This section consists of excerpts from Aristotles Rhetoric in which he discusses his division of rhetoric into deliberative, epideictic, and judicial or forensic rhetoric and a selection of speeches that illustrate each of these modes of rhetoric. There are two examples of deliberative rhetoric, eight of epideictic rhetoric, and seven of judicial rhetoric. The speeches range from the fifth century BC to the late twentieth century of our era.

Chapter 4 addresses the role of the classical rhetorical tradition in bolstering Iberianized Catholicism among native converts in Paraguay and Portuguese India. By taking a connected and comparative approach to the application of the classical rhetorical tradition by Jesuit missionaries and its reception by native audiences both in the Americas and in coastal western India, this chapter argues that classical rhetoric shaped Konkani-language missionary oratory much more than Nahuatl, Quechua and Guarani examples, and offers a possible explanation based on the social and caste structures of the two contexts. In so doing, this chapter places Latin American ethnohistory in a new meta-geographical context, and argues for the important constitutive role played by non-European languages, peoples and cultural practices in the Iberian World.

Chapter 2 argues for the pivotal role of humanist rhetoric and oratory in shaping and disseminating the political ideology of the global Hispanic Monarchy. Rather than taking a protonation state like Mexico or Peru as the unit of analysis, this chapter considers all the surviving funeral orations for Philip IV (1605–1665) in Spanish America, Iberian Asia, the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish North Africa, Spanish Italy and the Spanish Netherlands. These panegyrics are highly revealing of the political ideology espoused in each of these contexts. Grounded in epideictic rhetoric, which channeled a long-standing humanist commitment to a virtue-driven model of kingship, these orations offered absolute standards for imitation by the elite in the person of the king (“virtue politics”). This was a political ideology that left space for institutionalized resistance or “negotiation” in the face of unjust local officials who could be measured according to these standards, and held accountable by petitions to the king, the ultimate source of justice.

This chapter examines significant silences in a specific situation: namely, the Portuguese parliament’s annual commemoration of the April 1974 revolution that overthrew the Salazarist dictatorship. By concentrating on a formal occasion of epideictic rhetoric, it is possible to examine rhetorical silences in detail. The analysis makes two crucial distinctions: the differences between literal and metaphorical silences and the differences between absences produced by speakers and those produced by audiences. The analysis concentrates on absences in the ways that the right-wing parties participate in the ceremony. The right-wing parties, especially the CDS-PP, are ambivalent about the 1974 revolution and its symbol of the red carnation. However, this ambivalence cannot be expressed directly in the ceremony but is revealed in absences – whether it be speakers avoiding giving unqualified praise of the revolution or unmitigated criticism of Salazarism, or the audience withholding applause at specific moments, or audience and speakers not wearing the symbolic carnation. The absences, which need not be literal silences, can be subtly managed. One example shows how a CDS-PP speaker rhetorically creates a space for right wingers to applaud the mention of the postrevolutionary defeat of the far left, while not rhetorically creating an analogous space for applauding the revolution itself.