Words well used

As Marrou makes clear in his writing about Roman education, rhetoric continued to be based on hard and fast rules and formulae. A good speech had specific parts and those parts could be filled out with particular elements appropriate to the occasion, audience, desired tone, and so forth.

Such attention to detail casts a pall of the magical over rhetoric, at least in my mind. Curiously enough, the same sort of attention was paid to Roman ritualistic magic. Just as an effective speech was described as having various sections, so too did the prescribed ritual for convening with some spirit or deity so as to request some favour or other. What this leaves me wondering is which came first?

Was Roman ritual magic (and the Greek version before it), basically a way to hold a conversation with some supernatural force, borne out of the political use of words? Or did those who were born with gilded tongues take what they had originally used for religious or occult purposes and turn it to the political at some point in ancient history?

Given the sacred power of rulers, I also wonder if somehow the magical and the political weren't more closely related at some distant point in human history. Perhaps at one time having a way with spoken words was viewed as a gift that entitled its wielders to hold power over others, on both a natural (if someone's persuasive, they're simply persuasive), and religious (their quick wits being viewed as a sign of a close and open connection to the divine) level.

Maybe, at some point in history, ritualistic magic and rhetoric were the same thing, understood as simply the use of words to affect the world around you. This could be closer to the truth than you might expect. After all, studies have shown that swearing when you hurt yourself eases the pain, so maybe whatever magic there was around words themselves in that distant past has persisted in some small way into our own world.