Cicero called rhetoric a liberal art necessary for every citizen of a free republic. In the polities of ancient Greece and Rome, rhetoric was politi-cally potent because oratory was the regular means of political decision. Words were decisive, often a matter of life and death, not merely for in-dividuals but for peoples. In human milieux where human speech is so politically decisive, reflection upon its nature became keen.

The selections of this sourcebook have been arranged in three se-quences. The first two sequences comprise philosophical dialogues on the ends of rhetoric. Selections from Plato's Gorgias, Phaedrus, and Apol-ogy examine the rhetorician or teacher of rhetoric, and then Cicero's De oratore offers us a dialectic among practitioners about its practice. The philosophical dialogues on the art's intended ends and causative effects provide the theoretical and ethical context for examining its means. These philosophical dialogues are thus propaedeutic to the third se-quence, which focusses on the art itself with selections from Aristotle's treatise On Rhetoric, paired with orations from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.