An Outline of Classical Rhetoric Vickers

An Outline of Classical Rhetoric
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
In Defence of Rhetoric
Brian Vickers
Print publication date: 1989

Print ISBN-13: 9780198117919
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117919.001.0001

Brian Vickers
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198117919.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter begins, as rhetoric itself began, with real life, showing how eloquence was
seen as a natural phenomenon, practised by all human beings, merely written down and
systematized in rhetoric-books. It then gives a brief history of rhetoric in the time of its
first, and lasting formulation, together with an introduction to the major texts in classical
rhetoric, from Aristotle to Tacitus. It also outlines the main teachings of rhetoric on the
processes of composition, the attitude of the orator or writer towards his audience, and
the concept of style.
Keywords: rhetoric, major texts, Aristotle, Tacitus, composition, orator, style
i Rhetoric and Life
ALFRED DOOLITTLE. I’ll tell you, Governor, if youll only let me get a word in. I’m
willing to tell you. I’m wanting to tell you. I’m waiting to tell you.
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PROFESSOR H IGGINS. Pickering: this chap has a certain natural gift of rhetoric.
Observe the rhythm of his native woodnotes wild. ‘I’m willing to tell you: I’m
wanting to tell you: I’m waiting to tell you’. Sentimental rhetoric! thats the Welsh
strain in him. It also accounts for his mendacity and dishonesty.
Shaw, Pygmalion, Act II
Rhetoric, the art of persuasive communication, has long been recognized as the
systematization of natural eloquence. According to this tradition, the first writers of
rhetoric-books observed situations in real life where eloquence succeeded, analysed the
resources used by such speakers, and developed a teaching method which could impart
those skills. As one of the speakers in Cicero's dialogue De Oratore,1 , having summarized
the main doctrines in rhetoric, puts it:
the virtue in all these rules is, not that orators by following them have won a
reputation for eloquence, but that certain persons have noted and collected the
doings of men who were naturally eloquent: thus eloquence is not the offspring of
the art, but the art of eloquence. (1. 32. 146)
Quintilian, author of the most comprehensive classical treatise ‘On the Teaching of
Oratory’, the Institutio Oratoria, noted that ‘everything which art has brought to
perfection originated in nature’ (2. 17. 6), be it medicine, architecture, music, or oratory:
It was, then, nature that created speech, and observation that originated the art of
speaking. Just as men discovered the art of medicine by observing that some things
were healthy and some the (p.2) reverse, so they observed that some things
were useful and some useless in speaking, and noted them for imitation or
avoidance, while they added certain other precepts according as their nature
suggested. These observations were confirmed by experience and each man
proceeded to teach what he knew. (3.2.3)
The same process, the art of rhetoric codifying natural ability, also determined the
invention of topics: ‘the discovery of arguments was not the result of the publication of
textbooks, but every kind of argument was put forward before any rules were laid
down’ (5. 10. 120).
While writers of rhetoric-books collected, analysed, and classified methods of discovering

and organizing arguments, eloquence itself continued to flourish in a natural state.
Defending rhetoric from Plato's charge in the Gorgias and Phaedrus that it was a mere
‘knack’ or ‘routine’, not worthy of being declared a technē or ars, Aristotle, in the
opening paragraph of his Rhetoric, pronounced rhetoric to be the analogue or
counterpart of dialectic (whose status as a serious discipline was indisputable), since
Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general
ken of all men and belong to no definite science. Accordingly all men make use…of
both; for to a certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain
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them, to defend themselves and to attack others. Ordinary people do this either at
random or through practice and from acquired habit. (1354a 1–7)
The parallel existence of natural and acquired eloquence means that the latter must
always resemble the former. ‘For as art started from nature’, one of Cicero's speakers in
De Oratore warns, ‘it would certainly be deemed to have failed if it had not a natural
power of affecting us and giving us pleasure’ (3. 51. 197). Hence ‘the very cardinal sin’ of
oratory ‘is to depart from the language of everyday life, and the usage approved by the
sense of the community’ (1. 3. 12). For Cicero, the orator is—as Wordsworth said of the
poet—‘a man speaking to men’, and the proverbial injunction of the rhetorical tradition,
ars est celare artem, reminded the orator that however elevated his style and feelings
became he should not lose touch with what an ordinary person could think and feel. As
Quintilian advised him, ‘fix (p.3) your eyes on nature and follow her. All eloquence is
concerned with the activities of life,…and the mind is always readiest to accept what it
recognizes to be true to nature’ (8. 3. 71). To develop ability in speaking, Quintilian wrote,
is as natural as to develop the body by exercise, ‘consequently the more effective a
man's speaking the more in accordance with the nature of eloquence will it be’ (12. 10.
43–4). The successful speaker ‘stimulates us by the animation of his delivery, and kindles
the imagination, not by presenting us with an elaborate picture, but by bringing us into
actual contact with the things themselves’ (10. 1. 16).
The theoretical insistence on the naturalness of eloquence also had a historical grounding,
for rhetoricians could evoke, as the best proof of the existence of eloquence before the
codification of rhetoric, the poems of Homer. Aristotle, living in what was still to a great
extent an oral culture, refers to and quotes from Homer some forty times in his Rhetoric,
drawing on him for examples of speech and behaviour which are given the same
evidential status as references to contemporary life or history. So he distinguishes two
types of witnesses, ‘recent’ and ‘ancient’, the latter comprising ‘the poets and all other
notable persons whose judgements are known to all. Thus the Athenians appealed to
Homer as a witness about Salamis’ (1375b 25 ff.). Aristotle even believes that the ‘most
trustworthy of all are the “ancient” witnesses, since they cannot be corrupted’
(1376a 16), which to a modern reader seems to carry reverence too far. Homer or
Hesiod may state general principles, but they are surely not on the same level as people
who have observed something connected with a crime!
The reverence for Homer shared by Greeks and Romans, for whom he was already the
classic literary text, meant that the poems were closely scrutinized for evidence of
rhetorical activity. Crassus, Cicero's mouthpiece in De Oratore, deploring the separation
between rhetoric and philosophy created by Socrates, observes that in the old days
the same system of instruction seems to have imparted education both in right
conduct and in good speech; nor were professors in two separate groups, but the
same masters gave instruction both in ethics and in rhetoric, for instance the great
Phoenix in Homer, who says that (p.4) he was assigned to the young Achilles by
his father Peleus to accompany him to the wars in order to make him ‘a speaker of
words and a doer of deeds’. (3. 15. 57; Iliad, 9. 443)
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Quintilian picks up the same point, and adds that not only does Homer mention ‘a number
of orators’ but ‘the various styles are represented by the speeches of three of the
chiefs, and the young men are set to contend among themselves in contests of eloquence
[Iliad, 15. 283 f.]; moreover, lawsuits and pleaders are represented in the engravings on
the shield of Achilles [Iliad, 18. 497 ff.]’ (2. 17. 8). In his influential survey of classical
literature in Book 10, which discusses the authors whom the budding orator should
read, Quintilian follows the principle of Aratus—‘“With Jove let us begin”‘—in starting with
Homer, who is as multiple as ‘his own conception of Ocean’, the source and ‘inspiration
for every department’ of eloquent speech.
For, to say nothing of his eloquence, which he shows in praise, exhortation and
consolation, do not the ninth book containing the embassy to Achilles, the first
describing the quarrel between the chiefs, or the speeches delivered by the
counsellors in the second, display all the rules of art to be followed in forensic or
deliberative oratory? (10. 1. 46–7)
Homer was ‘master of all the emotions, tender and vehement alike’, and instinctively
observed such rhetorical devices as exordium, narratio, proof and refutation, peroration,
and all the ornaments of speech. ‘They are so numerous that the majority of writers on
the principles of rhetoric have gone to his works for examples of all these things’ (48–51).
The significance of eloquence in Homer is double. Writers on rhetoric continued to cite

his work, classifying the speeches into various categories. Menelaus represents the plain
style, Nestor the middle, the ‘resourceful Odysseus’ incarnates the grand style.2 He
may seem unimpressive before he speaks,
But when he let the great voice go from his chest, and the words came drifting
down like the winter snows, then no other mortal man beside could stand up
against Odysseus.3
(p.5) As late as Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad (1720), the speeches were
indexed under the rhetorical categories, ‘the Exhortatory or Deliberative, the
Vituperative, the Narrative, the Pathetic, and the Sarcastic’. But in addition to his
exemplary value to rhetoricians, Homer has an added significance in the history of
eloquence in that his orators are all presented speaking according to the needs of an
immediate situation, political, military, or personal. Rhetoric has always existed in a
symbiotic relationship with society, expanding or contracting itself according to the
demands that a social group makes on it. Since ‘almost half of the Iliad and more than two-
thirds of the Odyssey are devoted to speeches by the characters’4—at meetings of the
army-leaders in council, of the soldiers’ assembly, of embassies, of citizens—we find
there all the basic forms of communication that exist in oral cultures (and not only there):
face-to-face political conflict, threats of force, dissimulation, appeals for mercy. Speakers
do not always get what they want, since the word is subject to the will, and in Homer, as
in real life, persuasion does not always succeed (a propagandist for rhetoric might have
constructed things differently).5 But in these poems men invest their whole beings in
their eloquence and the success they hope it will bring, none more poignantly than Priam,
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begging Achilles to return the body of his son Hector for burial (Iliad, 24. 476 ff.). The
status and power of eloquence in later Greek life is already visible in the Odyssey, where
Odysseus explains to Euryalus that
the gods do not bestow graces in all ways

on men, neither in stature nor yet in brains or eloquence;
for there is a certain kind of man, less noted for beauty,
but the god puts comeliness on his words, and they who
look toward him
(p.6) are filled with joy at the sight, and he speaks to them
without faltering in winning modesty, and shines among
those who are gathered,
and people look on him as on a god when he walks in the city.6
Greek society needed orators, and valued rhetoricians.
The first teachers of rhetoric that we know of emerged precisely in answer to a new
social need. A systematic rhetoric was first developed in the Greek towns of Sicily after
the expulsions, between 471 and 463 BC, of tyrants who, among other illegal acts, had
seized property. To re-establish its ownership widespread litigation was necessary, and
one Corax and his pupil Tisias set up in Syracuse the first rule-based methods for
handling judicial disputes. Little is known of the detail of their teaching, but it included a
rudimentary account of the structure of a speech, while to Tisias (among others) is
ascribed the definition of rhetoric as the demiurgos, or artificer, of persuasion.7 Much
more is known about Gorgias, another product of the Greek province in Sicily, who came
to Athens from Leontini in 427 BC to request Athenian help, and made a great impression
with his eloquence.8 Gorgias was a Sophist, one of that school of philosophers who
devoted themselves to the practicalities of civic life, and whose advocacy of rhetoric was
based, as Plato recorded, on its ability to make men its slaves by persuasion, not force
(Philebus, 58 a–b.). His arrival was timely, for changes in both Athenian politics and law in
the second half of the fifth century put a much greater premium on the citizen's direct
involvement with community decisions. The system of single magistrates or the select
group of judges on the Areopagus gave way to one involving large popular juries, the
dikastēria, consisting of from 201 to 501 citizens, with complete jurisdiction over trial
proceedings. There being no public prosecutor, criminal cases were brought by citizens
who appeared in person to argue their case in a single set speech for either side. It is no
accident that the early handbooks of rhetoric, including Aristotle’ s, pay so much attention
to the techniques of successful litigation. An ability to speak effectively was a (p.7)
necessity for the liberty and prosperity of any proper Athenian. The need to address a
large jury coherently on a single appearance encouraged the composition of speeches
that were carefully reasoned, clearly arranged, and also appealed to the emotions, much
to the dislike of Aristotle and other more conservative thinkers.9 In politics, too,
democracy was broadening the base of participation in public life, so that the citizen who
wanted to speak successfully in the Assembly or Council might take lessons from the
Sophists, who specialized in political oratory. In the dialogue named after him, Plato makes
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Gorgias set out the practical advantages of eloquence. Rhetoric
is in very truth the greatest boon, for it brings freedom to mankind in general and
to each man dominion over others in his own country…. I mean the power to
convince by your words the judges in court, the senators in Council, the people in
the Assembly, or in any other gathering of a citizen body.10
To Plato, of course, it was deplorable that the rhetorician, not the philosopher, should
have such power, but to the majority of students of rhetoric down to the Renaissance its
great attraction was just this promise of success in civic life, and its upholding of liberty.
It is a historical fact, more familiar in this century than in any other, that tyrants and
totalitarian states destroy freedom of speech. Under the Thirty Tyrants in Athens at one
point the teachers of rhetoric were forbidden to work, and when Latin teachers of
rhetoric appeared in Rome at the beginning of the first century BC, ‘the senatorial party,
regarding them as a sign of democratic progress, tried to silence them’.11 An
involvement in politics was ranked highly in ancient society, since it implied that the
individual was escaping from self-centredness and devoting his abilities to the vita activa,
for the common good. This attitude is particularly strong in the Sophists, as we shall see,
from Protagoras to Isocrates. For Aristotle political oratory ‘is a nobler business’ than
forensic (judicial) oratory, ‘and fitter for a citizen than that which concerns the relations of
private (p.8) individuals’ (1354b 23). To him, indeed, politics was ‘a more instructive art
and a more real branch of knowledge’ than rhetoric (1359b 5), but for Isocrates, the
leading representative of the Sophists (the rival tradition to Plato and Aristotle), rhetoric
was the primary tool in education, and education was directed towards political activity
and practicality.12 For Roman rhetoricians, above all Cicero, the link between rhetoric
and the vita activa was fundamental. In the early De Inventione (c. 87 BC) rhetoric is held
to have taught men, when society was still unformed, ‘that they must work for the
common good’ (1. 2. 3). When rhetoric became corrupted men opted out of the active life
(1. 3. 4), but Roman orators and politicians reclaimed the art in order to protect the state
(1. 4. 5). Rhetoric is now defined as a department of ‘the scientific system of polities’, while
oratorical ability is subsumed under politics as essential to the state (1. 5. 6).
The mature De Oratore (55 BC) includes numerous passages praising rhetoric in glowing
terms for giving those who master it the power ‘to get hold on assemblies of men’:
In every free nation, and most of all in communities which have attained the
enjoyment of peace and tranquillity, this one art has always flourished over the rest
and ever reigned supreme…. What function is so kingly, so worthy of the free, so
generous, as to bring help to the suppliant, to raise up those who are cast down, to
bestow security, to set free from peril, to maintain men in their civil rights?…The
wise control of the complete orator is that which chiefly upholds not only his own
dignity, but the safety of countless individuals and of the entire State. (1. 8. 30–4)
The connection between rhetoric and political life, reiterated so frequently by Cicero,13
and so influentially for the Renaissance, is also found in Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria (AD
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92–4), but inevitably with less emphasis.14 Cicero had achieved fame in a long career (81–
43 BC) as an orator on political and legal affairs, (p.9) and his two greatest campaigns,
the defeat of Catiline and the attack on Mark Antony, displayed both oratorical power and
admirable integrity. Yet the collapse of the Republic and the establishment of the Empire
in 31 BC meant that rhetoric and free speech no longer flourished in public affairs, the
orator being ‘driven from the helm of State’, as Crassus had put it in De Oratore, ‘thrust
down and locked up exclusively in law-courts and petty little assemblies, as if in a
pounding-mill’ (1. 11. 45). Quintilian was confined to an even smaller space, the school-
room, first as a state professor of rhetoric and then as tutor to the Emperor Domitian's
nephews. From that position he naturally disagreed with those who ‘identify rhetoric with
politics’ (2. 15. 33), arguing that political questions provide only part of its material (2. 21.
2). Yet his comprehensive enquiry into the career of the orator, from boyhood to
retirement, typified an important process in which rhetoric became essential to public life
in another sphere, education.
The pioneer who took the logical step of developing a school to train the Greeks for
political and legal speaking, with a fixed school (as distinct from the Sophists, who travelled
from place to place), was Isocrates (436–338 BC).15 In about 393, several years before
Plato founded the Academy, Isocrates opened a small school whose graduates included
some of the outstanding men of their generation, among them the general Timotheus, the
historians Theopompus and Ephorus, and Nicocles, the king of Cyprus. As Cicero
recorded, at this time ‘there arose Isocrates, the Master of all rhetoricians, from whose
school, as from the Horse of Troy, none but leaders emerged’, some of whom ‘sought
glory in ceremonial, others in action’ (De Or. 2. 22. 94). Isocrates’ system, partly
described in the fragmentary speech Against the Sophists, emphasized three
fundamental elements (p.10) in rhetorical education—nature, training, and practice. The
teacher must not only explain principles but provide examples of oratory as models, and
guide his students to the acquisition of practical wisdom. Isocrates’ importance as the
founder of a rhetoric-school is marked by the many similar institutions that sprang up in
the ancient world, and his influence on education extended to Renaissance Europe. But
his significance far exceeds his actual teaching practice. In his extant speeches, which
were written for reading rather than public delivery, Isocrates saw language as the
defining mark of humanity and civilization:
In most of our abilities we differ not at all from the animals; we are in fact behind
many in swiftness and strength and other resources. But because there is born in
us the power to persuade each other and to show ourselves whatever we wish,
we not only have escaped from living as brutes, but also by coming together have
founded cities and set up laws and invented arts, and speech has helped us attain
practically all of the things we have devised. For it is speech that has made laws
about justice and injustice and honour and disgrace, without which provisions we
should not be able to live together. By speech we refute the wicked and praise the
good. By speech we educate the ignorant and inform the wise.
Since ‘nothing done with intelligence is done without speech’, then ‘speech is the marshal
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of all actions and of thoughts, and those most use it who have the greatest wisdom’.16
Isocrates’ praise of language was taken over unacknowledged by many other writers,
and achieved its widest diffusion through Cicero, in passages that, right up to the
eighteenth century, played a major role in forming the image of the orator as a culture-
hero. The early De Inventione elaborates on the Isocratean model by positing a time
‘when men wandered at large in the field like animals and lived on wild fare’, lacking
reason, religion, society, and law, until one ‘great and wise’ man ‘transformed them from
wild savages into a kind and gentle folk’ by use of ‘reason and eloquence’, ratio and oratio
(1. 2. 2). Once social order was established, according to this mythical history, persuasion
was still the crucial factor in leading men to submit themselves to authority and justice
(p.11) (1. 2. 3). Rhetoric continues to play a crucial cultural and political role, for it
preserves the community, ‘renders life safe, honourable’, and protects friends, so that
just as men excel animals ‘most by having the power of speech’, that man has ‘won a
splendid possession who excels men themselves in that ability by which men excel beasts’
(1. 4. 5). Although Cicero disowned De Inventione thirty years later as ‘the unfinished and
crude essays which slipped out of the notebooks of…my youth’ (De Or. 1. 2. 5), it was the
only one of his rhetorical works to have an unbroken tradition, with hundreds of
manuscripts and commentaries surviving from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Nor
was Cicero deterred from repeating this laus eloquentiae almost verbatim in the mature
work (1. 8. 32–3). The picture given there of the orator leading ‘scattered humanity…out
of its brutish existence in the wilderness up to our present condition of civilization as men
and as citizens’, helping to create ‘social communities,…laws, tribunals, and civic rights’,
was taken over bodily by many Renaissance writers on rhetoric.17 Quintilian similarly
described oratory as ‘the highest gift of providence to man’ (1. 10. 7), and echoed
Isocrates and Cicero in crediting eloquence with a civilizing function (2. 16. 9), ratio and
oratio being a divine gift to elevate us over the beasts (2. 16. 12–15, 2. 20. 9, 3. 2. 1, 3).
Hence the orator, in excelling other men in these capacities, becomes the highest
realization of humanity (2. 16. 17).
The effect (and perhaps intention) of these programmatic celebrations of rhetoric was to
confirm the validity of a rhetorical education and to attract both teachers and pupils. By
the middle of the fourth century BC rhetoric had become the central discipline in Greek
education, affecting ‘all public utterances’ and indeed all intellectual activity,18 and it
became yet more widespread in the Hellenistic period (338 BC onwards). Greek
rhetoricians began teaching in Rome in the second century BC, with great success.
Cicero recorded that when the Romans had ‘heard the Greek orators, gained
acquaintance with their literature and called in Greek teachers, our people were fired
with a really incredible enthusiasm for eloquence’ (De Or. (p.12) 1. 4. 14). The rhetor
was the best paid and most respected of teachers: Vespasian paid them salaries of up to
100,000 sesterces, and in AD 74 he even excused grammarians and rhetoricians from
local obligations, such as taxes and billetting.19 A boy's education began with grammar
and rhetoric, and the study of rhetoric could last from four to eight years, indeed ‘higher
education was reduced to rhetoric in the strictest sense of the word’, which dominated
teaching in Rome by the first century BC.20 The Romans made rhetoric even more
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systematic, unlikely though that seems, but added little of their own to the Greek corpus.
Yet although rhetoric affected many areas of Roman life and literature, it never became
the organic link between school and adult activity in politics and law that it had been in
Greece. For whereas all Greek citizens could exercise the right to speak on their own
behalf, ‘oratory in Rome, in the lawcourts, the senate, and assemblies, was practised
chiefly by a relatively small number of professional orators, highly conscious of
techniques and of their own roles’.21 Paradoxically, then, the number of people studying
rhetoric increased vastly while the number practising it was reduced. Furthermore,
‘freedom of expression in Rome was a relative matter. It was not something to which
every citizen was entitled’, and although he might acquire it by birth, wealth, or service,
this freedom was always limited by hierarchy.22 But the widespread knowledge of
rhetoric through the school system undoubtedly accounts for its dissemination through
the whole of Latin literature,23 and writers could be sure that their readers were able to
appreciate their art. From Rome rhetoric, in education, in public activity, and in all forms
of writing, spread through the world, its influence waning only in the nineteenth century.
ii The Major Texts

