Did Plato coin rhetoric?

The noun form of rhetor, “rhetoric,” did not exist, apparently, until Plato created it for his dialogue Gorgias. He created the term rhetoric to promote by contrast another word he made up, philosophy. Philosophy (the Greek philos meaning “love” and sophia meaning “wisdom”) was how he characterized the goal of the intellectual technique that he taught. He called that technique dialectic... Rhetoric, by contrast, as the art of teaching people how to bend an ignorant public to the will of an equally ignorant speaker, is a straw dog, a fake alternative, a piece of salesmanship, created to be destroyed in order to promote philosophy and to denigrate political instruction, literary instruction, and word craft. A rhetorician, also a made-up word (we can call it a neologism if we want to dignify it some), was one who taught others how to make public speeches and thus a person who made rhetors. Prior to Plato, nobody resisted the idea of being a rhetor, a public speaker, because the opposite of one who spoke in public was a private citizen: in Greek, an idiotes.

If this is true,¹ then rhetoric was created in order to promote philosophy. And thus it was a derogatory appellation from the start. Plato’s representation of philosophy helped broaden the general distrust of public speaking and the people who might try to influence public decision making by participating in it. It also justified a life of quiet contemplation away from the dust and noise of the marketplace, laying the foundation for what would become academic ivory towers. Plato was so rhetorically effective that to this day most people feel insulted if they are accused of using rhetoric. Anyone who knows the subject of rhetoric well, however, knows that Plato was among the most effective rhetors of all time. The greatest stunt Plato ever pulled was to convince the world that his philosophy provided access to the truth while everyone else’s educational practices spread lies and deceptions and mere rhetoric. Plato, in other words, was such a slick rhetorician that he managed to convince people he wasn’t one at all.

Pullman, George. Persuasion: History, Theory, Practice. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2013, p. xxii.