Rhetoric, Emotional Manipulation, and Political Morality: The Modern Relevance of Cicero vis-a`-vis...

Rhetoric, Emotional Manipulation, and Political Morality: The Modern Relevance of Cicero vis-à-vis AristotleAuthor(s): Gary RemerSource: Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Autumn 2013), pp.402-443Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the International Society for the Historyof RhetoricStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/RH.2013.31.4.402 .

Accessed: 08/05/2014 19:32

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of California Press and International Society for the History of Rhetoric are collaborating withJSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 129.81.49.175 on Thu, 8 May 2014 19:32:20 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ishr

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ishr

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/RH.2013.31.4.402?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Gary Remer

Rhetorica, Vol. XXXI, Issue 4, pp. 402–443, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 1533-8541. ©2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re-served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.4.402.

Rhetoric, Emotional Manipulation,and Political Morality: The Modern Relevanceof Cicero vis-a-vis Aristotle

Abstract: Notwithstanding the widespread assumption that Aristo-

tle forges a better relationship among rhetoric, the emotions, and

political morality than Cicero, I contend that Cicero, not Aristo-

tle, offers a more relevant account of the relationship among these

terms. I argue that, by grounding his account of emotional appeals

in the art of rhetoric, Aristotle does not evade the moral problems

originating in emotional manipulation. Moreover, Aristotle’s ap-

proach to emotional appeals in politics is, compared to Cicero’s,

static, unable to adapt to new political circumstances. I suggest that

Cicero’s approach to the rhetorical emotions is more acceptable to

a modern audience than Aristotle’s because it is ethically based

while also responsive to political realities. Cicero accommodates

emotional appeals to circumstance based on his belief in decorum

as a moral principle. Further, I show that emotional manipulation

in Cicero is not as problematical as it initially appears.

Keywords: Cicero, Aristotle, rhetoric, political morality, emotional

manipulation, emotions, decorum

Over the last thirty years, Aristotle has emerged as thecentral classical figure in the quest to integrate rhetoricwith politics and ethics.1 One of the fundamental reasons

why many contemporary scholars embrace Aristotle as the defenderof a moral political rhetoric is his stance concerning the emotions.Particularly in the Rhetoric, Aristotle’s response to the immoralityof emotional manipulation is his cognitive approach to the emo-

1M. Leff, “The Uses of Aristote’s Rhetoric in Contemporary American Scholar-ship,” Argumentation 7 (1993): 313–27 (316–17).



Rhetoric, Emotional Manipulation, and Political Morality 403

tions, in which thought or belief is construed as the efficient cause ofemotion.2 “In Aristotle’s view, emotions are not blind animal forces,but intelligent and discriminating parts of the personality, closelyrelated to beliefs of a certain sort, and therefore responsive to cog-nitive modification.”3 By grounding emotion in thought, Aristotlerejects the dichotomy of reason and passion that has dominated post-Cartesian philosophy in the West.4 And for votaries of Aristotle, thisjoining of emotion with reason obviates the irrationalism that oftengives rise to emotional manipulation.5

Like Aristotle, Cicero has garnered the interest, albeit to a lesserdegree, of scholars seeking to unify politics, persuasion, and ethics.6

Cicero, however, appears to have less to tell us about the moral use ofrhetorical emotions than Aristotle.7 In contrast to Aristotle, who rec-onciles reason and emotion, Cicero seems to set emotion against rea-son, openly praising the use of emotions to thwart rational decisionmaking. In De oratore, Cicero has the character Marcus Antonius, theinterlocutor primarily charged with explicating the rhetorical emo-tions, affirm that “nothing in oratory . . . is more important than . . . forthe audience itself to be moved in such a way as to be ruled by somestrong emotional impulse rather than by reasoned judgment.”8 Soonafter, Antonius boasts that he acquitted a defendant, “not so much

2W. W. Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion (London: Duckworth, 1975), 17.3M. Nussbaum, “Aristotle on Emotions and Rational Persuasion,” in A. O. Rorty,

ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 303–23(p. 303).

4D. Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and ClassicalLiterature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 43.

5See B. Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 2006), 238, n. 24; N. Klemp, “When Rhetoric Turns Manipu-lative: Disentangling Persuasion and Manipulation,” in W. Le Cheminant and J. M.Parrish, eds., Manipulating Democracy: Democratic Theory, Political Psychology, and MassMedia (New York: Routledge, 2011), 59–86 (pp. 68–69).

6M. Leff, “Cicero’s Pro Murena and the Strong Case for Rhetoric,” Rhetoric andPublic Affairs 1 (1988): 61–88 (p. 64); T. O. Sloane, On the Contrary: The Protocol ofTraditional Rhetoric (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997),36–41; T. M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (New York: Longman, 1990),34–38.

7By “rhetorical emotions,” I mean those emotions that serve as means of per-suasion in oratory. For purposes of this article, I equate “rhetorical emotions” withthe more popular “political emotions,” e.g., M. K. Sokolon’s Political Emotions: Aris-totle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UniversityPress, 2006) and B. Koziak’s Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos, Aristotle, and Gender(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).

8Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, trans. J. M. May and J. Wisse (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2001), 2.178.



R H E T O R I C A404

because the jurors were informed, but because their minds were af-fected” (Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, 2.20). It should not be surprising,then, that even though Bryan Garsten, in a recent book defendingrhetoric, devotes a chapter to Aristotle and a chapter to Cicero asstill-relevant champions of rhetoric, he turns only to Aristotle forcounsel on rhetorical appeals to emotions.9 Likewise, Jakob Wisse,though he views both Cicero and Aristotle as expounding a morallyneutral rhetoric, concedes that Aristotle’s Rhetoric “gives those whotry to whitewash him more opportunities to confuse the issue” andthat “less (uneasy) attempts at removing a suspicion of immoralityhave been made in the case of [Cicero’s] De oratore than in that ofthe Rhetoric.”10 Even scholars such as Wisse, who consider Aristo-tle’s rhetoric morally neutral, concede that it assumes the guise ofmorality vis-a-vis Ciceronian rhetoric—Cicero appearing less worthyof emulation for the emotional manipulation he recommends in Deoratore.

Notwithstanding the widespread assumption that Aristotleforges a better relationship among rhetoric, the emotions, and politi-cal morality than Cicero, I contend that Cicero, not Aristotle, offersa more relevant account of the relationship among these terms.11 Todistinguish between licit and illicit emotional appeals, Aristotle relieson the art of rhetoric itself, not external moral constraints, like thosefound in his ethical works—an advantage, according to several schol-ars of Aristotle’s rhetoric.12 I argue, however, that, by grounding hisaccount of emotional appeals in the art of rhetoric, Aristotle does notevade the moral problems originating in emotional manipulation.Moreover, Aristotle’s approach to emotional appeals in politics is,compared to Cicero’s, static, unable to adapt to new political circum-stances. I suggest that Cicero’s approach to the rhetorical emotions,if given a fair hearing, will be more acceptable to a modern audi-ence than Aristotle’s because it is ethically based while also respon-

9Garsten, Saving Persuasion, cited in n. 5, above, 115–41.10J. Wisse, Ethos and Pathos from Aristotle to Cicero (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert,

1989), 297.11As I do with “rhetorical” and “political emotions,” I equate “political” and

“rhetorical” morality. In the classical period, the rhetor (orator) was the politician.When I speak of “political morality” in relation to Cicero I mean a morality thatderives from the rhetorical/political context, not from an a priori philosophical system(see Leff, “Cicero’s Pro Murena and the Strong Case for Rhetoric,” cited in n. 6, above,63.

12E. Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1994); Garsten, Saving Persuasion, cited in n. 5, above, 118.




sive to political realities. Cicero accommodates emotional appeals tocircumstance based on his belief in decorum as a moral principle.The flexibility of the Ciceronian path allows it to be adapted to ourpresent political state of affairs, as opposed to the Aristotelian ap-proach, which cannot. Further, I show that emotional manipulationin Cicero is not as problematical as it initially appears.

To evaluate the two rhetoricians’ approaches to morality, rhetoric,and the emotions, specifically emotional manipulation, I begin withNathaniel Klemp’s two conditions of manipulation: first, that it re-quires the use of hidden or irrational force to affect another’s choices;and, second, that it is intentional.13 I consider two moral breachesstemming from emotional manipulation.14 The first moral breach iswhen politicians, in manipulating an audience’s emotions, hindertheir listeners from recognizing what is good or beneficial.15 Thisconsequentialist critique of emotional manipulation dates back to atleast Plato, who portrays Socrates in the Gorgias as attacking rhetorsfor flattering their hearers and providing “gratification and pleasure”without teaching about “the just and unjust,” i.e., for substituting the“apparent good” for the true good.16 And though we are likely todiffer with Plato about which goods orators deny their audiences(i.e., most people today would probably disagree with Plato that ora-tors are guilty of denying their listeners knowledge that would bettertheir souls), we are likely to accept Plato’s more general claim thatpoliticians emotionally manipulate audiences into making bad de-cisions about what is good for their members. Instead of identifyingthe bad consequences of emotional manipulation with ignorance ofabstract truths, we today might say that politicians’ emotional ap-peals sometimes lead to negative consequences, e.g., citizens’ votingagainst their economic interests or adopting political positions thatconflict with their deeply held convictions.

The second moral breach is that politicians, in using rhetoricto manipulate listeners emotionally, undermine their listeners’ auto-nomy—in Kant’s words, “win[ning] over men’s minds to the side

13Klemp,”When Rhetoric Turns Manipulative,” cited in n. 5, above, 62–64.14These two problems of emotional manipulation, especially the second, are

discussed in Klemp, “When Rhetoric Turns Manipulative,” cited in n. 5, above, 72–79).15Because I focus on political oratory, I do not distinguish between “politician,”

“rhetor,” and “orator.”16Plato, Gorgias, trans. T. Irwin [Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1979], 447a–466a. Con-

cerning pleasure and pain as an essential component of the emotions, see Aristotle,On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. G. A. Kennedy (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1991), 2.1.8.




of the speaker before they have weighed the matter, . . . rob[bing]the verdict of its freedom.”17 Like Locke and Rousseau before him,Kant believed that for an act to be considered moral, it must be freelychosen. Kant summarizes our duty to act respectfully toward thefreedom of others in the “Formula of Humanity”: “Act in such away that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in theperson of another, always at the same time as an end and neversimply as a means.”18 Rhetoric, however, treats listeners as means,depriving them of the freedom to choose their ends and to reason forthemselves: “mov[ing] men in important matters like machines to ajudgment that must lose all weight from them on quiet reflection.”19

In line with the “Formula of Humanity,” an orator who emotionallymanipulates listeners is morally culpable; the orator denies them theability to act as autonomous agents.20 The sophist and rhetoricianGorgias of Leontini anticipates this view of persuasion as denyingautonomy. In the Encomium of Helen, Gorgias denies that Helen is re-sponsible for her adultery with Paris because she was captivated “bymeans of [his] words, inspired incantations [that] serve as bringers-onof pleasure and takers-off of pain. . . . For discourse was the persuaderof the soul, which it persuaded and compelled.” Gorgias then affixesguilt: “He who persuaded (as constrainer) did wrong; while she whowas persuaded (as one constrained by means of the discourse) iswrongly blamed.”21 Likewise, it may be argued that politicians whowhip a crowd into an emotional frenzy are morally culpable not onlybecause of the bad results of their manipulation but also because theydeprive their listeners of reaching freely chosen decisions.

I develop my argument in the next three sections. In the firstsection, I analyze Aristotle’s and Cicero’s views on the emotions inrhetoric, seriatim. In the second section, I consider whether the normsof rhetoric, in Aristotle, can function as a bulwark against emotionalmanipulation. Then, in the third section, I examine Cicero’s moraldefense of rhetoric as it concerns the emotions, evaluating whetherit is an adequate response to Cicero’s own apparent justification ofemotional manipulation. In the Conclusion, I revisit the question of

17J. C. Meredith, Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1911), 192.

18I. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. J. W. Ellington (Indianapo-lis: Hackett, 1993), 4:429.

19Meredith, Kant’s Critique, cited in n. 17, above, 193, n. 120Klemp, “When Rhetoric Turns Manipulative,” cited in n. 5, above, 76.21Gorgias of Leontini, Encomium of Helen, trans. B. R. Donovan. (1999). Available

at http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/gorgias/helendonovan.htm, 10, 12.




emotional manipulation to reconsider the original premise that Aris-totle is more relevant to contemporary politics than Cicero. AlthoughI endeavor, throughout this article, to be faithful to Aristotle’s andCicero’s own arguments, I read them with an eye to what they mayadd to contemporary questions of the moral use of political emotions.Thus, I examine the implications of their theories beyond the contextsin which they themselves wrote and lived.