Rhetoric was a central element in education—setting aside the losses suffered by literary
culture in general—from before Plato (p.13) to after the Romantics. During most of this
period rhetoric was passed on either by direct teaching, where the master expounded
principles from his own knowledge, the students making notes and performing exercises
under his guidance, or else by textbooks that circulated in schools, universities, or in
society at large. Any one wishing to learn the range and capability of rhetoric must still
have recourse to such a textbook, if he can find one adapted to his needs.
It is essential to know the major texts, but also to realize that they are very diverse
compositions. Some of them begin, as the opening lectures in medieval and Renaissance
universities began, as this book begins, with praises of eloquence as a humanizing
discipline in which man realizes to the full his God-given faculty, whose cultivation will
benefit both society and himself. Other general topics may include a history of rhetoric,
or of one particular branch, oratory, style, epistolary theory. Such passages can build up
to the importance of and need for this particular treatment, and include disparaging
remarks about rival texts. Aristotle does this, as does Quintilian on many occasions, and it
continues as a topos down to the Renaissance, some writers even claiming that all
previous treatments are defective, theirs alone perfect. (NaÏve though this may seem to
all but the most gullible readers, such disparaging comments on other rhetoric-books
may have had a cumulatively damaging effect on rhetoric itself.) When the texts get down
to detail they can fulfil a prescriptive function, giving speakers or writers instruction in
methods of composition, invention, expression. They can also be descriptive, analysing
notable examples of oratory: Cicero takes Demosthenes, Quintilian both Demosthenes
and Cicero for instances of logical development, emotional appeal. Other writers analyse
style, either in terms of specific qualities—clarity, ornateness, appropriateness—or larger
schools of style, such as Asianism and Atticism. Rhetoric books can devote themselves to
a single type of oratory, forensic (judicial) being the most popular in Roman eloquence, or
a single genre, such as the sermon or letter in medieval and Renaissance times.
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The reader must take this diversity of material as it comes, accepting the fact that it is not
all of equal interest. The perfect rhetoric text has never been written, nor one that could
meet the (p.14) needs of users of every level, although the Renaissance saw several
attempts at the comprehensive rhetoric-book, vast and unwieldy tomes of over a
thousand folio pages, or rhetorical lexicons containing five thousand entries. The modern
reader, like his predecessors no doubt, will have to make a synthesis of various texts at
various stages in the development of his interests and knowledge. But one preliminary
point should be kept in mind, that while studying such texts is of immense value for the
recovery of the verbal culture of the past, and its manifestation in poetry, drama, fiction,
history, politics, painting, and music, in so doing we are not using them for the purposes
for which they were designed. That is, although the descriptive and historical parts can be
read as they were read then, the prescriptive texts were never meant to be read as
works of literature or history. They were ‘how-to-do-it’ manuals, and reading them
without the intention of putting their teachings into practice would be as perverse as
studying a book on tennis, or bridge, if we never intended to play those games. It is
perhaps not yet time for a complete revival of rhetoric as a systematic discipline of
speaking and writing, and in this interim period our study of the prescriptive texts, the
handbooks of tropes and figures, ought to be undertaken with a view to evaluating the
literature of the past which was created in accordance with this system, as I attempt to
do in a later chapter of this book. But no one should complain that the textbooks are
boring or ‘sterile’, as so many modern historians of rhetoric do, without really taking the
practicalities seriously.
Not all authors of rhetoric-books have accepted the prescriptive role as legitimate. Plato,
the earliest surviving writer on rhetoric, had largely negative feelings about a discipline
that represented the main challenge to Socratic dialectic. In his Phaedrus 24 (266 d ff.) he
makes Socrates reel off, in a slightly contemptuous manner, the contents of the early
technai or arts of rhetoric. The ‘niceties of the art’, he records, include the teaching that
‘a speech must begin with a preamble’, then move on to (p.15) exposition, direct and
indirect evidence, probabilities, proof and supplementary proof, and ‘refutation both for
prosecution and defence’. Socrates even includes a potted history, but given Plato's
general hostility to rhetoric and rhetoricians one detects a note of irony in his references
to ‘the admirable Evenus of Paros…the inventor of covert allusion and indirect
compliment and…the indirect censure’, all memorized with the help of a mnemonic
system.—‘A real master, that’, says Socrates ironically, leaving us to wonder about that
strange combination of deviousness and prepared devices. Tisias and Gorgias are also
called to mind, ‘who realized that probability deserves more respect than truth’—so
much the worse for rhetoric, then!—and had what Plato alleged to be the Sophists’
dangerous ability to transform their subject-matter by their handling of it, making ‘trifles
seem important and important points trifles by the force of their language’ (267 a–b).
Plato's hostility to rhetoric is so great, and his misrepresentation of it so extreme, that it is
impossible to take his accounts as reliable history or exposition.
Yet, as any reader will observe, his own dialogues included both theoretical discussions
of eloquence and practical examples, just like self-confessed rhetoric-books, even though
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he would have disowned the label. George Kennedy has argued that the two parts of the
Phaedrus reflect the two main types of rhetorical teaching in ancient Greece, the first part
comprising three speeches (although here they are hardly ‘specimens’ for imitation, as
they would be in a normal treatise), the second discussing the nature of rhetoric and its
formal properties.25 The Phaedrus might be called an anti-rhetoric, then, or an
‘alternative’ rhetoric, and in a certain sense it is true that Plato thought ‘he could do a
better job teaching rhetoric than the rhetoricians’.26 The first part begins with a written-
out speech, read aloud by Phaedrus, and supposedly composed by Lysias, which
describes ‘how a handsome boy was tempted, but not by a lover—that's the clever part
of it. He maintains that surrender should be to one who is not in love rather than to one
who is’ (227 c). This is meant to be a pastiche and a parody of Sophistic rhetoric, a
destruction by creation (230 e–234 c). In reply to what (p.16) the naïve youth Phaedrus
describes as an ‘extraordinarily fine’ speech Socrates seems to extemporize a reply
which has both a clearer rhetorical structure and better logical development than Lysias’
attempt. I say ‘seems to’, to draw attention to the fictions within Plato's carefully
composed dialogues, and to point up the fact that since Plato had also written Lysias’
speech he was able to make it inept in order to outshine it. Socrates now sets out the
answering case, the disadvantages of accepting such a lover (238 a–241 d), and there in
the hands of a lesser writer the debate might have ended. But Plato makes Socrates feel
that his daimon is rebuking him for having done something wrong, insulting love, who is
after all a god, and he then delivers a much longer and more personal speech, which
makes the one preceding seem like a rhetorical exercise. Now he argues in favour of the
lover, in his famous account of the nature of the soul and the forms of love through the
myth of the charioteer (244 a–257 b). This is the first, and still one of the most brilliant
examples of the rhetorical practice of arguing in utramque partem, on both sides of an
issue.
Plato's critique of existing rhetoric in the Phaedrus has a reforming, as well as a

destructive intent. Although he sets Socratic dialectic and the spoken word above all
other forms of communication, he is still concerned with improving the art, urging the
rhetorician to learn from dialectic how to make definitions, distinguish genus from species
and subspecies (the process of diairesis or division being accorded an almost mythical
power to divine the truth), and produce an organic whole. In what has been called
‘probably the most influential critical statement in Plato’,27 Socrates points to the
deficiency of Lysias’ speech in failing to unify its component parts: ‘any discourse ought to
be constructed like a living creature, with its own body, as it were; it must not lack either
head or feet; it must have a middle and extremities so composed as to suit each other
and the whole work’ (264 c). That concept of organic unity will reappear in Cicero, in
Horace's Ars Poetica, and in countless later treatises. Moving from formal properties to
the goal of rhetoric, which has earlier been defined as ‘a kind of influencing the mind by
means of words, not only in courts of law and other public gatherings’ (261 a) but also in
Socrates’ preferred face-to-face (p.17) dialectical encounter, Plato outlines a new
approach to rhetoric. Socrates develops the implications of the fact that the ‘object on
which our discourse is brought to bear’ is the soul. Anyone ‘who seriously proffers a
scientific rhetoric, will, in the first place, describe the soul very precisely’ (270 e–271 a),
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considering ‘what natural capacity it has to act upon what’, and how itself is acted upon.
Then, relating this psychological knowledge to the verbal artefact, the maker of a scientific
rhetoric ‘will classify the types of discourse and the types of soul, and the various ways in
which souls are affected…’ (271 a–b).
The orator's purpose in making such an inventory is to achieve a higher degree of

persuasion:
Since the function of oratory is in fact to influence men's souls, the intending orator
must know what types of soul there are. Now these are of a determinate number,
and their variety results in a variety of individuals. To the types of soul thus
discriminated there corresponds a determinate number of types of discourse.
Hence a certain type of hearer will be easy to persuade by a certain type of speech
to take such and such action for such and such reason, while another type will be
hard to persuade.
The orator must study this reaction, watching it ‘actually occurring, exemplified in men's
conduct’, for the ‘keenness of perception’ that he develops will give him the ability to
know just ‘what type of man is susceptible to what kind of discourse’ (271 d–e). Knowing
the character, he must also know the right occasions for speaking and for keeping quiet,
the ‘right and wrong time for the brachylogy, the pathetic passage, the exacerbation, and
all the rest of his accomplishments’ (272 a). This is the first sketch of a concept of
rhetorical decorum, adjusting style to audience-response.
Plato does not tell us how to classify either souls or types of discourse, but we can accept
his general argument that successful persuasion of human beings depends primarily on a
knowledge of psychology, to which verbal devices are subordinate. We can also accept
Socrates’ dismissing ‘the present-day authors of manuals of rhetoric’ for never having
concerned themselves with the soul (271 c). Most important, yet tantalizingly so, this
passage places Plato's attacks on rhetoric in (p.18) a new light. He evidently felt himself
able to establish the art on a fresh scientific basis, had it been important enough for him
to do so. One wishes that he had, being left as we are with a pars destruens (to be
considered in the next chapter) that far exceeds in length and energy the pars
construens. This sudden concern to work out the connection between rhetoric and
psychology seems to lead nowhere in Plato's system, unless it lies behind the application
of persuasion for state propaganda that emerges, as we shall see, in the late dialogues.
Otherwise we are left with the three paradoxes of Plato as ‘the rhetorician who distrusts
rhetoric, the poet who abolishes poetry from his state, and the admirer of oral dialectic
who publishes dialogues worked out with extraordinary care’.28 Plato is simultaneously
eloquent and deeply distrustful of his own powers of expression, rather like Thomas
Hobbes, who writes at the end of Leviathan (1651) that ‘there is nothing I distrust more
than my elocution’.29
To posterity Plato has more often seemed the out-and-out enemy of rhetoric, greeted or
scorned accordingly. Yet his immediate impact within the Academy was constructive. His
pupil Aristotle began lecturing on rhetoric before Plato's death, evidently with his
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master's approval, and in lectures extending over a period of years both expanded
Plato's positive suggestions and refuted some of his attacks (as will be seen in Chapter 3
below). Awareness of the extended genesis of Aristotle's Rhetoric 30 is essential for the
understanding of a text that otherwise seems in places self-contradictory. As Friedrich
Solmsen was the first to show,31 Aristotle probably started this lecture-course (given in
the afternoons, when less intellectually demanding topics were treated) when he
returned to Athens (p.19) and opened his own school in about 335 BC, although it may
contain material from his earlier period at the Academy (367–347), and even from his
period in Macedon (347–335), while the ‘final version’ may have been edited by pupils
after his death. The resulting text does indeed read as if three or more sets of lecture-
notes have been joined together by someone concerned to preserve everything the
master had said, not daring to edit out discrepancies between them. As every reader will
find, the opening section attacks the extant rhetoric-books on two grounds, for discussing
the arousal of the emotions instead of the true topic, persuasion; and for enumerating
such things as the parts of an oration. But Aristotle devotes much of Book Two to the first
topic, and part of Book Three to the second. Again, in some places Aristotle makes great
advocacy of the enthymeme and logical proof, linking rhetoric closely to his dialectic
(although with many gaps in the execution), while in other places he describes purely
rhetorical devices. The composite nature of the text makes it impossible to form a clear
view of Aristotle's final thoughts on the subject, but at least the Rhetoric survives. Other
rhetorical works he is known to have written are lost, including an early dialogue in the
Platonic mode, Gryllus (around 360 BC); a Synagoge Tēchnon, summarizing the
handbooks of earlier rhetoricians; and a Compendium of the Art of Theodectes,
rhetorician and dramatist.
Aristotle's preoccupation with rhetoric, we can see, was lifelong, which is hardly
surprising in view of its importance in Greek life and education, and the threat to Plato's
school posed by the Sophists. Aristotle shared Plato's disapproval of Isocrates, but he
shows himself his own man by challenging Plato's own prejudices head-on, as we shall
see. He announces that he will describe ‘the systematic principles of Rhetoric itself, and
defines it as ‘the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion’,
a goal that sets it apart from all other arts (1355b 22–35). This is to differ both from Plato,
by seeing persuasion as the goal that may not always be attained, and from other
rhetoricians who would link it immediately with ethics. He then distinguishes three kinds
or modes of persuasion: the first ‘depends on the personal character of the speaker’
(ethos); ‘the second on putting the audience into a fit state of mind’ (pathos); ‘the third on
the proof, or apparent proof, (p.20) provided by the words of the speech itself
(1356a 1–3). Ethos involves the speaker in appearing to be good and hence worthy of
trust, for ‘we believe good men more fully and more readily than others’, and a
speaker's ‘character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he
possesses’ (3–13). Pathos works when the speech stirs the reader's emotions, for ‘our
judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained
and hostile’. Aristotle postpones detailed discussion of the emotions to what is now known
as Book Two, chapters 2–11. (I retain these traditional divisions for ease of reference, but
they are not Aristotle’ s, nor do they mark any clear division of subject-matter.) He then
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turns to persuasion by proof, outlining the logical resources of rhetoric, the example and
enthymeme, that correspond to the induction and syllogism in dialectic. The length of this
last section (1356b 1–1358a 33) and the easy familiarity of the detail show where
Aristotle's greater sympathies lie, inspiring later rhetoricians to attempt a closer union
between rhetoric and logic.
These three modes of persuasion are taken up in varying detail later. Ethos is given the
least space (Book Two, first half of chapter 1), followed by Pathos (second half of that
chapter, and the next ten, with a further six chapters appended on the various types of
human character). Forms of argument are discussed for the remainder of Book Two (chs.
19–26), but recur in Book Three, which is notionally devoted to Style (chs. 1–12), when
Aristotle comes to arrangement, listing forms of argument in general (ch. 17), and specific
arguments to excite or allay prejudice (chs. 14–15). This triple division is the main
organizing thread of the Rhetoric, and was to prove very influential, but the
heterogeneity of the work allows Aristotle to discuss several other topics. Equally
influential, and apparently original, was his classification of rhetoric into
three divisions, determined by the three classes of listeners to speeches. For of

the three elements in speech-making—speaker, subject, and person addressed—it
is the last one, the hearer, that determines the speech's end and object. (1358a 36–
8)
That is a classic statement of what I would call a functional or holistic view of rhetoric, the
three elements of speaker, subject, and audience being seen as an interdependent triad.
It is a (p.21) typical Aristotelian ploy, of course, to seek out the determining factor on
which others depend, and in this case it results in the important classification of the
hearer as ‘either a judge, with a decision to make about things past or future, or an
observer’. The ‘judge’, as member of a jury in a lawcourt, decides about things that have
already happened, which gives the category of forensic (legal or judicial) oratory; as
member of a political assembly he decides on what must be done, in political (or
deliberative) oratory; and as ‘observer’ or onlooker he merely listens to a set speech of
display on ceremonial occasions, epideictic oratory, on which no formal judgement is
expected (1358b 1–13).
The division is elaborated further in a pregnant formulation which describes the action
and purpose relevant to each:
Political speaking urges us either to do or not to do something: one of these two

courses is always taken by private counsellors, as well as by men who address
public assemblies. Forensic speaking either attacks or defends somebody: one or
other of these two things must always be done by the parties in a case. The
ceremonial oratory of display either praises or censures somebody. (8–13)
The three kinds also involve three different phases of time, past, future, and present,
and, more importantly, they have ‘distinct ends in view’:
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The political orator aims at establishing the expediency or the harmfulness of a

