Book III is baffling. But the actual development of the book is quite

clear: chapters i-xii on λέξις, diction, or, in the widest sense, style; chapters xiii-xix, on τάξις, or arrangement.

Delivery, after declaring it to have the greatest force (δύναμιν ... μεγίστην), he dismisses in a few sentences. Tantalizing in its brevity, this passage is nevertheless suggestive; for it sketches an analytic division of delivery into voice-placing and volume, pitch, and rhythm; it points to the value for public speaking of the arts of dramatic recital; and, most important of all, it relates delivery to the whole idea of style as concrete presentation _versus_ abstract formulation.

In thus uniting delivery and diction as alike means of effective utterance Aristotle has seemed to some readers to disparage both. He has seemed to express, as in a similar passage of Book I,[40] a philosophic contempt for style. But this impression is not confirmed by scrutiny. Not only can he hardly be thought to despise that to which he devotes himself cordially throughout a large part of his treatise, but his words here hardly yield the inference that has been drawn from prejudicial translation. They may be rendered more precisely as follows:

An art [of delivery] is not yet settled; for even that of diction emerged but late and seems a bore when regarded ideally. But[41] since the whole practise of rhetoric is gauged to actual effect upon hearers (πρὸς δόξαν), we must give delivery our care, not of [abstract] right, but of necessity. [Abstract] justice, indeed, demands of our speech nothing more than that it should neither offend nor propitiate. For [abstractly] just [method] is so to make one’s plea with the facts that everything beyond exposition is superfluous. Nevertheless [delivery] is of great importance, as I have said, because of the human frailty of the hearer. Indeed, the consideration of the hearer is in a degree necessary in all teaching; for even in explanation it makes some difference whether we speak thus or thus—not so much, however [as in active persuasion], all these things [i.e., of diction and delivery] being means of suggesting images[42] and gauged to the hearer. Therefore no one thus teaches geometry.

That art, then [of delivery], when it comes, will produce the same effects as acting; and some authors, as Thrasymachus on the pathetic, have made a slight attempt at it. Acting is both a natural gift and less reducible to art; but diction has its technic. That is why those who have mastered it take prizes regularly, as do the histrionic orators;[43] for written speeches prevail more by diction than by thought.

“No one thus teaches geometry” cannot be taken as a slur on style. It simply reminds us, by applying to diction a distinction made with great fulness in the first two chapters of Book I, that rhetoric is not geometry. Formulation, as in geometry, is colorless because it is abstract; but any actual presentation, even mere information (ἐν πάσῃ διδασκαλίᾳ), demands style, whether concreteness or the arts of delivery, for mere lucidity (πρὸς τὸ δηλῶσαι), much more for any sort of appeal. For any sort of presentation, Aristotle is saying, we must study style; and we must include the study of delivery except in those written addresses which depend on style even more than on thought.

The appeal of style, Aristotle says in this same first chapter,[44] was first discerned by the poets. The method of suggestion, in other words, belongs to poetic. This is more than a critical distinction; it has an application directly pedagogical. The teaching of style, always delicate and difficult, may well begin through poetry, which in descriptive heightening and in harmony of sound with sense, especially of pace with mood, most plainly exhibits style as adaptation. The connection of this with delivery, both with reading aloud and with dramatic recital, though obvious, is often neglected. Elocution in our modern sense may, if rightly related, be one of the gateways to appreciation of style.[45]