Free About 1 hr0 learners Rev. 2026-10-20 0

In ancient Athens there were no lawyers. If your neighbor sued you, you stood before several hundred jurors and argued your own case while a jar of water drained away your time. If the city was about to vote on war, any citizen could rise and speak. Persuasion was not a polite skill. It could save your farm, your rights, or, as one famous morning in 427 BCE showed, the lives of an entire city.

Learn the art the way Greek students did. Hear Gorgias, Protagoras and Plato argue over whether rhetoric is wisdom or flattery, master Aristotle's tools of character, emotion and argument, and then do the actual school drills: arguing from likelihood, arguing both sides of a question, elaborating a famous saying through eight set headings, and composing a declamation of your own. Every level marks what comes from classical Athens and what comes from the later schoolbooks.

Levels

  1. 1 1. Why Rhetoric Mattered in Athens 5-question quiz
  2. 2 2. The Sophists and Their Critics 5-question quiz
  3. 3 3. Aristotle's Definition and the Three Proofs 5-question quiz
  4. 4 4. Three Kinds of Speech 5-question quiz
  5. 5 5. Finding Arguments: Topics, Emotions and Character 5-question quiz
  6. 6 6. Arranging, Styling and Delivering the Speech 5-question quiz
  7. 7 7. The School Exercises: Progymnasmata 5-question quiz
  8. 8 8. Declamation, Debate and Legacy 5-question quiz

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