proposed course of action; if he urges its acceptance, he does so on the ground
that it will do good; if he urges its rejection, he does so on the ground that it will do
harm; and all other points, such as whether the proposal is just or unjust,
honourable or dishonourable, he brings in as subsidiary and relative to this main
consideration. Parties in a law-case aim at establishing the justice or injustice of
some action, and they too bring in all other points as subsidiary and relative to this
one. Those who praise or attack a man aim at proving him worthy of honour or the
reverse, and they too treat all other considerations with reference to this one.
(1358b 21–8)
While admitting the justice of that classification, one's first response is of surprise at the
clarity with which Aristotle shows the realm of politics to be unethical, essentially
concerned with the good of a state, its survival or prosperity, and ready to set justice or
honour on one side. Not many rhetoric-books (p.22) continually stimulate their readers
to consider fundamental issues, and no other sustains analysis so cogently.
This ability to get at essentials, to discover the determining factors or actual modes of
operation in human life, makes Aristotle's Rhetoric compelling reading, and of far greater
significance than the usual technē. Pursuing his classification of the three kinds of rhetoric
he notes that what they have in common is that speakers in each kind ‘attempt not only to
prove the points mentioned but also to show that the good or the harm, the honour or
disgrace, the justice or injustice, is great or small, either absolutely or relatively’
(1359a 17–21). That is, the speaker in each kind of oratory must know the effects on
human beings of certain modes of action, whether acting or suffering. The political
speaker, as well as knowing about national defence, war and peace, ways and means, law
and legislation (Book One, ch. 4), must, since he urges his hearers to take or avoid a
course of action, show that he is concerned with their happiness. This fundamental point
leads Aristotle to ‘ascertain what is in general the nature of happiness’ (Book One, ch. 5).
He, gives four definitions of happiness, and lists fourteen constituent parts, divided into
external values—good birth, friends, money, honour—and internal values—goods of the
soul and body (1360b 7–27). The definitions and discussions are not as rigorous as in
Aristotle's ethical and political works, but they are ample enough to justify his claim that
‘rhetoric is an offshoot of dialectic and also of ethical studies’, which may also be called
political (1356b 25–6). Although the political orator was originally seen as concerned solely
with a country's welfare, in order to appeal to the interest of his hearers he must know
what things are ‘good’, so Aristotle adds a discussion of ‘the main facts about Goodness
and Utility in general’, absolute and relative (1362a 20–1365b 20). By allowing topics to
branch out organically from the main trunk of discourse, he leads us into ever-widening
areas of life.
Turning to the epideictic speaker, who praises virtue and censures vice, Aristotle
surveys these topics, defining virtue as ‘a faculty of providing and preserving good
things; or a faculty of conferring many great benefits…’ (1366a 36–8). He defines the
forms of virtue, ‘justice, courage, temperance, magnificence, magnanimity, liberality,
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gentleness, prudence, wisdom’, and (p.23) immediately ranks them: ‘if virtue is a faculty
of beneficence, the highest kinds of it must be those which are most useful to others, and
for this reason men honour most the just and courageous, since courage is useful to
others in war, justice both in war and peace’ (1366b 1–6). This ‘other-centred’ concept is
one of the key principles of the vita activa, and Aristotle invokes here some of the basic
principles of his ethics, albeit in simplified form. The forensic speaker is also sent back to
first principles. Since his subject is in effect wrongdoing, he must first ascertain ‘the
nature and number of the incentives to wrongdoing; second, the state of mind of
wrongdoers; third, the kind of persons who are wronged, and their condition’ (1368b 2–
5). Wrongdoing is defined as ‘injury voluntarily inflicted contrary to law’, law being then
defined as either ‘special’, that is the ‘written law which regulates the life of a particular
community’, or general, ‘all those unwritten principles which are supposed to be
acknowledged everywhere’ (6–11). There follows a brief but penetrating essay into the
psychology of the criminal (who acts either for vicious motives or lacking self-control); his
goals and avoidances, which leads to a classification of human action into seven causes:
three involuntary—chance, nature, compulsion—and four voluntary—habit, reasoning,
anger, and appetite (1368b 10–1369a 6). Voluntary actions are undertaken because they
promise either what is advantageous or good (a topic already discussed), or what is
pleasant, which leads to a definition and discussion of pleasure (1369b 30–1372a 3). Having
considered ‘the motives that make men do wrong to others’ Aristotle next reviews ‘the
states of mind in which they do it, and the persons to whom they do it’, which leads him
on to a more detailed discussion of justice, natural law, unwritten law, equity, and the
comparative badness of criminal actions (1372a 4–1375a 20).
In this way Aristotle's classification of the three kinds of rhetoric and their goals has led
him into discussing politics, ethics, criminology, jurisprudence, and the causes of human
drives and desires. This remarkably open-minded spirit of enquiry into everything that
depends on language gives Aristotle's Rhetoric its unique quality. It also reinforces the
point from which I began, that, as originally conceived, rhetoric is intimately concerned
with every aspect of human life. This (p.24) reciprocal relationship becomes still clearer
in Book Two, where he reverts to his original categories of persuasion, ethos, pathos, and
proof. Ethos receives the smallest space again, simply listing ‘the three things which
inspire confidence in the orator's own character’ (1378a 6–18). Passing on to pathos,
Aristotle begins by defining the emotions as ‘those feelings that so change men as to affect
their judgments, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure’ (1378a 20). He devotes
the next ten sections to pithy discussions of anger and calmness, friendship and enmity,
fear and confidence, shame and shamelessness, kindness and unkindness, pity,
indignation, envy, and emulation. The overriding analytic approach is shown in the opening
account of the emotion of anger: ‘here we must discover (1) what the state of mind of
angry people is, (2) who the people are with whom they usually get angry, and (3) on
what grounds they get angry with them.’ Partial knowledge is not enough, for without
mastering all three points ‘we shall be unable to arouse anger in anyone’ (1378a 23–6).
Here the orator is clearly seen in his prime role of persuading his hearers by arousing
their feelings, the rhetorical doctine of movere. But elsewhere Aristotle's eye seems to be
on the nature of the emotions in general, and he produces what are in effect moral-
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psychological essays, which provoked imitation both in classical times (Cicero, Seneca,
Lactantius) and in the Renaissance (Montaigne, Bacon). Setting aside specifically Greek
social and religious attitudes, these discussions show great penetration into psychology
and motive, and any reader will derive knowledge and stimulus from them. They have the
value that Dr Johnson ascribed to Bacon's Essays, being ‘the observations of a strong
mind operating upon life’.32
The same judgement applies to his account of ‘the various types of human character’,
considered ‘in relation to the (p.25) emotions and moral qualities, showing how they
correspond to our various ages and fortunes’ (1388b 32 ff.), an enquiry that anticipates
developmental psychology yet adds the dimension of ethics. The discussion of ages
produces a brilliant juxtaposition of youth and age, one that any essayist could be proud
of. ‘Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately’; their
desires are violent but quickly over. ‘They trust others readily, because they have not
yet often been cheated.…Their lives are mainly spent not in memory but in expectation.…
They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its
necessary limitations.…They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones; their
lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning.’ Old men, by contrast, ‘have
often been taken in, and often made mistakes.…The result is that they are sure about
nothing and under-do everything. They “think”, but they never know.…They tend to put
the worse construction on everything’, life having made them distrustful. ‘They live by
memory rather than by hope…They guide their lives by reasoning more than by moral
feeling’, considering utility rather than goodness, and not caring what people say about
them. If they feel pity it is for a different reason: ‘young men feel it out of kindness; old
men out of weakness, imagining that anything that befalls anyone else might easily happen
to them…’ (1389a 1–1390a 25). But, a modern reader might object, what has all this to do
with rhetoric? Everything! a fourth-century Greek might answer, since the rhetorician
needs above all to know about life. He must be aware, too, of the effects on human
character of the gifts of fortune such as good birth, wealth, and power, especially their
corruption, as when ‘wealth becomes a standard of value for everything else’ (1390b 15–
1391 b 8). As Aristotle remarks later, ‘Educated men lay down broad general principles’
(1396b 30), and the breadth of his discussion shows how widely rhetoric can be
conceived.
The final book is devoted to style, and is the part which, along with the intricacies of logical
proof (which I shall not broach here), the modern reader is likely to find least rewarding.
One problem is that many of his remarks refer specifically to Greek prose composition,
such as the need to use ‘pure, correct Greek’ (1407 a 19), or to avoid using compound
words or fancy epithets (p.26) that belong to verse, not prose (1405b 35–1406a 15). The
whole discussion of prose-rhythm and sentence-structure (1408b 21–1410b 5) only really
makes sense for Greek. Further, the concluding enumeration of the parts of a speech, for
including which he had censured other rhetoric-books, seems sketchy and unrelated. If
the extant sequence of the Rhetoric leaves the reader with a sense of anticlimax, the work
as a whole remains the most penetrating analysis of speech in its full individual and social
dimension.
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To Aristotle, writing in the Athenian polis, just as politics was superior to rhetoric as a
discipline, so ‘political oratory is a more difficult task than forensic’ (1418a 21). To the
authors of the first two Latin rhetorics, both published in the first century BC, Cicero's
De Inventione (c.87 BC), and the anonymous Rhetorica ad C. Herennium (c.84 BC), that
position was reversed. ‘There are three kinds of causes’, the author of the latter writes,
‘Epideictic, Deliberative, and Judicial. By far the most difficult is the judicial’, therefore he
devotes two of his four books to it (2. 1. 1). We note that the subject is now a ‘cause’, or
‘issue’ (the nearest English terms for the Greek stasis, systasis, and the Latin status,
constitutio), for the focus of attention is now courtroom oratory. ‘Of the five tasks of the
speaker Invention is the most important and the most difficult’, he continues, and he is
referring to the discovery of legal arguments. In De Inventione (which was to have
treated all five parts of rhetoric, but only completed the first), Cicero agrees that
invention ‘is the most important of all the divisions, and above all is used in every kind of
pleading’ (1. 7. 9: omni causarum genere). Both Cicero and his anonymous compatriot
imported into Roman rhetoric the doctrine of constitutio causae, or determination of the
nature of the issue under dispute, from a Greek rhetorician of the second century BC,
Hermagoras of Temnos, whose own work has perished but who elaborated a systematic
classification of the kinds of legal dispute that was to prove influential.33 As the Ad
Herennium explains,
The Issue is determined by the joining of the primary plea of the defence with the
charge of the plaintiff. The Types of Issue are… (p.27) three: Conjectural, Legal,
and Juridical. The Issue is Conjectural when the controversy concerns a question
of fact…; Legal, when some controversy turns upon the letter of a text or arises
from an implication therein…; Juridical, when there is agreement on the act, but the
right or wrong of the act is in question. (1. 11. 18–19, 1. 14. 24)
The status system addresses such topics as whether the act was committed or not; who
committed it; which part of the law applies; whether it covers this case; and, if the act is
admitted, the extenuating circumstances, if any. Cicero distinguishes four causes, the
conjectural, the definitional, the general, and the translative (1. 8. 10–1. 12. 17).
In effect these first two Latin rhetoric-books turn out to be legal treatises, drawing on
the general system of rhetoric (which they summarize with commendable brevity), but
adapting it to specific legal problems, and illustrating their doctrine with examples from
courtroom situations. The problem facing the modern reader with a general interest in
rhetoric is that the greater part of these texts is only comprehensible to specialists in
Roman law, or social history. The outline of the basic issues given above seems simple,
but we will be bemused by the amount of detail that accumulates and the number of
categories that are distinguished. The Ad Herennium divides the legal issue into six types
(including ‘Letter and Spirit’, ‘Ambiguity’, ‘Reasoning from Analogy’), the Juridical into
Absolute (the act was correct) and Assumptive, which has four main headings
(acknowledging the charge, shifting the responsibility to some other person or
circumstance, shifting the question of guilt, and comparison with an alternative act); while
the Conjectural is divided into six main headings (probability of defendant's guilt;
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comparison—no one else likely to be guilty; signs pointing to guilt; presumptive proof;
subsequent behaviour; confirmatory proof), and more than a dozen subheadings.
Rhetoric had a tendency towards elaborating classification to the maximum possible
degree, whether in these Hellenistic legal rhetorics, medieval epistolary manuals, or
Renaissance compilations on style, gesture, and memory. Since all these treatises are
how-to-do-it manuals an attempt at complete coverage of the subject is laudable, but
even the dedicated rhetoric-student reaches the point of asking whether the subdivisions
are justified, or whether they represent an impulse to classify ‘in excess of the (p.28)
facts’ (as T. S. Eliot said of Hamlet's preoccupation with his mother's sex-life). In this
instance, the answer seems to be, as Harry Caplan (whose Ad Herennium in the Loeb
Library is one of the best editions of any rhetoric-book) reports, that ‘modern students
of Roman Law for the most part think that from the juristic point of view, as against the
rhetorical, the status system was over-intricate and impractical’, and had no real influence
on judicial decisions: ‘the rhetorician's method of interpretation is rationalistic and
schematic, the jurist's is casuistic.’34 The two methods could not really cohere.
Yet, the De Inventione and the Ad Herennium were the two most popular rhetoric-books
of antiquity, and perhaps the two most disseminated works of any kind. More
manuscripts of them survive than of any other classical texts, and the total of copies and
commentaries originally circulating was probably in the thousands.35 Since neither
medieval nor Renaissance legal systems resembled Roman law-court practices, we are
forced to conceive of generations of users ‘reading past’ the law, as it were, ignoring this
doctrine while searching for other matters. What they found in both texts were brief and
coherent definitions of the main rhetorical doctrine, the three kinds of oratory, the five
stages of composition (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio), and the six
parts of a speech. Book 3 of Ad Herennium itemizes the topics of deliberative and
epideictic oratory, discusses memory and gesture, while Book 4 deals with qualities of
style and lists over a hundred figures of speech—for centuries the most-used section. It
is in general an admirable textbook, rationally organized, clearly expounded, and with
excellent illustrations. But one must add that it contains not a single memorable sentence
on rhetoric, or on anything else, over and above its self-appointed tasks. De Inventione,
although not as comprehensive, has many of the same virtues and vices, while opening up
a slightly wider horizon in the prooemium, with its Isocrates-inspired praise of language
and eloquence. But both are essentially technai, works used by the ancients in order to
learn rhetorical skills, and (p.29) whose popularity proves how well they satisfied those
needs. They are books we turn to for information, but not for stimulus, and after
Aristotle's Rhetoric they cannot but seem narrow, lacking interest in wider human issues.
In his major rhetoric-book, the De Oratore, which is also his longest work, Cicero
attempted a wider scope, indeed the widest, bringing into the rhetorician's field of
competence everything under the sun. It is a work over which he laboured long, and all
who appreciate Cicero's enormous importance for Western culture from classical times
to the early nineteenth century will want to study it.36 Yet two difficulties confront us at
the outset. One concerns content, the other form. The widest scope is claimed for
rhetoric, but it is claimed only, not demonstrated. Whereas Aristotle was able to give, in
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relatively brief compass, numerous practical demonstrations of the relevance of rhetoric

to politics, law, ethics, psychology, criminology, and other subjects, Cicero and his
speakers continually urge the need for the orator to master the whole of knowledge, but
they never outline a practical method of doing so, nor do they give any examples. One can
always resort to Cicero's moral works, of course, such as De Officiis (‘Of duties’) and De
Finibus (‘Of the ends or goals of human action’), but a rhetoric-book that sets out to be
as comprehensive as this one surely ought to be complete in itself. As for its form, it is
one of the few classical rhetorics to be written as a dialogue, less in the Platonic dialectical
than in the Aristotelian expository mode, as Cicero himself recorded 37 (having access to
dialogues of Aristotle subsequently lost). By making the participants in his dialogue
famous Roman orators of the past Cicero expressed his constant desire to set his own
work and career within the pantheon of Latin eloquence, and the historical dimension so
created is valuable. But Cicero was no Plato, much though he wanted to emulate him, and
neither in setting nor in characterization does he rival the Phaedrus or Gorgias. A more
serious fault is that we (p.30) sometimes feel that the dialogue form is being used for
what is essentially a task of exposition, with the risk that the personae will either give us
great slabs of information or, at the other extreme, dismiss a topic perfunctorily. Cicero
was evidently aware of both dangers, and is more successful with the first, breaking up
expository passages by interventions from the other participants. For the second failing
he is perhaps himself responsible.
The great problem in the dialogue form is to relate the speakers to clearly differentiated
attitudes. Where Plato uses the dialogue to downgrade rhetoric by a direct confrontation
between its proponents and their implacable enemy Socrates, Cicero makes his a dispute
among friends, that is between people who basically agree about the nature and value of
rhetoric, but who disagree on the way it should be acquired. Cicero could not just repeat
Plato's structure, obviously enough, and certainly no part of him could have formulated
the ruthless critique made by Socrates, but the consequence is that the issues which
divide his speakers seem by comparison relatively unimportant. The main speaker, and
for much of the time Cicero's mouthpiece, is L. Licinius Crassus, born 140 BC and aged
49 when the discussion is supposed to have taken place, 91 BC (he died shortly
afterwards). A leading politician, he was the most illustrious Roman orator before Cicero,
whom he taught as a boy. His notional opponent in the dialogue is M. Antonius (143–87
BC), grandfather of the triumvir, an outstanding public servant. The other speakers who
take part in the whole dialogue are P. Sulpicius Rufus and C. Aurelius Cotta, both
members of the party of conservative reform. Q. Mucius Scaevola the Augur, a lawyer
and Stoic, appears in Book I only, in order to deliver a token attack on the proposal to
educate the orator in literature and philosophy. Two speakers who figure in Books II and
III are Q. Lutatius Catulus, a successful consul, and C. Julius Caesar Strabo, lawyer and
aedile. All of Cicero's characters, then, are practising politicians and lawyers, all committed
to public speaking as a way of life, and all marked as representatives of the vita activa,
servants of the state.
Apart from Scaevola, whose objections (1. 9. 35–1. 10. 44, 1. 17. 74–79) are given only to
motivate their refutation by Crassus, what opposition there is comes from Antonius. In
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Book I he (p.31) attacks as unpracticable Crassus’ claim that the orator should master
all knowledge (1. 18. 80), a point that he later develops at greater length (1. 48. 209–1. 61.
262). Crassus suggests that Antonius, who had earlier described the practice of the
Athenian Academy in taking the opposite side on every issue (1. 18. 84), is merely
‘gratifying [his] singular liking for contradiction’ (1. 62. 263), and invites him to state his
own views. Antonius does so on the following day, first admitting that he had calculatedly
disagreed with Crassus before: ‘it was my design, if I should have succeeded in refuting
your arguments, to steal these pupils from you’ (2. 10. 40). But now, instead of fighting,
he outlines his own ideas, of which the most contentious is that oratory ‘owes little to art’,
which is concerned with the things that are known, while ‘the orator has to do with
opinion, not knowledge’ (2. 27. 30)—Plato's contention in the Gorgias. Antonius denies the
need for special rules in composing official dispatches, history-writing, or philosophical
topics (2. 12. 49–2. 15. 64), thus representing Nature, while Crassus stands for Art. This
opposition had been prefigured in the introduction, addressed by Cicero to his brother
Quintus, who holds that rhetoric ‘must be separated from the refinements of learning
and made to depend on a sort of natural talent and on practice’, while Cicero, on the
other hand, believes that ‘eloquence is dependent upon the trained skill of highly
educated men’ (1. 2. 5). But in practice the opposition between Antonius and Crassus
constantly breaks down.
Antonius believes in natural eloquence (1. 21. 94), but Crassus similarly holds that
‘natural talent is the chief contributor to the virtue of oratory’ (1. 25. 113), and later
comes even closer to Antonius’ position, stating that the orator doesn’ t learn his skill
from ‘artificial devices’, but uses them to confirm ‘the soundness, or reveal to us the
weakness, of whatever resources we attain by native talent, study, or practice’ (2. 57.
231). Antonius attacks the need for rules, but when he comes to discuss specific topics he
inevitably descends to precepts and detailed advice. He recommends the orator to ‘have
in readiness certain commonplaces [locos] which will instantly present themselves for
setting forth the case’ (2. 30. 130). Discussing the importance of moving the audience's
feelings, he follows Aristotle by enumerating the most common emotions likely to (p.32)
affect the jury's mind: ‘love, hate, wrath, jealousy, compassion, hope, joy, fear, vexation’,
going on to give advice on how to arouse each of these (2. 51. 206–2. 52. 211), and adding
the injunction not to make emotional appeals at the beginning of the speech (2. 53. 213 f.).
In this mode of exposition Antonius is not noticeably shamed by Crassus, who turns out
to show an equal dislike for formalities. If Antonius deals with the five rhetorical processes
and the six parts of speech with great brevity, scorning technicalities (2. 19. 79 f.), that is
exactly the spirit in which Crassus had dealt with them (1. 31. 142). When Crassus has to
deal with the figures of speech he rattles off a great list of them equally perfunctorily (3.
53. 200–3. 54. 208).
Viewing De Oratore from the perspective of the author, we can say that at this stage of
his career Cicero scorned the idea of writing a rhetorical handbook. One can reconstitute
the main topics of such a text from his book, but they are overlaid by such a vast
freewheeling discussion that it seems perverse to do so, especially when clear and
straightforward guides are available, the Ad Herennium and De Inventione Cicero
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evidently wished to write a comprehensive treatise, and therefore put such matter in
(writing to Atticus that he had included the technologia or technicalities of rhetoric),38
but he then reduced its value by the brevity of treatment and the dismissive tone.
Authorial attitudes come to dominate those of the characters, and the notional separation
of viewpoints necessary to sustain decorum personae vanishes as we realize that
Antonius and Crassus are actually united in their scorn for the usual kind of rhetoric
teaching and textbook. Antonius describes the masters in the rhetoric-schools as ‘dull
and inelegant’, uninventive (2. 31. 133), ‘untiring people who hammer day and night on
the same anvil at their one and only task’, chewing up rhetoric to make babies’ pap (2. 39.
162). Crassus explicitly approves of Antonius for having attacked the ‘narrow pettifogging
argumentation’ of the usual handbook (3. 30. 121), and on his own account mocks the
‘exceedingly foolish persons’ who write about elementary rules (3. 20. 75), whether Latin
or Greek (3. 24. 93–4). Antonius and Crassus agree on so many topics, in fact: that
rhetoric is the highest human cultural achievement (C: 1. 8. 30–4, 1. 46. 202; A: 2. 8. 33–2.
9. 35); that the orator needs to have a vast knowledge, (p.33) theoretical and practical
(C: 1. 13. 59, 1. 28. 128, 1. 36. 165 ff., etc.; A: 1. 18. 80, 2. 9. 38, 2. 16. 67–8, 2. 20. 85)—a
point endorsed by Cicero himself in propria persona, so collapsing any character
separation (2. 1. 5, 2. 2. 5); that rhetoric gains its effects by moving the passions (A: 2. 16.
70, 2. 27. 114–15, 2. 28. 121, 2. 42. 178, etc.; C: 3. 6. 23, 3. 14. 55, 3. 27. 105, etc.); that
rhetoric must adapt its presentation according to its audience (C: 1. 23. 108; A: 2. 38.
159); that rhetoricians must learn by imitating good models (C: 1. 34. 154, 3. 31. 125; A:
2. 22. 90, 2. 23. 96); and that students must be able to move from the shelter of their
schools into ‘political hurly-burly’, ‘the dust and uproar…of public debate’—a
prefiguration of the British House of Commons! (A: 1. 18. 81, 2. 20. 84; C: 1. 32. 147, 1.
34. 157).
Antonius and Crassus are not fully-formed independent characters, then, but
complementary, both expressing many of Cicero's own convictions about rhetoric. Much
of De Oratore only seems like a debate, it is in fact an exposition split up between two
personae. The division of labour, basically, setting aside numerous digressions and
interventions, is that Antonius deals with inventio (2. 27. 114–2. 54. 216—at which point a
disquisition on wit is provided by one of the other characters; 2. 71. 290–2. 75. 306),
dispositio (2. 76. 307–2. 85. 350), and then adds ‘something on the subject of memory, in
order to lighten the task of Crassus and to leave him nothing else to discuss except the
method of elaborating these subjects’ (2. 85. 350, 2. 86. 351–2. 88. 360). This comment
makes the characters’ role of sharing the exposition transparent. Cicero indeed draws
attention to the fact (as an attempt to excuse it?) by making Crassus express his delight
‘to see you at last known as a master of the theory, finally unmasked and stripped of the
veil of your pretended ignorance’ (2. 86. 350). But this remark wholly destroys the
characters’ notional differentiation, as does Crassus’ praise of Antonius’ wisdom as being
the product not only of practical experience but of ‘the most diligent study’ (2. 89. 362).
So where is ‘nature without art’ now? The agreed division between the two orators was
that Antonius should ‘expound the speaker's stock-in-trade’ while Crassus should deal
with its ‘elaboration and embellishment’ (2. 28. 121–4, 2. 90. 366, 3. 5. 19), the ubiquitous
distinction in Roman rhetoric between res and verba. But every schoolboy knew that that
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pair (p.34) should never be split up, indeed Cicero gives Crassus an explicit statement
of this principle (3. 5. 19–24), together with an eloquent passage on the disastrous
consequences of Socrates having divided cor and lingua (3. 16. 60–1). Crassus duly
treats elocutio (3. 5. 19–3. 55. 212) and pronuntiatio (3. 56. 213–3. 61. 228), but often
unwillingly, and with unforced digressions in Cicero's own style on the present
lamentably reduced scope of rhetoric, heroes of the past, outstanding Greek orators, the
ideal orator, and so on (3. 14. 52–3. 35. 143), to the point where Cicero has to make one
of the other speakers comment on a digression in order to justify it (3. 36. 144–5). But qui
s’excuse, s’accuse. Crassus, and Cicero, complete the allotted task ungraciously.
A critical evaluation of the dialogue form of De Oratore reveals it to be cumbersome,

inefficient in exposition, and frequently breaking its own supposed distinction between the
personae.39 As for the content, almost every issue in contemporary rhetoric is touched
on at some point. Although Crassus affects to despise forensic oratory for ‘making the
orator abandon a vast, immeasurable plain and confine himself to quite a narrow circle’,
and summarizes its topics in a throw-away paragraph (3. 19. 70), Cicero continues the
emphasis on judicial rhetoric already established in Rome. Antonius echoes the two
earlier Latin rhetoric-books by saying that ‘the battles of the law-courts involve really
great difficulty and, I rather think, by far the most arduous of human enterprises’ (2. 17.
72). Book II accordingly contains much lore about court-room practice (2. 24. 99 ff.), the
right way to conduct prosecutions (2. 48. 199 ff.), and to protect one's own case (2. 72.
292 ff.). As a complement to Antonius’ concern with the law Crassus is given many
passages exhorting the importance of rhetoric in politics and civic life. Developing the
connection between rhetoric and liberty made in his opening (p.35) laus eloquentiae,
Crassus describes how the outstanding orator ‘can either inspire a lukewarm and erring
nation to a sense of the fitting, or lead them away from their blundering, or kindle their
wrath against the wicked, or soothe them when they are excited against good men…’ (1.
46. 202)—an account repeated in almost identical language by Antonius (2. 9. 35, 2. 82.
337). Crassus’ words gain more authority, of course, from our knowledge of the
historical Crassus’ commitment to civic liberty, and at the opening of Book III Cicero—in
propria persona—recalls his last brave and triumphant speech to the Senate shortly
before his death (3. 1. 1–8). At least, Cicero adds, he was spared the sight of ‘Italy ablaze
with war, the Senate inflamed with passion’, and all the savagery and corruption that
followed in the civil war (3. 2. 8–3. 3. 12). Mention of this unhappy sequence in Roman
history makes Cicero recall ‘the reverses'suffered by his own ‘incredible and
unparalleled patriotism’, enough to make anyone wish to opt out of civic duties (3. 4. 13).
Here, I feel, Cicero inserts himself legitimately in the great tradition of Roman orators
who defended the state and its liberties. Cicero's significance in the history of rhetoric
may finally be not as a theorist but as a practitioner, author of the fifty-eight extant
speeches which were pillaged by Quintilian for examples of virtually every rhetorical
procedure, and which had an immense popularity in the Renaissance.
The De Oratore treats many topics in rhetoric, but invents few. According to George
Kennedy, Cicero's ‘one major contribution to technical rhetoric [was] the concept of the
officia oratoris, or duties of an orator’.40 As Antonius is made to say,
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for purposes of persuasion the art of speaking relies wholly upon three things: the
proof of our allegations, the winning of our hearers’ favour, and the rousing of their
feelings to whatever impulse our case may require. (2. 27. 115)
But Cicero's triad evidently draws on Aristotle's three modes of proof: ethos, pathos,
and logical argument, so that there is not much originality here. Yet this formulation, or its
variant in Orator (69), was handed down for centuries while Aristotle's Rhetoric was
unknown, and Cicero must be given credit for (p.36) being the channel by which
posterity gained much of its knowledge about classical rhetoric.
In De Oratore, we may feel, content is obscured by form, as if somewhere inside the

