The Almighty Gods

In this story, I envisioned the Gods and Goddesses sitting high on Mt. Olympus staring down on the humans trying so desperately to fight their own battles… until they decided to intervene. It was most interesting to me that throughout the story it only took a few simple sentences from a God or Goddess to eventually sway an entire army to do what they wanted.

For example, Kevin D. referenced to Minerva in an earlier blog post as being very aware of the Kairos and took advantage of the chance to capitalize on the situation at the time by appealing to Odysseus... "Are you going to fling yourselves into your ships, and be off home to your own land in this way?" says Minerva. The Gods and goddesses will always have the upper hand in these wars because of their opportunity to see all pieces of the puzzle... thereby being able to appeal to whoever they want and hopefully achieve the outcome they desire. 

In our day, there are people in power that do the exact same thing... they will use their power and position to achieve what they want, even if it isn't exactly what should happen. Just as much as there will be "Gods and Goddesses" of our day and age persuading people, there will always be guys like Thersites who see a problem and feel the need to do something about it... but with no authority to make their opinions credible they are often humiliated by those in power. Not to say that those without "Authority" don't have a voice, because if Thersites were appealing to the family members and friends of the soldiers at war, he would have had a much larger group to back him up. Unfortunately, it was just the wrong audience.  

I came to the conclusion that Rhetoric in all it's forms is powerful, but those in higher power will more often than not have the upper hand in persuading people to do what they want versus those who don't have such power. 

Importance of the Fourth Estate

               Ferdinand Lassalle’s “the Working Man’s Programme” really typifies some of Lassalle’s socialist ideas which took place during a break out of revolution in Germany during the 1800’s. His ideas received a lot of pushback, which caused Ferdinand to do some prison time, but also moved him almost effortlessly to the leadership of the new forming political party at the head of the social working class at the time. In his address about the importance of the working class, or the “Fourth Estate”, he uses a great deal of well thought out rhetoric to address his audiences and time his speech appropriately.

                Lassalle’s goal is to convince his audience of the importance of having the working class be involved in the state, and that their involvement will better all people of all classes, not just the individual. Lassalle uses Marx’s ideas about social change as a basis of authority for his arguments. This is really interesting as he eventually pulls away from Marx and uses those ideas to compare and contrast to his view that the state itself can be the tool to bring social reform. This is a powerful technique as he is able to appeal to all his audience members by mentioning ideals from the thoughts of Marx and then making it more in line with what is already in place. Some would call this a cowardly approach to a revolutionary speech, but I think it is a clever way, a “sales tactic” if you will, type of approach to transfer enthusiasm about his ideas to his audience.

              

              There is a great deal of pathos in Ferdinand Lassalle’s speech, but I feel it is used in a different way than some of the usual ways rhetoricians of the revolutionary age used this appeal.  Instead of using it to the effect of stirring the crowd to action by building their emotions, he uses it to show how much he cares about his ideas, and how much he emotionally feels these ideas are needed in the state. This has an effect on an audience that respects Lassalle’s ethos. Those that see his passion are stirred to action not by direct feelings that were conjured up in them by Ferdinand’s words, but by Ferdinand’s own emotion for this topic. This is a common approach used in coaching sports and is very effective if the relationship with your audience is strong. “What’s important to you, is now important to us” is a phrase that sums up well how Lassalle used the pathetic appeal in this speech.

May We Fight Until Death!

     There is no question that King Agamemnon is incredible at what he does best which is one thing - rallying his troops. One of the most brilliant parts of the excerpt is when King Agamemnon has his rebuttal following Nestor’s persuasive speech found on page 26. The first necessary thing to address is the fact that Agamemnon has power, authority, and arguably the most important thing he has is credibility. It is clear that he is well respected and that just as the prince of Pylos stated towards the beginning “if any other man of the Achaeans had told us of this dream, we should have declared it false…”. However, they believed since the beginning that Agamemnon was a credible source or one who could be trusted. He uses this sense of ethos largely to his advantage in front of his audience.

With this being said, King Agamemnon does a spectacular job at using the rhetoric appeal of pathos as he motivates the troops using a stellar choice of words and even imagery. He uses powerful phrases such as “may [we] join in fight”, “whet your spears”, “…your shields shall be wet with the sweat upon your shoulders.” To my understanding, the audience is a group of warriors who have been away from their families and homes for nine years. Of course, they want to gear up and go to war so they can finish this after all. Agamemnon uses these powerful phrases like a football coach uses to motivate, inspire, and pump up his team going into the fourth quarter. King Agamemnon even has clear evidence that his genius form of rhetoric and persuasiveness was effective as he finished due to the fact that the “Achaens roared applause.” Though some may argue that he lacked logic, it is evident that he was successful at touching the hearts of these men using pathos and developed his credibility through others using ethos.