This was the first “classic” book of “classic” rhetoric, referring to speeches that are designed explicitly to persuade people.  It’s not the aspect of rhetoric that I’m interested in, but I figure there’s a value to being familiar with it.

Aristotle was the great systematizer of ancient Greek thinking, and here he tells us that there were three kinds of speeches.  The first is political, where the speaker is trying to convince people to take some specific action, and it focuses on the future.  The second is forensic, where the speaker is trying to convince a judge that someone is or is not guilty of a crime, so it focuses on the past.  The third, then, is “ceremonial” – it covers everything else, especially attitudes, so we would think of it as political too.  He says it focuses on the present, although in practice it didn’t really seem to, since it would often be about what someone has done, celebrating their achievements.  This information is at the very beginning of the book, and he uses the rest of the book to go into depth about how to make one’s case.  He explains everything he can think of about what people care about, what makes someone or something good or bad, what motivates people to do good or bad, what the various emotions are and how they are caused, and what people are like when they’re young, old, or in between.  It’s probably a good summary of ancient Greek folk psychology, although some of it seems odd to modern ears – like that one cannot feel anger and fear toward the same person (or, for example, that a dog will never bite someone who is sitting down).  Eventually he gets to matters of wording and other style, and he encourages people to use vivid metaphors and relevant enthymemes (a word I learned – it means making an assertion based on common knowledge or common sense, then drawing a conclusion for the present case).  However, young speakers shouldn’t use many enthymemes because they don’t have the wisdom for it and will just sound silly, while language that’s too poetic isn’t suitable for these purposes (which might be generally true, but what counts as too poetic or too abrupt surely is a matter of taste specific to a given era).

Aristotle thinks clearly and writes clearly, and for his target audience – men of social standing who were members of his own culture – I would think this book would have been quite useful.