Timeline of Historical and Rhetorical Events
Historical event
First Olympic games, Greece
Romulus founds Rome
Peisistratus, tyrant in Athens
Brutus establishes Roman Republic
Democratic reforms in Athens
Parthenon completed in Athens
Aristotle founds Lyceum
Cicero assassinated by order of Mark Antony
Pantheon built in Rome
Fall of Rome to Visigoths
Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor
Universities of Paris and Oxford founded
Black Death in Europe
Joan of Arc is executed
Protestant Reformation begins
Date
776
753
560
509
507
450
432
399
390
386
370
336
161
84
86
55
43
95
118
410
800
1200
1348
1431
1513
1516
1517
1543
1594
1605
Galileo publishes Letters on Sunpots
Mayflower arrives in Massachusetts
American Revolution
1613
1620
1637
1690
1709
1762
1776
1801
Napoleon Bonaparte becomes Emperor of France
Charles Babbage invents the first computer
1804
1822
1826
1828
1831
1838
1855
Rhetorical event
Protagoras, the Sophist arrives in Athens
Execution of Socrates
Isocrates, Against the Sophists
Plato’s Gorgias
Aristotle’s Rhetoric
Plato, Phaedrus
Senatus Consultum outlaws the teaching of rhetoric in
Rome by Greek Sophists
Anonymous, Rhetorica ad Herennium
Cicero, De Inventione
Cicero, De Oratore
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria
Translations into Latin of the works of Aristotle on
ethics, natural history, metaphysics, politics
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
Sir Thomas More, Utopia
Pierre de la Ramee (Ramus), Arguments in Rhetoric
against Quintilian
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare, King Lear
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Giambattista Vico, On The Study Method of Our Time
Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck publishes evolutionary
theories
Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric
Rhetorician Sojourner Truth is freed from slavery
Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison begins
publishing The Liberator, an abolitionist paper
Rhetorician Frederick Douglass escapes from
slavery; bcomes powerful agitator against slavery
Feminist Harriet Taylor Mill observes, “High mental
powers in women will be but an exceptional accident, until every
career is open to them and […] are educated for themselves and
for the world, not one sex for the other” (The Rhetorical
Tradition).
Slavery abolished; Abraham Lincoln is assassinated
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
1865
1871
1873
Alexander Bell invents the telephone
B.C.E. (Before the Common Era)
C.E. (Common Era)
1876
Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral
Sense
Harvard separates rhetoric and literature