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What Are The Five Situations According To Cicero's Philosophies?

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What Are The Five Situations According To Cicero's Philosophies?
Cicero did a fantastic job in systematically presenting the psychological thinking behind a persuasive speech. The five situations which a speaker may encounter, as put forward by Cicero, are the resultant of five different kinds of audiences which one may face with during a presentation or delivery. Therefore, as emphasized by Cicero himself, one must use different strategies in addressing different audiences, and it is absolutely vital one does that in the opening of one’s speech (571).
The five different kind situations or causes as referred to by Cicero are namely honorable, astonishing, low, doubtful, and obscure (571). Personally I feel that there might be a relation between the causes of low and obscure which Cicero failed to point …show more content…
It makes perfect sense that to win over the crowd during a delivery; one has to make sure that the crowd likes one as a speaker. However, this is not to say that the words of persuasion and rhetorical invention are not important, in contrary, as Gorgias put it, “…if you have the power of uttering this word, you will have the physician your slave, and the money-maker of whom you talk will be found to gather treasures…, for you who are able to speak and to persuade the multitude (798).” Nevertheless, the manipulation of words is not my emphasis here, it is the appeal of the writer, in another words the ethos, as coined by Aristotle. As audience, we look upon to the speaker; his personality, wisdom, knowledge, and all other characters play a part in helping us forming a perception about him, and this will inevitability affect our responsiveness towards the issues he is addressing. As a result, we will develop into the five different kinds of audiences which mentioned earlier. And the speaker in turn, will have to employ his delivery methods accordingly so as to create resonance with the people. Form this observation, it is easy to see that the speaker’s personality and style and the type of audience are all inter-connected and have to be considered as a
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