We can make a broad distinction between two schools of classical thought on communication.
The first school sees communication as a way to discover the truth of things.
This school started with the famous philosopher Socrates and his student Plato.
They put a huge emphasis on the role of discourse
and logical argumentation in the communication process.
It is called the dialectic method:
which is simply put that logical and rational discussion
will help us resolve differences by finding out which viewpoint is true.
Therefore mans ability to reason is paramount for a civilization to flourish and advance.
Here we have, in a nutshell, the purpose of communication,
to express and critically weigh the value of ideas,
and eventually to discard or perfect them in correlation with their objective worth.
As models go, this one is obviously quite linear.
Good communication is rational communication that helps us to find ‘the truth’ in ideas.
It' easy to see why so many philosophers, who were also interested in natural science
and finding out how the world worked, were attracted to this school of thought.
Later, Medieval monks were also charmed
by this classical idea of communication to reach the truth.
It was in their opinion a way for pre-Christian Greeks and Romans
to see the greater truth of God.
So even though they were not Christians,
the writings of Plato and such were copied by Christian monks and have survived
while so many books of their contemporaries haven’t.
Usually we only know about these other books because Plato and such refer and react to them.
This second school of Greek communication science was called rhetorica.
Derived from the Greek ῥήτωρ (rhḗtōr) which means "public speaker".
Rhetorica taught the ability to perceive all means of persuasion in any given scenario,
according to Aristotle in one of his books on the topic.
So it was very much an applied science, where the practicality of theories decided their worth.
The main purpose was not to find truth but to persuade someone,
so essentially to make something seem like the truth even if it wasn’t.
Proponents of this school were also called sophists,
and were often attacked vehemently by natural philosophers like Socrates and Plato,
who above all else searched for the truth.
Later, many sophist writing was purposely not copied by Medieval monks for this same reason.
Despite the disapproval among natural philosophers,
rhetorica was extremely popular in the Classical world.
Not only in Greece but in Rome too
the ability to win people over through speeches was crucial for political or social advancement.
Caesar, Marc Anthony, Octavian, they were all trained in
and sometimes wrote about the art of persuasion.
Usually they had studied the basics of rhetorica in Greece itself.
Luckily some books on rhetorica did survive.
Most notably those by the Greek philosopher Aristotle
and the Roman statesman Marcus Cicero.
So what exactly did they teach?
We’ll talk about some basic rhetorical theory in the next section.