Hello,

For this response I posed two questions. How does Aristotle’s enthymeme, ethos, pathos, logos compare to Cicero’s stasis system in regards to appealing to an audience? And how do they differ?

Aristotle’s idea of an enthymeme based argument revolved around the emotion and common knowledge of the audience. By taking into account the emotion, or pathos, Aristotle felt that the audience would relate to what the speaker was saying, and be further inclined to agree with whatever argument was being made. To further catalyze this effect, Aristotle believed the rhetor should take into account the knowledge of the audience. This is the enthymeme idea. This tactic of securing audience agreement is, in my opinion, very similar to the stasis argument.

In order to convince an audience of an idea more easily, Cicero, like Aristotle, created a system aimed at adjusting to an audience. This is the stasis system, and though it is more geared for creating agreeable terms for an argument, without the use of the stasis system, an agreement will be hard to come to. This is similar to appealing to an audience, like Aristotle teaches. Similarly to an enthymeme, the first part of the stasis system looks at fact. An enthymeme takes into account the fact known about an argument, while the stasis system questions if fact is present.

Though these similarities do exist, Aristotle’s teachings and Cicero’s stasis system do differ in a lot of ways. The stasis system aims to set the foundation of a meaningful debate that is capable of coming to an agreement. Aristotle’s teachings more so deal with the faculty of making an argument and then taking into account things like the audiences emotion. Though some of the same themes exist in both teachings, Aristotle’s teaching does not look at the feasibility of the argument as much as Cicero’s.