dialogue a rhetorical handbook was trying to get out. Cicero's three other works on
rhetoric use simpler structures. Partitiones Oratoriae (c. 52 BC), written for his son
Marcus Tullius, is a dialogue in the ‘magistral'style, involving simple questions and
answers rather like a catechism. It briefly reviews the processes of composition, the parts
of a speech, the quaestio or matter at issue, and other topics related to judicial rhetoric.
Brutus (44 BC) is another dialogue, like De Oratore in the Aristotelian mode of longer
speeches, in which the interlocutors are Cicero himself, Cicero's friend Atticus (109–32
BC), and Marcus Junius Brutus (85–42 BC), at this point one of Julius Caesar's chief
lieutenants, later one of his assassins. The subject-matter is a history of Roman oratory,
anchored to Cicero's own situation in two ways. The recent death of Hortensius, friend
and patriot, alluded to at the beginning and end (1. 1–2. 6, 88. 301–97. 333) gives Cicero
occasion once more to lament the effects of Caesar's dictatorship on free speech, ‘the
Roman forum…robbed and bereft’ of eloquence, the courts of criminal and private
justice all hampered, and Cicero himself forced into ignoble retirement:
For me too it is a source of deep pain that the state feels no need of those weapons
of counsel, of insight, and of authority, which I had learned to handle and to rely
upon,—weapons which are the peculiar and proper resources of a leader in the
commonwealth and of a civilized and law-abiding state. Indeed if there ever was a
time in the history of the state when the authority and eloquence of a good citizen
might have wrested arms from the hands of angry partisans, it was exactly when
through blindness or fear the door was abruptly closed upon the cause of peace.
(2. 7–8)
Cicero's connection of rhetoric with liberty and democracy, and his justifiable reminder
of his own political career, were inspirations to proponents of the vita activa when this
work was disseminated after its rediscovery in 1421.
Brutus is a work of self-justification on another plane, that of style. At this period in Rome
a controversy raged over the proper style of oratory, between the Atticists, who wished
to recall Greek to its original purity in grammar and vocabulary, (p.37) reclaiming it
from the copiousness of ‘Asiatic’ rhetoric (so called from the Greek colonies in Asia,
where a more effusive form of oratory prevailed). Cicero attacks Calvus, one of the
younger school of Attic orators, for a style which he characterizes as meagre, pinched
and dry, quite lacking in the emotional force needed by the speaker who hopes to
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succeed in real-life public disputes. To mark the difference between their style and his
own (for Cicero is defending himself by attacking them), Cicero gives an idealized but
marvellously vivid picture of the successful public speaker:
This is what I wish for my orator: when it is reported that he is going to speak let
every place on the benches be taken, the judge's tribunal full, the clerks busy and
obliging in assigning or giving up places, a listening crowd thronging about, the
presiding judge erect and attentive. When the speaker rises the whole throng will
give a sign for silence, then expressions of assent, frequent applause; laughter
when he wills it, or if he wills, tears;so that a mere passer-by observing from a
distance, though quite ignorant of the case in question, will recognize that he is
succeeding and that a Roscius is on the stage. (84. 290)
Questions of style also dominate Orator (44 BC), a treatise on the perfect orator cast in
the form of a letter to Brutus, who had replied to the dialogue named after himself.
Devoting three-quarters of his text to elocutio, Cicero again defends his own oratorical
practice against the Atticists, purists and dry logicians, competent in docere or
instruction, wholly lacking in movere, the orator's power over the audience's feelings. As
in Brutus, Cicero holds up as the great model for orators Demosthenes (7. 23, 8.26–7, 31.
110–11, etc.), although here even Demosthenes is found wanting in the highest qualities,
and Cicero celebrates his own work as having attempted every kind ‘of oratorical merit’
(29. 102–4, 30. 106–8). The Orator is less carefully written than De Oratore, but the
modern reader may prefer its directness and spontaneity. If one relatively brief work
had to be chosen to give an impression of the role rhetoric played in Roman life, this
would be it.
Viewed as a whole Cicero's seven rhetorical treatises41 suffer from a deal of repetition
and overlapping. They were not (p.38) planned as a unity, although he did once claim
that five of them constituted a corpus, and they range from elementary treatises
designed for himself aged 19, or his son at the same age, to considered statements of his
deepest beliefs, and a series of occasional polemical and self-justifying works. The reader
working through them in the space of a few weeks inevitably finds that the author, writing
across a period of over forty years, repeated the same ideas many times, yet also failed
to treat some important topics, notably the tropes and figures, in anything like the detail
they deserve. In this sense Quintilian (c. 40–96 AD) had the advantage over Cicero, for
his Institutio Oratoria was written in two years (92–4), and was designed as a unified and
comprehensive treatise. Its length, at about 200,000 words, as long as many Victorian
novels, may be discouraging at first, but it is clearly constructed, and a little judicious
browsing will soon locate the sections of greatest interest to the individual reader. It
comprises twelve books, which the author describes as follows:
My first book will be concerned with the education preliminary to the duties of the
teacher of rhetoric. My second will deal with the rudiments of the schools of
rhetoric and with problems concerned with the essence of rhetoric itself. The next
five will be concerned with Invention, in which I include Arrangement. The four
following will be assigned to Eloquence, under which head I include Memory and
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Delivery. Finally there will be one book in which our complete orator will be
delineated. (1. Pr. 21–2)
That disposition, Books 3 to 7 on inventio, 8 to 11 on elocutio, with the other processes

subordinated, reflects a basic distinction between res, or subject-matter, and verba. The
res, once again, is judicial oratory, with the other genres, deliberative and epideictic,
receiving a brief mention (3. 4, 3. 7–8). Dismissing those writers who limited the duty of
the orator to instruction and denied him appeals to the emotions, Quintilian agrees that
such arts form a legitimate part of oratory, but holds that ‘its special and peculiar task is
to make good the case which it maintains and refute that of its opponent’ (5. Pr. 1).
Quintilian goes into more detail about specific courtroom techniques than any other
classical rhetorician, and his work is an invaluable guide to Roman legal practices.
(p.39) Yet the Institutio, although covering the whole rhetorical tradition systematically,
devotes only just over half its space to rhetoric. Quintilian gives lengthy accounts of two
topics that endeared him especially to readers between the fifteenth and nineteenth
centuries: literary criticism and education. Indeed, to him the two were closely related,
for
Unless the foundations of oratory are well and truly laid by the teaching of
literature, the superstructure will collapse. The study of literature is a necessity for
boys and the delight of old age, the sweet companion of our privacy and the sole
branch of study which has more solid substance than display. (1. 4. 5)
Quintilian's belief that ‘the love of letters and the value of reading are not confined to
one's schooldays, but end only with life’ (1. 8. 12) is so great that in one place it leads him
to a distinctly un-Roman recommendation of abandoning the vita activa:
Perhaps the highest of all pleasures is that which we derive from private study, and
the only circumstances under which the delights of literature are unalloyed are
when it withdraws from action, that is to say from toil, and can enjoy the pleasure of
self-contemplation. (2. 18. 4)
This concern with the student orator reading the best authors partly for self-
improvement and partly for sheer pleasure (a refreshing exception to the usual utilitarian
justification for literature), results in the famous survey of Greek and Roman literature
from this standpoint (10. 1), one of the first and most influential histories of literature.
The formation of the orator is Quintilian's whole concern, leading the reader ‘from the
very cradle of speech through all the stages of education which can be of any service to
our budding orator till we have reached the very summit of the art’ (1. Pr. 6). Where
other writers began with the rhetoric-schools, which boys visited from the age of 14 or
15, Quintilian starts from the time when the future orator is still infans, unable to speak,
and it was this account of primary education, at once practical and humane, that won him
so many admirers in posterity.42 Children, he writes, are by nature ‘quick to reason
(p.40) and ready to learn. Reasoning comes as naturally to man as flying to birds, speed
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to horses, and ferocity to beasts of prey’ (1. 1. 1). The human mind is endowed with
activity and sagacity, but deserves the best possible teacher, who should make education
a process to be enjoyed, not hated. The child's ‘studies must be made an amusement: he
must be questioned and praised and taught to rejoice when he has done well’ (1. 1. 20).
The teacher must encourage minds with praise and refresh them with relaxation, for
‘study depends on the good will of the student, a quality that cannot be secured by
compulsion’ (1. 3. 7–8). Quintilian despises all forms of coercion, rejecting flogging as
degrading, fit only for slaves (1. 3. 13–14). The teacher must be sensitive to a child's
development, and not object to ‘a little exuberance in the young learner’, for such daring
and inventiveness can be controlled: ‘Exuberance is easily remedied, but barrenness is
incurable, be your efforts what they may’ (2. 4. 5–7). The teacher's job is to guide his
students through the learning process until they can ‘find out things for themselves’ and
no longer need him. ‘For what else is our object in teaching, save that our pupils should
not always require to be taught?’ (2. 5. 13)
The humanity and adaptability seen in Quintilian's approach to general education is found
in his specific teaching on rhetoric. While affirming that ‘the art of speaking can only be
attained by hard work and assiduity of study, by a variety of exercises and repeated
trial, the highest prudence and unfailing quickness of judgment’ (2. 13. 15), and insisting
that since rhetoric is an art, the more training an orator receives the better he becomes
—’ If this were not so, there would not be so many rhetorical rules, nor would so many
great men have come forward to teach them’ (2. 17. 42)—Quintilian is the great enemy of
pedantry, unnecessary technicalities, and mindless rote-learning. He attacks the
‘affectation of subtlety in the invention of technical terms’ as a ‘laborious ostentation’ that
is educationally harmful. An ‘instructor proceeding on less technical lines'should not
‘destroy the coherence of his teaching by attention to such (p.41) minute detail’ (3. 11.
21). Those authors of textbooks who fall into the trap that rhetoric was always prone to, of
inventing a verbal equivalent for every situation, are bound to fail, for there are ‘such a
variety of causes’ in real life ‘as to render classification by species impossible’ (4. 1. 43).
These attempts at all-inclusiveness are not only self-defeating, as we are frequently
reminded,43 they also destroy the prime rule in rhetoric, that it should draw from life
and be lifelike. ‘The majority of students, finding themselves lost in an inextricable maze,
have abandoned all individual effort…and keeping their eyes fixed upon their master have
ceased to follow the guidance of nature’ (5. 10. 101). The practising orator, on his feet in a
lawcourt, needs above all a clear grasp of the immediate situation, and lacking this,
knowledge of the most elaborate rules is ‘a dumb science’ (5. 10. 119). The message is
repeated frequently: the ability that matters most is to be able to address the actual
situation, with a readiness to abandon fixed ideas and prepared scripts according to the
needs of the moment.44 This ability can be acquired both by practice in writing, ‘the best
producer and teacher of eloquence’—a topic discussed with many helpful practical tips
that a modern reader can still learn from (10. 3. 1.–10. 5. 7)—and, above all, by daily
speaking before an audience whose judgement we value. ‘Theory once mastered is not
forgotten’, but ‘promptness and readiness for action can be maintained by practice only’
(10. 7. 24). Quintilian's emphasis on daily practice reminds us that oratory is, properly
speaking, a performing art, like violin playing or ballet dancing.
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It could be argued that Quintilian's greatest service to rhetoric lay in his humane and
practical approach to the related tasks of learning and performing. No topic is too small or
unimportant if he has something useful to say. The range of his work is so allembracing
that we find here almost everything we need to know. It is necessarily eclectic, absorbing
the tradition, as so many rhetoric-books do, python-like. The major source and
inspiration, acknowledged time and again in the most fulsome (p.42) terms,45 is Cicero,
‘who shed the greatest light not only on the practice but on the theory of oratory; for he
stands alone among Romans as combining the gift of actual eloquence with that of teaching
the art’ (3. 1. 20). Cicero's influence is clearly seen in the broad lines of Quintilian's
argument. Just as he had deplored the separation between philosophy and rhetoric, so
does Quintilian, who urges even more aggressively that the rhetoricians should invade
the philosophers’ territory and reclaim their own. Cicero, the model of the orator actively
engaged in civic affairs, had stressed the mutual importance of rhetoric and the vita
activa; Quintilian, once a lawyer and now a schoolmaster, dutifully follows him, even
though he seems to have been almost wholly apolitical.46 His complete orator is ‘the man
who can really play his part as a citizen and is capable of meeting the demands both of
public and private business, the man who can guide the state by his counsels, give it a
firm base by his legislations and purge its vices by his decisions as a judge’ (1. Pr. 10).
The orator has ‘often revived the courage of a panicstricken army’ (2. 16. 8), can assist
‘the public at large…in the most serious emergencies’ (10. 7. 1), and in his dedication to
the community the orator is to be set far above the philosophers, who have withdrawn
themselves, refusing to take part ‘in the government of the state, which forms the most
frequent theme of their instruction’ (12. 2. 6–7; also 11. 1. 35, 12. 2. 21, 12. 3. 1, 12. 7. 1,
etc.).
Yet although Quintilian follows Cicero, the passage of time and differences of
temperament account for varying emphases. Cicero had undoubtedly conceived of the
orator as a man of virtue (De Or. 2. 2. 85–6), but Quintilian developed this notion of the vir
bonus to a far greater, indeed extreme and unrealistic degree (12. 1. 1.–44). On the links
between rhetoric and philosophy Cicero, who was much closer to Greek culture, having
studied in Athens with several distinguished teachers, emphasized the need for the
orator to master a wide philosophical syllabus, particularly dialectic.47 Quintilian pays
(p.43) lip-worship to the principle of wide education (1. 10. 34 ff., 12. 2. 20), but in
practice for him philosophy is reduced to ethics. The orator must master ‘the better part
of philosophy’, with its ‘task of forming character and establishing rules of life’ (1. Pr. 14),
the ‘discourse of what is good, expedient, or just’ (2. 21. 12; also 1. Pr. 10, 10. 1. 35, 12.
2. 5–9, etc.). Rhetoric may use some logical processes, but dare not be fettered by them
(5. 19. 29–31), for dialectic is ultimately too limited and cerebral for oratory. If it claims to
control ‘the struggles of the forum’ it will just be an obstacle to rhetoric, and ‘by its very
subtlety will exhaust the strength that has been pared down to suit its limitations’ (12. 2.
11–14).
This increased emphasis on practicality, and distrust of theory, marks a last major
difference between these two great rhetoricians on the teaching of the art of language
itself. Both agree that while philosophy can offer the res, or subject-matter of
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communication, only rhetoric can supply the verba that turn it into effective and
persuasive discourse. This is a position affirmed in the De Oratore, significantly enough,
by both Crassus (1. 11. 49–50) and Antonius (1. 21. 94, 2. 9. 38), in terms repeated
elsewhere (Or. 14–44). But where Cicero, the supreme master of rhetoric, is reluctant to
descend to the detail needed to show how elocutio can be mastered, Quintilian the
schoolmaster follows out the consequences and gives a full account of style as the
crowning point of the whole rhetorical edifice. We are justified in expending ‘the greatest
care’ on ‘the rules for the cultivation of eloquence’, he writes,
For the verb eloqui means the production and communication to the audience of all
that the speaker has conceived in his mind, and without this power all the
preliminary accomplishments of oratory are as useless as a sword that is kept
permanently concealed within its sheath. Therefore it is on this that teachers of
rhetoric concentrate their attention, since it cannot possibly be acquired without
the assistance of the rules of art: it is this which is the chief object of our study, the
goal of all our exercises and all our efforts at imitation, and it is to this that we
devote the energies of a lifetime. (8. Pr. 15–16)
Of course, he goes on, this does not mean that we should study words at the expense of
subject-matter, but rather unite the two in an oratory that will be ‘natural and
unaffected’, which will (p.44) ‘give the impression of simplicity and reality’, appeal to ‘the
common feeling of mankind’ while preserving ‘the natural current of our speech’ (18–28).
Quintilian is outstanding as a teacher for his humanity and practicality, but his lasting
importance is as the writer who, more than any other, fully realized the claim of rhetoric
to be a coherent system.
No other rhetoric text in classical antiquity offered a complete account of the art. Of the
lesser works extant some touch on the problematic status of rhetoric in society. Tacitus’
dialogue De Oratoribus 48 (probably AD 97) juxtaposes several contemporary attitudes
not easily reconciled. In the prefatory epistle Tacitus writes that his dialogue addresses
the problem why Rome previously had so many outstanding orators, while ‘our own
times’ are ‘barren, bereft of distinction in eloquence—scarcely, indeed, even retaining
the name “orator”’(1). The persona chosen to defend modern oratory is Marcus Aper, a
distinguished lawyer, who revives the Isocratean-Ciceronian celebration of the utility of
rhetoric to society, upholding justice and virtue for the common good, also the pleasure
and celebrity that his art brings to the orator (5–10). Aper vaunts the legal profession
further by attacking poetry, while Maternus, a poet present, comments on Aper's use of
the stock rhetorical trick of passing from eulogy to disparagement, before himself
defending poetry for its antiquity, peace, and the fame that it, too, can bring (11–13). The
dispute is also one between the contemplative and active lives, and Maternus does not
fail to make the expected denunciation of the perils and uncertainties of the public life,
attacking ‘the profiteering and bloodstained eloquence of today…a new thing, born of evil
habits’ (12). A new character enters, Messalla, an admirer of the ancients, who provokes
Aper to a defence of modern oratory (14–23), in which he claims that ‘eloquence has no
single face’ (18), and that ‘as times change and audiences vary, the style and appearance
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of oratory must change too’ (19). These days judges won’ t put up with long philosophical
disquisitions and clumsily developed (p.45) speeches, but demand ‘fluent arguments,
brilliant reflections, refined and colourful description’, so that contemporary orators have
had to ‘become more pretty and more ornate in style’ (20).
This apology amounts to a denunciation, of course, and Messalla comments on the effect
of this sort of ‘refinement’, which has made modern oratory theatrical in a bad sense,
‘language obscene, thoughts frivolous, rhythm licentious’ (26). Challenged to name the
causes of the decline, Messalla replies:
Everybody knows that eloquence, and the other arts too, have declined from their
old heights not for any lack of exponents, but because the young are lazy, their
parents neglectful, their teachers ignorant—and because the old ways are
forgotten. (28)
The lost ideals are those of Cicero's Brutus, with its autobiographical account of the
orator's education as including philosophy, law, music, mathematics, dialectic, ethics, since
‘wonderful eloquence is the lavish overflow from great learning, wide skills, and universal
knowledge’. Messalla restates the old (and, one would have thought, increasingly
impracticable) image of the orator, able to ‘speak on any question brilliantly and splendidly
and persuasively’ (30), going into the forum ‘armed with all the arts like a fully-equipped
soldier striding into battle’. Modern orators are ignorant of law, philosophy, and all other
arts, can merely ‘squeeze eloquence into a handful of bright ideas and a narrow range of
epigrams—dethroning it’ (32). The cause of the decline is that whereas orators previously
had a broad general education, and were apprenticed to an orator active in politics and
law, so that they ‘learned to fight, you might say, in the battle-line’ (34), today they go to
‘the schools of the so-called rhetors’, and learn to declaim ‘in imaginary debates that have
no sort of relation to reality’, instead of discussing ‘Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, Just
and Unjust’ (31).
The last speaker in the dialogue—traditionally the one whose words carry most weight—is
the poet Maternus, who turns the discussion to the more general question of the nature
of rhetoric itself, which he sees as stimulated more by a disturbed society than a settled
one: ‘Great eloquence is like a flame; it needs fuel to feed it’ (36). In the unsettled earlier
days of Rome orators saw ‘that they could reap advantages from the confusion and
licence (p.46) then prevailing’, and achieved great rewards by exploiting dissension,
eloquence being the one accomplishment needed for success in the vita activa (36–7).
Maternus claims that rhetoric ‘flourishes more easily in stormy and troubled times’ (37),
and he appears to be attacking the ancient orators for making their reputations out of
discord. Yet an unmistakable note of admiration comes through as he describes ‘the
importance of the cases’ in politics and law that were treated then, which provided
‘immense scope for eloquence’: ‘A talent swells with the size of the events it has to deal
with; no one can produce a famous and notable oration unless he finds a case equal to his
powers.’ The celebrity of Demosthenes and Cicero derives not from petty legal disputes
but from their defence of the state against its enemies. Just as ‘wars produce more good
fighters than peace’,
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So it is with oratory. The more often it stands in the firing-line, the more knocks it
gives and receives, the greater adversaries and the more bitter battles it takes on,
the higher and more sublime it reigns, ennobled by those crises. (37)
The old lawcourts gave the orator more time, space, freedom to develop his ideas, a
large audience, ‘noise and applause’: today cases are conducted in ‘public record offices’
before one or two people, under strict time-limits, subject to the constant interference of
the judge, so that eloquence has been emasculated (38–9).
Of course, Maternus concludes, with transparent irony—Tacitus was writing under the
emperor Domitian, we recall, although the dialogue is set in about AD 74, under
Vespasian—‘the great and famous eloquence I have in mind is the nurseling of licence—
which fools call liberty—and the companion of sedition’. In ‘well-organized states it does
not arise’, for where states have ‘the severest constitutions and the severest laws’,
where the rulers are powerful and the citizens dutiful, there is no need for eloquence
(40). With perfectly balanced irony Maternus concludes by praising present-day Rome
for having made rhetoric unnecessary:
What need of long speeches in the senate? Our great men swiftly reach agreement.
What need of constant harangues to the people? The deliberations of the state are
not left to the ignorant many—they are the (p.47) duty of one man, the wisest.
What need of prosecutions? Crime is rare and trivial. What need of long and
unpopular defences? The clemency of the judge meets the defendants half way.
(41)
Truly, rhetoric would have no role in such a society—but neither would justice or liberty.
Tacitus’ Dialogue is an anatomy of the decline of eloquence which in one respect echoed
many complaints. Messalla denounces the rhetors'schools for their two practice exercises
in declamation, the suasoriae and controversiae. The suasoriae or ‘persuasions’, given to
the younger boys, were speeches offering advice to a historical personage, such as
Hannibal deliberating ‘whether to remain in Italy, or to return home, or invade Egypt’
(Ad Her. 3. 2. 2). The older boys practised controversiae (cases in dispute), speeches for
the prosecution or defence based on imaginary cases in law—as Messalla says,
—God, how do I describe those? They are fantastically put together; and moreover
these deliberately unreal subjects are treated with declamatory bombast. So it
comes about that the most grandiose language is lavished on rewards for
tyrannicides or choices by the raped or remedies for plague or adultery by
matrons, or any of the other topics that come up daily in school, in the forum rarely
or never. (35)
In order to give the best scope for debate and ingenuity the controversiae represented
some absolute dilemma, often one based on made-up laws in fantastic circumstances:
The law ordains that in the case of rape the woman may demand either the death of
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her seducer or marriage without dowry. A certain man raped two women in one
night; one demanded his death, the other marriage. Which one should have your
decision?49
Two collections of declamations are extant, one by Seneca the Elder, the other ascribed
to Quintilian,50 and their bizarre themes were constantly criticized for their remoteness
from the realities of life, notably by Quintilian and Petronius.51 Yet the (p.48)
declamation schools left their mark on those who had attended them—including Ovid,
Juvenal, Lucan—while the printed collections had an amazing influence. Curtius noted that
Seneca's Controversiae were ‘a principal source of the Gesta Romanorum’, so popular in
the Middle Ages, and that one of Seneca's most celebrated creations (a young man
secures his freedom from pirates by marrying the pirate-chief's daughter: thus unable to
marry the heiress selected by his father, he is disinherited) provides the plot of a
romance by Mlle de Scudery, Ibrahim ou l’ illustre Bassa, as late as 1641.52 E. M. Waith
has shown that the Senecan controversiae were a source for several of the Beaumont
and Fletcher plays. The plot of The Queen of Corinth (1617) is based entirely on The Man
Who Raped Two Women’ (Book 1, no. 5), and even the twist that in fact he ‘rapes’ the
same woman twice (sic!) is derived from Seneca.53
The survival of the declamations in such places and forms is a freak, no doubt, but it
shows the tremendous persistence of texts used in education. Just as influential were the
progymnasmata or preliminary exercises in composition taught in the grammar schools.
The earliest extant treatise is by the Greek Aelius Theon, dating from about AD 100
followed by Hermogenes a century later (whose work was widely disseminated in
Priscian's Latin translation). The most popular text (because it included worked-out
examples of each exercise) was produced by Aphthonius in the fourth century; it had a
great vogue in the Renaissance, with commentaries by Rudolph Agricola and Reinhard
Lorich54 These collections of (p.49) composition-models started with simple forms, such
as the fable (apologus, fabula), maxim (sententia), instructive saying (chreia), and
mythological narrative (narratio), giving a set of rules for each. Boys would gradually
move on to more demanding exercises, commonplace, encomium and denunciation,
speech in character or impersonation (ethopoeia or prosopopoeia), and description
(ekphrasis). By this time pupils were producing quite elaborate essays, and learning how
to vary and above all to amplify material (‘elaboration’, ergasia, expolitio). With such
topics as praise and blame, thesis (arguing both sides of a question), narratio, and the
discussion of a law, students could make the transition to a rhetorical training proper. The
justification for such exercises is that they provided a framework within which a student
could develop his own individuality. As one of the best students of classical education,
Henri Marrou, has written, rhetoric had its own conventions,
but once these had been recognized and assimilated, the artist had complete
freedom within the system, and when he had mastered the various processes he
could use them to express his own feelings and ideas without any loss of sincerity.
Far from hindering originality or talent, the restrictions enabled very subtle,
polished effects to be produced.55
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The treatises mentioned so far have all been prescriptive, giving instructions on how to
use rhetorical processes in composition. One last example of this tradition worth including
is Horace's ‘Epistle to the Pisos’, which Quintilian nicknamed the Ars Poetica (c. 16 BC).56
Horace was drawing both on an immediate Greek source, one Neoptolemus of Parium,
and on a tradition going back to Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric. His work, although
eclectic and bewilderingly structured, owes a great deal to rhetoric, especially Cicero,
taking over for poetry and drama many of the traditional precepts of the orators.57 The
(p.50) prescriptive part of the poem is arranged according to the rhetorical triad of
ordo, arrangement (42–4), facundia, style (45–118), and res, subject-matter (119–294).
But within this division we find comments on the rhetorical processes of inventio,
dispositio, and elocutio (38–58), and especially the need for decorum between style,
genre, and subject (1–21, 85–92, 108–23, 155–78—a juxtaposition of youth and age
obviously inspired by Aristotle's Rhetoric, see p. 25 above—, 225–32, 309–19). Horace's
debt to the rhetorical tradition is unmistakable when he describes the affective intention
of the poet towards his audience, the officia oratoris as formulated by Cicero (p. 35
above):
It is not enough for poetry to be beautiful; it must also be pleasing and lead the
hearer's mind wherever it will. The human face smiles in sympathy with smilers and
comes to the help of those that weep. If you want me to cry, mourn first yourself;
then your misfortunes will hurt me, Telephus and Peleus. If your words are given
you ineptly, I shall fall asleep or laugh. (99–107: cf. Cicero and Quintilian, pp. 77 ff.
below)
After movere come docere and delectare. For the first, the poet, like the orator, is
advised to study philosophy, acquire wisdom from the ‘Socratic books’, learning ‘his duty
to his country and friends, the proper kind of love with which parent, brother, and guest
should be cherished’ (309 ff.)—common themes in ethics, especially in Cicero's De
Officiis. For the second, delectare must always accompany docere:
Poetry aims either to do good or to give pleasure—or, thirdly, to say things which
are both pleasing and serviceable for life…. The man who combines pleasure with
usefulness wins every suffrage, delighting the reader and also giving him advice;
this is the book that…gives your celebrated writer a long lease of fame. (333 ff.)
Many of those ideas, taken from the rhetorical tradition and formulated here with
unequalled pithiness—si vis me flere, dolendum est/Primum ipsi tibi; aut prodesse volunt
aut delectare poetae,/aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae; omne tulit punctum qui
miscuit utile dulci—were taken back by the rhetorical (p.51) tradition, and echoed a
thousand times. Horace's fame as a poet helped to make this work accepted as a fusion of
rhetoric and poetics, with an incalculable influence in the Renaissance and after.58
The preceptive tradition in rhetoric continued in the handbooks of figures and tropes,
and in composition manuals addressed to specific genres. But some apparently
prescriptive rhetorics also included much descriptive material, analysing the styles of
individual writers or specific stylistic qualities, marking a transition from rhetoric to
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literary criticism. The work On Style attributed to one Demetrius, and dating from the
second or first century BC,59 defines four styles and analyses each, together with its
anti-type (grand: frigid; elegant: affected; plain: arid; forceful: unpleasant). Within each the
writer analyses further the role played by diction, word-arrangement, and subject-
matter, discussing grammatical, syntactical, and rhetorical aspects, with apt quotations
from a range of Greek writers. A later Greek critic, Dionysius of Halicarnassus (in Rome
by 30 BC), used a less elaborate theory of style (preferring the Attic style as exemplified
by Demosthenes), writing treatises on individual Greek writers—Lysias, Isocrates, Plato,
Demosthenes—and a work on prose style, where four main elements producing pleasure
and beauty are distinguished: melody, rhythm, variety, and appropriateness.60 One
stylistic feature was singled out by a critic called ‘Longinus’ in a treatise On Sublimity,
written in the late first century AD,61 which is arguably the most (p.52) sensitive
application of rhetoric to literary criticism made in antiquity, or since (further discussion
in Chapter 6 below). Finally, another Greek rhetorician, Hermogenes of Tarsus (born c.
AD 160), took the move towards ever more detailed classification of style as far as it
could go, in a series of works which schematized stylistic qualities on to a grid, almost
reducing writing to a mechanical process. On the horizontal plane, as it were, he
distinguishes seven characteristics of style: clarity, grandeur, beauty, speed, ethos,
verity, and gravity. (As in all the works of this school, the attempt to sum up qualities of
style with one epithet seems a hopeless task.) Vertically, each head is given such
subcategories as diction, syntax, rhythm, sound, length of sentences, word-order, and a
selection of rhetorical figures. All that the writer has to do, supposing that he wants to
reproduce one of these styles, is to run his finger down the list and find which vowels or
consonants to use, which to avoid, whether to use the nominative or ablative cases,
whether to use nouns or (!) verbs, and all his problems are solved.62 Hermogenes’
works, which include treatises On Ideas or On Types of Style (Peri Idēon) and On Staseis
(with three other works ascribed on doubtful evidence) had a great, and in some ways
surprising diffusion in the Renaissance.63 The appetite for rhetoric texts at that time was
inexhaustible, and these stylistic treatises were regarded as extending the main
prescriptive tradition from the De Inventione to Quintilian rather than replacing it. But
their vogue shows that the demand for detailed help in composition did not decline in the
period that historians now describe as ‘early modern’.
iii The Main Processes of Rhetoric

