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How does one become a competent public speaker? Public Speaking teachers have been asking this question for a very long time. There are many answers to this question. The answer this book chooses is The Progymnasmata. The Progymnasmata is close to 2,500 years old. The ancient Greeks and later the ancient Romans used it to teach their students the fundamentals of good public speaking. The Progymnasmata is a group of fourteen or so basic exercises that when artfully constructed allow a speaker to produce the gymnasmatum a full-blown public address. Public Speaking was important to the workings of both the Greek city state and the Roman Republic. The Greek or Roman citizen had a responsibility to be competent in public speaking because in a direct democracy like Greece or a republic like Rome, the citizen might be called on at any time to speak in the Greek agora or before the Roman senate. The ancient teachers taught their students the art (techne) of public address. They taught them through small exercises in oratory and argument so that they could give their students the building blocks of a speech and asked them to put those blocks in whatever order they thought necessary to produce a well-crafted, interesting, persuasive, and unique speech. TECHNE: The Ancient Art of Public Discource for the 21st Century Speaker teachers readers how to craft their speeches the way the ancient Greeks and Romans did theirs; the way Medieval and Renaissance Europeans did theirs; the way modern Americans do theirs; by studying public speaking the old-fashioned way, they will be on the road to learn the Art of Rhetoric.
