The spectacle of a single person walking to a podium to persuade an audience remains now exactly as it was then. Very few disciplines survive twenty centuries. Nothing of the science of the period is of much more than curiosity value. The drama is still performed, but most of its stylistic conventions are anachronisms. Disciplines tend to date, positions are superseded, ideas fall into disuse, new frontiers are discovered. None of that is true of rhetoric. Reputations in the ancient republics were won and burnished by theatrical performance, and in politics today, they still are. Whether they
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