—Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford—once sent me a manuscript that they had submitted to Rhetorica and asked for my opinion. Their essay is an insightful argument for detailed basic research on women theoreticians and practitioners of rhetoric and oratory; they illustrate perspectives that would contribute to a more representative accounting of the roles women played in our history. I found very little to suggest or modify; the essay was cogent, and I am delighted that it was published in Rhetorica. Similarly, projects such as Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (ed. Andrea Lunsford) and Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance are encouraging signs of historical research. Both of these works demonstrate how the rhetorical tradition is expanding. Yet, both works share the concern presented here, that our expanded view of the rhetorical tradition also creates the need for more primary research and advances in research methods that are sensitive to the new growth. I did recommend to these scholars that in their next project, however, they branch out to include women who taught rhetoric and oratory from the 1930–1970 era. In addition to Marie Hochmuth Nichols, I mentioned Laura Crowell, principally because I was so impressed by her work on British rhetoric and oratory when I was an undergraduate. I told Lunsford, Ede and Glenn that Crowell was an especially poignant example because in 1988 the CCCC at Seattle sponsored a panel on women in the history of rhetoric. The irony was that Laura Crowell was in a rest home only a few miles away and would have been delighted to attend the event. She was not invited only because she was not known by the panel members!
When I told these three colleagues about Laura Crowell, they mutually agreed to the need and even volunteered to contact Professor Crowell in an effort to reclaim part of our living history. I agreed to call Professor Crowell (I had not spoken with her for several years) and let her know of this renewed interest. When I spoke with her in September 1995, she not only could not remember me, but also told me she could not remember what she had done as a professor of rhetoric and oratory at the University of Washington for so many years! I did not know what to say. I told this story to my former student, Barbara Warnick, who was at that time a professor at Washington, at the NCA Convention in November 1995. Barbara told me (her eyes moist with tears) that Laura had just died in the last two weeks. I can think of no better or more personal illustration of the fragility of our collective memory, and the need for recovering historical study, than that instance.
My second example illustrates that men too are sensitive to the importance of such historical work. Harold Barrett, my former and first professor of the history of rhetoric, convinced me of the value of reconstructing and preserving primary work. In this case, the project of recovery was an important address by an exemplar of The Cornell School of Rhetoric, one of our greatest scholars of this past century, Harry Caplan. In 1968 Caplan gave a public lecture called “The Classical Tradition: Rhetoric and Oratory” at the Annual Conference on Rhetorical Criticism hosted by California State University, Hayward (now East Bay). Barrett was wise enough to record the address, but Caplan did not wish to have the manuscript published at the time since (he believed) it required further polishing. Those who heard the address considered it to be invaluable, the product of wisdom acquired only after a life-time of scholarship on rhetoric and oratory. Caplan died some years later and the lecture was left unpublished. For many years, Barrett and I have spoken of the loss of this treasure. Eventually, Barrett was able to secure permission from Harry Caplan’s literary executor to publish the lecture. He went to the rare book and manuscript collection at Cornell University and copied the text. Barrett sent the tape and manuscript to me at TCU. With the aid of research associates Mark James and Lois Agnew, we were able to have the text—heavily edited with handwritten changes—computer-scanned and formatted for reconstruction. We worked for months with the audio tape, the computer scan and some good old-fashioned textual criticism and reproduced Caplan’s lost speech, which is approximately sixty typed pages in length. This work can be found in the Spring 1997 issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly. We are using this project as an argument for why our journals should consider publishing such primary evidence that does not fit into book or monograph-length format.
I believe that these two examples are positive illustrations of the importance of reclaiming the lost art of researching the history of rhetoric. The fragility of what we do should be apparent if scholars as recent as Professors Crowell and Caplan were almost lost to us, let alone those who existed centuries before, as I have been discussing for most of this introduction. Edmund Burke, the prominent eighteenth century British statesman, once wrote, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” For our purposes, we might well take the spirit of Burke’s statement and paraphrase it to say that all that is
