oratory, the rationale and practice of persuasive public speaking. It is immediate in its audience relationships and reactions, but it may also have broad historical repercussions. The orator may become the voice of political or social history.
A vivid instance of the way a speech can focus the concerns of a nation was Martin Luther King’s address to a massive civil rights demonstration in Washington, D.C., in 1963. Repeating the phrase “I have a dream,” King applied the oratorical skill he had mastered as a preacher to heighten his appeal for further rights for U.S. blacks to an intensity that galvanized millions.
An oration involves a speaker; an audience; a background of time, place, and other conditions; a message; transmission by voice, articulation, and bodily accompaniments; and may, or may not, have an immediate outcome.
Rhetoric, classically the theoretical basis for the art of oratory, is the art of using words effectively. Oratory is instrumental and practical, as distinguished from poetic or literary composition, which traditionally aims at beauty and pleasure. Oratory is of the marketplace and as such not always concerned with the universal and permanent. The orator in his purpose and technique is primarily persuasive rather than informational or entertaining. An attempt is made to change human behaviour or to strengthen convictions and attitudes. The orator would correct wrong positions of the audience and establish psychological patterns favourable to his own wishes and platform. Argument and rhetorical devices are used, as are evidence, lines of reasoning, and appeals that support the orator’s aims. Exposition is employed to clarify and enforce the orator’s propositions, and anecdotes and illustrations are used to heighten response.
The orator need not be a first-rate logician, though a capacity for good, clear thought helps to penetrate into the causes and results of tentative premises and conclusions and to use analogy, generalizations, assumptions, deductive–inductive reasoning, and other types of inference. Effective debaters, who depend more heavily on logic, however, are not always impressive orators because superior eloquence also requires strong appeals to the motives, sentiments, and habits of the audience. Oratorical greatness is invariably identified with strong emotional phrasing and delivery. When the intellectual qualities dominate with relative absence of the affective appeals, the oration fails just as it does when emotion sweeps aside reason.
The ideal orator is personal in his appeals and strong in ethical proofs, rather than objective or detached. He enforces his arguments by his personal commitment to his advocacy. William Pitt, later Lord Chatham, punctuated his dramatic appeals for justice to the American colonies with references to his own attitudes and beliefs. So were personal appeals used by the Irish orator Daniel O’Connell, the French orators Mirabeau and Robespierre, and the Americans Daniel Webster, Wendell Phillips, and Robert G. Ingersoll.
The orator, as illustrated by Edmund Burke, has a catholic attitude. Burke’s discussion of American taxation, conciliation, Irish freedoms, justice for India, and the French Revolution show analytical and intellectual maturity, the power of apt generalization, and comprehensiveness of treatment.
Oratory has traditionally been divided into legal, political, or ceremonial, or, according to Aristotle, forensic, deliberative, or epideictic.
Typically, forensic, or legal, oratory is at its best in the defense of individual freedom and resistance to prosecution. It was the most characteristic type of oratory in ancient Athens, where laws stipulated that litigants should defend their own causes. In the so-called Golden Age of Athens, the 4th century bc, great speakers in both the law courts and the assembly included Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Hyperides, Aeschines, and Dinarchus.
In the 1st century bc of ancient Rome, Cicero became the foremost forensic orator and exerted a lasting influence on later Western oratory and prose style. Cicero successfully prosecuted Gaius Verres, notorious for his mismanagement while governor of Sicily, and drove him into exile, and he dramatically presented arguments against Lucius Sergius Catiline that showed a command of analysis and logic and great skill in motivating his audience. Cicero also delivered 14 bitter indictments against Mark Antony, who was to him the embodiment of despotism.
Among the great forensic orators of later times was the 18th- and 19th-century English advocate Thomas Erskine, who contributed to the cause of English liberties and the humane application of the legal system.
Demosthenes, the Athenian lawyer, soldier, and statesman, was a great deliberative orator. In one of his greatest speeches, “On the Crown,” he defended himself against the charge by his political rival Aeschines that he had no right to the golden crown granted him for his services to Athens. So brilliant was Demosthenes’ defense of his public actions and principles that Aeschines, who was also a powerful orator, left Athens for Rhodes in defeat.
The third division of persuasive speaking, epideictic, or ceremonial, oratory was panegyrical, declamatory, and demonstrative. Its aim was to eulogize an individual, a cause, occasion, movement, city, or state, or to condemn them. Prominent in ancient Greece were the funeral orations in honour of those killed in battle. The outstanding example of these is one by Pericles, perhaps the most finished orator of the 5th century bc, in honour of those killed in the first year of the Peloponnesian War.
The 19th-century American speaker Daniel Webster excelled in all three major divisions—forensic, deliberative, and epideictic oratory. He brought more than 150 pleas before the U.S. Supreme Court, including the Dartmouth College Case (1819) and the Gibbons v. Ogden case (1824); he debated in the U.S. Senate against Robert Young Hayne and John Calhoun on the issues of federal government versus states’ rights, slavery, and free trade; and he delivered major eulogies, including those on the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.
Another major type of persuasive speaking that developed later than ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric was religious oratory. For more than 1,000 years after Cicero the important orators were churchmen rather than politicians, lawyers, or military spokesmen. This tradition derived from the Judaean prophets, such as Jeremiah and Isaiah, and in the Christian Era, from the Apostle Paul, his evangelistic colleagues, and such later fathers of the church as Tertullian, Chrysostom, and St. Augustine. Ecclesiastical speaking became vigorously polemical. The rhetorical principles of Aristotle and Cicero were adopted by ecclesiastical leaders who challenged rival doctrines and attacked the sins of the communities.
