Whether it is a dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles or the colonisers and the colonised in Things Fall Apart, we can all learn techniques of persuasion from literature As the campaign for the White House gears up and the struggle over Brexit becomes ever more intense, we’re inundated with spin, fake news and alternative facts. Techniques of persuasion – which the ancient Greeks called the science of rhetoric – are very much alive. Homer’s ILIAD (8th century BC) opens with the dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles pitching inherited power against proven merit. But systematic studies of rhetoric, and realisations that it empowered immoral people, then emerged with 5th-century democracies. Barry Unsworth’s 2002 novel THE SONGS OF THE KINGS retold the _Iliad_ and Euripides’ _Iphigenia in Aulis_ to skewer the sophisticated spin of New Labour, especially Peter Mandelson. Agamemnon’s chief strategist is Odysseus, whose “own fluency betrayed him sometimes, when he felt the excitement of the prospect, through words alone, of prevailing over another mind, using the fears and desires of that mind to disarm and control it”. Continue reading...
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