Describing the Rhetorical Emotions

Aristotle

Toward the beginning of the Rhetoric, Aristotle delineates threepisteis (singular: pistis) or “means of persuasion” that are “entechnic”(“artful”), pisteis that the speaker “invents” to persuade the audience.(“Atechnic” [“nonartful”] pisteis are preexisting proofs, therefore, notcreated by the speaker, e.g., witnesses, testimony of slaves takenunder torture, contracts.) The three pisteis are 1) ethos, the means ofpersuasion that “are in the character of the speaker”; 2) pathos, inwhich there is persuasion “through the hearers when they are led tofeel emotion by the speech”; and 3) logos, or proof based on rationalarguments.22

Although ethos in Aristotle may superficially resemble a typeof emotional appeal that produces in the audience a “feeling” oftrust toward the speaker, it does not evoke emotions. (The emotionsin Cicero, as will be seen, are divided between pathos and ethos.)Ethos is the element of speech that presents the speaker as “worthyof credence; for we believe fair-minded people to a greater extentand more quickly [than we do others].” In contrast, pathos aimsat effecting an emotional response in the audience.23 For Aristotle,orators do not use ethos to elicit sympathy or any similar emotiontoward themselves; such appeals to sympathy are part of pathos.

Ethos affects judgment through the audience’s confidence inthe speaker’s veracity, whereas pathos, in Aristotle, influences judg-ment through variations in the emotions. Thus, in the second bookof the Rhetoric, where he analyzes the individual emotions most

22Aristotle, On Rhetoric, cited in n. 16, above, 1.2; Wisse, Ethos and Pathos fromAristotle to Cicero, cited in n. 10, above, 13–17.

23Wisse, Ethos and Pathos from Aristotle to Cicero, cited in n. 10, 33–34. See alsoAristotle, On Rhetoric, 1.9.1. Ethos helps the hearer decide whether he or she findsthe speaker reliable or not, which is a decision the hearer arrives at “from the speech,not from a previous opinion that the speaker is a certain kind of person” (1.2.4).




completely,24 Aristotle (On Rhetoric) defines the emotions (pathe) as“those things which, by undergoing change, people come to differ intheir judgments and which are accompanied by pain and pleasure, forexample, anger, pity, fear, and other such things and their opposites”(2.1.8). Aristotle discusses twelve emotions in some detail (2.2–11):anger (orge), mildness or calmness (praotes), love or friendly feel-ing (philia), hate (misos) or enmity (ekhthra), fear (phobos), confidence(tharsos), shame (aiskhyne), kindliness (kharis), pity (eleos), righteousindignation (nemesan), envy (phthonos), and emulation or eagernessto match the accomplishments of others (zelos).25

Aristotle describes the pathe as engendering judgment, but doesnot clearly explain how. The now dominant explanation is that emo-tions affect judgment through beliefs. If we accept that Aristotleadopts a cognitive approach to emotion, then beliefs elicit emotions,whose variations (caused by these initial beliefs) influence other be-liefs or decisions (i.e., judgments) about policies or a defendant’sguilt or innocence.26 Aristotle lends support to this explanation inthe Rhetoric immediately following his definition of the emotions. Hetells us that each emotion must be discussed in three ways. Using theexample of anger, Aristotle indicates that we must determine: 1) thestate of mind of people who are angry; 2) “against whom are they usu-ally angry”; and 3) “for what sort of reasons” (Aristotle, On Rhetoric,2.1.8). The mention of objects (“against whom”) and grounds (“rea-sons”) is important because “it strongly suggests that Aristotle doesnot dissociate cognition from emotion.”27 Aristotle does not conceiveof emotions as unthinking sensations or feelings; if he did, he couldnot analyze an emotion’s objects and grounds.

Aristotle’s discussion of individual emotions supports this inter-pretation. Before analyzing anger and fear, Aristotle defines them:“Let anger be [defined as] desire, accompanied by [mental and phys-

24Aristotle’s analysis of the emotions in his works on ethics or psychology is lesscomplete. Concerning the limited discussion of the emotions in these writings, seeJ. M. Cooper, “An Aristotelian Theory of the Emotions,” in A. O. Rorty, ed., Essays onAristotle’s Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, 238–57 (pp. 238–39),G. Striker, “Emotions in Context: Aristotle’s Treatment of the Passions in the Rhetoricand His Moral Psychology,” in A. O. Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1996), 286–302 (p. 286), and Sokolon, Retrieving PoliticalEmotion, cited in n. 7, above, 14–15.

25Some scholars enumerate up to fifteen emotions treated by Aristotle. Cooperexplains the reasons for enumerating the emotions differently (“An AristotelianTheory of the Emotions,” cited in n. 24, above, 242).

26Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, cited in n. 4, above, 37.27Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, cited in n. 4, above, 37.




ical] distress, for conspicuous retaliation because of a conspicuousslight that was directed, without justification, against oneself or thosenear to one” (On Rhetoric, 2.2.1); “[l]et fear be [defined as] a sort of painor agitation derived from the imagination of a destructive or painfulevil” (2.5.1). In both instances, Aristotle implies that a thought or be-lief is essential to the emotion.28 Anger requires the belief that one hasbeen conspicuously slighted without justification. Fear presupposesthe thought of an impending evil. In either case, when the thoughtis absent, so is the emotion. Therefore, if I am shown that the reasonsfor my emotion are not relevant, then my emotion should disappearor diminish.29 Emotions are “responsive to cognitive modification,”and are treated in the Rhetoric, especially the second book, as distinctfrom impulses.30

I have argued that Aristotle primarily assumes a cognitive ap-proach to the emotions. Aristotle does not, however, adopt this ap-proach without exception in the Rhetoric. At times, Aristotle advisesthe speaker to affect the listeners’ emotions without basing theseemotions on thinking.31 The most glaring example of such a noncog-nitive appeal—which is also deceptive—occurs in the third bookof the Rhetoric, where Aristotle, in discussing style, argues that thelistener will be affected by the emotions of the speaker: “and thehearer suffers [literally, “shares the pathos of”] along with the patheticspeaker, even if what he says amounts to nothing. As a result, manyoverwhelm their hearers by making noise” (Aristotle, On Rhetoric,3.7.5).32 Aristotle assumes that the lexis (style) the speaker adoptscan directly influence the hearer’s emotions, if the style is coordi-nated with the desired emotion (3.7.3). Another instance of elicitingemotions without instilling any prior belief is found in Book 3, inAristotle’s discussion of delivery. Although Aristotle disparages de-

28W. W. Fortenbaugh, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric on Emotions,” Archiv fur die Geschichteder Philosophie 52 (1970): 40–70 (pp. 55–56).

29Nussbaum, “Aristotle on Emotions and Rational Persuasion,” cited in n. 3,above, 311.

30S. R. Leighton, “Aristotle and the Emotions,” in A. O. Rorty, ed., Essays onAristotle’s Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 206–37 (pp. 223–24).

31That Aristotle adopts a cognitive approach, but does not maintain this ap-proach throughout, is supported in the secondary literature. Richard Sorabji, forexample, states that “Aristotle’s accounts of emotions are shot through with cogni-tive terms, but they are not yet tidied in the way that the Stoics were later to tidythem” (R. Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 22).

32R. Wardy, “Mighty is the Truth and it Shall Prevail?” in A. O. Rorty, ed., Essayson Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 56–87 (p. 79).




livery in oratory as “vulgar” and independent of “facts” and “truejustice,” he states that one “should pay attention to delivery, not be-cause it is right but because it is necessary.” Delivery is “somethingthat has the greatest force” because it can “affect the audience,” given“the sad state of governments” and “the corruption of the audience”(3.1.3–6). Unlike the previous example, Aristotle does not explicitlyrefer to pathos in the case of delivery. But it is difficult to explainhow delivery affects the audience other than emotionally withoutprior cognition. (Delivery does not persuade through argument orethos.) And, as Aristotle observes in the same chapter, Thrasymachusdiscusses delivery in his account of emotional appeals (3.1.7).33

Cicero

Although I argue that Aristotle and Cicero approach the emo-tions in rhetoric differently—and those differences have political andmoral implications—Cicero begins his analysis of the emotions muchlike Aristotle; Cicero also adopts the three-fold division of pisteis intoethos, pathos, and logos. In the section of De oratore devoted to theinvention of arguments, Cicero introduces the three means of per-suasion through the character Antonius.34 Antonius explains that,when composing a speech, he initially devotes himself to creatingrational arguments and “[a]fter that, I consider very carefully twofurther elements: the first one recommends us or those for whom weare pleading [ethos], the second is aimed at moving the minds of ouraudience in the direction we want [pathos].” Antonius reiterates thispoint by stating that “the method employed in the art of oratory . . .

33These two examples are from the third book, which some argue is writtenindependently of the rest of the Rhetoric. Even if composed separately, however, “itsdevelopment seems to have been roughly parallel to that of books 1–2” (Aristotle,On Rhetoric, 304).

34Cicero retains the threefold means of persuasion found in Aristotle, althoughCicero situates the pisteis in the larger framework of officia oratoris, the “tasks” or“activities of the orator,” of which Cicero designates five: “invention (thinking outof the material), arrangement (ordering it), style (putting the ordered material intowords), memory (memorizing the speech), and delivery” (Cicero, On the Ideal Orator,trans. J. M. May and J. Wisse [New York: Oxford University Press, 2001], 29). (Aristotleis less clear about these activities; he treats, less explicitly, invention, arrangement,and style [Cicero, On Duties, trans. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins [Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1991], 29–32.) For Cicero, the three means of persuasion aresubsumed under the first activity, invention. Cicero defines “invention” in his juvenileDe inventione as “the discovery of valid or seemingly valid arguments to render one’scause plausible” (Cicero, De inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell [Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1949], 1.9).




relies entirely upon three means of persuasion: proving that our con-tentions are true [argumentation], winning over our audience [ethos],and inducing their minds to feel any emotion the case may demand[pathos]” (Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, 2.114–116).35

In contrast to Aristotle, who categorizes all emotional appealsunder pathos, Cicero divides them between two pisteis, ethos andpathos. Ethos’s goal is to win over the hearers “to feel goodwill towardthe orator as well as toward his client” (On the Ideal Orator, 2.182).36

Cicero shows that, like Aristotle, he intends ethos to demonstrate theorator’s (or the client’s) moral character. Cicero has Antonius say:

Well then, the character, the customs, the deeds, and the life, both ofthose who do the pleading and of those on whose behalf they plead,make a very important contribution to winning a case. . . . Now people’sminds are won over by a man’s prestige, his accomplishments, and thereputation he has acquired by his way of life.

2.182

Unlike Aristotle, however, for whom ethos establishes the speaker’strustworthiness without eliciting emotions, Cicero seeks to effect,through ethos, an emotional response in the audience. This differencebetween Cicero and Aristotle is supported by Cicero’s use of conciliare(winning over), a verb that “clearly implies a form of acting upon theemotions.”37 For example, Cicero has Antonius speak of winninggoodwill (benevolentiam conciliare), to persuade through ethos, and ofwinning esteem (conciliat caritatem), an emotion associated with ethos;Antonius employs conciliare when speaking of the orator winninglove (amor), an emotion classified under pathos (On the Ideal Orator,2.115, 2.182, 2.206–207).38 Aristotle, however, says nothing of winningthe audience’s goodwill in relation to ethos.39

35I use the terms “ethos” and “pathos” here, though Cicero does not designatethese pisteis with specific names.

36In speaking of goodwill toward the client, Cicero has judicial oratory in mind.37E. Fantham, “Ciceronian Conciliare and Aristotelian Ethos,” Phoenix 27 (1973):

262–75 (pp. 267–68).38C. Gill, “The Ethos/Pathos Distinction in Rhetorical and Literary Criticism,”

Classical Quarterly 34 (1984): 149–66 (p. 159). On Ciceronian ethos as an emotionalappeal, see Fantham, “Ciceronian Conciliare and Aristotelian Ethos,” cited in n. 37,above, 262–75, W. W. Fortenbaugh, “Benevolentiam conciliare and animos permovere:Some Remarks on Cicero’s De oratore 2.178–216,” Rhetorica 6 (1988): 259–73, and Wisse,Ethos and Pathos from Aristotle to Cicero, cited in n. 10, above, 233–49.

