Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
No one has written The Listener
Our civilization is full of great books on speaking, and two of the greatest come from the ancient world. Listening is one of the most important and enchanting life skills anyone can have, and it has no equivalent.
Few of us know how to listen because no one has taught us how. No one has listened to us either, so we come to social life greedy to speak and hungry to meet others, yet reluctant to hear them.
Friendship then degenerates into a socialized egoism. Like most things, it comes down to education.
Why did the ancients write so much about speaking?
In Athens, citizens argued their own cases in court and voted in open assemblies, so persuasive speech carried direct political and legal power. Aristotle's Rhetoric, written in the fourth century BC, set out how arguments persuade. Cicero's De Oratore, from 55 BC, did the same for Roman public life. Teachers of rhetoric were among the first paid professional educators in the Greek world.
How did Greek students train to speak well?
Rhetorical education in the Greek and Roman world followed a graded set of exercises called the progymnasmata. Students began by retelling fables and narratives, then moved on to arguing for or against a proposition. Later stages included praising a person and debating a law. The sequence was used for centuries and shaped schooling long after antiquity.