Chapter one provides an overview of Rhetoric's intersection with Law in classical Greece.

The authors begin with the legend of Corax and Tisias and move from there into an explanation of the ways rhetoric was practiced in the Grecian legal system. Magistrates heard legal cases up until the fifth century BCE, when the jury system came into play. I was particularly interested in the size of the jury pools - 6,000 citizens in a pool and 501 jurors to a case, as opposed to today's 12 peers plus an alternate. They seem to have been just as litigious as us modern-day folk, though, and a citizen could sue anyone he chose to. This practice made rhetorical adeptness a virtue, as citizens needed to be able to convincingly defend themselves in the courts. And this, in turn, gave rise to a class of professional rhetoricians: teachers and logographers (speechwriters).

The professionals' observation of courtroom rhetoric lead to the formulation of three rhetorical principles discussed here: dissoi logoi (twofold arguments), to prepon (the appropriate), and kairos (the opportune moment.) These mean, respectively: that there are the proverbial two sides to every argument; that the most effective argument will be the one most appropriate for the situation and audience; and that the rhetorician must intuit the best time to speak.

The rest of the chapter is concerned with the pertinent Sophists: Gorgias, Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle. I'm not going to blog them in this entry since we'll be covering their works in detail in a few weeks. I'll try to do some sort of justice to each of them then.