Inspired by Quintilian's example, and wishing to make this book contain in itself, as far as
possible, all the material necessary for its understanding, I shall now outline the major
(p.53) doctrines of rhetoric briefly, and with very selective annotation.64 This will be
more than just a summary, since I wish to develop two of the themes of this book, the
rhetorical tradition's emphasis on persuasion by moving the feelings, and the revival of
classical rhetoric in the Renaissance.
The Three Genres

The three main genres of oratory, as Aristotle classified them, were the judicial, the
deliberative, and the epideictic. The first two were covered most fully by the major
classical rhetoric texts, but with a certain discrepancy between theory and practice,
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especially in the case of deliberative or political oratory. Despite the rhetorician's

celebrations of the power of speech in open political gatherings, the fact is that oratory
was never the sole source of political influence, and what power it had was always at the
mercy of changes in the state. As George Kennedy describes it, the Roman senate was ‘a
highly oligarchic body whose decisions, though influenced by speeches, were also very
much the result of ties of family or personal friendship and the prior decision of an inner
group of senators’. In theory it was ‘an advisory, not a law-making body’.65 Kennedy's
history of rhetoric at Rome conveniently traces the stages by which the influence of
political rhetoric diminished. Already in the Roman revolution ‘the role of oratory…
steadily declined as the military might of individual generals rose’ (pp. 74–5). In the
Augustan period ‘judicial oratory flourished under only slightly altered conditions;
political oratory, however, lost ground while new forms of persuasion, a new rhetoric in
the verbal and visual arts, arose to influence public opinion’ (p. 302). By the first century
AD deliberative oratory was much changed, ‘the factionalism and bitter debates of the
late republic were gone (p.54) from the assembly and the senate. Indeed the assembly
now existed only in name’ (p. 430). Lawcourts were still important, and the early empire
saw an expansion both in the number of legal cases and the courts trying them, as well as
a striking spread of bureaucracy, which made use of rhetorical forms of communication
(p. 434). But two new elements in the lawcourts of the first century AD ‘served further to
undermine the freedom of speech’. These were the treason-trials, and the rise of
informers, the delatores, ‘clever, unscrupulous men [who] won position, wealth, and
notoriety by feeding on the suspicions of the emperor and his officials’ (pp. 440–2).
Tacitus’ Dialogue on Orators and other texts of the late first and early second centuries
show the continuing decline of eloquence, as the links between rhetoric and politics
weakened further (p. 446). This is the historical reality against which we must measure
the rhetoricians’ claims for their pet topics or achievements. The fact is that Cicero's
major treatises ‘were produced at a time when Roman rhetoric in its traditional forms
was being checked’ (p. 239). An air of fantasy or wish-fulfilment hangs over the De
Oratore in particular.
This progressive decline of both deliberative and judicial oratory helps account for what
might otherwise seem the surprising success of the Cinderella of the three. Epideictic
rhetoric turned out to be the most generally applicable in later periods, especially
following the collapse of Graeco-Roman political and legal systems. It was, indeed, the only
form still usable as a whole (although parts and processes from the other two survived,
sometimes adapted to strange contexts). It is for this reason that, in the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, all literature became subsumed under epideictic, and all writing was
perceived as occupying the related spheres of praise and blame.66
Yet in classical theory epideictic oscillated between a functional and a purely ornamental
concept. Both Plato and Aristotle relate epideictic to ethics, considering praise to be the
correct response to virtue, blame to vice. Plato banished the (p.55) poets from his state
but allowed the poetry of praise to remain, ‘hymns to the gods and encomia to good men’
(Republic, 10. 607), in which the poet was expected to show that ‘the just are happy and
the unjust unhappy’ (3. 392). In the Protagoras (325–6) Plato saw encomium as being
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useful in exciting the young to virtue, while in the Laws (659–61, 801 ff.) he approved of
communal celebrations in which songs of praise to the gods and to ‘citizens who have
departed and have done good and energetic deeds’ will benefit morals and virtue.
Isocrates, too, in his Evagoras, eulogized the virtues of his hero consciously, in order to
stimulate emulation for virtue among the young.67
Plato and Isocrates give epideictic a social function, reinforcing the norms of public
morality. Aristotle's account is less concerned with its role in the state, but always
conceives of it ethically. As he says in the Rhetoric, those ‘who praise or attack a man aim
at proving him worthy of honour or the reverse’ (1358b 28). One ground for praise is
heroic activity, where a man ‘has neglected his own interest to do what was honourable.
Thus, they praise Achilles because he championed his fallen friend Patroclus, though he
knew that this meant death’, and ‘to die thus was the nobler thing for him to do, the
expedient was to live on’ (1359a 1 ff.). The ‘objects of praise and blame’, he writes later,
are ‘Virtue and Vice, the Noble and the Base’, the highest form of virtue consisting in
being useful to other people (1366a 23–1366b 5). It follows that praise can only be given to
noble acts made intentionally, as the result of a man's moral choice, where his actions are
the product of his good qualities (1367 b 20 ff.). Aristotle at least joins Plato and Isocrates
in ascribing a pragmatic or persuasive function to epideictic, which can rouse the listeners
to emulation:
To praise a man is in one respect akin to urging a course of action. The suggestions
made in the latter case become encomiums when differently expressed….
Consequently, whenever you want to praise any one, think what you would urge
people to do. (1367 b 35 ff.)
Here Aristotle qualifies his original distinction, where deliberative (political) oratory was
said to address a judge and to refer to future acts and decisions, while epideictic was
merely directed towards an onlooker, and had no concern with the (p.56) future
(1358b 1 ff., 1377 b 21). Subsequently he breaks down his categories still further, stating
that ‘the use of persuasive speech is to lead to decisions’, even if we address only a
single person, ‘as when we scold a man for his conduct or try to change his views’. The
‘judge’, then, is not just the formally constituted arbitrator of a trial, or a political
assembly, for ‘anyone is your judge whom you have to persuade’ (1391 b 8 ff.). This
deduction at last allows Aristotle to see epideictic, too, as involving decisions: ‘our
principle holds good of epideictic speeches also; the “onlookers” for whom such a speech
is put together are treated as the judges of it’ (1391 b 15).
Aristotle's enlarging of the rhetoric of praise and blame to the affecting of internal
decisions—opinions and attitudes—is important for the later history of rhetoric, when
epideictic became the sole genre to survive intact. Medieval and Renaissance writers
seldom regard their subject-matter neutrally, but usually express a clearly positive or
negative evaluation which attempts to change the reader's views. Aristotle would have
been an excellent model for them, but Roman rhetoric presented a more ambivalent
attitude toward epideictic. In the three centuries between Aristotle's Rhetoric and the
first Latin handbooks, epideictic had been developed in the panegyrical orations to
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emperors and rulers, and had come to be associated with the praise of a specific
outstanding person, rather than a virtue, developing in the process connotations of
flattery and insincerity. The Rhetorica ad Herennium gives only a sketchy treatment of
epideictic (3. 6. 10 ff.), listing the topics for invention under ‘External Circumstances’,
deriving from Fortune (descent, education, wealth, kinds of power), ‘Physical Attributes’,
coming from Nature (agility, beauty, health, strength), and ‘Qualities of Character’,
stemming from Virtue (wisdom, justice, courage, temperance). This listing of the primary
virtues goes back to Plato (Rep. 4. 428 ff.) and Aristotle (Rhet. 1366b 1 ff.), but the author
fails to develop its importance, and in one place seems to identify epideictic with the
‘speech of entertainment’ (4. 23. 32). He also discusses the ‘praiseworthy’ under
deliberative or political rhetoric (3. 4. 7), revealing a certain blurring of categories.
Cicero's De Inventione is more coherent, accepting the by now standard division into
three classes of subject and linking epideictic with honestum (1. 5. 7, (p.57) 2. 4. 12).
Yet, like this anonymous colleague—both writers evidently drawing on a common source
—Cicero invokes honestas as ‘the greatest necessity’ but places it under deliberative
oratory, being future-oriented towards ‘things to be sought and…avoided’ (2. 52. 157
ff.). In this way epideictic linked politics and ethics.
In Cicero's mature rhetorical works epideictic is given two conflicting evaluations. In De

Oratore the orator is seen as excelling all others in his power to encourage men to virtue
or reclaim them from vice through vituperate and laudare (2. 9. 35). But while accepting
the ethical nature of epideictic here, some speakers in the dialogue dismiss panegyrics as
‘serviceable’ but not ‘essential’, not needing the exposition of rules, since the panegyrist
is concerned with the unpredictable favours of fortune (2. 11. 44 ff.). Antonius even
makes an opposition between epideictic and other genres, saying that the Greeks practise
it ‘more for reading and for entertainment, or for giving a laudatory account of some
person, than for the practical purposes of public life’ (2. 84. 340). Epideictic is thus
identified with delectare, rather than with movere or docere, and denied a serious
political or social function. This judgement is repeated in the Orator, which describes
epideictic speeches as ‘show-pieces’, designed to give pleasure and entertainment,
‘unconnected with the battles of public life’ (11. 37, 12. 38, 12. 42, 61. 207–8). Yet in De
Oratore Cicero also gives his protagonists a defence of epideictic for showing how virtue
manages the gifts of nature and fortune (2. 84. 342–8), and as a fertile field for the
exercise of amplification (2. 85. 346, 3. 27. 105; also Brutus, 12. 47). This view is
developed in Partitiones Oratoriae, where Cicero concedes epideictic both an ethical and
a social function, praising
the form that we adopt for panegyrics on distinguished men and for censuring the
wicked. For there is no class of oratory capable of producing more copious
rhetoric or of doing more service to the state, nor any in which the speaker is more
occupied in recognizing the virtues and vices. (20. 69)
Like Isocrates, Cicero believes that the practice of celebrating virtue and detesting vice
will benefit the orator's own life: ‘the principles awarding praise and blame…have a value
not only for good oratory but also for right conduct’ (21.70). This (p.58) judgement
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leads on to a long discussion, in the Platonic-Aristotelian mode, of the virtues and their
place in life (22. 75–23. 81), an issue referred to more briefly in the Topica (23.89–91).
At various times in Cicero, then, epideictic is both display, for entertainment only, and of
great importance to inculcating ethics in the individual as in the state. In Quintilian the
same dichotomy exists. On the one hand epideictic is said to provide delectatio, only (3. 4.
6.): it ‘aims solely at delighting the audience, and…seeks not to steal its way into the mind
nor to wrest the victory from its opponent, but aims solely at honour and glory’ (8. 3. 11,
3. 4. 13, 3. 7. 1). It can be compared with poetry, since both aim solely at giving pleasure
(10. 1. 28), and epideictic therefore can allow itself ‘much more elegance and ornament’
than deliberative or forensic oratory (11. 1. 48). Yet Quintilian also opposes this view,
noting that ‘panegyrics are advisory in form and frequently discuss the interests of
Greece’ (3. 4. 14), and even rejecting Aristotle's triadic definition as ‘easy and neat rather
than true: for all three kinds rely on the mutual assistance of the other. For we deal with
justice and expediency in panegyric, and with honour in deliberations’ (3. 4. 16). Roman
oratory, he claims, unlike Greek, has given epideictic
a place in the practical tasks of life. For funeral orations are often imposed as a duty
on persons holding public office, or entrusted to magistrates by decree of the
senate. Again, the award of praise or blame to a witness may carry weight in the
courts, while it is also a recognised practice to produce persons to praise the
character of the accused. (3. 7. 2)
Aristotle himself had broken his initial categorization, and Quintilian follows him in
stressing the identity between those actions or qualities praised in epideictic and advised
in deliberative oratory (3. 7. 28), so that epideictic can take over the goals of that genre,
too, being concerned with both honestas and utilitas (8. Pr. 8).
The amount of space that Quintilian devotes to epideictic shows its importance to Roman
oratory. We praise both gods and men, celebrating the gods’ majesty, power, exploits,
and the discoveries by which they benefited mankind (3. 7. 68).
(p.59) For men, we can begin with factors preceding birth, such as the native land,
parents, ancestors, and can continue by reviewing character, physical endowments, and
external circumstances such as fortune. But, Quintilian adds,
the praise awarded to external and accidental advantages is given, not to their
possession, but to their honourable employment. For wealth and power and
influence, since they are the sources of strength, are the surest test of character
for good or evil: they make us better or they make us worse. (3. 7. 10–14)
This caveat was to become extremely important in the Renaissance debate over the
relative merits of ‘virtue’ and ‘nobility’. In formal terms, Quintilian advises, an encomium
can be constructed by taking a man's life, deeds, and words ‘in due chronological order’.
At other times we do better to ‘divide our praises, dealing separately with the various
virtues, fortitude, justice, self-control and the rest of them and to assign to each virtue
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the deeds performed under its influence’ (3. 7. 15). This kind of approach was to become
influential in Renaissance epic and epic-theory, where characters were often seen as
embodying separate virtues and vices. Cities can also be ‘praised after the same fashion
as men’, for ‘the virtues and vices revealed by their deeds are the same as private
individuals’ (3. 7. 26). And in all these cases, as Aristotle (Rhet. 1368a 35) and the Ad
Herennium (3. 6. 10) had shown, the same methods can be ‘applied to denunciations as
well, but with a view to opposite effects’ (3. 7. 20), by merely inverting the judgements.
Later rhetoric-books consolidated the position of epideictic. In his treatise On Ideas

