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Ethos
as a Technical Means of Persuasion
Dr.
Manfred Kraus
Before Aristotle ancient rhetoricians generally used to regard the speaker's character and personal appearance as a factor more or less external to the skillful composition of a speech by a professional orator. Yet Attic orators, by virtue of the customary practice of logography, i.e. speech-writing on behalf of a client, by Plato's and Aristotle's time had acquired a considerable skill in impersonating their clients' characters in their speeches as best they could, so as to make these speeches convincing and reliable-looking when delivered by the client himself. Aristotle, however, in his Rhetoric, was the first to explicitly treat the ethos of the speaker as a technical means of persuasion, i.e. as a persuasive strategy artfully created and controlled by the orator's own skill. For him, ethos is one of three main factors that contribute to a speech's persuasiveness, alongside with the arousal of emotions (pathos) in the audience and rational argumentation (logos). After Aristotle, however, this clear-cut tripartite system got increasingly blurred, in that ethos was gradually shifted to the sphere of the so-called 'gentler' and more stable emotions which create feelings like sympathy and confidence in the audience, while pathos was restricted to the more violent and momentary emotions like joy, hate, fear or anger. This significant shift in meaning is noticeable already in Cicero, but most explicit in Quintilian. Ethos has thus in a way changed sides: from a factor primarily associated with the speaker's character it has become an element within the souls of those who listen.
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