page_title: Public speaking
section_title: Greece
hierarchical_section_title: Public speaking / History / Greece
caption_attribution_description: Aule Metele is a Romano-Etruscan work in the Roman style and depicts an Etruscan man wearing a short Roman toga and footwear. His right arm is raised to indicate that he is an orator addressing the public. An inscription on the hem of his toga gives his name and parentage.
context_page_description: Public speaking is the process or act of performing a speech to a live audience. Public speaking is commonly understood as formal, face-to-face, speaking of a single person to a group of listeners. However, due to the evolution of public speaking, it is modernly viewed as any form of speaking between an audience and the speaker. Traditionally, public speaking was considered to be a part of the art of persuasion. The act can accomplish particular purposes including to inform, to persuade, and to entertain. Additionally, differing methods, structures, and rules can be utilized according to the speaking situation.
  Public speaking was developed in Rome and Greece. Prominent thinkers from these lands influenced the development and evolutionary history of public speaking. Currently, technology continues to transform the art of public speaking through newly available technology such as videoconferencing, multimedia presentations, and other nontraditional forms.
context_section_description: Although there is evidence of public speech training in ancient Egypt, the first known piece on oratory, written over 2,000 years ago, came from ancient Greece. This work elaborated on principles drawn from the practices and experiences of ancient Greek orators. Aristotle was one who first recorded the teachers of oratory to use definitive rules and models. His emphasis on oratory led to oration becoming an essential part of a liberal arts education during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The classical antiquity works written by the ancient Greeks capture the ways they taught and developed the art of public speaking thousands of years ago.
  In classical Greece and Rome, rhetoric was the main component of composition and speech delivery, both of which were critical skills for citizens to use in public and private life. In ancient Greece, citizens spoke on their own behalf rather than having professionals, like modern lawyers, speak for them. Any citizen who wished to succeed in court, in politics or in social life had to learn techniques of public speaking. Rhetorical tools were first taught by a group of rhetoric teachers called Sophists who were notable for teaching paying students how to speak effectively using the methods they developed.
  Separately from the Sophists, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle  developed their own theories of public speaking and taught these principles to students who wanted to learn skills in rhetoric. Plato and Aristotle taught these principles in schools that they founded, The Academy and The Lyceum, respectively. Although Greece eventually lost political sovereignty, the Greek culture of training in public speaking was adopted almost identically by the Romans.
caption: The Orator, c. 100 BCE, an Etrusco-Roman bronze sculpture depicting Aule Metele (Latin: Aulus Metellus), an Etruscan man wearing a Roman toga while engaged in rhetoric; the statue features an inscription in the Etruscan alphabet.
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