Kamala Harris and her fellow Democrats used ancient Greek rhetorical tricks to keep their audiences spellbound

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite by Richard Toye, University of Exeter The Democratic Party has had a good week. I’ll start that again – the Democratic Party has had an amazingly good week. Not so long ago, the Democrats seemed down, if not actually out. Now, they’re not merely pulling ahead in the polls – they seem to have recaptured that vital but elusive thing: hope. Those inside the hall in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention were treated to a series of impressive and moving speeches from, among others, Barack and Michelle Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Tim Walz and – yes – Joe Biden. The man so recently written off by many as a doddering geriatric was the star on the first night, as he passed on the flame to his vice-president, Kamala Harris. The secret to these rhetorical triumphs lies in three words with origins in ancient Greece: ethos, pathos and logos. The meanings are simple but crucial to successful oratory – as the famed Greek philosopher Aristotle first pointed out in The Art Of Rhetoric. As deployed by Aristotle, ethos refers to character – both the moral character of the speaker and, as we develop the idea...