Hermogenes defined encomium as ‘the setting forth of the good qualities’ of mankind in
general or in particular, differing from the other forms by having no other end than ‘the
witness to virtue’.68 In his ‘treatment of all poetry as a subdivision of epideictic’ George
Kennedy sees the final ‘victory of rhetoric over poetics’; 69 but the two arts had been
closing on each other for a century or more. Aristotle's Rhetoric had taken many of its
examples from the poets, and had discussed the similarities and differences between
prose (p.60) and poetry. Literary language legitimately uses ‘foreign’ or unfamiliar
expressions, but these are more common in verse than prose, where ‘the subject-matter
is less exalted’ (1404b 8 ff.). Prose oratory, however, should certainly use metaphor,
since it is used in everyday conversation (1404b 31 ff.), and prose-writers are urged to
‘pay specially careful attention to metaphor, because their other resources are scantier’
than the poets’ (1405a 5 ff.). Prose should avoid compound epithets and other poeticisms,
however (1406a 5–14). In an often quoted passage from De Oratore Cicero had laid down
that
the poet is a very near kinsman of the orator, rather more heavily fettered as
regards rhythm, but with ampler freedom in his choice of words, while in the use of
many sorts of ornament he is his ally and almost his counterpart. (1. 16. 70; also 3.
7. 27)
Although we still have no adequate study of rhetoric in Latin poetry and drama, poets
were educated by the rhetores, acquired a considerable knowledge of rhetoric, and saw
their art as complementary to the prose of oratory. Writing to Salamus (a rhetor who had
taught Germanicus Caesar) Ovid proclaimed the poets’ use of rhetoric: ‘Our work
differs, but it derives from the same sources; we are both worshippers of that liberal art.
…as my numbers receive vigour from your eloquence, so I lend brilliance to your
words’ (Ex Ponto, 2. 5. 65 f.). Quintilian advised the orator to read the poets in order to
find examples of the figures (10. 1. 27 ff.), and in his own work takes his examples from
poet and orator alike, a practice followed by almost all subsequent rhetoric-books.
Perhaps, then, rather than speaking of a ‘victory’ we should think of an alliance between
poetics and rhetoric.
To return to epideictic, the techniques of panegyric set out by the Ad Herennium and
Quintilian were simplified for use in schools by the progymnasmata, as we would expect,
but also formed the basis of separate treatises. The most elaborate of these was the Peri
Epideiktikon, dating from the late third or early fourth century AD, and ascribed to
Menander the Sophist,70 which contains two treatises, both incomplete, and not
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necessarily by the same author. The first discusses hymns to (p.61) the gods
(subdivided into eight different types), celebrations of countries, cities (including
harbours, citadels; the city's origins, accomplishments, virtues). The second treatise
explains how to write an ‘imperial oration’, or encomium of the emperor; a speech of
arrival at a city; a ‘talk’ or more casual form of encomium, less bound by rules; a
‘propemptic talk’, or speech ‘which speeds its subject on his journey with
commendation’; an epithalamium or wedding speech, with its more specialized
appendage, the bedroom speech; birthday, consolatory, and funeral speeches, speeches
of invitation, leavetaking, lament, and many more. If this profusion of genres seems
another example of the rhetorician's ‘taxonomania’,71 his desire to take account of every
possible eventuality, in language or life, we might note the impressive range of authors
drawn on for examples (Homer, Isocrates, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon), which justify
the isolation of this literary genre. Historically, Menander enjoyed a wide dissemination in
the Renaissance. First published in the Aldus collection of Rhetores Graeci (Venice, 1508–
9), his system was taken over and elaborated further by J. C. Scaliger in his Poetices Libri
Septem (Lyons, 1561), and left its mark on George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie
(London, 1589).72 Later poets whose works exemplify Menander's categories, whether
or not due to direct knowledge, include Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.
As for epideictic in general, as E. R. Curtius noted, ‘the epideictic oration had by far the
strongest influence upon medieval poetry’, since ‘stylistic elements belonging to
panegyric can find application in all genres and to all kinds of subjects’.73 Edmond Faral
and Douglas Kelly have shown that the tendency to divide all utterances into praise or
blame affected much medieval literature, resulting in the virtual absence of neutral
descriptions and an enlargement of the writer's affective intent, addressing the emotions
of his audience.74 In the Renaissance many influences converged to give epideictic the
leading status, among them the allegorical (p.62) interpretations of the Aeneid as a work
exemplifying virtue; the Latin translation of Averroës’ paraphrase of Aristotle's Poetics,
which begins ‘Every poem and all poetic discourse is blame or praise…[of] the
honourable or the base’; and the techniques of debate in schools and universities, where
opposed arguments fell naturally into the moulds of laus and vituperatio.75 As a result of
these and other influences epideictic was indissolubly linked with ethical themes, and
deeply affected all literary genres. Epic was the form most obviously influenced, with its
tendency to divide characters into the polar extremes of virtuous and vicious, but the
injunction to make moral discriminations by praise and blame was applied even to lyric. As
Ben Jonson said of the the poet,
We do not require in him mere elocution; or an excellent faculty in verse; but the
exact knowledge of all virtues, and their contraries; with ability to render the one
loved, the other hated, by his proper embattling them.76
The Stages of Composition

Classical rhetoric distinguished five stages in the composition of speech: inventio,
dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio or actio. As Cicero defined them in his
youthful handbook,
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Invention is the discovery of valid or seemingly valid arguments to render one's

cause plausible. Arrangement is the distribution of arguments thus discovered in
the proper order. Expression is the fitting of the proper language to the invented
matter. Memory is the firm mental grasp of matter and words. Delivery is the
control of voice and body in a manner suitable to the dignity of the subject matter
and the style. (1. 7. 9; very similarly, Ad Herennium, 1. 2. 3)
Both Cicero and his anonymous contemporary reveal their concern with forensic
rhetoric, describing inventio as ‘the most important of all the divisions’, to be ‘used in
every kind of pleading’ (1. 7. 9; Ad Her. 3. 8. 15). In De Oratore Cicero's main
protagonists, Antonius and Crassus, echo each other by making (p.63) the briefest
references to the compositional processes (1. 31. 142, 2. 19. 79 ff.), but in Partitiones
Oratoriae Cicero presents a more helpful account in the form of a dialogue between
himself and his son:
C. JUN.
Inasmuch then as the first aim of the speaker's functions is to invent,
what will be his aim?
C. SEN.
To discover how to convince the persons whom he wishes to persuade
and how to arouse their emotions.
C. JUN.
What things serve to produce conviction?
C. SEN.
Arguments, which are derived from topics that are either contained in
the facts of the case itself or are obtained from outside.
C. JUN.
What do you mean by topics?
C. SEN.
Pigeonholes in which arguments are stored.
(1. 2.5)
This doctrine of the topoi derives from Aristotelian rhetoric, but is developed very
differently by Cicero in his Topica. It derives some of its categories from dialectic, a
curious hybrid. (Some modern accounts have overemphasized the link between inventio
and logic.) Readers will have noticed that Cicero immediately connects invention with the
main goal of rhetoric, ‘how to convince the persons whom he wishes to persuade and
how to arouse their emotions’.
The construction of an argument (‘a plausible device to obtain belief, as Cicero defines it)
involves the orator in analysing the case at hand against an array of possibly relevant
categories. These ‘“places” of argument’, as Quintilian sums them up, can be drawn
from persons, causes, place and time (which latter we have divided into preceding,
contemporary and subsequent), from resources (under which we include
instruments), from manner (that is, how a thing has been done), from definition,
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genus, species, difference, property, elimination, division, beginnings, increase,

consummation, likes, unlikes, contradictions, consequents, efficients, effects,
results, and comparison, which is subdivided into several species. (5. 10. 94)
It would seldom occur to a modern lawyer to make up a list of all the categories of
argument, especially not such a heterogeneous one as this, but doing so would
encourage him to be systematic, and undoubtedly bring out every aspect of the case in
hand. After inventio comes dispositio, and for Quintilian it is ‘not (p.64) without good
reason’ that arrangement is ‘treated as the second of the five departments of oratory,
since without it the first is use-less’. A sculptor can have cast all the limbs of a statue
accurately but unless he can assemble them in the right position the result will be a
monster (7. Pr. 1–2). Dispositio concerns the best arrangement of arguments and also
the structure of a whole speech.
From the discovering and arranging of arguments we pass to their verbal expression,
elocutio being the specific domain of the orator, the ‘supreme power of speaking [being]
granted to him alone’, as Cicero puts it (Orator, 19. 61, 14.44; also De Or. 1. 13. 56–1. 14.
67; Quintilian, 1. Pr. 12; 17; etc.). The orator needs above all copia verborum ac rerum
(10. 1. 5), a phrase of Quintilian's that provided the inspiration for one of Erasmus’ most
popular works,77 fullness of matter and language, eloqui as opposed to loqui (natural or
dialectical speech). Quintilian, quoting some of these passages from Cicero, and enlarging
on this etymology, justifies his illustrious predecessor's emphasis from the nature of
eloquence itself.
The rhetoric-book's teaching on elocutio can be divided into two unequal categories, the
doctrine of tropes and figures, often seen in a functional context as the main agents of
persuasion (see Chapter 6 below), and the less important topic of the ‘qualities of style’.
This concept, developed by the pupils of Aristotle, notably Theophrastus and Demetrius,
held that the style of the finished oration should possess a number of positive qualities,
including correctness (pure Greek, or pure Latinity), clarity, ornateness, and
appropriateness. Taken over by Cicero (De Or. 3. 3. 7), it reappears in Quintilian and is
much enlarged in the Greek stylistic treatises78 mentioned above (although the inherent
vagueness of many of the definitions of style prevented it ever becoming generally
usable). Development of this doctrine in the Hellenistic period marks a shift from rhetoric
as a persuasive process, involving artist, artefact, and audience, to a concern with the
artefact alone, detached from the speaker-hearer relationship. It comes close to what we
understand today as poetics, yet of course, once elaborated, it could always be
reinserted in the full rhetorical context.
(p.65) The two remaining processes only make proper sense when rhetoric is a
performance-art. Memoria involves the orator memorizing his speech for delivery, and
discussion of this stage usually included encomia to the faculty of memory itself, ‘the
treasure-house of the ideas supplied by Invention’ (Ad Her. 3. 16. 28). Quintilian, quoting
that description, says that memory is a natural gift that must be improved by training, for
‘all the labour of which I have so far spoken will be in vain unless all the other
departments be co-ordinated by the animating principle of memory. For our whole
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education depends’ on it (11. 2. 1). The rhetorical doctrine of memoria was based on the
association of specific sounds, words, ideas, or arguments with a physical space—a wall,
or part of a building—divided into a matching number of compartments. The classic
anecdote illustrating the power of a trained memory was that of Simonides of Ceos, who
left a banquet he had attended just before the roof collapsed, destroying the remaining
guests. Thanks to his use of the rhetorical loci Simonides could recall who had sat where,
allowing the relatives to identify the deceased for burial (De Or. 2. 86. 351 ff.; Ad Her. 3.
16. 28–24. 40). Like every department of rhetoric, memoria was elaborated into a vast
number of categories, taken even further by some Renaissance texts, carried indeed
beyond the stage of usefulness or practicality.79
The final stage in the composing and delivering of a speech is the orator's use of voice
(pronuntiatio) and gesture (actio). Quintilian says that this dual skill ‘has an extraordinarily
powerful effect in oratory. For the nature of the speech we have composed within our
minds is not so important as the manner in which we produce it, since the emotion of each
member of our audience will depend on the impression made upon his hearing’ (11. 3. 2).
As classical rhetoric was a performance-art, (p.66) its teachers went to extraordinary
lengths to inculcate effectiveness in this single appearance before the judge and jury.
Aristotle found the subject neglected (1403b 20), and realizing that delivery ‘affects the
success of a speech greatly’ he made this acute analysis of its constituent parts:
It is, essentially, a matter of the right management of the voice to express the
various emotions—of speaking loudly, softly, or between the two; of high, low, or
intermediate pitch; of the various rhythms that suit various subjects. These are the
three things—volume of sound, modulation of pitch, and rhythm—that a speaker
bears in mind. It is those who do bear them in mind who usually win prizes in the
dramatic contests; and just as in drama the actors now count for more than the
poets, so it is in the contests of public life, owing to the defects of our political
institutions. (1403b 28–35)
Aristotle would no doubt have been appalled at the importance ascribed to vocal delivery
and gesture in Roman rhetoric. In De Oratore Crassus actually asserts that delivery ‘is
the dominant factor in oratory; without delivery the best speaker cannot be of any
account at all, and a moderate speaker with a trained delivery can often outdo the best of
them’ (3. 56. 213). Cicero justifies this emphasis on the grounds that since ‘reality beats
imitation in everything’ the art of rhetorical gesture should not just imitate life but
improve on it, bringing out more clearly those signs of emotion that exist in real life, but
sometimes indistinctly: ‘For nature has assigned to every emotion a particular look and
tone of voice and bearing of its own; and the whole of a person's frame and every look on
his face and utterance of his voice are like the strings of a harp, and sound according as
they are struck by each successive emotion. For the tones of the voice are keyed up like
the strings of an instrument’ to answer every touch, and all can be ‘regulated by the
control of art; they are the colours available for the actor, as for the painter, to secure
variety’ (3. 56. 214–15: a passage extremely interesting to Renaissance art-theorists,
notably Leonardo da Vinci). In Brutus Cicero says of actio that ‘nothing else so
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penetrates the mind, shapes, moulds, turns it’ (28. 142). In the Orator delivery is
described as ‘a sort of language of the body’ (17. 55), and Cicero quotes again the
famous anecdote of Demosthenes who, being asked three times what the most important
faculty of the (p.67) orator was, replied each time ‘action’. The Ad Herennium does not
find it the most important accomplishment, but concedes its ‘exceptionally great
usefulness’ and gives it pithy but detailed treatment (3. 11. 19–3. 15. 27). Quintilian
agrees that delivery ‘has an extraordinarily powerful effect in oratory. For the nature of
the speech that we have composed within our minds is not so important as the manner in
which we produce it, since the emotion of each member of our audience will depend on
the impression made upon his hearing’ (11. 2. 2). His account is appropriately full,
discussing a remarkable repertoire of gestures, involving the head, eye (most
expressive), arms, hands, fingers, and even the placing and movement of the toga, which,
like every other resource, is under the orator's alert control (11. 3. 1–184). Classical
rhetoric tried to allow for any eventuality in life, but the best writers made it into a
system in which all the parts cohere. Its teachings on gesture had a remarkable afterlife,
as we are just finding out, in baroque opera-performance and eighteenth-century
acting.80
The Parts of a Speech

‘A speech has two parts’, wrote Aristotle, moving from lexis to taxis, ‘You must state
your case, and you must prove it’ (1414a 30). Impatient with over-elaborate divisions, he
dismissed those rhetoricians who, unconcerned with what had actually been done in the
case at issue, instead laid down rules about ‘what must be the content of the
“introduction” or “narration”, or any of the other divisions of a speech’. Such theorists
were ‘theorizing about non-essentials as if they belonged to the art’ (1354b 16 ff.). Yet,
since the Rhetoric conflates material from two or more lecture courses, we subsequently
find Aristotle himself adopting the prescriptive role, giving details of ‘heightening the
effect’ (1368a 1–22), of effective ways of arguing (1375a 7, 27 ff.; 1376a 18 ff.), or of
‘investing speeches with moral character’ (1391 b 20). So he, too, comes to discuss the
parts of a speech, starting with the prooemium, which he compares to the (p.68)
prologue in poetry and the prelude in flute-music (1414b 20). The essential function of the
introduction is
to show what the aim of the speech is; and therefore no introduction ought to be
employed where the subject is not long or intricate. The other kinds of introduction
are remedial in purpose, and may be used in any type of speech. They are
concerned with the speaker, the hearer, the subject, or the speaker's opponent.
(1415a 22 ff.)
The type that was to receive most attention in classical rhetoric, needless to say, was the
one appealing to the hearer. As Aristotle said, this ‘aims at securing his goodwill, or at
arousing his resentment, or sometimes at gaining his serious attention to the case, or
even at distracting it’, by making the judge or jury laugh, or telling them that the case
‘does not affect them, or is trivial or disagreeable’ (1415a 34–1415b 5). The rhetorician is
told to lose no time in trying to establish an emotional hold over the judges, especially
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those with ‘the weak-minded tendency…to listen to what is beside the point’ (1415b 7)—
the sarcasm reveals Aristotle's contempt for the democratic jury-system, composed of
amateurs, not professional philosophers. In the narration, too, Aristotle advises, ‘you
must make use of the emotions. Relate the familiar manifestations of them, and those that
distinguish yourself and your opponent’ (1416a 36). In the epilogue you must continue as
you have begun, exciting ‘the required state of emotion in your hearers’, including ‘pity,
indignation, anger, hatred, envy, emulation, pugnacity’ (1419b 12, 25).
From Aristotle and other now-lost texts in the Greek tradition students of rhetoric could
learn that a speech has certain formal divisions, and that each carried with it a specific
persuasive function. While various systems emerged, a popular division was into six
parts: exordium, narratio, partitio, confirmatio, refutatio (or reprehensio), and conclusio.
As the Rhetorica ad Herennium defined them,
The Introduction is the beginning of the discourse, and by it the hearer's mind is
prepared for attention. The Narration or Statement of Facts sets forth the events
that have occurred or might had occurred. By means of the Division we make clear
what matters are agreed upon and what contested, and announce what points we
intend to take up. Proof is the presentation of our arguments, together with their
corroboration. (p.69) Refutation is the destruction of our adversaries’
arguments. The Conclusion is the end of the discourse, framed in accordance with
the principles of the art. (1. 3.4)
The author discusses each part in some detail (1. 3. 4–2. 31. 50), in terms similar to
Cicero's in De Inventione (1. 4. 19–1. 56. 109), but at greater length and with more
attention to the types ‘of issue’, that is, legal status-theory. Both writers see the
structure of an oration as providing a variety of ways of bringing pressure to bear on the
judge, direct and indirect, and of affecting his judgement of the opponent. There are two
kinds of exordium, the direct (principium), which uses plain language to make the auditor
‘well-disposed, receptive, and attentive’, and the subtle or indirect (insinuatio), ‘which by
dissimulation and indirection unobtrusively steals into the mind of the auditor’ (De Inv. 1.
15. 20; Ad Her. 1. 4. 6). The speaker will use the latter if he knows that his cause is shaky,
or downright discreditable. The captatio benevolentiae, winning the audience's goodwill,
involves the orator setting out his good qualities (ethos), lamenting his or his client's
misfortune (pathos), and working up hatred of his opponent (Ad Her. 1. 4. 6.–1. 7. 11; De
Inv. 1. 15. 20–1. 18. 26). Strategies of gaining advantage are already being prepared at
the outset of the speech.
The narratio is by no means a neutral statement of facts, for if used skilfully the orator
can ‘turn every detail to our advantage so as to win the victory’, both by ‘winning belief
and ‘incriminating our adversary’ (Ad Her. 1. 8. 12). There are three types of narrative,
he goes on, ‘legendary, historical, and realistic’ (1. 8. 13; De Inv. 1. 19. 27; Quintilian, 2. 4.
2). Whichever form we use, the narratio ought to be ‘brief, clear, and plausible’ (De Inv.
1. 10. 28; Ad Her. 1. 9. 14); plausibility being achieved if the story told has characteristics
that ‘appear in real life’, such as action appropriate to character (decorum personae),
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coherent motives, opportune time and space for ‘the events about to be narrated’, all of
which will bring verisimilitude (De Inv. 1. 21. 24). We should remember that Cicero is
visualizing the advocate for either prosecution or defence reconstructing the events that
gave rise to the legal dispute as he wants them to have occurred. We are in the realm of
the argument from probability, or plausibility, which in (p.70) Graeco-Roman law—
strange though it may seem to modern ears—was deemed more credible than the ‘truth’
of witnesses or evidence. Since the opposed parties are bound to disagree, the partitio
divides up the points at issue, showing ‘in what we agree with our opponents and what is
left in dispute; as a result of this some definite problem is set for the auditor on which he
ought to have his attention fixed’ (De Inv. 1. 22. 31; Ad Her. 1. 10. 17). Here brevity,
completeness, and conciseness are essential, above all the orator should refer to each of
the heads of his division, no fewer, no more.
The partitio effected, we pass on to the crucial stages of confirmatio and confutatio (or
refutatio):
The entire hope of victory and the entire method of persuasion rest on proof and
refutation, for when we have submitted our arguments and destroyed those of the
opposition, we have, of course, completely fulfilled the speaker's function. (Ad Her.
1. 10. 18)
The essentially pragmatic, adversarial nature of Roman judicial rhetoric emerges very
clearly in that comment. Cicero shows his own philosophical approach by inserting a long
excerpt from his studies of Greek dialectic, concerning propositions, attributes of persons
or of actions, and the two main forms of argument, inductive and deductive, or syllogistic
(1. 24. 34–1. 41. 77). But he shares the Roman legal profession's concern with learning
how ‘to impair, disprove, or weaken the confirmation or proof in our opponent's speech’
(1. 42. 78), and in his practical performance more than fulfilled these goals. In the
judgement of a modern historian, Cicero's eminence as ‘the greatest Roman orator can
hardly be questioned…. He was almost equally adept at argument, at presentation and
destruction of character, and at emotional appeal.’81
The emotional or affective intent of the orator dominates all accounts of the peroration,
which was said to have three parts, ‘the summing-up; the indignatio or exciting of
indignation or ill-will against the opponent; and the conquestio or the arousing of pity and
sympathy’ (De Inv. 1. 52. 98). Of the second Cicero (p.71) writes that, if properly done,
the indignatio ‘results in arousing great hatred against some person, or violent offence at
some action’, and, like his anonymous compatriot, he lists a number of topics effective in
working up the hearers’ anger (1. 53. 100–1. 54. 105: Ad Her. 1. 30. 47–9). Cicero advises
his fellow orators to accompany the narrative ‘with reproaches and violent denunciations
of each act, and by our language bring the action as vividly as possible before the eyes of
the judge’ (1. 54. 104). Classical law-trials were evidently emotionally uninhibited to a
degree that will surprise the modern reader getting to know these texts. Roman
lawcourts must have resembled theatres, indeed ‘cases were divided into sections
known as actiones, and the prosecutor was known as an actor’, while both Cicero and
Quintilian compare the orator's art with the actor's.82 The conquestio or lament reverses
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these tactics, seeking to ‘make the auditor's spirit gentle and merciful that he may be
more easily moved’, using such loci communes as ‘the power of fortune over all men and
the weakness of the human race’. Like so many rhetoricians, Cicero guarantees the
efficient functioning of the device: ‘When such a passage is delivered gravely and
sententiously, the spirit of man is greatly abased and prepared for pity, for in viewing the
misfortune of another he will contemplate his own weakness’ (De Inv. 1. 55. 106). Both
authors list ways of producing this effect, and both end by warning us not to go on too
long with the famous saying of the rhetorician Apollonius, ‘nothing dries more quickly than
a tear’ (Ad Her. 2. 31. 50; De lnv. 1. 56.109).
These two unpretentious textbooks give the most helpful account of the parts of an
oration. It is obviously beneath the mature Cicero's dignity in De Oratore to make more
than the briefest reference to such elementary matters (1. 31. 142, 2. 19. 79 ff., 2. 76.
307 ff.), but Antonius does at least give some account of exordium (2. 79. 30 ff.), and
narratio (2. 80. 326 ff.). Quintilian discusses the whole sequence, as one might expect,
fully, with much mature and sensible advice. The exordium is not always needed in
deliberative oratory, ‘since he who asks an orator for his opinion is naturally well-
disposed to him’ (3. 8. 6), (p.72) but in forensic oratory its main use is to render the
audience attentive (4. 1. 1–79). Quintilian's most concise advice on composing an
exordium is that
he who has a speech to make should consider what he has to say; before whom, in
whose defence, against whom, at what time and place, under what circumstances
he has to speak; what is the popular opinion on the subject, and what the
prepossessions of the judge are likely to be; and finally of what we should express
our deprecation or desire. (4. 1. 52)
The narratio is equally directed at the hearer, its purpose being ‘not merely to instruct,
but rather to persuade the judge’ (4. 2. 21). It is difficult to achieve simplicity and clarity
here, indeed most speakers ‘will never find anything more difficult in the whole range of
oratory’ (4. 2. 38). The partitio can also clarify the issue, if properly used, for ‘it follows
nature as a guide’, helps the speaker's memory (4. 5. 3.), and not only makes our
argument clearer by isolating the points ‘and placing them before the eyes of the judge,
but relieves his attention by assigning a definite limit to certain parts of our speech, just
as our fatigue upon a journey is relieved by reading the distances on the milestones
which we pass’ (4. 5. 22). Quintilian describes the peroration as ‘the most important part
of forensic pleading’ (6. 2. 1), in which ‘we may give full rein to our emotions’ (4. 1. 28), for
it offers great ‘opportunities for exciting the passions of jealousy, hatred or anger’ (6. 1.
14), opportunities that he analyses in impressive detail (6. 1. 1–55).
The Orator's Three Duties

