Rhetoric

Aristotle.

So this is in his book Rhetoric.

And the second book of Rhetoric is about how to control people's emotions because it's about a pathos.

And he goes through each emotion.

Anger may be defined as an impulse accompanied by pain to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification toward what concerns oneself or toward what concerns one's friends.

The art of dressing up is the sham or simulation of gymnastic, the art of cookery of medicine.

Rhetoric is the simulation of justice, and sophistic of legislation.

they may be summed up in an arithmetical formula tiring is to gymnastic as cookery is to medicine as sophistic is to legislation and cookery is to medicine as rhetoric is to the art of justice and this is the true scheme of them but when measured only by the gratification which they procure they become jumbled together and return to their aboriginal chaos socrates apologizes for the length of his speech which was necessary to the explanation of the subject and begs polus not unnecessarily to retaliate on him Do you mean to say that the rhetoricians are esteemed flatterers? They are not esteemed at all.

Why have they not great power, and can they not do whatever they desire? They have no power, and they only do what they think best, and never what they desire, for they never attain the true object of desire, which is the good.

Or rather, Gorgias, let me turn to you and ask the same question.

What are we to call you, and what is the art which you profess? Gorgias.

Rhetoric, Socrates, is my art.

Socrates.

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network.

I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Elizabeth McHale about a book that just came out in 2026 from Oxford University Press titled Constructing a Renaissance Pope, Rhetoric Ceremony and Authority in the Age of Leo X., which covers the period of 1513 to 1521, roughly.

Obviously, with any historical period, we always end up with some sort of a before and after as well to think about origins and impact, which is very much relevant here because we are talking about a specific pope, the son of Lorenzo de' Medici, right? So really a whole lot going on in this Renaissance world of shininess, literal shininess, we might talk about that, right? But also the shininess of kind of the whole court.

Yes, it's an individual, but there's the whole papal politics going on, how it's related to other politics.

And having two kids and being department chair.

So, you know, you're busy.

Thanks for taking the time to come tell us about the book that's just come out, published by Oxford University Press in 2026 and titled Constructing a Renaissance Pope, Rhetoric, Ceremony and Authority in the Age of Leo X. Liza, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Thank you, Miranda.

The dialogues which have been translated in the first appendix, and which appear to have the next claim to genuineness among the Platonic writings, are the Lesser Hippias, the Menexenus or Funeral Oration, the First Alcibiades.

Of these, the Lesser Hippias and the Funeral Oration are cited by Aristotle, the first in the Metaphysics, the latter in the Rhetoric.

Neither of them are expressly attributed to Plato, but in his citation of both of them he seems to be referring to passages in the extant dialogues.

From the mention of Hippias, in the singular by Aristotle, we may perhaps infer that he was unacquainted with the second dialogue bearing the same name.