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"But now," continues Messala, "our very boys are brought into the schools of those lecturers who are called 'rhetores, who had sprung up before Cicero, to the displeasure of our ancestors, as is evident from the fact that when Crassus and Domitius were Censors they were ordered to shut up their school of impudence, as Cicero calls it.
Moreover the mediaeval tradition persisted in England for over a hundred years after it had been displaced in Italy. The Greek text was first published in the Aldine Rhetores Graeci , and was for the first time incorporated in the works of Aristotle published in Basel, 1531. As early as 1478, however, the Latin version by George of Trebizond had been published in Venice.
The Poetics had been known to the middle ages only through a Latin abridgment by Hermannus Allemanus. This was derived from a Hebrew translation from the Arabic of Averroes, who, in turn, knew only a Syriac translation of the Greek. The Greek text was first published in the Aldine Rhetores Graeci badly edited by Ducas. Robortelli edited it in 1548. Segni translated it in 1549.
The most readable portions are the prefaces, where he writes in his own person in the unaffected epistolary style. We learn from them many particulars about the lives of the great rhetores and the state of taste and literary education. There are no indications that Seneca rose to the first eminence.
The special preparation which was, in Cicero's time, employed for students at the bar is also described in the treatise from which I have quoted the preparation which is supposed to have been the very opposite of that afforded by the "rhetores."
Allegory and Example in Rhetoric When Thomas Wilson published the first edition of his Arte of Rhetorique in 1553, the corpus of Greek criticism in the Aldine Rhetores Graeci had been in print forty-five years, and the commentaries of Dolce, Daniello, Robortelli, and Maggi were available.
The boys among the boys, the lads among the lads, utter and listen to just what words they please. Their very exercises are, for the most part, useless. Two kinds are in vogue with these 'rhetores, called 'suasoriæ' and 'controversiæ," tending, we may perhaps say, to persuade or to refute.
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