Readers of Aristotle's Rhetoric will discover two conflicting accounts, once again, of the
orator's duty towards his audience. In one Aristotle takes the severely philosophic line
that ‘the modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art’ of rhetoric, and
that ‘enthymemes…are the substance of rhetorical persuasion’, for they alone deal with
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‘the essential facts’, everything else being merely accessory (1354a 12). The enthymeme
in rhetoric is the counterpart of the syllogism in logic, both being structures of argument
governed by rules, albeit less strict in rhetoric. From this first, austere position Aristotle
rejects ‘the arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and (p.73) similar emotions’ as being
beside the point, ‘merely a personal appeal to the man who is judging the case’ (18). In
‘well-governed states’—such as Athens used to be when murder-cases on the
Areopagus were tried before a small group of experienced magistrates—appeal to the
emotions would be irrelevant, and the litigant had only to show ‘that the alleged fact is so
or not so, that it has or has not happened’ (24). Yet, as things are now, Aristotle
concedes, with orators addressing massive juries (of 201 to 501 citizens), and having to
appeal to their emotions (1354b 8), one had better master this art. And so he switches to
the other attitude, which was to be much more influential in classical and Renaissance
rhetoric, that ‘since rhetoric exists to affect the giving of decisions’ the orator must ‘put
his hearers, who are to decide, into the right frame of mind’, this being particularly
important in lawsuits (1377 b 21 ff.), where ‘to conciliate the audience is what pays’
(1354b 22).
Accepting the realities of the rhetorical situation Aristotle defines three modes of
persuasion, as we have seen, ethos, pathos, and logical proof. He bases his argument on
the underlying link between feelings and thoughts, arguing that reason is seldom
unattended by emotion: ‘When people are feeling friendly or placable, they think one sort
of thing; when they are feeling angry or hostile’, they think differently (1377 b 21 ff.). The
lawyer must show his opponents in an unfavourable light, then work up the judges’
feelings against them, carefully unleashing emotion so as to effect persuasion. In the
Phaedrus Socrates had defined rhetoric as ‘a kind of influencing of the mind by means of
words’ (261 a), but Aristotle sees that words alone are not enough: ‘those who heighten
the effect of their words with suitable gestures, tones, dress, and dramatic action
generally, are especially successful in arousing pity’ (1386a 30 f.). In his own body and
dress the orator has a whole arsenal of expressive devices at his disposal.
The triad of ethos, pathos, and logical proof eventually reached Roman rhetoric, but not’
in time for the De Inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Whatever the common
Hellenistic source of those works, they lack the Aristotelian triad, and this presumably
reflects the fact that Aristotle's Rhetoric was lost for a certain period, being rediscovered
only in 82 BC.83 But in the De Oratore (p.74) (55 BC) Cicero clearly draws on Aristotle
when he makes Crassus say that ‘the speaker will not be able to achieve what he wants
by his words, unless he has gained profound insight into the characters of men’, knowing
‘all the mental emotions’, all their ‘natural characters and…habits of conduct’ (1. 12. 53; 1.
5. 17; 1. 14. 60). The other main speaker, Antonius, refers specifically to Aristotle, stating
that since the essential point is how ‘to sway the feelings of the tribunal’, then ‘for
purposes of persuasion the art of speaking relies wholly upon three things: the proof of
our allegations, the winning of our hearers’ favour, and the rousing of their feelings to
whatever impulse our case may require’ (2. 27. 114). Antonius recurs later to ‘those
three things which alone can carry conviction; I mean the winning over, the instructing
and the stirring of men's minds’, the basic topics to consider in inventio (2. 28. 121, 2. 29.
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128). In his other rhetorical works Cicero repeats the triad of movere (or flectere),
docere, and delectare in a more pithy form {Brutus, 49. 185, 80. 276), but with the
emphasis gradually shifting: ‘the orator is in duty bound to instruct; giving pleasure will
win him the audience's favour; to move them is indispensable’ (De Opt. Gen. 1. 3). Or, as
the Orator puts it, ‘to prove is the first necessity, to please is charm, to sway is victory;
for it is the one thing of all that avails most in winning verdicts’ (21. 69). Movere becomes
the most important power.
Yet, while this doctrine derives from Aristotle it has suffered a sea-change. We find
occasional traces of the original Aristotelian distinction between ethos and pathos, as in
the Orator, where ethikon is said to refer to the orator's self, pathetikon to the emotions
he arouses. But even here we can see the strange Roman adaptation by which ethos
becomes merely a more gentle form of the emotions aroused by pathos. ‘The former is
courteous and agreeable, adapted to win goodwill; the latter is violent, hot and
impassioned, and by this cases are wrested from our opponents; when it rushes along in
full career it is irresistible’ (36. 128). The process involved in working up the feelings is
known as amplificatio, which is a ‘forcible method of arguing, argument being aimed at
effecting proof, amplification at exercising influence’, when it becomes ‘a sort of weightier
affirmation, designed to win credence in the course of speaking by arousing emotion’
(Part. Or. 8. 27, 15. 53). Cicero tended to (p.75) see amplificatio on a scale extending to
infinity, declaring that ‘there is no limit to the power of an oration to exalt a subject or
render it contemptible’ (36. 126–7), success in amplificatio being ‘the one distinction that
most specially marks the orator’ (De Or. 3. 27. 105: so often in classical rhetoric we find
this or that skill singled out as ‘the one essential’ faculty). The orator who is fully able to
master his audience's feelings can move them in any direction, arouse any emotion,
achieve any goal he wishes. Of all the topics in the laus eloquentiae this was the one that
most fascinated Cicero, and most affected the Renaissance, the promise of absolute
power over the audience's mind and feelings.
This theme runs through the De Oratore, emerging in each speaker and in every
discussion. Crassus begins it:
there is to my mind no more excellent thing than the power, by means of oratory,
to get a hold on assemblies of men, win their good will, direct their attentions
wherever the speaker wishes, or divert them from wherever he wishes. (1. 8. 30)
The great attraction of rhetoric is that the orator who has mastered it can, at will, arouse
‘men's hearts to anger, hatred, or indignation’, or calm them down ‘to mildness and
mercy’ (1. 12. 53, 1. 36. 165, 1. 46. 202, 2. 44. 185 and 189, 2. 81. 332, 3. 6. 23, 3. 30. 118,
3. 51. 197). He has carte blanche, the power to arouse ‘whatever passion the
circumstances and occasion may demand’ (1. 46. 202, 2. 27. 114), to lead his audience
‘whithersoever he pleases’ (2. 41. 176, 3. 14. 55). Cicero follows Aristotle in subjecting
reason to emotion, the most important achievement for the orator being, Antonius states,
to have his hearer
so affected as to be swayed by something resembling a mental impulse or emotion,
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rather than by judgement or deliberation. For men decide far more problems by
hate, or love, or lust, or rage, or sorrow, or joy, or hope, or fear, or illusion, or
some other inward emotion, than by reality, or authority, or any legal standard, or
judicial precedent, or statute. (2. 42. 178)
The orator can only do this if he is himself moved by the emotions he seeks to arouse,
indeed if the ‘speaker is not himself aglow with passion’ the minds of the listeners will not
(p.76) be ready to absorb his influence (2. 44. 189–90). Antonius declares that ‘I never
tried, by means of a speech, to arouse either indignation or compassion, either ill-will or
hatred, in the minds of a tribunal, without being really stirred myself, and gives a vivid
account of how the ‘vast indignation’ he had shown aroused deep feeling in a court,
working up its hatred against a tyrant (2. 47. 195–2. 49. 200).
If the De Oratore has one unifying thread it is this celebration of the power of ‘Eloquence,
rightly styled, by an excellent poet [Pacuvius], “soulbending sovereign of all things”, that
she can not only support the sinking and bend the upstanding, but, like a good and brave
commander, can even make prisoner a resisting antagonist’ (2. 44. 187). Cicero's other
rhetorical works reiterate the idea, if with less intensity of emphasis. The power of movere
is constantly granted the highest place among the orator's resources (Brutus, 23. 89, 52.
193, 54. 198–9, 80. 276 and 279; Part. Or. 4. 13; Orator, 28. 97, 36. 126–7). The speaker
who can ‘inflame the minds of his hearers’ can ‘turn them in whatever direction the case
demands’ (Brutus, 80. 279, 84. 290, 93. 322; Part. Or. 3. 9, 19. 67, 27. 96; Orator, 5. 20,
25. 122, 36. 131–2). In the Brutus Cicero gives a vivid picture of how, when ‘a real orator’
speaks,
the listening throng is delighted, is carried along by his words, is in a sense bathed
deep in delight…. They feel now joy, now sorrow, are moved now to laughter, now
to tears;…are stirred to anger, wonder, hope, fear; and all these come to pass just
as the hearer's minds are played upon by word and thought and action. (49. 187;
compare 84. 290)
And in the Orator he gives an account of his own achievements that shows how he
regarded himself as having fulfilled all the requirements of the ideal speaker (36. 129–32).
As George Kennedy aptly reminds us, ‘the lack of modesty which we sometimes think of
as a peculiar weakness of Cicero was a permanent feature of Roman oratory, especially in
the case of a new man like Cicero or Cato’.84 They knew that self-advertisement
sometimes does work.
Quintilian accepted Cicero's estimate of his rhetorical (p.77) performance, indeed never
ceased to hold him up as the paragon or orators. In his fifth Verrine oration, describing
the scourging of a Roman citizen, he judges that Cicero's narratio ‘excites the warmest
indignation’ and ‘moves us even to tears’ (4. 2. 113). Elsewhere Quintilian celebrates ‘the
sheer force of his eloquence’ (9. 2. 53), the skill of that ‘supreme artist in playing on the
minds of men’ (11. 1. 85). On the place of emotional appeal in rhetoric Quintilian follows
Cicero closely, but where Cicero is usually content just to praise the ability to arouse the
emotions, Quintilian works out the practical details. He accepts the Aristotelian-Ciceronian
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triad, ranking both docere (4. 5. 6) and delectare (5. 8. 3) far below movere, where
eloquence shows its true power. Quintilian adapts this topic, too, to the teaching situation,
advising the teacher to read great speeches with his class and show ‘how the orator
establishes his sway over the emotions of his audience, forces his way into their very
hearts’ (2. 5. 8). Where Aristotle had given logical proof joint status with ethos and pathos
Quintilian plays down logical processes as too intellectual, the real aim of oratory being to
drag the audience by the force of our discourse ‘and occasionally throw them off balance
by an appeal to their emotions’ (5. 19. 29–31). This is both ‘the most powerful means of
obtaining what we desire’ and the hardest of tasks (6. 2. 1), yet ‘it is this emotional power
that dominates the court’ (6. 2. 4), ‘it is in its power over the emotions that the life and
soul of oratory is to be found’ (6. 2. 7). Like Cicero, Quintilian sees the emotions as
existing on a scale, pathos including ‘the more violent emotions’, which command and
disturb, while ethos refers to the ‘calm and gentle’ ones which ‘persuade and induce a
feeling of goodwill’ (6. 2. 9). When pathos is properly aroused and the judge is overcome
by feeling, he is unable to consider reason or truth, and his emotions give the verdict
despite himself (6. 2. 6–7)—another claim for rhetoric's automatic success. Pathos is
largely concerned ‘with anger, dislike, fear, hatred and pity’, there being various kinds of
each (6. 2. 20–1). The orator should draw on all of these, since
the force of eloquence is such that it not merely compels the judge to the
conclusion toward which the nature of the facts leads him, but awakens emotions
which either do not naturally arise from the case or (p.78) are stronger than the
case would suggest. This is known as deinosis [‘making terrible’], that is to say,
language giving additional force to things unjust, cruel, or hateful. (6. 2. 24)
Demosthenes was outstanding in this respect.
Quintilian thinks that appeal to the emotions is necessary in all three kinds of oratory (3. 4.
15), including deliberative, for the audience must be worked on in political no less than in
legal debates (3. 8. 12). Emotional appeal should be used in every part of the speech, in
the exordium (4. 1. 5), in digressions (4. 2. 104), in the narratio—for in that part of the
speech the judge is most attentive and can be aroused more easily (4. 2. 113–15, 119,
128)—and above all in the peroratio, where ‘we have to consider what the feelings of the
judge will be when he retires to consider his verdict’ (6. 1. 10). Quintilian's long analysis
of the arousal of emotion in the peroration (6. 1. 1–55) is an admirably practical account—
whatever we may feel of the ethical issue—of how the Roman advocate went to work. The
prosecution counsel ‘has to rouse the judge, while the defender has to soften him’ (6. 1.
9), so that each will be trying to ‘win the judge's goodwill and to divert it from their
opponent’ (6. 1. 11). The prosecution must excite the passions of jealousy, hatred, or
anger in the judge (14), make the accused seem as atrocious or deplorable as possible
(15), using amplificatio to enhance effects (6. 1. 16, 51). The defence counsel must
arouse pity by describing the ‘previous or present sufferings’ of the accused, and
contrasting his present fortune with what will happen if he fails (23–4). He can also use
prosopopoeia, an impersonation speech put into the mouth of his client (25), while—
developing one of Aristotle's points—
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Actions as well as words may be employed to move the court to tears. Hence the
custom of bringing accused persons into court wearing squalid and unkempt attire,
and of introducing their children and parents, and it is with this in view that we see
blood-stained swords, fragments of bone taken from the wound, and garments
spotted with blood, displayed by the accusers, wounds…, scourged bodies bared
to the view. The impression produced by such exhibitions is generally enormous,
since they seem to bring the spectators face to face with the cruel facts. (6. 1. 30–1)
Readers of Shakespeare will recall the tremendous effect made (p.79) by Antony
showing Caesar's blood-stained toga (which Quintilian refers to here); or the political
success that the patrician class hopes to gain by having Coriolanus display the wounds he
has received fighting for his country (a real Roman custom); or Volumnia's stage-
managed conquestio which deflects her son's revenge on Rome (Coriolanus, 5. 3. 21 ff.).
Effective though these external devices may be, to Quintilian ‘the prime essential for
stirring the emotions of others is…first to feel those emotions oneself (6. 2. 26). To
‘counterfeit grief, anger and indignation’ without adapting our own feelings to them is
ridiculous. We must ‘assimilate ourselves to the emotions of those who are genuinely so
affected’, for then our eloquence will really derive from the feeling we want to produce in
the mind of the judge:
Will he be angry, if the orator who seeks to kindle his anger shows no sign of
labouring under the emotion which he demands from his audience? Will he shed
tears if the pleader's eyes are dry? It is utterly impossible. (6. 2. 27)
As to how the orator induces such emotions in himself, to Cicero this depended on the
language he uses, ‘for the very quality of the diction, employed to stir the feelings of
others, stirs the speaker himself even more deeply than any of his hearers’ (De Or. 2. 46.
191). Quintilian's account is more subtle, appealing to the visual sense, for his orator
should ‘generate’ the emotions he wishes ‘to prevail with the judge’ by using ‘visions’
(the Greek term is phantasiai),
whereby things absent are presented to our imagination with such extreme
vividness that they seem actually to be before our very eyes. It is the man who is
really sensitive to such impressions who will have the greatest power over the
emotions. (6. 2. 29–30)
This ‘power of vivid imagination, whereby things, words and actions are presented in the
most realistic manner’, is known as enargeia (also illustratio and evidentia: 32), and
depends on our being able to ‘identify ourselves with the persons’ we represent, ‘and
for a brief space feel their suffering as though it were our own’ (34). Actors are
sometimes overcome by emotion after completing their part (‘What's Hecuba to him, or
he to Hecuba?’),
(p.80) But if the mere delivery of words written by another has the power to set
our souls on fire with fictitious emotions, what will the orator do whose duty it is to
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picture to himself the facts and who has it in his power to feel the same emotion as
his client whose interests are at stake? (35)
Quintilian testifies that he himself has often been so much moved while speaking ‘that I
have not merely been wrought upon to tears, but have turned pale and shown all the
symptoms of genuine grief’. In rhetoric art not only imitates, it re-creates nature.
The Three Styles

All of these emotional states must, of course, be represented in the appropriate language.
Aristotle had laid down the first principles of linguistic decorum, stating that in rhetoric
language ‘will be appropriate if it expresses emotion and character, and if it corresponds
to its subject’ (1408a 10). So he instructs his pupils that ‘to express emotion, you will
employ the language of anger in speaking of outrage; the language of disgust and discreet
reluctance to utter a word when speaking of impiety or foulness; the language of
exultation for a tale of glory’, and humiliation for pity (1408a 15 ff.). This ‘aptness of
language is one thing that makes people believe in the truth of your story’ (20), and
reinforces the impression of your ethos (25). Aristotle discusses prose style more fully in
Book Three, without however reverting to this functional, persuasive view of language,
being more concerned there with the artefact than with the speaker-hearer relationship
(see e.g. 1404a 8 ff., 1404b 1, 1405a 7, 1407 b 25, etc.). The early Roman rhetorics share
this concern with the artefact rather than with the persuasive process. The Rhetorica ad
Herennium makes the first extant division of the kinds of style into three, but as regards
their stylistic components:
The Grand type consists of a smooth and ornate arrangement of impressive words.
The Middle type consists of words of a lower, yet not of the lowest and most
colloquial, class of words. The Simple type is brought down even to the most
current idiom of standard speech. (4. 8. 11)
(p.81) Although the author does link the grand style with ‘Amplification and Appeal to
Pity’, it is in terms of ‘ornate words’ and ‘impressive thoughts’, gravitas or grandeur,
and his concern, too, is with the language of the artefact rather than its varying degrees
of emotional impact.
That connection seems to have been made first by Cicero, who took the very influential
step of correlating the three styles with the three officio, oratoris. In De Oratore
Antonius repeats his aims as an orator, ‘the winning of men's favour, secondly their
enlightenment, thirdly their excitement’, and then links them in general terms with the
appropriate language: ‘the first calls for gentleness of style, the second for acuteness, the
third for energy’ (2. 29. 128–9). Later he goes into more detail on the ‘passionate style’,
which ‘searches out an arbitrator's emotional side [perturbatio] rather than his
understanding [cognitio]’ (2. 53. 214). The correlation of goal and style was properly
systematized in the Orator, where Cicero earmarked ‘the plain style for proof, the middle
style for pleasure, the vigorous style for persuasion; and in this last is summed up the
entire virtue of the orator’ (21. 69). Of them all, the orator using the grand style
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undoubtedly has the greatest power. This is the man whose brilliance and fluency
have caused admiring nations to let eloquence attain the highest power in the state;
I mean the kind of eloquence which rushes along with the roar of a mighty
stream…. This eloquence has power to sway men's minds and move them in every
possible way. Now it storms the feelings, now it creeps in; it implants new ideas and
uproots the old. (28. 99)
Orators of the grandiloquent style ‘were forceful, versatile, copious and grave, trained
and equipped to arouse and sway the emotions’ (5. 20), none more so than Demosthenes
(8. 26). Cicero goes into for him an unusual amount of detail defining the plain (24. 81),
middle (26. 91 ff.), and grand styles (28. 97 ff.), emphasizing that the perfect orator must
be able to manage all three: ‘He in fact is eloquent who can discuss commonplace matters
simply, lofty subjects impressively, and topics ranging between in a tempered style’ (29.
100).
Quintilian's account of the role of language in rhetoric extends through Books 8, 9, 10,
and part of 12, covering an enormous range of linguistic effects which resist brief
summary. On the (p.82) detailed resources of elocutio he writes that ‘there is no more
effective method of exciting the emotions than an apt use of figures’ (9. 1. 21), and a later
chapter will evaluate his contribution to this topic. As for this issue of the three styles and
the three officia oratoris, it is only towards the end of his book that he takes up his
earlier promise (12. 10. 1 f.) to discuss the ‘kind of style’ the orator should adopt. He is
obviously unhappy with Cicero's tidy designation of three styles, because of the great
varieties of style that exist in oratory, as in painting (12. 10. 2 ff., 10). But subsequently he
does discuss them, and makes the Ciceronian correlation, though rather grudgingly (12.
10. 58). The orator should use the plain style to instruct, the grand style to move, the
intermediate style to charm: ‘for instruction the quality most needed is acumen, for
conciliation gentleness, and for stirring the emotions force’ (59). Once again the genus
grande gets the lion's share. The other styles have their merits,
but he whose eloquence is like to some great torrent that rolls down rocks and
‘disdains a bridge’ and carves out its own banks for itself, will sweep the judge
from his feet, struggle as he may, and force him to go whither he bears him. This is
the orator that will call the dead to life…it is in his pages that his native land itself will
cry aloud. (12. 10. 61)
These praises of eloquence are themselves demonstrations of their own art, and in them
we note how the rhetorician seeks to align his power with the great forces of nature,
rivers in flood, thunder and lightning, or snow-storms (as with Homer's Ulysses). The
‘streams’ of eloquence must flow ‘as mighty rivers flow, filling whole valleys’ (5. 14. 31);
‘It is this force and impetuosity that…Aristophanes compares to the thunderbolt’ (12. 10.
65). What impressionable person, reading these words in a time when rhetoric was still
alive, would not also want to acquire ‘the power of true eloquence’?
Notes:
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(1) For the conventions governing quotations and references see above, p. xvii.
(2) Kennedy 1963, pp. 35–9. Kennedy 1980, pp. 9–15, gives an excellent analysis of
Homeric speeches.
(3) Iliad, tr. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1951), 3. 216–23.
(4) Curtius 1953, p. 64.
(5) Kennedy 1980, p. 15, describes the ninth book of the Iliad, in which Odysseus,
Phoenix, and Ajax come as ambassadors to persuade Achilles to return to the battle, but
fail, as ‘a picture of the failure of formal rhetoric in dealing with a highly personal situation.
…In the first work of European literature we are brought face to face with some of the
limitations of rhetoric.’ Yet Homer is surely facing the fact in life that human desires will
inevitably conflict, and that language has only a limited ability to resolve disputes or
change people's goals. If it were otherwise, one exposure to good—or evil—speech
would fix us for ever.
(6) Odyssey, tr. Richmond Lattimore (New York, 1968), 8. 166–73.
(7) Marrou 1964, p. 53; Kennedy 1963, pp. 26, 58–61.
(8) Kennedy 1963, pp. 26–7, 47, 61–8, 168–73; Kennedy 1980, pp. 29–31.
(9) Kennedy 1980, pp. 26–9, 42.
(10) Gorgias, 452 d–e; tr. W. D. Woodhead in Plato 1963.
(11) Kennedy 1963, p. 29, citing Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1. 2. 31 and Suetonius, De

