On "The First Sophists: History and Historiographers"

In the first chapter of her book, Susan Jarratt suggests an alternative historiographical methodology based loosely on the practices and epistemology of the early sophists of ancient Greece. By employing antithesis and parataxis--two of the characteristic tactics of the sophists--Jarratt suggests that the rhetorical historiographer can disrupt "the continuity of the given historical narrative," and thereby open up a space within which new historical narratives can be considered (Jarratt 17). As an example of the type of exercise she has in mind, Jarratt points to Gorgias' Encomium of Helen, which suggests that Helen's abduction ought not--perhaps--to be blamed on her. The idea here seems to be that Gorgias' contemporary Athenians (and possibly the wider ancient Greek world) placed the onus for the entire Trojan War on the actions of Menelaus' queen, and Gorgias is able to call into question this forgone (and highly dubious) conclusion through his deployment of sophistic rhetorical techniques (e.g., antithesis and parataxis). Jarratt suggests that the modern sophistically inclined rhetorical historiographer can similarly cause his or her contemporaries to reconsider what they think they know about their collective (and individual?) historical narrative. Through a creative approach that draws on various disciplines and techniques, the rhetorical historiographer "plays with the material like Frankenstein with body parts," the point of which "is not exposing or discovering the unknown, but rearranging the known" where "rearrangement is revaluation"(28). Jarratt frames this point in terms of disrupting the teleology of the current historical narratives, by which she seems to mean the notion that we already know where the history has to end up. The assumption Jarratt seems to be operating under is that shaking up our sense of what our history is constitutes a boon. Surely there are revaluations that could be made through rearrangements of the known that would constitute an improvement, but there are just as surely many other revaluations that could only be described as moral disasters. How are we to determine which is which? Here is the charge leveled at the first sophists by Plato and Aristotle, which seems just as valid here and now: Rhetoric does not possess the mechanism for determining better from worse. To the extent that rhetoricians deploy value theories that would allow them to judge better from worse revaluations, they are no longer engaged in rhetoric but philosophy.