Our Political Roots: Examples of Ancient Greek Rhetorics

Oedipus the King
5 rhetorical fallacies

1. Ad Hominem – page 64 – “You won’t talk for pleasure? Then perhaps you’ll talk for pain.” [Oedipus]

2. Paradox – page 26 – “Blind instead of seeing, beggar instead of rich.” [Tiresias]

3. Hasty Generalization – page 32 – “Just this: were you not hand-in-glove with him, he never would have thought of pinning Laius’s death on me.” [Oedipus]

4. Ad Hominem – page 35 – “a fool…Crazed decisions” [Oedipus and Creon, name-calling]

5. Hasty Generalization – page 22 – “Creon? Of course! Was it you or he that thought up that?” [Oedipus]

5 figurative language

1. Metaphor – page 39 – “From you who set this foundering ship.”

2. Synecdoche – page 39 – “And now again can take the helm.”

3. Irony – page 53 – “Apollo once declared that I would come to couple with my mother, and with these very hands of mine spill out the life-blood of my father.”

4. Simile – page 71 – “a spurt of black-ensanguined rain like hail beat down.”

5. Hyperbole – page 19 – “Your flinty heart set in hopeless stubbornness? My flinty heart!”

6. Personification – page 5 – “The city droops with elegiac sound.”

7. Synecdoche – page 10 – “Clues breed clues and we must snatch at straws.”

10 literary terms

1. Symbol – page 70 – “rips from her dress the golden brooches she was wearing.” Brooch symbolizes the queen and her royalty, but after she dies, the brooch is used as a weapon, in a sense that royalty has power and can we used to hurt others.

2. Climax – page 67 – “I want to gaze no more. My birth all sprung revealed from those it never should, Myself entwined with those I never could. And I the killer of those I never would.” [Oedipus] This is when Oedipus realizes that he as married his mother and killed his father, exactly what the oracle told him would happen. This even leads to the falling action.

3. Protagonist – page 5 – “I whom men call Oedipus the Great...King Oedipus, the sovereign of our land.” Oedipus is introduced into the story.

4. Syntax – page 66 – “What a slave? Or someone of his line?… She, she gave it to you?… With what intention?… The child’s own mother?… What kind of prophecy?” Oedipus is questioning the Shepard, so he can learn the truth about his life. The use of interrogative sentences creates suspicion and builds up the story, leading to the climax.

5. Hyperbole – page 19 – “Your flinty heart set in hopeless stubbornness? My flinty heart!” This is an exaggeration about Tiresias, made by Oedipus because Tiresias refuses to speak, “my lips are sealed.”

6. Symbol – page 57 – “I loosed the pin that rivet your feet. Which gave you also your unlucky name.” The messenger reveals to Oedipus how he was found, bound at the feet, and why he was named Oedipus, “swollen-foot.”

7. Tone – page 34 – “Then what is it you want – my banishment? [says Creon] Banishment? Great heavens, no! I want you dead: A lesson to all of how much envy’s worth. [Oedipus]” Oedipus’ tone is bitter, judgmental and condescending, while Creon’s tone is frank and cool like a cucumber :]

8. Theme – page 46 – “If he will keep to several, I, as only one, am not the killer, not the same. But if he says it was a lone man journeying – ah then! – the verdict tilts too heavily on me.” Oedipus portrays the theme that although the truth may ruin one’s life, the truth will set one free and that people will do anything to know the truth.

9. Epiphany – page 55 – “Worlds apart? He was my father, wasn’t he? No more nor less than I who tell you this.” [Oedipus] The protagonist has a realization/epiphany that his father was not Polybus, when the messenger is talking to him.

10. Conflict – page 18 – “Please send me home…What? Refuse to speak? Is that fair and loyal to your city?… Ah, fair speech! If yours were only so I should not shy away.” This is a conflict between Oedipus and Tiresias. Oedipus wants Tiresias to help him find out who killed Laius, but Tiresias doesn’t want to talk and participate.