Rhetoric: Hedging in Helen?

As the semester progresses, I find myself occasionally struck with a flight of fancy inspired by my readings.  Since my readings are, of course, rhetorical texts suited to graduate-level study, it might be more accurate to describe these flights of fancy as 'fits of curiosity into some nitpicky detail that may or may not be worthy of further exploration but probably isn't fleshed out enough to justify a paper all by itself.'

So I shall blog them.  (What else would I do with them?)

The first of these leapt out at me while I was perusing The Encomium of Helen.  Gorgias, of course, is a proto-rhetor (see Schiappa, 1995) of some repute; Plato detested him enough to name a dialogue after him.  Most notably for the purposes of this consideration, Gorgias was a fan of wordplay.  This is clearly evident in Helen; even after the translation to English one can find rather a lot of clever turns of phrase.

The Helen, of course, is Gorgias' speech which exonerates Helen of any guilt in that whole Trojan War business.  Whether it is an effective speech is subject to debate, of course--after all, what if she was just kind of a ho?--but one specific detail leaps out at me.

(Helen, in case you don't remember, is the reputed daughter of the whole 'Leda and the swan' debacle, the most beautiful woman alive, who married Menelaus but was later promised to Paris (or perhaps Alexander) by Aphrodite, which resulted in an abduction (maybe) and a war (as the story goes).)

The quote that we're going to review here relies entirely on the Greek convention of chiasmus, which is the reversal of items for impact.  The sentence in question is this: "Now that by nature and birth the woman who is the subject of this speech was preeminent among preeminent men and women, this is not unclear, not even to a few; for it is clear that Leda was her mother, while as a father she had in fact a god, though allegedly a mortal, the latter Tyndareus, the former Zeus; and of these the one seemed her father because he was, and the other was disproved because he was only said to be; and one was the greatest of men, the other lord of all."

If you follow that closely, you'll see that it switches back and forth.  Let's try it again with italics and underlining:  "... while as a father she had in fact a god, though allegedly a mortal, the latter Tyndareus, the former Zeus; and of these the one seemed her father because he was, and the other was disproved because he was only said to be; and one was the greatest of men, the other lord of all."

This is brilliant, though not at all uncommon for the time period.  This was, in fact, a sufficiently common convention that Aristotle used it in arranging his treatment of the emotions in book two of the Rhetoric.

However, and herein lies my question, was it in any way sacrosanct?  Because if someone could play fast and loose with it just a little bit, that someone could hedge magnificently on the divinity (or partial divinity) of a person, thus avoiding the choice between blasphemy and declaring a king a cuckold.  Let's look at it one more time, but this time, we'll assume one clause might not follow the back-and-forth: "... while as a father she had in fact a god, though allegedly a mortal, the latter Tyndareus, the former Zeus; and of these the one seemed her father because he was, and the other was disproved because he was only said to be; and one was the greatest of men, the other lord of all."

I can't help but wonder if Gorgias, clever Gorgias who considered himself a brilliant speaker and was not at all afraid to utilize all manner of wordplay to convey his meaning(s), might have been equivocating just a little bit.