39Fortenbaugh, “Benevolentiam conciliare and animos permovere,” cited in n. 38,above, 261–62.




Although Cicero uses conciliare—a relatively mild verb—whenspeaking of ethos and pathos, he usually employs more forceful verbsto describe the orator’s appeal to pathos, such as permovere (excite,affect with violent emotion), impellere (compel, constrain), incitare(arouse), capere (seize), excitare (stir up), and movere and commo-vere (move and arouse) (On the Ideal Orator, 2.185–87, 2.211–15).This use of powerful verbs suggests the main difference betweenthe types of emotions contained in ethos and pathos. For Cicero,pathos is an appeal to the vehement emotions, whereas ethos elic-its the more gentle emotions (Cicero, Orator, 128–29). Regardingethos, Cicero has Antonius explain that the effect of bolstering aman’s character through his “prestige, his accomplishments, andthe reputation he has acquired by his way of life” is “enhancedby a gentle tone of voice on the part of the orator” (On the IdealOrator, 2.182). In contrast to the orator employing pathos, who uses“vigorous oratory” displayed in “some form of sharp and violentemotional arousal to set the juror’s hearts aflame,” the speakerevoking ethos speaks “in a quiet, low-keyed, and gentle manner”(2.183).40 In discussing proof from character, however, Cicero hasAntonius refrain from specifying which emotions comprise the le-niores affectus (2.212).41 The particular passions contained in pathos,that “mode of speaking . . . which stirs the hearts of the jurorsquite differently” (On the Ideal Orator, 2.185), are similar to thosepathe Aristotle considers in the Rhetoric, but are identified as vi-olent in Cicero and not similarly designated in Aristotle (2.206–211)42: affection (amor), hate (odium), anger (iracundia), envy (in-vidia), pity (misericordia), hope (spes), joy (laetitia), fear (timor), andgrief (molestia).

Although the particular emotions that Cicero lists as relevant topathos are comparable to Aristotle’s pathe in the Rhetoric, Cicero, un-like Aristotle, does not define “emotion.” And nowhere in De oratoredoes Antonius “offer anything like a clear general statement concern-

40The more detailed discussion of vehement and gentle emotions in Cicero’s Deoratore (2.178–216a), upon which I have relied, is written primarily for judicial oratory.But in De oratore, we are presented with a comparable division, in a discussion ofpolitical oratory, between the rhetoric of the Senate, where “matters must be handledwith less display,” and the public meeting (contio), which “gives all the force oforatory” (Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, 2.333).

41J. M. May, Trials of Character: The Eloquence of Ciceronian Ethos (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 10–11.

42Wisse, Ethos and Pathos from Aristotle to Cicero, cited in n. 10, above, 34, 242–45.




ing the nature of emotional response.”43 Rather, Antonius seems togo out of his way to avoid analyzing emotions conceptually. For ex-ample, when alluding to debates between Hellenistic philosopherson the emotions, Antonius asserts that it matters not if an oratorknows “whether anger was a disturbance of the mind or a desireto avenge pain” (On the Ideal Orator, 1.220). Likewise, Cicero has hisinterlocutors avoid determining whether or not an emotion is the re-sult of beliefs, i.e., whether or not to adopt, like Aristotle, a cognitiveapproach to emotions.44

Although Cicero does not determine the relation between emo-tion and cognition, De oratore is filled with passages that characterizeemotional appeals as rhetorical attempts to overpower the audience’srational capacities—passages that imply that emotions are blind im-pulses detached from cognition. For example, Cicero contrasts ethosand pathos with reasoned argument when Antonius argues that noth-ing is more important in oratory than for “the orator to be favorablyregarded by the audience [ethos], and for the audience itself to bemoved in such a way as to be ruled by some strong emotional im-pulse [pathos] rather than by reasoned judgment [logos]” (On theIdeal Orator, 2.178). Antonius’s point seems to be that the orator can,and should, by-pass the hearer’s thinking processes by appealingto the emotions. Likewise, Cicero has Antonius distinguish betweenargumentation, on the one hand, and “winning favor” and “stir-ring emotions,” on the other hand, Antonius stating about the latterproofs, that “I concentrate particularly on the aspect that is most ableto move people’s hearts” (2.292–93; see also 2.129, 2.214, 2.337).

On closer inspection, however, Cicero does not necessarily op-pose reason and emotion. Thus, emotions may be cognitively basedwithout resulting from formal argument. For example, Cicero de-scribes how Antonius established the character of his client, ManiusAquillius, by making him “stand where all could see him, tore open

43Fortenbaugh, “Benevolentiam conciliare and animos permovere,” cited in n. 38,above, 269–70. and F. Solmsen, “Aristotle and Cicero on the Orator’s Playing uponthe Feelings,” Classical Philology 33 (1938): 390–404 (p. 397).

44In Tusculan Disputations, however, where Cicero assumes a Stoic position on theemotions, he views them as derived from cognitions, albeit false beliefs inconsistentwith the Stoic conviction that only virtue matters (Tusculan Dispositions, trans. J. E.King [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971], 3.61); M. Graver, Cicero on theEmotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002),xix–xxxiii; S. Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 2004), 53, n.114. On the contradiction between Cicero’s view of the emotionsin De oratore and later in Tusculan Disputations, see E. Narducci, Cicerone e l’eloquenzaromana: Retorica e progetto culturale (Rome: Laterza, 1997), 77–96.




his shirt, and exposed his breast, that his countrymen might see thescars that he bore on the front of his body,” scars from the wounds hereceived in defense of Rome (Cicero, Verrine Orations, vol. 2, 2.5.3;45 Onthe Ideal Orator, 2.124, 2.194–96). Antonius does not establish Aquil-lius’s character here with explicit argumentation. Nevertheless, by“expos[ing] to the jurors the scars on the old general’s chest,” An-tonius instills the thought in his audience that Aquillius is a manof good character because he was willing to sacrifice his life for theRepublic.

Not only does Cicero recognize that beliefs create emotions, but,more specifically, he acknowledges that rational argumentation canengender emotions. In De oratore, Publius Sulpicius Rufus lauds hislegal antagonist, Antonius, for using commonplaces against QuintusCaepio and for filling the proceedings with hatred, indignation, andpity (On the Ideal Orator, 2.203; see also 2.108–109).46 That common-places are employed in inventing arguments and that Sulpicius linksAntonius’s use of commonplaces with overwhelming the audiencewith emotions shows that Sulpicius does not view argumentationas being opposed to emotional appeals. And Antonius’s claim that“I bested your [i.e., Sulpicius’s] accusation in the case not so muchbecause the jurors were informed, but because their minds were af-fected” (2.197–201) is consistent with his eliciting emotions throughargumentation. What Antonius means is that he employed argu-ments to mislead the audience by diverting its attention from theissues relevant to the debate, so that the audience’s emotions willbe inflamed. His arguments, like many others that Cicero condones,are still rational arguments, even if not germane to the questionat hand.

Why does Cicero avoid providing a definitive picture of the rela-tionship between emotion and cognition? I agree with Fortenbaughthat Cicero purposely refrains from defining emotion because “thenature of emotional response is not easy to pin down.”47 As Forten-baugh explains, anger and fright are grounded on belief; cheerfulnessand sadness may be caused by “a physiological condition or an ex-ternal stimulus like infectious rhythm.” Because of such possible

45Cicero, Verrine Orations, vol. 2, trans. L. H. G. Greenwood (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1953), 2.5.3.

46“Commonplaces” has two overlapping meanings: “commonplace observa-tions, and common sources of arguments” (R. A. Lanham, A Handlist of RhetoricalTerms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 169.

47Fortenbaugh, “Benevolentiam conciliare and animos permovere,” cited in n. 38,above, 269–70.




differences in the origins of particular emotions, Cicero refrains fromgeneralizing about emotions as a class. Perhaps, it would be morecorrect to say, however, that Cicero refuses to define emotion becausehe does not want to pin himself down on the meaning of emotionalresponse. Reflecting the rhetorical practice of argument in utramquepartem, where both sides of an issue are presented and debated,48

Cicero wishes to display the double-sided nature of the emotionsin rhetoric—as irrational and as consistent with reason. Therefore, herepresents the source of emotions ambiguously. For instance, when hefinds fault with the absence of ethos and pathos in the post-Aristotelianrhetorical handbooks, he accentuates the noncognitive character ofemotional impulses (On the Ideal Orator, 2.201). His concern in thiscase is to deemphasize reason relative to emotion in order to amplifythe need for reintroducing ethos and pathos into rhetoric. But whendiscussing copia (“expansive richness of utterance”49 ) as a strategyfor allowing argumentation to affect the hearts and minds of theaudience members, Cicero roots pathos in logos (On the Ideal Orator,2.109); emotion and cognition, then, are not set in opposition to eachother.50

Making Normative Sense of the Emotion

in Aristotle

Parallel to Aristotle’s cognitive approach to emotion is his con-ception of the rhetorical means of persuasion as being grounded inargument. In each instance, Aristotle accepts, even values, emotionas a necessary element of judgment, but roots emotion in reason.Emotion, as already seen, is derived from thought or belief. Analo-gously, the pisteis are founded on rational argumentation: pathos, aswell as ethos, receives its legitimacy as a rhetorical proof through itsbasis in argument.

48G. Remer, “Cicero and the Ethics of Deliberative Rhetoric,” in B. Fontana, C. J.Nederman, and G. Remer, eds., Talking Democracy:Historical Perspectives on Rhetoricand Democracy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 135–61(pp. 143–46).

49Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, cited in n. 46, above, 42.50In the prologue to De oratore, Cicero, speaking in his own persona, argues that

“in soothing or in exciting the feelings of the audience the full force of oratory andall its available means must be brought into play” (Cicero, On Duties, 1.17; emphasisadded). Presumably, “all its available means” includes rational argumentation.




The centrality of argument to the pisteis and to Aristotle’s un-derstanding of rhetoric as an art finds support in his definition ofthe art of rhetoric: “Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability, in each[particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion. This isthe function of no other art” (On Rhetoric, 1.2.1). We might assumethat Aristotle is adopting here a variant of the commonly used defi-nition of rhetoric as “the art of persuasion” (Plato, Gorgias, 454b5–10).But to define rhetoric as the “art” or “artificer” of persuasion sug-gests that rhetoric becomes an art when it succeeds at persuasion.But Aristotle explicitly avoids making persuasion itself the aim ofrhetoric: “[rhetoric’s] function is not to persuade but to see the avail-able means of persuasion in each case (Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 1.1.14;emphasis added). For Aristotle, what defines rhetoric as an art is notpersuasion per se.

What does it mean to say that, according to Aristotle, the art ofrhetoric is not defined by “persuasion,” but by “finding the avail-able means of persuasion?” Eugene Garver elucidates the differencebetween these two definitions by distinguishing between the twoends of an art (techne) like rhetoric: first, the external, given end;second, the internal, guiding end.51 The given end is the purpose ofthe practice, which in rhetoric is persuading; the speaker achievesthe external end when he has successfully persuaded. What definesrhetoric, or any other practice, as an art, however, is its guiding end.In rhetoric, this internal end is finding the available means of per-suasion, which means limiting the “means” to argument.52 Aristotleaffirms the centrality of argument in “rhetoric as art” in his introduc-tion to the Rhetoric. There, he describes rhetoric as based on reasonedargument, especially the enthymeme or rhetorical syllogism, whichhe terms “the ‘body’ of persuasion” (Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 1.1.3).And although Aristotle envisions his own rhetoric as “speaking onthe subject,” he describes the rhetoric conceived of by the authorsof rhetorical handbooks as “say[ing] nothing about enthymemes,”i.e., ignoring argumentation and focusing mostly on “matters exter-nal to the subject,” like “verbal attack and pity and anger and suchemotions of the soul [that] do not relate to fact but are appeals tothe juryman” (1.1.3–4). Aristotle, however, does not delineate what

51See S. Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991,190–98, for a similar distinction between given and guiding ends, and A. MacIntyre,After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre DamePress, 1984), 188, for the distinction between goods “internal” to a “practice” andthose “externally and contingently attached to it.”

52Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, cited in n. 12, above, 24–28.




defines a speech as outside the subject. “What is ‘outside the subject’is a judgment only the audience can make.”53 Aristotle rejects theemotional appeals of the Arts of Speech, the technical handbooks, “forit is wrong to warp the jury by leading them into anger or envy orpity: that is the same as if someone made a straightedge rule crookedbefore using it” (1.1.5).

