2015/08/07 by James Herrick · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Rhetoric and Communication Studies
paper · doi:10.4324/9781315664019-8
openalex publication_date 2015/08/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In addition to these functions of language, anyone dependent upon words for their livelihood also recognized their dependence upon audiences. Certainly, concern for holding the audience’s attention pre-dates the formal study of rhetoric. Literary scholar Brian Boyd writes, “Greek bards reciting or singing about their gods and heroes already belonged to a system of competing for attention.” Thus, bards had to be innovators and inventors, wordsmiths willing to vary the pace, length, and manner of telling their stories to compete with other existing stories or to make a familiar story stand out as if being told for the first time. Boyd suggests that Homer experimented with the method of compression, or shortening the time in which critical actions took place in the war between Athens and Troy. “As in the Iliad, Homer again in the Odyssey prefers the intensity of compression to the slackness of mere sequence.”5 So, the resources of language were widely recognized and experimented with centuries before formal rhetorical studies appeared and took hold in the Greek city-states of the fifth century bce. What conditions prepared the way for a more organized approach to rhetoric?