United States or Saint Pierre and Miquelon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
His treatises De Inventione and Topica, the first and nearly the last of his compositions, are both on the invention of arguments, which he regards, with Aristotle, as the very foundation of the art; though he elsewhere confines the term eloquence, according to its derivation, to denote excellence of diction and delivery, to the exclusion of argumentative skill.
First, the anonymous character of the work; and, secondly, the frequent imitations of it by Cicero in his De Inventione, an incomplete essay written when he was a young man. Who the author was is not agreed; the balance of probability is in favour of CORNIFICIUS. Kayser points out several coincidences between Cornificius's views, as quoted by Quintilian, and the rhetorical treatise to Herennius.
The De inventione is the source for Alcuin's rhetorical writings, and was the only Ciceronian rhetoric known to Abelard or Dante. Brunette Latini translated seventeen chapters of it into Italian. Although mutilated codices of the De oratore and the Orator were known to Servatus Lupus and John of Salisbury, complete manuscripts of these most important works were not known previous to 1422.
In fact, Cicero's De inventione is so much like it that some suspect that Cicero's notes which he took in school got into circulation and forced the publication of his professor's lectures. Aristotle's philosophy of rhetoric, Cicero's charming dialog on his profession, Quintilian's treatise on the teaching of rhetoric none of these is a text-book. The rhetoric Ad Herennium is.
Moreover, the most important classical treatises on the theory of poetry by Aristotle and Longinus were almost unknown throughout the middle ages, and the rhetorical writings of Cicero and Quintilian were known only in fragments. The current rhetorical treatises of the middle ages were Cicero's De inventione, and the Ad Herennium.
Cicero does not tell us whether he himself gave Caelius lessons in rhetoric, or whether he sent him to a professional teacher; he had himself written a treatise on a part of the subject the de Inventione of 80 B.C., the earliest of all his prose works and was therefore quite able to give the necessary instruction if he found time to do so.
Accordingly we find that even in his early manhood he attempted to propound a theory of oratory in the unfinished work De Inventione, or Rhetorica, as it is sometimes called. This was compiled partly from the Greek authorities, partly from the treatise Ad Herennium, which we have noticed under the last period.
The same influence caused Cicero in his youthful De inventione to classify rhetoric as part of political science, and in the De oratore to make Antonius restrict rhetoric to public and communal affairs, although in another section he returns to Aristotle's "any subject" as the material of rhetoric as does Quintilian later.
The series of his rhetorical works has been preserved nearly complete, and consists of the De Inventione, De Oratore, Brutus sive de claris Oratoribus, Orator sive de optimo genere Dicendi, De partitione Oratoriâ, Topica, and de optimo genere Oratorum.
Consequently, in a work which he significantly entitles De inventione dialectica, he defines logic as the art of speaking in a probable manner concerning any topic which can be treated in a speech. According to Agricola's scheme, rhetoric retains "elocutio," style; and logic carries over "inventio," as his title shows, and "dispositio."
Word Of The Day