Persuasion in Homer Is Not Yet a Concept but an Event of Turning

Michael Naas’s Turning: From Persuasion to Philosophy is a sustained refusal to let the post-Platonic vocabulary of rhetoric and psychology arrive too early in the Iliad. Naas’s governing claim is that the Homeric field of persuasion is not yet what later Greek philosophy and rhetoric will make of peitho: not a technique possessed by a constituted subject and applied to another constituted subject, not a psychological causality moving an inner agent from one belief to another, not even an opposition between reasoned argument and seductive flattery. Persuasion in Homer is an event of turning, a movement in which the one who turns, the one who is turned, the speech that turns, and the communal world that receives the turning have not yet been separated into the categories on which the later opposition between philosophy and rhetoric will depend. The book’s project is therefore historiographical and philosophical at once: to read the Iliad as the topos in which persuasion has not yet been turned into a thing, and to track the long subsequent operation by which Greek thought, from Hesiod through Aeschylus to Plato, gradually concealed what the epic had held open.

The Middle Voice as the Grammar of Archaic Persuasion

Part One of the book — “The Middle Voice of Persuasion” — supplies the linguistic apparatus the rest of the argument depends on. Naas works from the grammatical fact that classical Greek preserves a third voice between active and passive: a voice in which the subject is simultaneously the agent and the affected, simultaneously turning and being turned. Where modern Indo-European languages force a choice between I persuade and I am persuaded, the middle voice marks a relation in which obedience and persuasion are not opposites but two phases of a single circuit. “In obedience there is already persuasion by the other; in persuasion there is already obedience to oneself” — Naas’s formulation belongs to the same philological field that Rutger Allan, Bruno Snell, and Ruth Padel work from different angles, and the convergence is not accidental. The Homeric soul, lacking an interior space sealed against the world, undergoes persuasion the way it undergoes weather, divine address, kinship pressure, gift, oath, prayer, and grief. What later appears as the name Peitho is, here, the grammar of that undergoing.

Turning-Toward and Turning-Away: Persuasion as Pharmakon

The architecture of the book is organised around the ambivalence of the turning. Part Two reads persuasion as turning-toward — the recovery of relation through command, counsel, prophecy, custom, oath, confidence, trust, and memory. Part Three reads persuasion as turning-away — the loss of relation through deception, seduction, separation, forgetting, madness, hubris, and blindness. The structure is deliberately Derridean: persuasion is a pharmakon, remedy and poison at once, and the same speech that binds a community can dissolve it. Naas refuses to grant priority to either face. The Iliad’s tragic intelligence consists precisely in holding both — recovery and loss — within a single ambivalent event that the later tradition will divide into legitimate and illegitimate persuasion, dialectic and rhetoric, male reason and female seduction, philosophy and its other.

Achilles at the Limit: Book 9 and Book 24

Part Six — “Persuasion at the Limit” — is the book’s exemplary reading. The embassy of Book 9 brings every communal instrument of turning into Achilles’ shelter at once. Phoenix offers narrative and kinship memory, Odysseus offers gifts, Ajax offers the bare claim of philia; all three offer the restoration of community. The embassy fails because every mechanism by which persuasion ordinarily turns a Homeric hero back into the social order has been brought to bear and exhausted, and what the failure exposes is the structural fragility of the community itself — the dependence of Achaean order on the contingent willingness of its best man to be turned. Naas reads Achilles not as a stubborn ego refusing reasonable arguments but as the figure who reveals what persuasion actually is by standing at its limit. Book 24 then performs the counter-scene: Priam enters Achilles’ shelter, takes the hands that killed his son, and what turns Achilles is not argument but the presence of another suffering father. The turning here is not rhetorical victory; it is the middle-voice event in which two mortal men recognise mortality together. Naas’s contribution is to show that this is persuasion in its archaic sense — the event the later tradition will be unable to think because it has already divided turning into persuader and persuaded.

From Persuasion to Philosophy: The Tradition’s Long Suppression

Parts Five and the closing sections trace the gradual concealment of what the Iliad held open. In Aeschylus the goddess Peitho is invoked at the end of the Oresteia to turn the Furies into the Semnai, and Naas reads the scene as the moment when the ambivalence of turning is dramatized and partially repressed at once. In Plato the repression hardens: persuasion is bifurcated into legitimate dialectic and illegitimate flattery, psychagogia is reserved for philosophy and denied to rhetoric, and the turning is recoded as the conversion of the soul toward the Good in the allegory of the cave. By the time of the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, persuasion has been “psychologized, reduced, and redefined as a strictly human affair,” and the Homeric topos has become inaccessible except through the kind of philological return Naas undertakes. The book’s closing claim — that “the turning between rhetoric and philosophy still founds and disrupts any attempt to write a ‘history’ of persuasion” — places it beside Detienne and Vernant’s Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society as a recovery of an excluded form of practical intelligence.

Why This Book Belongs on Seba’s Ancient Roots Shelf

For the depth-psychological reader, Turning belongs beside Nagy, Snell, Padel, and Allan as the philosophical complement to their philological work. Nagy demonstrates that the Homeric hero is a structural position within an oral tradition rather than a self-contained character; Snell demonstrates that the unified inner subject is a historical achievement rather than an anthropological constant; Padel demonstrates that the tragic self is porous to divine and somatic invasion; Allan clarifies the middle voice as the grammar of participation. Naas adds the missing piece: persuasion itself — the field in which one soul is supposed to act upon another — is, in archaic Greek experience, neither acting nor being acted upon but a middle-voice turning that precedes the distinction. For any practitioner whose clinical or contemplative work depends on the recognition that change is not engineered but undergone, this book supplies the philological grounding the depth tradition has long needed. The Iliad, on Naas’s reading, is not a primitive document awaiting psychological translation. It is an epic that still knows what the later tradition has had to forget: that wrath may become grief, grief may become recognition, and recognition may briefly restore a shattered community — and that none of these turnings can be reduced to a technique one subject applies to another.