These excerpts from early in the Rhetoric seem to suggest thatAristotle wants to exclude all, or almost all, emotional appeals fromrhetoric. Such an understanding of Aristotle would eliminate emo-tional manipulation as a problem, because emotional appeals wouldmostly be removed from rhetoric. Purging pathos from rhetoric, how-ever, is difficult to harmonize with his detailed analysis of emotionalappeals in the second book of the Rhetoric. Aristotle’s discussion thereindicates that emotional appeals are a legitimate part of rhetoric, oneof the three pisteis that comprise the rhetorical art.54 The simplestand most persuasive solution to the apparent contradiction betweenthe two parts of the Rhetoric is to read Aristotle as recognizing asartistic only those emotional appeals that derive from reasoned ar-gument, that do not digress from the matter in hand. Although Aris-totle excludes some emotional appeals from the art of rhetoric, hedoes not reject all emotional appeals. The artful appeal to pisteis isrestricted to those proofs derived from argument. Thus, Aristotlestates: “[There is persuasion] through hearers when they are led tofeel emotion [pathos] by the speech [or argument, tou logou]” (OnRhetoric, 2.1.5). Aristotle accepts that emotional appeals are legiti-mate rhetorical means of persuasion, “but only provided they aremade an integral part of the orderly exposition of and argumentfor the orator’s case.”55 Likewise, Aristotle (On Rhetoric, 2.1.5) main-tains that ethos as a pistis of the rhetorical art “should result from thespeech [or argument, dia tou logou]” and not from testimonials aboutthe speaker’s character.56

53Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, cited in n. 12, above, 39.54For several interpretations of this apparent inconsistency in Aristotle, see

Sprute “Aristotle and the Legitimacy of Rhetoric,” in D. J. Furley and A. Nehamas,eds., Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Philosophical Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1994), 117–28, Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 28, and Solmsen, “Aristotle and Cicero on theOrator’s Playing upon the Feelings,” cited in n. 43, above.

55J. M. Cooper, “Ethical-Political Theory in Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” in D. J. Furleyand A. Nehamas, eds., Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Philosophical Essays (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1994), 193–210 (pp. 196–97).

56Cooper, “Ethical-Political Theory in Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” cited in n. 55, above,197; Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, cited in n. 12, above, 27.




In limiting emotional appeals to those derived from argument,Aristotle addresses the conditions of rhetoric as an art. In contrastto what we shall find in Cicero, Aristotle is not evaluating pathosmorally.57 The Rhetoric has norms, but they are artistic norms. Thenorms regulating emotions, which are grounded in rhetoric’s internal(i.e., its artistic) end, require that pathos be rooted in argument andthat emotional appeals should relate to the subject. In the Rhetoric,Aristotle does not ask speakers “to impose external moral rules onthemselves.” Instead, he restricts “the scope of their competence” bydefining the conditions of the art they practice.58

For emotional appeals to be deemed artistic, they must be consis-tent with rhetorical norms. Aristotle, however, does not obligate thepublic speaker to follow these norms. Rhetoric qua art, for Aristo-tle, does not generate any moral obligations on the speaker becauserhetoric qua art does not create moral obligations at all. If the art-ful rhetorician does not “stoop to winning a case by inflaming thepassions of the audience,” it is not because doing so is immoral,“but because it is not part of the art.” The artful rhetorician wouldrefrain from appealing to emotions without argument because doingso would contravene achieving the internal, guiding end of the art.59

Nevertheless, as we shall see, Aristotle assumes that the speaker willsometimes pursue the external end of success, not the internal end,so that Aristotle acknowledges that not all emotional appeals will be,or should be, consistent with the art of rhetoric.60

Aristotle does not suggest in the Rhetoric, however, that emo-tional appeals outside artistic norms are, or should be, the rule. Thematerials for enthymemes from which the pisteis are derived are in-tended to reflect “the structure of ordinary deliberative reasoning.”As such, they are meant to approximate the “patterns of reason-ing that most people use unconsciously whenever they deliberate.”61

Aristotle conceives of emotional appeals that are not based on argu-ment and are external to the subject as out of the ordinary. If he didnot, the guiding end of rhetoric would itself be exceptional. But hedoes not provide any rules or advice as to when the speaker shouldaim for success at the given end; the speaker must decide for him- or

57E. Garver, Confronting Aristotle’s Ethics: Ancient and Modern Morality (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2006), 18; Garsten, Saving Persuasion, cited in n. 5, above,118.

58Garsten, Saving Persuasion, cited in n. 5, above, 118.59Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, cited in n. 12, above, 210.60Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, cited in n. 12, above, 32, 47.61Garsten, Saving Persuasion, cited in n. 5, above, 130–31.




herself when to eschew the guiding end and look to the external end,doing whatever is possible to persuade the audience.62

Assuming that emotional appeals are largely controlled by artis-tic norms, we can then evaluate the conditions created by these normsto determine how problematical emotional manipulation is for Aris-totle. In particular, does Aristotle’s grounding of emotional appealsin argument diminish emotional manipulation? Because Aristotledoes not address the issue directly, we must infer the answer fromthe implications of his rhetorical norms.

That Aristotle grounds rhetorical emotions in argument meansonly that the Aristotelian orator does not manipulate emotions di-rectly, but does so through argumentation. Emotions, though, canbe moved by faulty and false arguments. Nowhere in the Rhetoricdoes Aristotle state that enthymemes must be true. Aristotle not onlyaccepts, but sometimes suggests, employing deceptive arguments,offering specific examples of such arguments.63 For example, Aris-totle advises the speaker, in epideictic oratory, to misrepresent theperson being praised as acting “in accordance with deliberate pur-pose,” even when this person’s actions are coincidental and chancehappenings. Doing so, according to Aristotle, is likelier to win praisebecause acting “in accordance with deliberate purpose is characteris-tic of a worthy person” (On Rhetoric, 1.9.32).64 In addition, Aristotlesupports obfuscating the truth when he instructs the rhetor “to speakin universal terms of what is not universal,” which is “especiallysuitable in bitter complaint and great indignation” (2.29.10). Further,Aristotle writes in the Rhetoric:

Another [topic], for the accuser, is to find fault with some big thingbriefly after praising some little thing at length or, after setting forthmany good things [about the opponent], to find fault with the one thingthat bears on the case. Such [speakers] are most artful and most unjust;for they seek to harm by saying good things, mingling them with bad.

3.15.10

It would seem that that by approving of erroneous argumentation,Aristotle condones emotional manipulation; listeners are moved de-ceptively to experience emotions.

62Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, cited in n. 12, above, 40, 47–48, 201.63Sprute, “Emotions in Context,” cited in n. 54, above, 125; Wardy, “Might is the

Truth and It Shall Prevail?” cited in n. 32, above, 74–76.64Aristotle provides another example of how to mislead an audience in the

Rhetoric (1.9.28–29).




When emotions result from false arguments, however, cannotthe “incorrect” emotions be changed or eliminated when counteredby truthful arguments? And if “misplaced” emotions are likely tobe altered by the more truthful speaker’s arguments, is Aristotlestill responsible (or equally responsible) for condoning emotionalmanipulation? As Garver states: “When an emotion is translated intoan argument it becomes defeasible.” Therefore, the “false” emotioncan be diminished or removed by hearers analyzing the speaker’sargument itself.65 Aristotle appears to believe that faulty argumentswill likely be defeated, all things being equal, because “the trueand just are by nature stronger than their opposites” (On Rhetoric,1.1.12). The audience is liable to “detect the fallaciousness of apparententhymemes not by finding hidden motives but by looking moreclosely at the argument qua argument.”66

For defenders of Aristotle’s artistic rhetoric, it seems that Aristo-tle can be largely shielded from moral culpability in both categories ofemotional manipulation, confirming the view that Aristotle eclipsesCicero as an exemplar of the moral use of rhetorical emotions. First,Aristotle can be said to evade the consequentialist critique of rhetoric;appeals to emotions that are largely conformable to reason shouldnot prevent auditors from perceiving their good, whether justice oreconomic self-interest. Incorrect beliefs that give rise to emotions,even beliefs that are purposefully falsified by the speaker, can be rea-soned about, thereby diminishing this threat of manipulation. Sec-ond, Aristotle appears less vulnerable to the critique that rhetoricundermines listeners’ autonomous decision making. If we assumethat the Aristotelian speaker’s auditors keep their wits about them,even if emotionally moved, then they retain their freedom of judg-ment. The audience’s consideration of the rhetorical arguments actsas a suitable counterweight to emotional manipulation.

Listeners, though, do not always detect fallacious arguments andwill, at times, allow themselves to be manipulated. Garsten, for exam-ple, cites Aristotle’s example of judicial oratory, where jurors judge“other people’s business,” unlike the deliberative genre, where mem-bers of the audience vote on laws or policies that affect them. In therhetoric of the courtroom, jurors, lacking a direct interest in the out-come of the case, seek to be charmed by speakers, “listening merelyfor their own pleasure [pros charin]” and allowing “their own pleasure

65Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, cited in n. 12, above, 134, 119; Nussbaum, “Aristotleon Emotions and Rational Persuasion,” cited in n. 3, above, 306.

66Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, cited in n. 12, above, 162.




or pain [to idio hedu e luperon]” to distort their judgment (Aristotle,“Art” of Rhetoric, 1.1.10, 1.1.7).67 Thus, Aristotle commends well-runstates and institutions, like the Athenian Areopagus, which forbidsspeech (e.g., emotional appeals) that is “outside the subject” (Aris-totle, On Rhetoric, 1.1.5). The Areopagus was an elite body, composedof the wealthiest Athenian citizens.68 For Aristotle, however, Athe-nian juries’ decisions are often influenced by irrelevant emotionalappeals.69 As Garsten relates, in judicial rhetoric, when listeners donot scrutinize the speaker’s arguments, Aristotle finds the listeners tobe principally responsible for being emotionally manipulated; the au-dience is complicit in its own manipulation by choosing to listen forits pleasure. That the audience’s desire to be charmed minimizes theorator’s moral responsibility is plausible.70 Here we have emotionalmanipulation, but of a lower order.

Although Aristotle relies on the force of the argument to safe-guard hearers from emotional manipulation, emotions instilled by ar-gument cannot always be removed by counter-argument, and, there-fore, “false” emotions can still manipulate even in artistic rhetoric.As Nancy Sherman points out, “emotions don’t reform at the beckand call of reason.”71 On the contrary, “they cling tenaciously in theface of a considered desire or willing to turn them around.”72 Per-sonal experience shows the pitfalls of assuming that emotions canbe counted upon to respond to rational argument. We may continueto feel hatred, anger, love, and other emotions after being shownthat the beliefs from which these emotions derived are no longer—

67Aristotle 1926, 1.1.10, 1.1.7; Garsten, Saving Persuasion, cited in n. 5, above, 122.68D. S. Allen, The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 44.69When Athena, as head of the Areopagus, justifies her decision in the Eumenides

(in favor of Orestes and Apollo against the Furies), she speaks outside the subject,relying on an irrelevant argument: she is “always for the male” because “[t]here isno mother anywhere who gave me birth” (Aeschylus, Oresteia, trans. R. Lattimore[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953], 739–42; Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric,cited in n. 12, above, 105–106. Thus, Athenians themselves seem to have entertaineddoubts about whether any institution can forbid speaking outside the subject. Wallacecites the view that speakers did not limit themselves to speaking only on the crimebefore them (R. Wallace, The Areopagos Council, to 307 B.C. (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 258, n.111).

70Garsten, Saving Persuasion, cited in n. 5, above, 121–22. The audience’s desireto be charmed, however, is an insignificant part of Aristotle’s analysis of rhetoric,in contrast to Cicero’s.

71N. Sherman, “Emotional Agents,” in M. P. Levine, ed., The Analytic Freud:Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2000), 154–76 (p. 156).

72See also Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, cited in n. 4, above, 31–32.




or never were—true. As psychoanalytic theory indicates, even if anemotion has cognitive content and may be intentionally modified,the source of the emotion may not be apparent. Surface emotionshave roots in the unconscious: “Rage at you may really be about rageat myself, fretful love may be grounded in hidden fears of inferiority,enmity may be a defence against too close an attachment,” and soon.73 Therefore, a speaker who incites certain emotions through falseor faulty argumentation may tap into preexisting primitive drivesthat resist factually correct arguments. Although the unconscioussources of some emotions may become intellectually transparent,modifying these emotions is a far more onerous task than can be per-formed by rhetorical argument. The upshot is that the widespreadtrust in Aristotle’s rationalistic approach to protect against manip-ulation is misplaced. Emotions do not respond as easily to cognitivemodification a la Aristotle’s enthymemes as his supporters suggest.

