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Treatises on rhetoric, the art of effective expression in prose, form an important part of it; two of them still survive from the time of Sulla, the Rhetorica ad Herennium of an unknown author, and Cicero's early treatise de Inventione.
But while denying to Cicero the highest legal attributes, we must not forget that the jury before whom he pleaded demanded eloquence rather than profound knowledge. The orations to which they were accustomed were laid out according to a fixed rhetorical plan, the plan proposed in the treatise to Herennius and in Cicero's own youthful work, the De Inventione.
The Ad Herennium and the De inventione were first printed by Jenson at Venice in 1470. The first book printed at Angers was the Ad Herennium under the usual mediaeval title of the Rhetorica nova. The first edition of the De oratore was printed in the monastery of Subaco about 1466. The Brutus first appeared in Rome in the same year which witnessed the first edition of the Orator.
The Ciceronianus of Erasmus testifies that by the next century the scholarship of the renaissance had discovered that the Ad Herennium was not from the pen of Cicero, and that the De inventione was considered apologetically by its famous author, who wrote his De oratore to supersede the more youthful treatise.
Thus, while the rhetorical works of Aristotle were practically unknown, and the Ciceronian tradition rested on the De inventione and the Ad Herennium, the rhetorical ideas of Quintilian, as preserved in abridgments and in the treatises of Cassiodorus and Isidore, passed current throughout the middle ages.
It was almost certainly written by one Quintus Cornificius, an older contemporary of Cicero, to whom the work was long ascribed. It, no doubt, owes its preservation to this erroneous tradition. The first two books were largely used by Cicero in his own treatise De Inventione, part of a work on the principles of rhetoric which he began in early youth.
But in England the first reference to the Orator appears in Ascham's Scholemaster one hundred years after its first printing. Thus the Ciceronian rhetoric of the middle ages was derived from the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium and from the youthful De inventione, not from the best rhetorical treatises of Cicero as we know them.
The two still imperfectly extant, the Pro Roscio Comoedo of 76, and the Pro Tullio of 72 B.C., form, together with two other speeches dating from before his visit to the East, the Pro Quinctio and Pro Roscio Amerino, and, with his juvenile treatise on rhetoric known as the De Inventione, the body of prose composition which represents the first of his four periods.
He begins with Solon, and after briefly mentioning the orators of Greece, proceeds to those of his own country, so as to take in the whole period from the time of Junius Brutus down to himself. About the same time he wrote his Orator; in which he directs his attention principally to diction and delivery, as in his De Inventione and Topica he considers the matter of an oration.
There is not much in the treatise De Inventione to arrest us. We should say, from reading it, that the matter it contains is too good for the production of a youth of twenty-one, but that the language in which it is written is not peculiarly fine. The writer intended to continue it or wrote as though he did and therefore we may imagine that it has come to us from some larger source.
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