In the Middle Ages, Pope Urban II elicited a great response to his oratorical pleas for enlistment in the First Crusade. The Second Crusade was urged on with great eloquence by St. Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux. In the 15th and 16th centuries the revolt against the papacy and the Reformation movement stimulated the eloquence of Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, Hugh Latimer, and, most notably, Martin Luther. At the Diet of Worms, as elsewhere, Luther spoke with courage, sincerity, and well-buttressed logic. Religious controversies in the 17th century engaged such great oratorical skills as those of Richard Baxter, the English Puritan, and Catholic bishop J.B. Bossuet of France. In the 18th century the Methodist George Whitefield in England and North America, and the Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards in America, were notably persuasive speakers. Preachers of oratorical power in the 19th century included Henry Ward Beecher, famous for his antislavery speeches and his advocacy of women’s suffrage from his Congregational pulpit in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N.Y., and William Ellery Channing, American spokesman for Unitarianism.
Because the orator intuitively expresses the fears, hopes, and attitudes of his audience, a great oration is to a large extent a reflection of those to whom it is addressed. The audience of Pericles in ancient Greece, for example, was the 30,000 or 40,000 citizens out of the state’s total population of 200,000 or 300,000, including slaves and others. These citizens were sophisticated in the arts, politics, and philosophy. Directing their own affairs in their Assembly, they were at once deliberative, administrative, and judicial. Speaker and audience were identified in their loyalty to Athens. Similarly, the senatorial and forum audience of Cicero in ancient Rome was an even smaller elite among the hundreds of thousands of slaves and aliens who thronged the Roman world. In the Forum the citizens, long trained in law, and with military, literary, and political experience, debated and settled the problems. The speeches of Cato, Catiline, Cicero, Julius Caesar, Brutus, Antony, Augustus, and the others were oratory of and for the Roman citizen.
In the Christian Era, however, the religious orator often found himself addressing an alien audience that he hoped to convert. To communicate with them, the Christian often appealed to ancient Greek and Roman thought, which had achieved widespread authority, and to Judaean thought and method, which had the sanction of scripture. By the time of the Reformation, however, Christian dogma had become so codified that most of the disputation could be carried on in terms of doctrine that had become well known to all.
The history of the British Parliament reveals a continuing trend toward common speech and away from the allusions to ancient Greek and Roman thought that abounded when the members consisted largely of classically educated aristocrats.
In the golden age of British political oratory of the late 18th century, greater parliamentary freedom and the opportunity to defend and extend popular rights gave political oratory tremendous energy, personified by such brilliant orators as both the elder and the younger William Pitt, John Wilkes, Charles James Fox, Richard Sheridan, Edmund Burke, and William Wilberforce. Parliamentary reforms of the 19th century, initiated and promoted by Macaulay, Disraeli, Gladstone, and others of the century, led to more and more direct political speaking on the hustings with the rank and file outside Parliament. Burke and his contemporaries had spoken almost entirely in the Commons or Lords, or to limited electors in their borough homes, but later political leaders appealed directly to the population. With the rise of the Labour Party in the 20th century and the further adaptation of government to the people, delivery became less declamatory and studied. The dramatic stances of the 18th-century parliamentary debaters disappeared as a more direct, spontaneous style prevailed. As delivery habits changed, so did the oratorical language. Alliteration, antithesis, parallelism, and other rhetorical figures of thought and of language had sometimes been carried to extremes, in speeches addressed to those highly trained in Latin- and Greek-language traditions. These devices gave way, however, to a clearness of style and vividness consonant with the idiom of the common man and later with the vocabulary of radio and television.
Similarly, American speech inherited and then gradually discarded British oratorical techniques for its own speaking vernacular. John Calhoun, in his addresses to Congress on behalf of the South, absorbed much of the Greek political philosophy and methods of oral composition and presentation, and his principal opponent in debate, Daniel Webster, too, had the marks of British communicative tradition. This inheritance was absorbed into the speaking adjustments indigenous to those later peoples of New England, the West, and the South. The orator whose speech preceded Lincoln’s at Gettysburg—Edward Everett, statesman and former professor of Greek literature at Harvard—was a classical scholar. Lincoln, on the same platform, had address born of his native Middle West yet expressed with authentic eloquence.
The 20th century saw the development of two leaders of World War II who applied oratorical techniques in vastly different ways with equal effect. It was primarily through his oratory that Adolf Hitler whipped the defeated and divided Germans into a frenzy of conquest, while Winston Churchill used his no less remarkable powers to summon up in the English people their deepest historical reserves of strength against the onslaught. Subsequently, though the importance of persuasive speech in no way diminished, radio and television so reshaped the method of delivery that much of the theory of traditional oratory often seemed no longer to apply. The radio fireside chats of Pres. Franklin Roosevelt were the most successful of his persuasions. In the televised debates of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon during the U.S. presidential campaign in 1960, the candidates might be said to have been most persuasive when they were least oratorical, in the traditional sense of the term. Nonetheless, even conventional oratory persisted as peoples in newly developing nations were swept up into national and international political struggles.
A good general collection is H. Peterson (ed.), A Treasury of the World’s Great Speeches, rev. ed. (1965).