Exemplifying emotional manipulation that was virtually im-mune to counter-argument were the Willie Horton advertisements,which appeared in the George H. W. Bush–Michael Dukakis presi-dential race of 1998.74 William “Willie” Horton was an African Amer-ican man convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life im-prisonment in a Massachusetts state prison, without the possibility ofparole. Following a weekend furlough, from which he did not return,Horton raped a woman and assaulted her fiance, both of whom wereWhite. The pro-Bush camp, through speeches and, most effectively,a series of television advertisements, attacked Dukakis, governor ofMassachusetts when Horton was released, for supporting the fur-lough program that enabled a dangerous criminal to commit rapeand assault. These advertisements were highly effective in depictingDukakis as a liberal who was “soft on crime.”

Apropos of the guiding end of rhetoric, the Willie Horton adspresent arguments. Taken as a whole, the ads argue that Dukakisopposes the death penalty, supports the furlough program, and thatthe program, during Dukakis’s first two terms, furloughed 268 con-victs who escaped. The ads contend that Bush, contrary to Dukakis,supports the death penalty for those convicted of first-degree mur-der, suggesting that, under Bush, Horton would have been executed

73Sherman, “Emotional Agents,” cited in n. 71, above, 157.74The information about the Willie Horton advertisements is primarily based on

K. H. Jamieson, Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1992), 15–42, and T. Mendelberg, The Race Card: Campaign Strategy,Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,2001), 134–68.




rather than furloughed. The implications of the commercials’ argu-ments were that Dukakis was soft on crime, Bush was tough on crime,and that Dukakis was at least indirectly responsible for the rape andassault committed by Horton after being furloughed.

The Dukakis campaign and the press criticized the ads as falseor, at best, misleading. Critics of the ads pointed out that Dukakisinherited the furlough program from his Republican predecessor;that of the 268 escapees from the furlough program, only four hadbeen convicted of first-degree murder; and that Horton was theonly one of the escapees who went on to commit rape. In addition,the federal government, during the Reagan-Bush administration,had its own furlough program for convicted felons, and “[u]nderthe terms in effect under the Reagan-Bush administration, Hortonwould have been eligible for furlough.”75 Despite these and othercounter-arguments, the public’s fear of Dukakis as too liberal oncrime continued unabated. A nine-member focus group meetingin Dallas in early November 1998 (but typical of the experiencewith similar focus groups) was shown evidence documenting thegeneral success of the Massachusetts furlough program and theexceptionality of the Horton case. Although the group members weresplit 5–4 in early September in favor of Dukakis, they were now 7–2in favor of Bush. The Willie Horton ads had done their damage, andevidence refuting the ads did not sway the focus group members.76

Likewise, Garver writes: “Many voters reported responding to theWillie Horton advertisements by saying, ‘I know that it’s an unfair ad,and that it’s wrong to blame Dukakis for a program a lot of states use;still, I’m voting for Bush on the strength of that ad.’”77 Artistic rhetoricwas by the voters’ own accounts insufficient to change minds. TheWillie Horton ads elicited emotions in viewers that were not readilyresponsive to cognitive modification.

The Willie Horton commercials evoke emotions, like fear, that,from a psychoanalytic view, have ideational content, albeit contentthat is at least partly unconscious. Clearly, the fears evoked by the adswere not only initiated by verbal arguments, but also instigated bythe first ad’s use of a close-up mug shot of Horton that flashes on thescreen. (Subsequent commercials, which did not show any pictures ofHorton, could rely on viewers’ seeing the initial commercial or newsclips about it.) With the addition of Horton’s picture, fears of generic

75Jamieson, Dirty Politics, cited in n. 74, above, 40.76Jamieson, Dirty Politics, cited in n. 74, above, 31–33.77Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, cited in n. 12, above, 161.




crime were compounded by unconscious drives linked to race, likefears and fantasies about the rape of White women by Black men.78

And belief in psychoanalytic theory is not a prerequisite to acceptingthat race played a major role in the influence of the ads. Independentof any assumptions about unconscious drives, deeply rooted irra-tional prejudices about race are generally acknowledged as havingplayed a major role in the ads’ influence on the public.79 In addition,the style and delivery of the Willie Horton ads—we have alreadyseen that Aristotle recognizes that style and delivery may incite emo-tions without the hearer’s initial cognitive appraisal—affected voters’feelings. Consistent with conventional journalistic norms, the com-mercials are “dramatic, personal, concise, visual, and take the formof narrative.”80 Thus, the Willie Horton ads, independent of content,were vested with the authority of television news.

Rather than presenting factual arguments that voters could con-sider rationally, the Willie Horton ads were emotionally manipula-tive when judged by Klemp’s conditions of manipulation: the adsappealed to voters’ covert or irrational tendencies, and they wereintentional. Klemp himself sees these ads as covert forms of ma-nipulation, whereas Garver judges them as overtly manipulative.81

I believe that there are elements of both types of manipulation, asviewers were aware that some emotional appeals influenced theirelectoral decisions despite knowing that these appeals were manipu-lative, but they were also unaware of other manipulative techniquesthat drove their electoral choices. As for the intentionality of the ma-nipulation, careful analysis of the Willie Horton commercials leavelittle doubt that the Bush campaign intended “to employ the racecard but to deny that it was doing so.”82

78On psychoanalysis as a means of understanding racial prejudice, see S. Clarke,Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (London: Palgrave, 2003), 59–175.

79Jamieson, Dirty Politics, cited in n. 74, above, 34.80Jamieson, Dirty Politics, cited in n. 74, above, 17.81Klemp, “When Rhetoric Turns Manipulative,” cited in n. 5, above, 66. The

voters, Garver (Aristotle’s Rhetoric, cited in n. 12, above) concludes, were not deceived,but rhetorically manipulated (161). In general, Garver claims that because emotionalappeals in Aristotle “are intentional and argumentative, they do not rely essentiallyon deception” (134).

82Mendelberg, The Race Card, cited in n. 74, above, 137, 138–44. Although theBush campaign almost certainly intended to play the race card, I do not think itpossible to distinguish artistic from inartistic rhetoric based on speaking outside thesubject. In the Willie Horton commercials, as in other examples of speech purportedlyoutside the subject, there is no practical way to determine the line between what isinside and outside the subject. Thus, Garver (cited in n. 12, above) states that external




The Willie Horton ads are noteworthy as recent examples of ef-fective emotional manipulation. They are not, however, exceptional.Like other instances of emotional manipulation, these commercialsimpede members of an audience from 1) autonomous decision mak-ing, which is 2) in their best interests—both moral wrongs associatedwith emotional manipulation. Taking the Willie Horton ads, again,as an example, the arguments, imagery, style, and delivery in thesecommercials unleashed unconscious forces and racial prejudices thathindered voters from choosing freely, even as voters sometimes con-ceded that they knew they were being manipulated. And the com-mercials focused voters’ attentions on an exceptional instance thathad little to no importance for their future well-being and awayfrom other issues that would affect voters, e.g., the economy, foreignpolicy, taxation, social and economic inequalities, and welfare. Oncethe commercials’ producers or, in rhetoric more broadly, the speak-ers intent on manipulating listeners, succeed in their goals, they aremorally culpable for this manipulation. Why, given that Aristotle inthe Rhetoric neither precludes the conditions for emotional manipu-lation nor morally opposes such manipulation, should not Aristotleshare in this culpability? I contend that he does.

Aristotle’s artistic norms for rhetoric do not, as I have demon-strated, protect against emotional manipulation. But what if theyhad? Garver and Garsten, for example, appear satisfied with a rhetor-ical framework in which the rhetors are free of moral obligation intheir emotional appeals. I question, however, whether most of ustoday would be content without any moral obligation. Perhaps wethink that politicians who rely on institutional norms without moralobligation are less likely to act morally. Or we may sense that notvesting politicians with moral duties is just wrong. Thus, in the Dis-courses on Livy, Machiavelli approves of institutional arrangements tocheck corruption, like Rome’s balancing of patricians and plebeiansagainst each other (Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 1.4).83 Neverthe-less, the absence of personal moral obligation in his politics makesMachiavelli, for many if not most, an ethically dubious characterat best.

regulations that distinguish speech inside and outside the subject are impossible toformulate. “What is ‘outside the subject’ is a judgment only the audience can make”(39), and therefore will vary with the audience. Whether an argument exists or not,however, can be discerned.

83N. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. H. C. Mansfield and N. Tarcov(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).




Aristotle recognizes ethical requirements, and the orator mustact ethically, if he is to be a virtuous man. These, however, areexternal moral rules, i.e., there is nothing specifically “rhetorical,”about the ethical criteria. The ethical standards governing the oratorare identical to those governing anyone else. “There is no ethics ofrhetoric, there is only an ethics of rhetoricians, and that is just ethicsitself.”84 Can emotions be virtuous, according to Aristotle? Whichemotional appeals does Aristotle find ethical? Does he think thevirtuous person is ever justified in manipulating others’ emotionally?These are interesting questions, but beyond the scope of this articleor of the analysis of Aristotelian rhetoric. They are questions aboutAristotelian virtue and ethics, which Aristotle himself distinguishesfrom techne like rhetoric.

Cicero and the Morality of Emotion

Emotional Appeals in Romulus’ Cesspool

If Aristotle’s appeals to pathos, discussed in the previous section,lend themselves to emotional manipulation, how much more do Ci-cero’s emotional incitements? Unlike Aristotle, Cicero, particularlyvia Antonius in De oratore, explicitly counsels orators to stimulate ve-hement emotions in order to prevent the audience’s members fromthinking rationally. And, Antonius observes, “some pretty clever pre-cepts can be given for manipulating human feelings and for capturingpeople’s good will” (On the Ideal Orator, 2.32; emphasis added). De-spite what seems damning evidence against Cicero, however, I willshow why his position on the rhetorical emotions is less manipulativethan it appears and, most important, how Cicero, in contrast to Aris-totle, provides a vision of a moral rhetoric that eschews emotionalmanipulation.

The exaggerated significance that Cicero attributes to ethos and,especially, pathos is itself the starting point in extenuating the chargeagainst Cicero’s rhetoric as manipulative; his description of the om-nipotence of emotional appeals is exaggerated. We have already seenthat Cicero explicates the emotions antithetically, at times empha-sizing its opposition to, at times focusing on its consistency with,reason. Likewise, Cicero offers two contrasting viewpoints on the or-ator’s eliciting of emotions. On the one hand, he presents the orator aswielding pathos and ethos to overpower his listeners and to lead them

84Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, cited in n. 12, above, 229.




to adopt the outlook he wishes. From this perspective, the oratordominates the audience, manipulating it as he sees fit. On the otherhand, Cicero also represents the public speaker as evoking emotionssincerely to an audience that can, in general, discern the truth and thatelects on its own to be appealed to with vehement emotions. In thisscenario, the members of the audience are not controlled by the oratoras much as they control the orator themselves. Cicero depicts the twoopposing viewpoints by relying on argument in utramque partem. Heopts for this rhetorical exercise, partly, “because [he] found it gave thebest practice in oratory,” i.e., it allowed the orator to see the strengthsand weaknesses of not only his own position, but that of his opponent(Tusculan Disputations, 2.9). He also selects this type of argumenta-tion because he considers truth to be multiplex, and arguing differentsides points up different aspects of the truth.85 Thus, Cicero character-izes the orator as manipulating the audience emotionally and as beingdominated by the audience because each characterization reflects anelement of the rhetorical situation.86

To present each position most strongly, Cicero (or his interlocu-tors) must argue each standpoint robustly, even to the point of exag-geration. For Cicero (On the Ideal Orator, 3.80), “the true, the perfect,the one and only oratory” will be able to “in every case unfold twoopposing speeches” with “the vigor that is acquired in the forum,” asis “our practice of speaking.” It should not be surprising, then, thatCicero argues for the orator’s ability to overpower listeners emo-tionally in the most emphatic terms. The eloquence of the grandstyle, the most emotional style, Cicero writes, “has power to swaymen’s minds and move them in every possible way” (Orator, 97; seealso 125, 128). Cicero’s hyperbole—Can the orator’s use of emotionalappeals truly move people in every possible way?—not only usesargument in utramque partem effectively, but also echoes Gorgias’inflated claims about the power of rhetoric (Plato, Gorgias, 456a–c)

85Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, cited in n. 6, above, 37; Sloane, Onthe Contrary, cited in n. 6, above, 30–31.

