Prosopopoeia

Prosopopoeia (Greek 'making a face') is the figure by which a rhetor puts words into the mouth of someone or something that cannot speak for itself — a dead ancestor, an abstract virtue, a city, a river, the state. It differs from personification: personification attributes human qualities to a non-human thing, while prosopopoeia lets that thing take over the sentence and address the audience directly.

The classical schoolroom used prosopopoeia as an exercise. A student would be asked to compose the speech Andromache would deliver over Hector's body, or the speech the walls of Athens might make to their citizens. The exercise trained voice: to sound convincingly like someone else, on an occasion the student had never witnessed, using only what could be known of the character and the moment.

In modern political rhetoric prosopopoeia survives most visibly in appeals in which the speaker gives voice to the nation, to future generations, or to the dead. It is a powerful and easily misused device: because the borrowed voice cannot answer back, the speaker's construction of it goes unchecked, and prosopopoeia at scale slides quickly into ventriloquism.

Common mistake: using prosopopoeia to close an argument rather than to open one. When the dead, or the nation, or the founders are made to endorse the speaker's own position, the audience should hear the ventriloquism as clearly as the voice; a rhetor who does not signal the construction is asking for a trust the figure does not by itself earn.