For maximum effect, stories should be deployed strategically. That requires understanding the art of persuasion, the stages of a successful story, scene setting, and how to use the stories of others to illustrate important points. But by far the most powerful of all is knowing and using the stories which only you can tell.

This chapter works through Romans 9 in conversation with other early Jewish evidence, arguing that Paul consistently cites the prophetic promises of the restoration of northern Israelites “from the nations” as promises that gentiles themselves (by definition not YHWH’s people) would become incorporated into Israel as part of Israel’s own redemption. Faced with potential accusations of divine injustice, Paul argues that this is in keeping with God’s prior dealings with his people, who have persistently resisted God’s purposes, leading God to achieve his purposes through new processes.

This volume is intended to introduce students and general readers to the theory and practice of rhetoric. Part I offers classic statements of rhetoric in Plato (in the Gorgias), Aristotle (in the Art of Rhetoric) and other seminal thinkers—both what rhetoric is and what its potential virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, are. The rest of Part I is devoted to explaining Aristotle’s classic and influential account of rhetoric: its three main kinds (deliberative, epideictic, and judicial) and the three “modes of persuasion” or proofs characteristic of it (those that appeal to the speaker’s ethos or character, to the pathos or emotion of the audience, and to logos or the logic of the speech itself). Part II offers a broad range of exemplary speeches, ancient and modern, grouped thematically. There is a preference throughout for political speeches, as distinguished from essays, letters, and other forms of communication; and our collection boasts a diversity of speakers.

This section consists of excerpts from Aristotles Rhetoric in which Aristotle discusses the three modes of persuasion (ethos, pathos, and logos) and of speeches illustrating each mode. There are three speeches that illustrate how one may be persuasive by appealing to passions (pathos), three that appeal to the good character of the speaker (ethos), and two that appeal to rational arguments (logos). The speeches range from the fifth century BC to the twenty-first century of our era.

Engaging two intertwined and yet competing literatures detailing moral aspects of suffering through the lenses of sympathy and empathy, this chapter examines the extent to which suffering (and responses to it) may be viewed as a condition of possibility for ethical/moral experience. While arguably distinctive responses to suffering that have unique ethical entailments, sympathy and empathy still share, however, a more primordial manifestation in pathos. Drawing upon insights from the phenomenological tradition, the chapter argues that pathic attunement is the generative, responsive ground from which sympathy and empathy arise. Moving beyond the either/or framework that often emerges in anthropological discussions of empathy and sympathy, a focus on pathos leads to a different way of envisioning suffering as a condition of possibility for moral experience. Without collapsing the ethical and political, pathos is thus a phenomenon through which recursive relationships between ethical, political, and ontological orientations to others becomes discernible and therefore analysable.

This chapter surveys archaic and classical Greek ideas about music and memory. It first asks why song-producers and audiences, while readily acknowledging the effectiveness and value of music’s verbal components as preservers and enhancers of memory, do not seem to recognize the purely musical elements as being especially “memorable.” Second, I turn toAristotle, seeking to piece together how he thinks music – along with “voice” and sounds in general – functions in relation to memory, primarily through the psychological-somatic workings of the human “imagination,” i.e., his notions of affect (pathos) and phantasia. Even while Aristotle does not address musical memory directly, his work provides a sophisticated account of the material and physiological processes whereby hearing and memory operate in humans and other animals – adumbrating modern accounts based on a more accurate understanding of neurology and cognition. At the same time, since ancient music was experienced live (rather than through recordings or broadcasts) and could never be exactly repeated, there existed a different relationship between present and past in music-listening than most of us are used to today.

John Staines explores the role of compassion in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688). He argues that although the novel’s attitude towards slavery is complicated, its pathos makes readers feel compassion for an injustice committed against a noble human. Behn’s narrative stands at the start of the creation of the modern novel, a new genre that justified itself as a means of educating readers in sentiment and sympathy. Yet Behn’s decision to end her story by torturing and dismembering her hero is, by the standards of later novels, shockingly indecorous as it forces readers to confront his body in a final scene of compassion. In this chapter, John Staines demonstrates that the appeal to compassion is central to Behn’s text, as it is central to neoclassical discussions of rhetoric and poetics. Oroonoko’s pathos helped it continue to have influence long after its political interventions had passed into obscurity and irrelevance. Its shared suffering endured.

Building directly on the linguistic elements and the language theory discussed in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 deals with the second level of lexis by focusing on the ἀρχὴ τῆς λέξεως (the foundation of lexis), i.e. Aristotle’s remarks regarding individuals’ use of linguistic elements as determined by sociolinguistic factors. The chapter has three sections, each of which examines Aristotle’s claims within lexis in a different social context.

In early modern England the theory of the emotions set out in classical rhetoric provides a context for understanding how they work in Shakespeare which is at least as important as Galenic humoral theory. The key concepts that link oratory and drama are ethos and pathos, where ethos may be understood in terms of character delineation and pathos as the emotion which character representation is intended to arouse in the audience. The key term used to describe the way rhetoric works on an audience is movere, ‘moving’. Rhetoric provided Shakespeare with a model of how to move the affections of his audience, but there are many points in his plays that reveal an awareness of the dangers of rhetoric – that the obvious deployment of artifice risks sounding insincere – and it is this that lies behind his development of more naturalistic forms of expression in his drama. This is also what lies behind the construction of Shakespeare’s reputation as the supreme exponent of the passions in the 150 years after his death, as ‘nature’ became the third term in the relationship between rhetoric and the emotions and the essential principle on which ‘moving’ is based.

What counts as legitimately sublime and what as counterfeit? The question of policing boundaries is internal to the sublime, and particularly fraught insofar as it is defined as transgressing limits of various kinds. If music is included in the sublime – by no means a foregone conclusion in its history – then what sort of music? Must it be violent, shocking or dissonant, transgressing orderly harmony in some obvious way? This chapter examines the fraught status and remit of harmony in the literary-critical discourse of the sublime. When music and musical concepts appear within broader scholarship on the sublime, they are often aligned with dissonance and irresolvability, as part of a construction of modernity likewise aligned with the breaking of old orders and harmonies. The chapter complicates this view through a double study of the late Romantic author Thomas De Quincey and his favourite singer, the Italian contralto Josephine Grassini. It examines both the multifaceted work to which music and harmony are put in De Quincey’s Confessions (1821), and the complexity of Grassini’s performances beyond the limits of the text, including her vocal traits, gendering, roles and repertoire during the Napoleonic wars, leading to reconsideration of sublimity’s relationship to pathos alongside harmony.