86Wayne Rebhorn acknowledges that Cicero portrays the orator as dominatingover the judges, but considers this portrayal “a kind of ‘minority view.’” Morecommon, Rebhorn argues, is Cicero’s placing “the judge metaphorically above thecompeting speakers” (W. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and theRenaissance Discourse of Rhetoric [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995], 34–35, 38–39). Given the prevalence, in De oratore, of statements supporting the orator’s useof emotions to direct the audience, I think Cicero’s emphasis on the oratoricaldomination of listeners is more than a minority view, but an important side of hismore complete view.




and of the orator’s words as “bringers-on of pleasure and takers-offof pain” (Gorgias of Leontini, 10). Despite his differences with thesophists, including Gorgias, Cicero shares with them, particularlyGorgias, the attribution to rhetoric, especially to emotional appeals,of near magical force.

Against his just-stated view that the orator controls his audi-ence emotionally, Cicero develops the contrary standpoint, begin-ning with Antonius’s explanation of how, when persuading othersthrough pathos, he also experiences the same emotions himself. Beforedescribing his own emotionalism, though, Antonius hails Crassus forbeing stirred by the passions he induces in his listeners: “it seems tome [Antonius states] that you are not just setting the jurors on fire, butare ablaze yourself [ipse ardere]” (On the Ideal Orator, 2.188). Antoniusthen details his own emotional transformation:

I swear to you that every time I have ever wanted to arouse grief orpity or envy or hate in the hearts of jurors through my oratory, I wasinvariably, while working to stir the jurors, thoroughly stirred myself bythe same feelings to which I was trying to lead them. . . . For no materialis so easy to kindle, that it can catch fire unless fire is actually appliedto it; likewise, no mind is so susceptible to an orator’s power, that itcan be set on fire unless the orator who approaches it is burning andall ablaze himself.

2.189–90

Cicero has been read, cynically, as making Antonius into a sort of“method actor,” who creates in himself the thoughts and emotionsof his public character to successfully move his audience.87 But ifwinning is part of Cicero’s goal in explicating “ipse ardere,” so toois characterizing the orator as sincere.

Cicero presents ipse ardere as signifying the orator’s authenticity.For example, Crassus is said to feel “the self-same emotions” ashis hearers because of the sincerity and truth of his thoughts. Andwhen Antonius describes his own emotional condition, he declaresthat although among great experts who are his closest friends, i.e., theinterlocutors in De oratore, “I have no reason to lie about myself,” and“I swear to you that every time I ever wanted to arouse [emotions]in the hearts of jurors through my oratory, I was invariably . . .thoroughly stirred myself by the same feelings to which I was tryingto lead them” (On the Ideal Orator, 2.188–90).

87M. Zerba, “Love, Envy, and Pantomimic Morality in Cicero’s De Oratore,”Classical Philology 98 (2003): 299–321 (p. 308).




The reasons Antonius offers for why an orator would shuninauthentic emotions minimize, even stand in opposition to, theGorgianic tradition of rhetoric as magically omnipotent. “Now if, forinstance, the grief that we must assume would somehow be unrealand pretended, and if this mode of speaking would involve nothingbut deception and imitation and feigning,” Antonius explains, “thenwe would probably require some quite powerful art” (On the IdealOrator, 2.189). The art that Cicero boasted could sway men’s mindsand move them in every possible way is now not quite up to the task;rhetoric is not sufficiently powerful to succeed when its practitionersare not motivated by genuine emotions.

Cicero highlights the authenticity of the orator’s emotions bycontrasting the actor and orator. The authenticity of the orator’semotions, however, entails more than feeling the emotions that onedesires others to see. As Antonius observes, actors may, in a certainsense, assume a character’s emotions, e.g., when they depict “theancient misfortunes and unreal, fictional griefs of heroes.” Actors’emotions, however, are like masks, reflections of others, but not trueto themselves. Thus, Antonius contraposes his genuineness to theactor’s spuriousness: “I am not the actor of another’s character, butthe author of my own” (On the Ideal Orator, 2.193–94). Manipulation,Cicero implies here, cannot coexist with such authenticity. The au-thentic orator possesses no hidden agenda. The orator here evokes noemotional appeals that conflict with rational arguments: “the powerof the thoughts you [the orator] treat and of the commonplaces youhandle when you are speaking is great enough to preclude any needfor pretence and deception” (2.190). The Ciceronian speaker as pre-sented in De oratore’s account of ipse ardere does not resemble thecrafty emotional manipulator described elsewhere in De oratore. In-stead, he is a person whose internal self and external persona isidentical.

Like Aristotle, Cicero believes that, in general, truth ultimatelyprevails. He voices this belief most explicitly in the person of GaiusLaelius, the dominant speaker in De amicitia, Cicero’s dialogue onfriendship. There, Laelius affirms that “by the exercise of care . . . , ev-erything pretended and false may be distinguished from what is gen-uine and true.” More specifically, in spite of his intermittently voicedcontempt for the lower classes,88 Cicero, through Laelius, evinces histrust in the populus’s ability to discern between manipulative and

88N. Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1988), 95–97.




moral political speakers: “A public assembly [contio], though com-posed of very ignorant men, can, nevertheless, usually see the dif-ference between a demagogue—that is, a smooth-tongued, shallowcitizen—and one who has stability, sincerity, and weight” (Cicero,De amicitia, 95–96).89 The demagogue—assentator—to which Laeliusrefers, is a flatterer who seeks political advantage by “insinuat[ing]himself into the favour of the assembly” (95). Although Laelius doesnot expressly speak of the assentator’s emotional manipulation, ma-nipulation through flattery typically elicits pleasant emotions. And,as noted earlier, pleasure (or pain) is a concomitant of emotion, atleast according to Aristotle’s definition of pathe. The implication ofthis discussion in De amicitia is that emotional manipulation is usuallyineffective in swaying a public audience, pace Cicero’s own contraryviews elsewhere.

We have already seen that Aristotle acknowledges that, in judi-cial oratory, the jurors’ desire for pleasure makes them vulnerableto emotional manipulation, which, as Garsten interprets Aristotle,makes them complicit in their own manipulation. I argued furtherthat this complicity mitigates the orator’s moral culpability. Like Aris-totle, Cicero recognizes that listeners are not simply passive thingsmanipulated by crafty public speakers. Far more than Aristotle, how-ever, Cicero adverts to the audience’s role in impelling the speaker toemploy vehement emotional appeals. The people crave the variedemotions the orator can evoke in them:

The listening throng is delighted, is carried along by [the orator’s] words,is in a sense bathed deep in delight. . . . They feel now joy now sorrow,are moved to laughter now to tears; they show approbation detestation,scorn aversion; they are drawn to pity to shame to regret; are stirredto anger wonder, hope fear. . . .

Cicero, Brutus, 18890

89See also Cicero, De amicitia, trans. W. A. Falconer (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1923): “on the stage, I mean on the platform [in contione], where there isthe greatest opportunity for deception and disguise, truth yet prevails, provided itis made plain and brought into the light of day . . . ‘’ (97). The contio was the non-voting informal assembly in which the orator spoke before the people. The contio metbefore formal voting political assemblies were convened or at any time a presidingmagistrate decided to convene such a meeting (R. Morstein-Marx, Mass Oratory andPolitical Power in the Late Roman Republic [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2004], 7–12).

90Cicero, Brutus, trans., G. L. Hendrickson (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1939), 188.




And the grand style, which I previously described as the most emo-tional, is the style “which all look up to and admire” (Orator, 97).Its antithesis, the Stoic style of speech, is “unsuitable for the orator”because it is “meager, dry, cramped, and disjointed.” Ciceronian ora-tory, however, “must be adapted to the ears of the crowd,” which,contra the Stoic’s way of talking, includes pleasing the public andstirring its emotions (On the Ideal Orator, 2.159). Because the audienceexpected, even respected, “loud ostentations of emotion,” it was pos-sible, in Cicero’s day, for the orator to “get very close to, or even past,the edge of what we would consider plain manipulation, withoutlosing one’s credibility.”91

Thus, Cicero concludes his case for the audience’s control of theorator, which he offers in opposition to his alternate view of the oratormanipulating the audience emotionally.92 How persuasive, however,is his defense of orators as not emotionally manipulative? His char-acterization of the authentic orator, who experiences the emotions heelicits in others, may be a useful corrective to the stereotype of thepolitician who employs emotions as expediency dictates. Neverthe-less, although not all politicians cynically exploit emotions, enoughdo, so that Cicero has not eliminated the problem of emotional ma-nipulation by banking on the emotional authenticity of politicians.As for Cicero’s faith in the people’s capacity to distinguish between ademagogue and a trustworthy politician, we too, as democrats, trustthat the electorate can generally differentiate between politicians whohabitually manipulate us and those who do not. But the citizenry isconfounded enough by emotional manipulation—witness again theeffectiveness of the Willie Horton advertisements—that the problemof emotional manipulation in politics remains.

Cicero’s observation that the people want the orator to excitethem emotionally, however, is of greater relevance. The audiencemembers’ wish for vehement emotional appeals mitigates the ora-tor’s moral culpability because they are partners in, and arguably ini-tiators of, their own manipulation. The people’s involvement in theirmanipulation, though, does not free the manipulating orator frommoral responsibility. Even if Cicero, in one side of his argument,overstates the orator’s power to sway listeners with pathos, public

91Wisse, Ethos and Pathos from Aristotle to Cicero, cited in n. 10, above, 263–64.92I am not arguing that Cicero structures his case for a rhetoric that is not

emotionally manipulative in the manner of the examples and quotes I present. Rather,I maintain that the responses I attribute to him are consistent with the positions hetakes.




speakers can and do emotionally coerce audiences. Public speakersengage in such manipulation not only covertly, but even overtly, suchas when listeners know they are being moved emotionally, yet arestill exploited because of their irrational tendencies.93 That audiencesdesire to be stimulated with strong emotions does point up theirpower over the orator and opens up the possibility of the peoplerestricting emotionally manipulative appeals. Orators must complywith their audience’s wishes: “The eloquence of orators has alwaysbeen controlled by the good sense of the audience, since all whodesire to win approval have regard to the goodwill of their auditors,and shape and adapt themselves completely according to this andto their opinion and approval” (Orator, 24). The strength of Cicero’sargument here for popular control of the orator reflects a truth aboutthe rhetorical situation: public speakers influence audiences, but, inthe final analysis, orators cannot succeed without their audience’sapproval. This power of audience over speaker, as will be seen, isembodied in the principle of decorum.

Like Aristotle’s discussion of the rhetorical emotions, Cicero’saccount lacks moral obligation. But Cicero transmutes the common-sensical recognition that orators must adapt their oratory into a moralvirtue. This change is embodied in “decorum,” which denotes thatfor speech to be effective it must fit in with (decet) “the characteristicfeatures of the speaker, subject, audience, occasion, or medium.”94

Cicero summarizes this concept when he writes: “I shall begin by ap-proving of one who can observe what is fitting [deceat]. This, indeed, isthe form of wisdom that the orator must especially employ—to adapthimself to occasions and persons” (Orator, 123). Decorum determineswhich emotional appeals are legitimate or appropriate according tothe situation.

Although decorum is a marginal concern for Aristotle comparedto Cicero,95 the Stagirite anticipates Cicero’s use of decorum, in theRhetoric, prescribing there that style should be “neither flat nor abovethe dignity of the subject, but appropriate [prepon]”; it must fit thespeaker and subject consistent with the proper mean (Aristotle, OnRhetoric, 3.2.1–3). (Cicero translates the Greek “to prepon” as “deco-rum” [Orator, 70].) But although Ciceronian decorum includes the

93Klemp, “When Rhetoric Turns Manipulative,” cited in n. 5, above, 63.94R. Hariman, “Decorum,” in T. O. Sloane, ed., Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2001), 199–209 (p. 199).95Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, cited in n. 12, above, 48.




need to adapt one’s speech to the dignity of subject and speaker, it(unlike the Aristotelian concept) also entails conforming one’s speechboth to the demands of context, i.e., the audience, and of place andtime.96 Accordingly, Cicero accommodates emotional appeals to therequirements of the situation, as decorum dictates; Aristotle doesnot.97 Perhaps most important for our present purposes, however, isthat to prepon in the Rhetoric is not a moral concept.

