Friday, September 5, 2014

Flattery - the king of Pathos

One of the biggest short-comings of relying on pathos as a rhetorical device to persuade is that the orator too often tugs at the heartstrings of the audience to avoid relying on logic.  Even with an average -- or even favorably partial -- audience will often notice a lack of strong logic and consequently realize that the speaker does not actually have substance to his or her point.  A tasteful amount of flattery easily rectifies this problem.  Flattery soundly supersedes all other forms of pathos in its ability to effectively and efficiently persuade an audience without needing substantial amounts of logic.  In his speech to rally his troops, Agamemnon, brilliantly employs flattery to convince his troops that for some reason they will succeed in this assault on Troy – despite their previous nine years of failure.  He opens his speech declaring, “Ye sons of Mars, partake your leader’s care/ Heroes of Greece, and brothers of the war! /... Now shameful flight alone can save the host.” (Iliad,Book II, pg. 29).  Several small, but powerful, flatteries litter the beginning of this speech.  Firstly, as the god of war, few things would make soldiers more proud than to be addressed as the “sons of Mars,” regardless of its verity.  Secondly, every soldier wants to be a hero for his or her country, so being addressed as “Heroes of Greece” when they had failed for nine years to actually do anything particularly heroic, would definitely engender motivation to become the heroes they had already been labeled.  Finally, the king flatters his subjects by letting them know that they are so invincible and that their success is so certain that the only way the enemy would win is by their “shameful flight.”  Again, such a statement is borderline laughable to an objective onlooker as Troy had successfully rebuffed Agamemnon and his troops for almost a decade.  Clearly, the large loopholes in Agamemnon’s logic are filled poignantly with flattery. 

2 comments:

  1. I like your analysis. It can help us think about appropriate ways to address varying audiences. For Agamemnon, the audience was his troops, and his focus on appealing to pathos rhetoric worked. In my experience, if I need to motivate a child to obey, I might appeal to pathos, but if I am in a more professional setting, I know that people will only listen to me if I provide plenty of solid support and evidence (logos) for my proposal.

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  2. I see Agamemnon's speech as being very similar to a coach's pep talk before a hard game. Most coaches use pathos because that is what gets the players pumped up. A coach doesn't want his players at the end of his speech to be sitting back and nodding their heads in agreement. He wants them to be cheering and energetic; so he uses pathos. I imagine that is a similar approach to what a general wants with his troops.

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