Rhetoric, the Art of Persuasion, has been defined as "a study or discipline concerned with principles of communicating either to inform or to persuade others," and this is certainly an informative definition.¹ Communicating, however, is a complicated process, and communicative acts can and do take many different forms. We humans can communicate locally with only a simple nod of the head; and by publishing a web page we can even communicate globally. But flowers, too, can communicate with insects; and (according to some modern rhetoricians) flowers even use rhetoric in displaying their colors, actually "persuading" the bees to visit them for nectar.² For the Greek inventors of rhetoric, however, neither nods nor flowers were part of rhetoric; at least not in the primary sense of the word, because to the Greeks rhetoric was a way of speaking.³ Indeed, our word 'rhetoric', which is related to our word 'word', is derived from the Greek word 'eiro', whose basic meaning is 'I speak'.⁴ And the Greek counterpart of our word 'rhetoric' was originally applied, in the 6th century BCE, to speeches presented in the public assembly.

Rhetoric constitutes, however, more than merely talking, and rhetoric has rightly been called the art of persuasion. Thus, we call upon rhetoric when we have a case to plead and we want to make that case by using persuasive language. And like those very advocates in the Greek assembly who were responsible for bringing the connotation "persuasion" to the term "rhetoric", through their ability to influence the assembly with "sweetly flowing" phrases, we too can use the numerous and intricate interconnections of words and ideas to pander our rhetorical honeydew.

The task of the rhetor, then, is to discover those forms of discourse that allow the art of persuasion to come into play. However, in attempting to persuade an audience of a situation, we are also attempting to convey to that audience our understanding of the situation. And "conveying an understanding", as we shall see, entails, at least, the invocation of images and ideas that "embody", in some form or other, the that situation we want to convey. Let us look, then, what this invocation and embodying actually consists.