For Cicero, decorum imposes a moral duty on the orator to ac-commodate his thought and language, including his emotional ap-peals, to propriety. Cicero, in his rhetorical works, does not explicitlydelineate decorum as a moral concept. Rather, he develops decorumas an obligation more ambiguously rooted in aesthetic sensibilitiesand the practical necessities of persuasion. Nevertheless, even in hisrhetorical writings, Cicero alludes to the ethical character of decorum.For example, Cicero links decorum in rhetoric to the moral duty ofpropriety (Orator, 72). Cicero also grounds decorum in the sense ofcommunity (communis sensus), which he vests with moral force.98 It isin De officiis, however, that Cicero most fully develops decorum as amoral virtue and duty.99 As Cicero argues there, decorum “cannot beseparated from what is honourable: for what is seemly [decet] is hon-ourable [honestum], and what is honourable is seemly” (On Duties,

96R. Kaster, “Decorum,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the AmericanPhilological Association, Philadelphia, PA, 1982, 2–3.

97Aristotle uses “emotion” differently, based on the intellectual category of hisanalysis, e.g., ethics, rhetoric, dialectic, or psychology. In On Rhetoric, for instance,Aristotle defines the emotion “anger” as “desire, accompanied by distress, for con-spicuous retaliation because of a conspicuous slight . . .” (2.2.1). In De anima (trans.J. A. Smith [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], 403a25–b1), where Aristo-tle is interested in a physical definition, he defines it as a boiling of the blood orwarm substance around the heart. These definitional differences derive from distinctintellectual aims, however, and are not determined by decorum.

98G. Remer, “The Classical Orator as Political Representative: Cicero and theModern Concept of Representation,” Journal of Politics 72 (2010): 1063–82 (pp. 1070–71); D. Kapust, “Cicero on Decorum and the Morality of Rhetoric,” European Journal ofPolitical Theory 10 (2011): 92–112 (pp. 95–100).

99Decorum is the fourth cardinal virtue (after wisdom, social virtue, and great-ness of spirit) Cicero lists in De officiis (1991, 1.93–151), and is a duty, in the sense that itis “an act that is ethically required and the omission of which is ethically forbidden,”which refers to duties (officia) (like decorum) derived from justice (A. R. Dyck, ACommentary on Cicero, De Legibus [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996],7–8). On the unique status of decorum in De officiis, see M. Schofield, “The FourthVirtue,” in W. Nicgorski, ed., Cicero’s Practical Philosophy (Notre Dame: University ofNotre Dame Press, 2012), 43–57.




1.93–94). And Cicero applies decorum specifically to oratory, in Deofficiis, when discussing the roles “we assume for ourselves by ourown decision,” i.e., our vocations (On Duties, 1.115).100

For Cicero, decorum is the primary moral standard for emo-tional appeals in political speech. In the Roman Republic, the twomain arenas for deliberative or political oratory are the contio andthe Senate. Each body has its own decorum controlling emotionalappeals. In the contio, most appeals are to the vehement emotions(On the Ideal Orator, 2.337). In De oratore, Cicero associates the pas-sionate speech called for in the contio with “some grander, somemore brilliant mode of oratory,” which is required by “the pas-sionate emotions of the crowd” (2.337). The audience at a publicmeeting, which ranged as high as 15,000 to 20,000 listeners,101 pro-vided the orator with his “greatest stage” (Cicero, On the Ideal Or-ator, 2.338), a setting that naturally stirs orators “to employ a moredistinguished mode of oratory” (ornatius dicendi genus). As previ-ously discussed, the orator’s use of ethos and pathos before publicassemblies is required by the audience, which delights in experi-encing a spectrum of emotions. The propriety of which emotionsto elicit and when they should be incited, Cicero suggests, is ul-timately settled upon by the “assent of the multitude and the ap-probation of the people”; their verdict, not the opinions of the ex-perts or even of the orator himself, is determinative (Brutus, 185–86,188–89).

This contional mode of oratory anticipates what Cicero wouldcome to term in the Orator (20, 69) the “grandiloquent” (“grand”) or“vigorous” style, the most vehement of the three styles of oratory(plain, middle, and grandiloquent). The connection between, if notthe identity of, contional oratory and the high style is implied byCicero’s use of the same terms to describe them: ornatus (ornate)and gravis (stately) (On the Ideal Orator, 2.338, 2.337, 2.333; Orator, 97,99). Like the orator speaking at a contio, the orator employing thegrand style must be “trained and equipped to arouse and sway theemotions” (Orator, 20). In both forms of oratory, the speaker shouldaspire to attain the heights of eloquence.

100C. Gill, “Personhood and Personality: The Four-Personae Theory in Cicero DeOfficiis I,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 6 (1988): 169–99 (pp. 173–74).

101J. T. Ramsey, “Roman Senatorial Oratory,” in W. Dominik and J. Hall, eds., ACompanion to Roman Rhetoric (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 122–35 (p. 124).




The other setting for political oratory is the Senate. Because theSenate was a smaller deliberative institution, with usually 200 toslightly more than 400 members of the political elite attending,102 dif-ferent emotional appeals were considered appropriate for speechesto this body. In theory, at least, rhetoric in the Senate was more re-strained. As Antonius observes, a speaker’s advice in the Senate wasto be handled “with less display, for this is a wise council, and manyothers must be given the opportunity to speak” (On the Ideal Orator,2.333); speech in the Senate was to be free, or largely free, of pathosand affect.103 Based on Cicero’s published speeches to the Senate,however, pathos was in fact used. Invective, with its goal of turningthe audience’s emotions against the orator’s opponent, was a com-mon feature of senatorial oratory (Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum, 74).104

And even under optimal conditions, Cicero observes that “when thetopic [being discussed] is so important,” then copiousness (copia), the“nonrational” use of stylistic abundance, is needed either to win overthe Senate or supply it with information (On the Laws, 3.40; De legibus,3.40).

The emotional appeals Cicero deems appropriate in the contioand Senate reflect the decorum of these bodies in his own day. ButCicero is well aware of the corrupt condition of the late Roman Re-public. In a letter to Atticus, in which he criticizes “our friend Cato,”he writes of the rigid Stoic: “He speaks in the Senate as though hewere living in Plato’s Republic instead of Romulus’ cesspool” (Ci-cero, Letters to Atticus, vol. 1, letter 21).105 Cicero completed De oratorein 55 bce, during a period of political crisis, just three years after hisbanishment by the tribune Publius Clodius Pulcher. Emphasizinghis awareness of the Republic’s precariousness, Cicero sets De oratorein 91 bce, during another period of political crisis, when the RomanSenate was divided over the enfranchisement of Rome’s Italian allies.(The Social War between Rome and the Italians began just slightlyafter the dialogue was supposed to have taken place.) Because Ci-

102Ramsey, “Roman Senatorial Oratory,” cited in n. 101, above, 124.103D. Mack, Senatsreden und Volks redden bei Cicero (Wurzburg: K. Triltsch, 1937),

17.104Mack, Senatsreden und Volks redden bei Cicero, cited in n. 103, above, 82; Cicero,

Paradoxa Stoicorum, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942),74.

105Cicero, Letters to Atticus, vol. 1, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1999), letter 21.




cero sees himself as speaking to an audience, even in the Senate, thatis often poorly informed, insufficiently public-spirited, too willingto be entertained, and sometimes downright dishonest, he does nothesitate to overwhelm the audience with strong emotions in lieu ofapproaching them with more judicious speech.

But even if the audience participates in its own emotional ma-nipulation, as I noted above, the orator, as well as the rhetoricianwho promotes manipulative tactics, cannot elude moral responsi-bility. From Cicero’s perspective, the orator’s moral obligations aredetermined by decorum. (As already seen, Aristotle does not concernhimself, in the Rhetoric, with the public speaker’s moral obligations;the bounds of legitimate emotional appeals are determined by artis-tic norms, which the orator may or may not choose to follow.) ForCicero, the audience’s acceptance of vehement emotional appealsand the propriety of such appeals in his political context morallyjustify the kinds of appeals he recommends in De oratore. Cicero isespecially willing to yield on ethical norms when the welfare of theres publica is threatened. Thus, he contends in De officiis that assist-ing “one’s country . . . [takes] precedence in all duties.” Cicero notonly gives priority to the obligation to one’s country, he believes thatserving the interests of the country is honorable by definition (OnDuties, 3.90, 3.40). As an orator himself, Cicero viewed many of hispublic words and actions as dictated, and justified, by the good ofthe Republic.

As a general proposition, Cicero’s evaluating the morality ofemotional manipulation according to context seems reasonable. “Mo-ral evaluations of manipulation depend on context. . . . [T]he circum-stances of politics are complex, and situations will inevitably arisewhere manipulation is morally permissible.”106 Perhaps Cicero’s cir-cumstances sometimes demanded emotional manipulation. Still, thewillingness of orators, including Cicero, to use pathos, in its most ex-cessive forms, to achieve their ends should give us pause. When mov-ing an audience through violent emotions becomes the norm—as itdid for Cicero—rather than something exceptional, we are descend-ing into uncomfortable moral territory. Cicero, however, does notlimit himself to his own political conditions, but envisions a futurepolitical and legal community where political speech is not inclinedto lapse into emotional manipulation. I turn now to Cicero’s vision ofa different, better political reality and the shift in emotional appealsthat accompanies this vision.

106Klemp, “When Rhetoric Turns Manipulative,” cited in n. 5, above, 79.




A Better Decorum

Because the communis sensus changes over time, rhetorical proofs,such as appeals to the pathe, must change too. In De oratore, Antoniusasserts that “the fundamental requirement for speaking persuasivelyis to know the character of the community [mores civitatis]. Since [it]frequently changes, our mode of speaking should often change as well” (Onthe Ideal Orator, 2.337; emphasis added). As seen earlier, to preponin Aristotle excludes the orator’s need to adapt to different audi-ences. Aristotle does not direct rhetors to alter their pathetic appealsconsistent with changes within political communities.107

Cicero not only acknowledges the mutability of emotional ap-peals in deliberative oratory, he also advocates change. We find Ci-cero’s call for improved political speech in De legibus, the dialoguein which he presents a superior version of the Roman legal system.In line with Stoic thought of the first and second centuries bce, Ci-cero’s laws in De legibus refer to human legislation that prescribesintermediate appropriate actions (media officia), i.e., duties that canbe followed by imperfect humans—all humans who are not wisemen. In contrast to intermediate actions, perfectly appropriate ac-tions, termed “right actions,” are commanded by natural law, whichis only attainable by the wise man.108 This distinction between perfectand imperfect duties is reiterated in De officiis, where Cicero confirmsthat the duties he discusses in this book are “those that the Stoics call‘middle’ [media]. They are shared and widely accessible” (On Duties,3.14–16). Thus, the laws of De legibus, which includes rules aboutpolitical speech, and the ethical decorum of De officiis, which under-girds the moral nature of emotional appeals, are both connected tointermediate duties, relevant, as is rhetoric, for real and not idealhuman beings.

Cicero proposes a law in De legibus that departs significantlyfrom the guidelines for emotional appeals in De oratore. Cicero’sinitial submission of this law is concise: “Let those things whichare brought before the people or the senate be moderate [modica]”(On the Laws, 3.10). Cicero’s further excursus on this “important”

107Although I disagree with Sprute (cited in n. 54, 118–21), who argues thatAristotle recognizes in the Rhetoric two levels of rhetoric, ideal and normal, Sprute’saccount of Aristotle’s ideal rhetoric differs from Cicero’s superior oratory. For Sprute,Aristotle excludes all emotional appeals in ideal rhetoric; Cicero, even in his superiorrhetoric, does not.

108E. Asmis, “Cicero on Natural Law and the Laws of the State,” ClassicalAntiquity 27 (2008): 1–33 (pp. 2, 11–12, 15–16, 22).




and “excellent law” explains that by “moderate” he means “decent[modesta] and calm [sedata],” terms that connote speech quite differentfrom the political oratory of De oratore. Although contional oratory inDe oratore is intended to excite and incite the audience’s emotions,the political oratory of De legibus is designed to calm the audience.Take the term “modica,” which describes the milieu of the Senateand contio in De legibus. In the Orator, Cicero uses a form of “modica”repeatedly to denominate or characterize the middle style (21, 69, 95,98, 101), which he distinguishes from the grand style by its eschewing“the fiery force” of the high style and by the “even tenor of its way”(21). In this discussion of the middle style, Cicero pairs “modica”at least four times with some form of “temperatum,” which denotesself-restraint, the antithesis of both the “grand, impetuous, and fiery”high style (99) and its antecedent, the oratory of the contio. And likethe speech proposed in De legibus, which is calm [sedata], the middlestyle “proceeds in calm and peaceful [sedate placideque] flow” (92).Cicero’s goal of calmer political speech in De legibus, however, is nottantamount to the extirpation of emotional appeals from deliberativeoratory. Like the middle style, the political speech of De legibus isdesigned to be “moderate and tempered” (95), in language and in theeliciting of passions.

