I'm going Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and and the Leverume Trust, online at

W.W. history of philosophy. net. Today's episode, Silver Tongues in

Golden Moths, rhetoric and ancient philosophy.

It was December 1981 with New Year's Eve just around the corner, and Busy B. Stararski was at the microphone.

He was enthusiastically laying down some rather simplistic rhymes over a beat.

His main theme was that everyone should party.

Then fellow hip-hop performer Kool-Mow-D leapt onto the stage.

Kool-Mow-D proceeded to demolish poor busy B with a torrent of rhyming improvised invective, accusing him of lacking lyrical

imagination, of stealing rhymes from other wrappers, and of generally being really

lame. A typical passage, which I quote mostly because of its

unusual lack of obscenities, went like this. In a battle like this, you know you'd lose. Between me me and you who do you think they'll choose well if you think it's you I got bad news because when you hear your name you're going to hear some booze

Okay, it's not T.S. Elliot, but Kulmo D's tongue was quick and poisonous enough to make this a

legendary humiliation for Busy B, and a pioneering moment in the development of freestyling battle rap, in which MCs throw rhymed insults at one another.

As Kul Mo D put it on one of his albums, he considered rapping as a competitive sport.

In the ancient world too there were performers who competed at improvised verbal pyrotechnics.

They did not rap to a beat, but they could help defendants beat a rap. They were

rhetoric and they were at home in the law courts as well as legislative bodies or

even before the Emperor himself.

The art of public persuasion already played a role in classical Greek philosophy, Plato

contending with the Sophists, and Aristotle devoting a treatise to rhetoric.

But it also helped to shape the philosophical scene in late antiquity.

And no wonder, rhetoric was part of the standard educational curriculum for the young men and occasionally

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