Here we have looked at some of the things that make Greek religion rhetorical - prayer, hymn, procession. Prayer is self-evidently a specially formatted set of words and therefore undeniably is in some sense rhetorical - even the mesmeric, legalistic style of Roman prayer is a rhetoric. But it is too narrow just to look at the words and at the structure they build, because prayer is part of a total rhetoric and constitutes an element in the rhetoric of religion, often preceding the most powerful argument in Greek religious rhetoric, the bloody killing of animals to the howling of women: in a word, ‘sacrifice’. We need to be alert not only, then, to the verbal dimension but to a performative dimension, embracing costume, formation, gesture and every manner of behaviour, impacting on the emotions that are so central to the purpose of rhetoric (on which, see D. Konstan, Chapter 27). All these activities are performed before the twin audiences of humans and gods, where humans ritually adopt the fiction that they are listening to a discourse directed to others. This becomes a little clearer in the instance of ‘hymns’, the celebratory songs in praise of a god, a sort of human panegyric whose poetic and musical register is the appropriate category of speaking for a divine audience, though sophists on earth before mass human audiences might in later centuries experiment with prose hymns (if performed in rather a sing-song tone).
But once we reach the procession, the words take a back seat. Praise in words is something that might happen in one language - the language of words - whilst the total package is largely delivered in the language of ritual, the drOmena rather than the legomena (see p. 320). At the same time, the two-dimensionality of procession, its essentially linear nature, encourages a more than metaphorical view of it as rhetoric.
Much could be said beyond this. A different rhetoric applies to magic, to curses and curse-tablets - and the rhetoric of privacy, of concealed performance, is a whole new topic. Likewise the procession too belongs to a family of performances, which embrace also the theOriai, religious delegations to other states to ‘view’ ( theorein) their ceremonies, and the acts of pilgrimage that individuals performed to notable ancient sites - normally oracles. It was Homer who thought that the gods had a different language. And oracles, we may suppose, are a place where they spoke it. What we have done here is to open up the topic of religion as rhetoric. It is for the reader to carry it forward.
World History
