eloquent

Eloquence was a central ideal of education in the ancient world. Greek teachers of rhetoric trained citizens to speak in law courts and assemblies, and Aristotle's Rhetoric, from the fourth century BCE, analyzed persuasion through the speaker's character, the audience's emotions, and the logic of the argument, later summarized as ethos, pathos, and logos. In Rome, Cicero wrote De Oratore in 55 BCE, arguing that the ideal orator needed broad learning in law, history, and philosophy, not merely a pleasant voice.

Roman teachers divided the art of speaking into five parts: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. The Latin term for style, elocutio, comes from the same verb as eloquent and referred to the choice and arrangement of words. Quintilian, whose Institutio Oratoria appeared around 95 CE, adopted Cato the Elder's definition of the orator as “a good man skilled in speaking,” tying eloquence to moral character. That curriculum shaped European schools for more than a thousand years, surviving in the medieval trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

Many speeches remembered as eloquent are short and plain. Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address of November 19, 1863, contains about 270 words and took only a few minutes to deliver, while the main speaker that day, Edward Everett, talked for roughly two hours. Everett wrote to Lincoln the next day that he wished he had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as Lincoln had in two minutes. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech of August 28, 1963, drew its power from repetition, biblical cadence, and images from American history. Winston Churchill's wartime broadcasts of 1940 relied heavily on short, concrete words.

Eloquent is not limited to speech. Writers describe an eloquent gesture, an eloquent silence, or an eloquent photograph when something communicates meaning strongly without words. In the phrase eloquent of, the word means strongly suggestive, as in ruins eloquent of a city's former wealth. This extended use reflects an old idea that the purpose of eloquence is to make meaning felt, not merely to sound impressive. Shakespeare often uses the effect; in King Lear, Cordelia's refusal to flatter her father speaks more eloquently than her sisters' lavish declarations of love.

Eloquence has always had critics. In the dialogue Gorgias, Plato accused rhetoricians of flattering audiences instead of teaching them the truth, and modern listeners remain wary of smooth talkers in politics and advertising. The distinction between eloquence and glibness is still a useful one: eloquent speech is clear, sincere, and fitted to its audience, while glib speech is fluent but shallow.