Rhetoribus, 1; Marrou 1964, pp. 338–9.
(12) Kennedy 1963, p. 17.
(13) See De Oratore, 1. 46. 202, 1. 48. 211 and 214, 2. 8. 33, 2. 9. 35, 2. 16. 67–8, 2. 82.
337–8, 3. 1. 1–3. 2. 5, 3. 2. 8–3. 9. 12, 3. 4. 13, 3. 15. 5 7, 3. 16. 1, 3. 16. 59, 3. 17. 63, 3. 19.
72, 3. 20. 74, 3. 28. 109, 3. 32. 131, 3. 33. 133, 3. 34. 139; Brutus, 2. 6–7, 6. 22, 12. 45, 14.
54, 76. 265, 94. 324, 96. 328–31; Orator, 41. 141–2, 43. 148.
(14) See Quintilian, 1. Pr. 10, 2. 16. 1 and 8, 11. 1. 35, 12. 2. 6 and 20, 12. 7. 1, 12. 11. 1.
(15) On Isocrates see Kennedy 1963, pp. 174–203 (a somewhat harsh account);
Kennedy 1980, pp. 31–6; Marrou 1964, pp. 119–35; Werner Jaeger, Paideia: the Ideals
of Greek Culture, tr. G. Highet, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1939–45), iii. 46–155; H. M. Hubbell, The
Influence of Isocrates on Cicero, Dionysius and Aristides (New Haven, 1913); August
Burk, Die Pädagogik des Isokrates als Grundlegung des humanistischen Bildungsideals
(Würzburg, 1923); L. Gualdo Rosa, La fede nella Paideia: Aspetti della fortuna europea
di Isocrate nei secoli XV e XVI (Rome, 1984); Christoph Eucken, Isokrates. Seine
Positionen in der Auseinandersetzung mit den zeitgenössischen Philosophen (Berlin,
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1983); and O. A. Baumhauer, Die sophistische Rhetorik (Stuttgart, 1986).
(16) Nicocles, 5 ff. (= Antidosis, 253 ff.); tr. Kennedy 1963, pp. 8–9.
(17) Vickers 1983a, pp. 412–16.
(18) Kennedy 1963, pp. 7, 237, 268–72; Clarke 1953; Marrou 1964, pp. 267–81, 338–9,
381–5.
(19) J. Bowen, A History of Western Education. Vol. 1. The Ancient World (London, 1972),
pp. 197–8, 205.
(20) Marrou 1964, pp. 284, 204, 285; Bonner 1977.
(21) Kennedy 1980, p. 23.
(22) Kennedy 1972, p. 302.
(23) Curtius 1953; Clarke 1953; D’Alton 1931; Bonner 1977.
(24) Quotations are from the translation by R. Hackforth, reprinted in Plato 1963. One can
still use with profit W. H. Thompson's edition of the Phaedrus (London, 1868), which
reveals far more clearly than many recent commentators the extent of Plato's animus
against rhetoric.
(25) Kennedy 1963, p. 74.
(26) Monfasani 1976, p. 243.
(27) Kennedy 1980, p. 56.
(28) Kennedy 1980, p. 59.
(29) ‘A Review, and Conclusion’, Leviathan, ed. M. Oakeshott (Oxford, 1946), p. 466.
(30) English readers of this text have had to rely for many years on E. M. Cope, An
Introduction to Aristotle's Rhetoric: with Analyses, Notes and Appendices (London,
1867) and E. M. Cope and J. E. Sandys, The Rhetoric of Aristotle (Cambridge, 1877), a 3-
vol. commentary. Now W. M. A. Grimaldi, SJ, who published Studies in the Philosophy of
Aristotle's Rhetoric (Wiesbaden, 1972), has begun to produce a Commentary, so far on
Book I (Bronx, NY, 1980). For a compact bibliography of classical rhetoric see Fuhrmann
1984, pp. 153–60.
(31) Solmsen, Die Entwicklung der aristotelischen Logik und Rhetorik (Berlin, 1929);
Kennedy 1963, pp. 82–7; and various essays collected in Keith V. Erickson (ed.),
Aristotle: The Classical Heritage of Rhetoric (Metuchen, NJ, 1974).
(32) Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1897), ii. 229. Roland Barthes praised
Page 56 of 61
Aristotle's discussion of the pathē for avoiding the reductive tendencies of modern
psychology in dealing with such feelings as anger, hatred: ‘toutes ces passions sont prises
volontairement dans leur banalité: la colère, c’ est ce que tout le monde pense de la
colère…. La psychologie rhétorique est donc tout le contraire d’ une psychologie
réductrice, qui essayerait de voir ce qu’ il y a derrière ce que les gens disent et qui
prétendrait réduire la colère, par exemple, à autre chose, de plus caché.’ Rejecting
‘aucune idée herméneutique (de décryptage)’. Aristotle sees the passions as ‘des
morceaux de langage tout faits’, and applies a more advanced ‘psychologie classificatrice,
qui distingue des “langages” [des passions]’ (Barthes 1970, p. 212).
(33) On Hermagoras see Dieter Matthes, ‘Hermagoras von Temnos, 1904–1955’,

Lustrum, 3 (1958), 58–214, and Kennedy 1972, p. 61.
(34) Caplan (ed.), Ad Herennium, pp. 32–3, 90–1; W. Trimpi, ‘The Quality of Fiction: The
Rhetorical Transmission of Literary Theory’, Traditio, 30 (1974), 1–118, pp. 26 n., 36 n.
(35) Ward 1978.
(36) A major commentary is in progress (in German): De Oratore Libri III, ed. Anton
Leeman and Harm Pinkster, Vols. 1 (Heidelberg, 1981) and 2 (Heidelberg, 1985) having
reached Book 2, para. 98. See also Alain Michel, Rhétorique et philosophie chez Cicéron
(Paris, 1960).
(37) Cicero, Letters to Atticus, tr. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Harmondsworth, 1978), xiii.
19—’ my recent compositions follow the Aristotelian pattern, in which the other roles in
the dialogue are subordinate to the author's own’ (p. 533).
(38) Cicero, Letters to Atticus, iv. 16 (p. 174); Fuhrmann 1984, p. 53.
(39) I am not persuaded by George Kennedy's estimate of it as standing ‘beside or only

slightly behind Aristotle's Rhetoric and Quintilian's De institutione oratoria as a rhetorical
classic’ (Kennedy 1972, p. 199). He himself comments on ‘the lack of precision in the
treatise’ (p. 212), its inconsistencies (pp. 219–20), the way the dialogue form ‘covers up
some imprecision’ and does not allow Cicero to work out his ideas ‘in an entirely
satisfactory way’ (p. 226), and the fact that although the account of invention in Book II
draws on Aristotle, ‘the real keystone of logical proof in the Rhetoric, the theory of
enthymeme and example, is totally lacking’ (p. 222). These are serious deficiencies in a
‘classic’: although I agree that De Oratore is a major work, Cicero's choice of the dialogue
form seems to me unfortunate.
(40) Kennedy 1980, p. 100; Kennedy 1972, p. 207 describes the affective triad (movere
—docere—delectare) as ‘the central concept of Cicero's rhetorical theory’.
(41) I have not discussed De Optimo Geneve Oratorum, c. 44 BC, which was designed as
an introduction to Latin translations of two famous speeches by Aeschines and
Demosthenes.
Page 57 of 61
(42) On Quintilian's reputation and influence see F. H. Colson (ed.), M. Fabii Quintiliani
Institutionis Oratoriae Liber I (Cambridge, 1924), pp. lxiv-lxxxix; the French edition of
Book I by Charles Fierville (Paris, 1890); Marianne Wychgram, Quintilian in der
deutschen und französischen Literatur des Barocks und der Aufklärung (Langensalza,
1921; Pädagogisches Magazin, Heft 803), with useful bibliography at pp. 139–47;
Muntéano 1967, pp. 177–85, 297 ff., and passim; Kennedy 1969, PP. 139–40.
(43) See 1. Pr. 24, 3. 8. 67, 3. 11. 21, 4. 1. 43, 4. 1. 70, 5. 10. 100, 5. 11. 30, 7. 1. 37, 8. Pr.
4, 8. 4. 15, 9. 3. 99.
(44) See 2. 13. 2 and 6, 5. 10. 109 and 119, 5. 13. 60, 5. 14. 31, 6. 1. 5, 6. 5. 2, 7. 1. 2, 10.
6. 5, 10. 7. 24, 12. 9. 17–18.
(45) For Quintilian's admiration of Cicero see, e.g., 5. 11. 17, 6. 3. 3, 8. 3. 3–4, 8. 3. 64, 9. 2.
53, 10. 1. 105–9, 11. 1. 85, 11. 3. 47 and 108, 12. 1. 19–20, 12. 6. 4, 12. 10. 12.
(46) Kennedy 1969, p. 23.
(47) De Or. 1. 3. 9, 1. 28. 128; Brutus, 6. 23, 41. 153, 89. 306, 90. 309, 93. 322; Part. Or.
40. 139; Orator, 3. 12, 4. 14, 4. 16, etc.
(48) See the Loeb edition of Tacitus, Vol. 1 for the Dialogus tr. W. Peterson, rev. M.
Winterbottom (London, 1970), and Winterbottom's more fluent translation in Russell and
Winterbottom 1972, pp. 432–59, from which my quotations are taken (references are to
the paragraphs). For the dating, I have been persuaded by C. E. Murgia's arguments,
‘The Date of Tacitus’ Dialogus’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 84 (1980), 99–125.
(49) Clarke 1953, p. 90. See also Marrou 1964, p. 202.
(50) Michael Winterbottom has edited The Minor Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian
(Berlin, 1984) with a valuable commentary, and has translated the Elder Seneca's
Declamations, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (London, 1974), Vol. 1, Controversiae,
Books 1–6; Vol. 2, Controversiae, Books 7–10 and Suasoriae.
(51) See Quintilian, e.g. 2. 20. 3, 4. 2. 28 f., 5. 12. 17 ff., 5. 13. 36–43, 6. 1. 41–3, 6. 2. 36, 8.
3. 23, 10. 2. 12, 10. 5. 14–18, 12. 2. 7 f., 12. 6. 4, 12. 11. 15; Juvenal, Satires, 7. 150–4,
168–70; and Petronius, Satyricon, 1–4 (included, with other relevant material tr.
Winterbottom, in Russell and Winterbottom 1972, pp. 344–71). For modern studies see
D. A. Russell, Greek Declamation (Cambridge, 1983); S. F. Bonner, Roman Declamation
(Liverpool, 1947); Bonner 1977, pp. 250–87, 309–27; M. Winterbottom (ed.), Roman
Declamation (Bristol, 1980); and Winterbottom, ‘Schoolroom and Courtroom’ in Vickers
1982a, pp. 59–70; J. Fairweather, Seneca the Elder (Cambridge, 1981). On the decline of
oratory see also K. Heldmann, Antike Theorien über Entwicklung und Verfall der
Redekunst (Munich, 1982).
(52) Curtius 1953, p. 155.
Page 58 of 61
(53) Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven, Conn.,
1952), pp. 86–98, 203–7 on additional influences.
(54) See Bonner 1977, pp. 250–76. Baldwin 1928, pp. 23–38, summarizes the treatise of
Hermogenes, while Ray Nadeau gives ‘The Progymnasmata of Aphthonius in Translation’
in Speech Monographs, 19 (1952), 264–85; good treatment in Kennedy 1983, pp. 54–73.
For the later diffusion of these exercises see Curtius 1953, p. 442 and Baldwin 1944,
with, however, an unconvincing claim for their influence on Shakespeare (2. 231–49). See
also Quintilian 1. 9, 2. 1–2. 4.
(55) Marrou 1964, p. 204.
(56) See the Loeb edition, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica. tr. H. R. Fairclough
(London, 1929) and the excellent translation by Donald Russell in Russell and
Winterbottom 1972, pp. 279–91, used here (references by line-number).
(57) The erudite edition and commentary by C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry, 3 vols.
(Cambridge, 1963–82), is very thorough on the post-Aristotelian rhetorical tradition, but
insists on a too sharp distinction between poetics and rhetoric, and undervalues
Horace's debt to the rhetorical tradition. This gap is partly filled by the older studies of G.
C. Fiske and M. A. Grant, Cicero's ‘De Oratore’ and Horace's ‘Ars Poetica’ (Madison,
Wis., 1929), and ‘Cicero's Orator and the Ars Poetica’, Harvard Studies in Classical
Philology, 35 (1924), 1–75.
(58) See Weinberg 1961, i. 71–200, and M. T. Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and
Aristotelian Literary Criticism, 1531–1555 (Urbana, Ill. 1946).
(59) See Demetrius 1961; useful translation by Doreen Innes in Russell and
Winterbottom 1972, pp. 171–215, with unfortunate omissions of sections on the
rhetorical figures.
(60) See Dionysius of Halicarnassus, The Critical Essays, tr. S. Usher, 2 vols., Loeb
Classical Library (London, 1974, 1985), and substantial excerpts tr. D. A. Russell in
Russell and Winterbottom 1972, pp. 305–43. S. F. Bonner, The Literary Treatises of
Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Cambridge, 1939; Amsterdam, 1969) somewhat overvalues
its author, I feel, and takes a too negative view of rhetoric (e.g. pp. 41, 82, 99). There is
much intelligent analysis of Dionysius and other writers reviewed here in D. A. Russell,
Criticism in Antiquity (London, 1981), while the earlier period is well covered by A. D.
Leeman, Orationis Ratio. The Stylistic Theories and Practice of the Roman Orators,
Historians, and Philosophers, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1963).
(61) See Longinus 1964; the complete text is admirably translated by Russell in Russell
and Winterbottom 1972, pp. 460–503.
(62) Excerpts from Peri Idēon, tr. Russell (with abridgements) in Russell and
Winterbottom 1972, pp. 561–79. See now Wooten 1987.
Page 59 of 61
(63) Annabel Patterson, Hermogenes and the Renaissance. Seven Ideas of Style
(Princeton, NJ, 1970) is unsatisfactory in several respects (see my review in TLS, 28
May 1971, p. 626); more reliable treatment in Kennedy 1972, pp. 619–33 and Kennedy
1983, pp. 76–103; Monfasani 1976, pp. 18, 248–54, 322–7, and Monfasani 1983, pp. 176,
183–6.
(64) The most comprehensive summary is still Richard Volkmann, Die Rhetorik der
Griechen und Römer in systematischer Uebersicht, 2nd edn. (Leipzig, 1885; Hildesheim,
1963). German scholars have also provided the most complete modern surveys, such as
Josef Martin, Antike Rhetorik, Technik und Methodem (Munich, 1974), and Heinrich
Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, 2 vols. (Munich, 1960)—with some
eccentricities. On the other hand, nothing in any language matches George Kennedy's
ongoing history of rhetoric: Kennedy, 1963, 1972, 1980, 1983.
(65) Kennedy 1972, pp. 20–1; the quotations following are also from this source.
(66) On epideictic see Burgess 1902, Baldwin 1928, Buchheit 1960, Hardison 1962,
Kennedy 1963, Vickers 1982b, and Helen North, From Myth to Icon. Reflections of
Greek Ethical Doctrine in Literature and Art (Ithaca, NY, 1979), pp. 135–76, an excellent
discussion of ethos, epideictic, and persuasion.
(67) Cit. Hardison 1962, p. 30.
(68) Cit. Baldwin 1928, pp. 30–1.
(69) Kennedy 1972, p. 632.
(70) See the admirable edition and translation of Menander Rhetor by D. A. Russell and N.
Wilson (Oxford, 1981).
(71) The coinage is D. Shackleton Bailey's: TLS, 20 June 1986, p. 672, commenting on the
passion for classification in the late Roman republic (Varro distinguished ‘at least 99
classes of soil’).
(72) An ambitious but over-stated attempt to apply Menander's categories is F. Cairns,

Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (Edinburgh, 1972).
(73) Curtius 1953, pp. 69–71, 154–82.
(74) Faral 1924, p. 76; Kelly 1978, pp. 232, 242.
(75) Hardison 1962, Vickers 1982b, and ‘King Lear and Renaissance Paradoxes’, Modern
Language Review, 63 (1968), 305–14.
(76) Jonson, Timber: or Discoveries, 1038–45, in Jonson, Works, ed. C. H. Herford, P. and
E. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925–52), viii. 595. Jonson's model is of course Quintilian, 1.
Pr. 9–14.
Page 60 of 61
(77) Erasmus, De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia (1512; 3rd, rev. edn., 1534) had at
least 150 printings by 1600 and about 200 all told. See Erasmus 1978.
(78) See Kennedy 1963, pp. 273–90; Kennedy 1972, pp. 225, 349, 628–9.
(79) On memoria see Herwig Blum, Die antike Mnemotechnik (Hildesheim, 1969).
Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966), has attracted a great deal of interest
to the topic, which is all to the good, but it is an unreliable study on several heads. David
Newton-de-Molina, reviewing Blum's book in Essays in Criticism, 20 (1970), 353–9, says
that it ‘serves to refute nearly all the conjectures made in the opening chapters of The
Art of Memory, conjectures upon which the rest of Dr. Yates's argument is based’, and
provides ‘an implicit correction of Yates's hectic theorising’ (p. 354). See further Newton-
de-Molina's Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation (1972), ‘A critical select history of the classical
arts of memory and their interpretation, with special reference to English arts of memory,
1509–1620’.
(80) See Angelica Goodden, ‘Actio’ and Persuasion. Dramatic Performance in Eighteenth-
Century France (Oxford, 1986), a somewhat disappointing study, and Dene Barnett, The
Art of Gesture: the Practices and Principles of 18th Century Acting (Heidelberg, 1987),
which is comprehensive.
(81) Kennedy 1972, p. 275. For a thorough, and somewhat unsympathetic analysis of
Cicero's oratorical tricks, see Classen 1982 and Classen, Recht—Rhetorik—Politik.
Untersuchungen zu Ciceros rhetorischer Strategie (Darmstadt, 1985).
(82) Kennedy 1972, p. 18; Cicero, De Or. 3. 56. 214–20; Quintilian 11. 3. 61–3, 158;
Aristotle, Rhet. 1417 b 3.
(83) Kennedy 1972, pp. 114–15.
(84) Kennedy 1972, p. 101.
Page 61 of 61

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An Outline of Classical Rhetoric

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: rhetoric, major texts, Aristotle, Tacitus, composition, orator, style

i Rhetoric and Life

Shaw, Pygmalion, Act II

While writers of rhetoric-books collected, analysed, and classified methods of discovering

The significance of eloquence in Homer is double. Writers on rhetoric continued to cite

the gods do not bestow graces in all ways

Greek society needed orators, and valued rhetoricians.

Gorgias set out the practical advantages of eloquence. Rhetoric

ii The Major Texts

Plato's critique of existing rhetoric in the Phaedrus has a reforming, as well as a

The orator's purpose in making such an inventory is to achieve a higher degree of

three divisions, determined by the three classes of listeners to speeches. For of

Political speaking urges us either to do or not to do something: one of these two

The political orator aims at establishing the expediency or the harmfulness of a

relatively brief compass, numerous practical demonstrations of the relevance of rhetoric

A critical evaluation of the dialogue form of De Oratore reveals it to be cumbersome,

In De Oratore, we may feel, content is obscured by form, as if somewhere inside the

That disposition, Books 3 to 7 on inventio, 8 to 11 on elocutio, with the other processes

iii The Main Processes of Rhetoric

The Three Genres

especially in the case of deliberative or political oratory. Despite the rhetorician's

In Cicero's mature rhetorical works epideictic is given two conflicting evaluations. In De

Later rhetoric-books consolidated the position of epideictic. In his treatise On Ideas

The Stages of Composition

Invention is the discovery of valid or seemingly valid arguments to render one's

genus, species, difference, property, elimination, division, beginnings, increase,

The Parts of a Speech

The Orator's Three Duties

so affected as to be swayed by something resembling a mental impulse or emotion,

Demosthenes was outstanding in this respect.

The Three Styles

(3) Iliad, tr. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1951), 3. 216–23.

(4) Curtius 1953, p. 64.

(6) Odyssey, tr. Richmond Lattimore (New York, 1968), 8. 166–73.

(7) Marrou 1964, p. 53; Kennedy 1963, pp. 26, 58–61.

(9) Kennedy 1980, pp. 26–9, 42.

(10) Gorgias, 452 d–e; tr. W. D. Woodhead in Plato 1963.

(11) Kennedy 1963, p. 29, citing Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1. 2. 31 and Suetonius, De

(12) Kennedy 1963, p. 17.

1983); and O. A. Baumhauer, Die sophistische Rhetorik (Stuttgart, 1986).

(17) Vickers 1983a, pp. 412–16.

(20) Marrou 1964, pp. 284, 204, 285; Bonner 1977.

(21) Kennedy 1980, p. 23.

(22) Kennedy 1972, p. 302.

(23) Curtius 1953; Clarke 1953; D’Alton 1931; Bonner 1977.

(25) Kennedy 1963, p. 74.

(26) Monfasani 1976, p. 243.

(27) Kennedy 1980, p. 56.

(28) Kennedy 1980, p. 59.

(33) On Hermagoras see Dieter Matthes, ‘Hermagoras von Temnos, 1904–1955’,

(35) Ward 1978.

(39) I am not persuaded by George Kennedy's estimate of it as standing ‘beside or only

(46) Kennedy 1969, p. 23.

(49) Clarke 1953, p. 90. See also Marrou 1964, p. 202.