Unlike the orator of Cicero’s rhetorical works, who generallycontrols the audience to maneuver them as he sees fit—“to win overtheir inclinations, to drive them at will in one direction, and to drawthem at will from another” (On the Ideal Orator, 1.30)—the orator(actor) presiding over political meetings in De legibus is not drivento incite the audience members’ emotions or manipulate their wills.Although Cicero describes De legibus’s orator in similar language, asdirecting and shaping “not only the minds and wishes of his hearers,but almost their expressions as well” (3.40), the orator’s intentionhere is to calm emotions. As J. G. F. Powell interprets this passage, theorator directs the audience in the Senate and “in the popular assemblytoo. Now this is an excellent law because it keeps unruly demagoguesunder control. The preservation of moderate proceedings dependson the actor.”109 In arguing that Cicero’s goal here is to maintain

109Dyck cites Powell’s expectation of Cicero’s train of thought in our passage,as indicated in a letter to Dyck (Commentary on Cicero, cited in n. 99, above, p. 538).Although Aristotle lauds the Athenian Areopagus for barring irrelevant emotionalappeals from its judicial decisions, as noted above, the Areopagus was a judicial bodyrestricted to Athens’ highest classes, originally based on birth and later on wealth (S.Hornblower and A. Spawforth, “Areopagus,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary [Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 151–52). Aristotle does not envisage a popular




moderation, I am not asserting that he is concerned with fosteringindividual autonomy. More likely than not, he is primarily interestedin ensuring the state’s welfare.110 Regardless of his motivations, Cicerosupports moderate political speech, which is contrary to emotionalmanipulation.

The decorum mandated in De legibus, like the decorum of Cicero’srhetorical works, is grounded in the communis sensus. The “sense ofcommunity” in De legibus, however, is less transitory than that ofthe rhetorical works. Although Cicero describes the character of thecommunity in De oratore as changing frequently, in De legibus thecommunis sensus derives from the deeply rooted values of the com-munity, which are stable, if not immutable.111 Both De legibus, whichtreats near-ideal laws, and De republica, which discusses the idealstate, represent the sense of community as originating in the wisdomof the ancients, which is confirmed through long-standing commu-nal acceptance. For example, Cicero explains that the mos maiorum(the custom of the forefathers) was—until the widespread corrup-tion of his own day—respected by all, and preserved by the “greatmen” over the generations (On the Commonwealth, 5.1).112 Accordingto Cicero, the community’s acceptance of the Roman Constitution,like the mos maiorum, is grounded in enduring tradition. For Cicero,the Roman Constitution is “the organization of the State so wiselyinstituted by our ancestors” and is the best constitution ever becauseit represents the Romans’ “practical, collective wisdom,” its princi-ples having been tested over a long period of time (Cicero, Pro Sestio,137).113 Cicero reinforces the moral force of the Roman Constitution

judicial body in which manipulative emotions are actually excluded. In addition, itis doubtful whether the Areopagus, like other Athenian criminal courts, restrictedargumentation to the charge at issue (Wallace, The Areopagus Council, cited in n. 69,above, p. 124).

110See ensuing passage where Cicero (On the Laws, trans. J. E. G. Zetzel [Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press], 1999) condemns violence in politics because“[t]here is nothing more destructive for states, nothing more contrary to right andlaw . . .” (3.42).

111Cicero meant legislation for the best type of government to be lasting. “In hisLaws, Cicero aims to compose just such a body of law” (Asmis, “Cicero on NaturalLaw and the Laws of the State,” cited in n. 108, 24–25).

112P. A. Brunt, The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1988), 56–58; H. Roloff, Maiores bei Cicero (Gottingen: DieterichscheUniversitat, 1938).

113Cicero, Pro Sestio, trans. R. Gardner (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1958), 137; Asmis, “Cicero on Natural Law and the Laws of the State,” cited in n.108, 31.




by associating it with the Stoic natural law. For example, he has hisclose friend Atticus state, when referring to the Roman Constitu-tion, that “our laws are in accordance with nature; the wisdom ofour ancestors” (On the Laws, 2.62).114 According to Cicero, the RomanConstitution and the decorum of the ancient traditions, if not perfect,are still naturally just.

Cicero considers the emotionally restrained oratory of De leg-ibus to be superior to the passionate oratory of his rhetorical works.The code of laws Cicero presents in De legibus, including his law forpolitical speech, is intended to be as ideal a set of laws as attain-able by those who are not wise men. The decorum that controls thepolitical speaker in this dialogue is based on the sense of commu-nity derived from ancestral values, which is morally superior to theshort-lived decorum of the orator speaking during the Republic’s lastdays. Not only did Cicero believe in this more enduring decorum’smoral superiority, but we today—living during a period of intensepolitical partisanship—are likely to consider it morally preferable tothe decorum of Cicero’s time and, within limits, the standards ofpolitical speech today. The political speech enshrined in Cicero’s Delegibus avoids the immorality of emotional manipulation by toningdown emotions intended to overwhelm reasoned thought. It pro-motes good consequences—at least it does not hinder them—and itallows hearers to make their own decisions freely.

Cicero’s dream of restrained political speech anticipates the cur-rent calls for political civility. But like many current proponents ofcivility, Cicero has no clear plan for effecting the change of heartnecessary to implement his legislative proposal.115 Cicero’s reviseddecorum, implicit in his law, must be accepted by the people. Be-cause the auditors are the ultimate authority of decorum in rhetoric,Cicero is unwilling to impose his revised law on the audience. Ac-cordingly, in De legibus, Cicero responds to his friend Atticus, whoquestions the feasibility of gaining support for his proposed legisla-tion: “What I say does not refer to this senate or to men of the present,but to those of the future who may wish to obey these laws” (3.29; emphasisadded). If we turn to Cicero’s specific law regulating deliberative ora-tory, his contemporaries may not have supported its passage because

114That the Roman Constitution is in accordance with nature, i.e., natural law,does not mean that it is identical to natural law, which is “perfectly in accordancewith nature” (Asmis, “Cicero on Natural Law,” cited in n. 108, above, pp. 26–31).

115Cicero clearly believes that the exemplarity of good men will more likelyeffect change in the “character of states” than the reform of the people throughformal education (On the Laws, 3.29–32).




they largely delighted in emotional appeals. Likewise, and despiteprotestations to the contrary, today’s electorate is attracted to vehe-ment emotional appeals, or at least it is moved by them—consider,for example, the effectiveness of negative campaigning.

Conclusion

I conclude by revisiting the question of emotional manipulationin Aristotle and Cicero, adverting to those elements of the “Cicero-nian response” that make it more relevant today than Aristotle’s.Toward the beginning of this article, I took as my point of departureKlemp’s two essential conditions of emotional manipulation: 1) asa form of force and, 2) as intentional. I also highlighted two moralfaults of manipulation: 1) manipulation’s bad consequences for hear-ers and 2) its denial of autonomous decision making. Based on thescholarly literature and a superficial reading of both rhetoricians, Iconceded that Cicero appears far more open to charges of emotionalmanipulation than Aristotle. It has been my aim to demonstrate oth-erwise.

Emotional manipulation is a greater problem in Aristotle thaninitially appears. His rationalist approach to rhetoric, which largelyroots emotional appeals in argumentation, does not safeguard theaudience from false or irrational manipulative emotions. In addition,Aristotle suggests that pathos can be elicited by nonargumentativesources (e.g., style and delivery), which can themselves give rise tomanipulation. Further, Aristotle’s rhetorical norms are not moral, butare derived from the art’s internal ends. The Aristotelian orator quaorator is not morally bound to follow or avoid any specific practices,including the avoidance of excessive emotional appeals. True, theAristotelian orator qua free-born, adult, male citizen should be vir-tuous, but Aristotelian virtue is distinguishable from Aristotelianrhetoric. For Aristotle, what makes a person virtuous relative toemotion differs from what characterizes a good orator relative toemotion.

In contrast to Aristotle, Cicero condones emotional manipulationless than he initially appears. As I demonstrated, Cicero presents adouble-sided view of rhetoric, each side containing a portion of amore complex truth. He counters one claim that the orator can almostmagically manipulate audiences with another in which the audienceis seen as controlling the orator. By acknowledging the audienceas the ultimate decision maker, bolstered by its ability—even in con-tiones—to discern the truth, Cicero downplays what appears, in much




of his rhetorical writings, as the near-ubiquity of emotional manip-ulation. Moreover, the audience’s penchant for emotional stimula-tion diminishes the orator’s—and Cicero’s—moral responsibility forseeking to overwhelm the audience emotionally. Thus, although I, byand large, accept Klemp’s two conditions of manipulation, becausehe states them categorically (i.e., manipulation either does or doesnot exist), he ignores the presence of degrees of manipulation. Thefurther emotional appeals approach pure manipulation, the greaterthe manipulator’s culpability.116

Unlike Aristotle, Cicero grounds rhetoric in a morality based ondecorum. Because Cicero vests the orator with moral obligation, hespeaks to us in a way that Aristotle cannot. We do not compartmental-ize politicians’ speech and actions into a separate sphere with its ownamoral norms, as does Aristotle. We—even the cynical amongst us—expect that politicians are bound by, and should heed, their moralduties. Like Cicero, we want politicians to be restrained by moralrules, even if we grant, like Cicero, politicians’ moral duties some-times differ from those of the citizenry at large (On Duties, 1.113).117

Part of what we find troubling about Machiavelli, I believe, is thathis political actors are governed by the utile (the useful or expedient),but not also by the honestum (the moral).118

For us, as for Cicero, politicians must balance the two.Because Cicero’s rhetorical morality is based on decorum, how

the orator should employ emotion will vary with context. Thus, Cicerosuggests that moral standards are more permissive when the state’sexistence is threatened and stricter under healthier political condi-tions. His claim that vehement emotional appeals (that overshadowrational thinking) are sometimes morally justifiable is worth carefulconsideration today, when a black and white approach to politicalethics seems insufficient. For example, in war, when the enemy usespropaganda to unify its population against us, is it morally correct toforego all use of propaganda? Is what would be viewed normally asobjectionable emotional appeals—overwhelming the audience with

116See, for example, R. E. Goodin, Manipulatory Politics (New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1980, 122), where he writes, for example, of “a pretty innocent formof manipulatory politics.”

117The claim that different professions have their own distinct moralities, of-ten referred to as “professional ethics,” is discussed in A. I. Applbaum, Ethics forAdversaries: The Morality of Roles in Public and Professional Life (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1999).

118G. Remer, “Rhetoric as a Balancing of Ends: Cicero and Machiavelli,” Philos-ophy and Rhetoric 42 (2009): 1–28 (pp. 17–20).




extreme patriotic feelings, temporarily eliciting friendly feelings toformer (and future) enemies (like the Soviet Union) to advance mil-itary ends, even deepening hatred for the enemy by emphasizingtheir atrocities and minimizing their positive actions—necessarily tobe condemned in just wars, like the fight against the Nazis? AlthoughI am not delineating the particulars of when and where such appealsmay be justified, or even whether these particular appeals can be jus-tified, I think it reasonable to concede that emotional manipulation isto be accepted begrudgingly under some political conditions.

Finally, Cicero’s vision of an explicitly moderate rhetoric distin-guishes him from Aristotle. This vision, for Cicero, is grounded inthe traditional values of the people, and, if it is to be realized, must beaccepted by the people once more. This vision is also not utopian, notthe ideal of the Stoic wise man, but a practically achievable improve-ment on Cicero’s own status quo. Thus, in De legibus, Cicero tellshis brother, Quintus, that the latter’s conservative idealism—whichCicero largely shares—must be tempered by political realities even inthe framing of a superior legal code (3.26, 3.33). Cicero’s proposal formore moderate and restrained political discourse anticipates currentdemands for political civility today. We still face the same question,however, of how to move from our decorum, which countenancesemotional manipulation in politics, to one that does not.



Rhetoric, Emotional Manipulation, and Political Morality: The Modern Relevance of Cicero vis-a`-vis...

Documents

Transcript of Rhetoric, Emotional Manipulation, and Political Morality: The Modern Relevance of Cicero vis-a`-vis...