Topoi and Tēkmeria: Rhetorical fluidity among aristotle, isocrates, and alcidamas

Abstract

Topological criticism gains dynamism when it attends to texts’ chronologies. The topos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric gains clarity when read within the context of Aristotle’s spatial metaphor of reasoning as cognitive motion. Further, the dynamics of probabilistic topoi over time can be more clearly understood when conjoined with a focus on tekmeria, signs held to be necessary in the negative spaces of self-evidence and impossibility. The quasi-dialogue between Isocrates’ Against the Sophists and Alcidamas’ About the Writers of Written Speeches, a debate about the relative temporal characteristics of written and oral discourse, offers warrants for the claims that topological criticism can be dynamic. Read together, these texts reveal the workings of time-in-texts and texts-in-time at the fulcrum between orality and literacy in ancient Greek thought.