Critolaus against rhetoric

This chapter focuses on Critolaus in relation to rhetoric. In the scholarly literature, three main assumptions are found regarding his opposition to it: 1. Critolaus relied on earlier arguments—mainly those of Plato—and added nothing new except for minor modifications. 2. Reconstructing his precise arguments is considered pointless, since our sources are largely summaries and abridged accounts from much later periods. 3. His opposition to rhetoric presents him as an independent Peripatetic, given that Aristotle regarded rhetoric as an art. I will argue that careful philological analysis can, in fact, reconstruct in detail both Critolaus’ arguments and their framework. Critolaus attacked not only the teachers of rhetoric but also the Stoics, who supported rhetoric as an art (even in its distinctively Stoic sense). Against the Stoics, he compiled a list of philosophers—those whom they considered their own predecessors—who defined the goal of rhetoric as persuasion. He then dissected the Stoic definition of art, showing that, by their own criteria, rhetoric fails to qualify as such. Each element of that definition elicited from him a focused critique and a corresponding conceptual term. Thus, what at first appears a confused collection of disparate arguments emerges as a highly structured and carefully designed critique. Finally, I suggest that Critolaus’ opposition to rhetoric as an art was not entirely independent, given the period in which he lived and the Peripatetics’ knowledge of Aristotle’s views on rhetoric.