Be real!

I don't feel I could make a better comparison between Plato's Gorgias and Cicero's De oratore than has already been made by Macey Richardson in her post. I agree with all of the points that she made and even found greater insight of how the two treatises relate by reading her post.

I don't know if any of you have seen the BBC series Sherlock, but I like it enough
to watch it, which is saying a lot... I'm a fan of  Benedict
Cumberbatch, who plays Sherlock Holmes in the series. I think I'm a fan because the actor
has become Sherlock, he has taken on his emotions, his personality, everything that is
Sherlock Holmes, so that I actually believe him when he's acting, he's genuine because in a way
what he feels when he acts as this fictional character is probably what the writers felt as they
created that character.

In the closing paragraphs of De oratore Cicero narrates the dialogue of Crassus, who is discussing style. But he finishes powerfully by declaring that "...delivery is the supreme factor in successful oratory." and then goes on to say that the emotions and the delivery used in oratory cannot be faked. He says that artificiality is easily and quickly detected. Many of the previous blog posts have aligned Cicero with the Sophists, which I mostly agree with. But in the dialogue between Socrates and Gorgias in Plato's Gorgias one of the common points brought up by Socrates his belief that it would be better for the masters of any given subject to speak about their subject instead of a professional orator, because it is more genuine. In De oratore Cicero seems to bridge a disconnect fabricated by Socrates; good rhetoric and oratory does need genuine deliverers, but just because someone isn't a specialist in a given subject doesn't mean he or she isn't passionate about it. (However, having more knowledge about a subject definitely makes it easier to talk about that subject; notice how much shorter this blog post is than my posts about architecture... I usually have to cut stuff out of those posts because they're too long.) 

It's very interesting to see Cicero draw his knowledge from so many different sources of learning, I think that is a part of what Macey was talking about in her post about the difference in the dialogue in De oratore  versus the dialogue in Gorgias; the dialogue was much less biased and more open, or as Macey put it; "mature". 

My nephew!!! Isn't he cute? He's so happy in this picture
because he's doing his favorite thing, dipping things and then eating them.
He's passionate about it and you can tell, so the emotion is contagious!

Convincing Us that We're Suffering?

The prompt for today asked us to show how logos in Euripides’s plays can show the human condition and natural suffering as well as a means of persuasion. I wasn't able to go to the play because I had class, but I was able to find a video of another of Euripides plays online. I watched “Medea.” As I thought about our prompt and watched this play, my first thought was that Euripides does a good job of morphing the two kinds of logos. He is quite persuasive in convincing the audience of the suffering that the characters feel. In a way, If I had been seeing this in person, it may have been even more powerful in persuading me that suffering is the only thing that can come of life. Luckily, I'm more sensible than that.

Medea goes to poison Glauce to gain revenge on her husband

The medium that Euripides used, that of a play, allowed for convincing acting and a severe portrayal of suffering. Within the first five minutes of the play, there was complaining, lamenting, and crying. The actors and actresses used their words as well as their actions to create an environment of distress. This could only have been accomplished with this medium.
The content of this play itself encourages the thought that pain and suffering are inevitable. Medea’s husband wants to leave her, the scandal ruins her family and she is exiled, she plots revenge on her husband (by killing her children…? A bit irrational, don’t you think?), and in the end there is a lot of death and sadness.

Initially, I thought that the different forms of logos would be competing. Ultimately, the union of drama and the human condition was enhanced and made more persuasive through the words and acts of these characters.