Public Speaking – An Ancient Art
If you want to find public speaking ideas you don’t have to sign up for an expensive course or buy the latest trendy book on public speaking you can just head down to your local library. Guides to presentation tips have been written for a very long time and you can find 2500 years old books that contain tips that are good to this day. The orators of ancient Greek knew how to capture an audience and the basic principles they put in writing feel surprisingly modern and up to date two and a half millennia later.
The Iliad, the epic tale of heroes like Achilles and Oddysseus is the oldest work known were ancient greeks refer to professional orators. The Greek philosopher Empedocles made extensive studies on the power of language and rhetoric and is sometimes referred to as the man who did public speaking into a science, All later works on the topic of public speaking and rhetoric can trace their origins back to his work.
Corax of Syracuse and his pupil Tisias is believed to have written the first guide to public speaking. Corax did according to later writes like Cicero, Aristotle and Plato live in Scicily during the 5th century BC when the tyrant of Syracuse was deposed and democracy formed. The deposed ruler had confiscated a large number of properties and people where now flooding to the courts in the hope of getting their properties back. It was in light of this Corax wrote the public speaking guide to allow ordinary men to be able to represent themselves in court when trying to get their land back.
In the 5th century, sophists, travelling retoric and philosophy teachers, gave popular lectures in how the best get your point forward using different oratory techniques. They travelled from one city to the next trying to enrol students that they would teach in the art of retoric against a fee. Corax and Tisias is often seen as two of the founding fathers of this movement but they are however far from the most well known of the earliest Sophists, that honor isntead goes to Protagoras. Protagoras was active in and played an important role on develop the field of reasoned understanding, he is also acredited the famous quote: “Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not“.
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus is another example of a very prominant ancient rhetorician and he was a Romn Teacher (ca. 35 ca. 100). He was born in La Rioja (located in Hispania) but wanted to study rhetoric and therefore moved to Rome. After the forced suicide of Emperor Nero, a time of civil war and turmoil besieged the Romans and in 69 no less than four emperors succeeded each other. This was also the year Quintilianus decided to open a public school on effective public speaking. Pliny the Younger was one of his students, and Tacitus is also thought to have been enrolled in this school. Quintilianus ios believed to have written a multitude of books on the topic of public speaking but only one work have survived until today, that work is called “Institutio Oratoria“. This work deals with public speaking in theory and practise, and is also filled with Quintilianus’ thoughts on the foundational education and development of the public speaker.
