Persuasion in Ancient Greece

Andrew Scholtz, Instructor

Study Guides. . .

Peitho Readings

Click here for map to areas covered in readings.

Access to Readings

Click here to access the web document with the readings.

Optional additional reading-viewing: "Images of the Abduction / Seduction of Helen" (this site).

Readings Journal Prompts

For journal entry topics, please see below. . . .

Study Guide

These are challenging readings, and will need to be gone over carefully. (It's actually a short assignment.) The idea will be to build up a knowledge base in Peitho (goddess)-peitho (abstraction) as a cultural reality as background to consideration of peitho as a political reality.

Background: Peitho/peitho, peithein

The Greek noun peitho means "persuasion"; grammatically, it is feminine gender (female persons are typically, though not always, designated by words in the feminine grammatical gender).

• That means that peitho, if treated as if a person (i.e., personified), will be a woman: the goddess/nymph/spirit Peitho. But is persuasion inevitably feminine in its broader associations/implications?

The verb peithein means "to persuade."

Study Questions

Guide to Readings Journal Entries

You'll be looking at evidence for persuasion-Persuasion as a goddess worshipped in temples, as a mythical personage, and as an abstraction or action. You'll be seeing persuasion itself in isolation and in connection with other concepts/personages, and in various sorts of contexts . . .

• Evidently, persuasion was something "real" for ancient Greeks. . . 
  • In what sense?
  • What does persuasion seem to have "meant"?
• Related to that, in your readings, you'll see Peitho-peitho turn up in a variety of contexts — erotic, political, etc.
  • Are there connections?
  • If so, what?

Guide to Note-Taking

For each reading, see if you can offer an answer to each of the following questions. (Note down your answers for future reference):

1. What "shape" does persuasion take in each? Do you find it as a . . .
   • person or personification
     • human?
     • divine?
   • abstraction?
   • how "gendered"? (masculine versus feminine associations)
2. What are the aims of persuasion . . .
   • sexual?
   • political?
   • other?
3. What are the modalities of persuasion . . .
   • verbal?
   • non-verbal?
4. What (if any) moral evaluation do you detect in connection with persuasion in each passage? Is persuasion . . .
   • "good"-beneficial?
   • "bad"-destructive?
   • ambiguous?
   • why?

Of the passages as a whole, ask:

• Are the different kinds of persuasion (personified, abstract, sexual, etc.) related? Unrelated? Explain . . .

Political Aphrodite?

Aphrodite is the goddess of love, sex, and marriage. But her list of duties seems to have extended beyond that, as a passage from Pausanias, a description of the foundation of the small temple of Aphrodite Pandemos at Athens, attests.

That passage projects the foundation of the temple way back into the city's mythical past. But Aphrodite Pandemos, the "Common" Aphrodite, or else Aphrodite "Of all the People," arguably held political significance starting maybe in the 300s BCE, maybe earlier.

The other passages, one from Xenophon's Symposium, another from Nicander, also talk about Aphrodite Pandemos, but assign to her a very different significance.

QUESTIONS:

• Why politicize this sexual goddess? Why sexualize this political goddess?
• Do these two views of the goddess present us with any kind of a contradiction? Could there be connections?
• What can they tell us about attitudes to persuasion? About possible roles under a democracy?

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