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But the Ad Herennium does make divisio a part of a speech, and does require not over three parts. As late as 1612, Thomas Heywood quotes the authority of "Tully, in his booke Ad Caium Herennium." The relative importance of Cicero's rhetorical works to the middle ages is well illustrated by a count of the manuscripts preserved.
These "characters" were epitomized in the Latin rhetorics and the school exercises continued. The rhetoric Ad Herennium calls them notatio, Cicero, descriptio, and Quintilian, mores. Quintilian furthermore makes interesting comments on the use of the character sketches by the poets. Professor Butcher calls attention to the early influence of the character sketches on the middle comedy.
In the libraries of Europe today there exist seventy-nine manuscripts of the De inventione, eighty-three of the Ad Herennium, forty of the De oratore, fourteen of the Brutus, and twenty of the Orator. Thus in the University of Bologna the study of rhetoric was based on the De inventione and the Ad Herennium.
The De oratore was used but slightly, and the Brutus and the Orator not at all. What little classical rhetoric there is in Stephen Hawes was derived from the Ad Herennium. The survival and popularity of the Ad Herennium during this period is one of the most interesting phenomena of rhetorical history.
This, happily, does not remain. But we have four books, Rhetoricorum ad C. Herennium, and two books De Inventione, attributed to his twentieth and twenty-first years, which are published with his works, and commence the series.
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.
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.
But six years after the publication of the Ciceronianus of Erasmus, the edition of Cicero's Opera published in Basel in 1534 still incorporates the Ad Herennium, and Thomas Wilson in England owes most of his first book and part of the second of his Arte of Rhetorique to its anonymous author, whom he believed to be Cicero.
The analytical rules of rhetoric were growing ever more intricate and time-wasting, and how pedantic they were even before Vergil's childhood may be seen by a glance into the anonymous Auctor ad Herennium.
But Wilson wrote a very good rhetoric with no books before him but Quintilian, Cicero and the rhetoric Ad Herennium, which he thought to be Cicero's, Erasmus, Plutarch De audiendis poetis, and St. Basil. His treatment of poetry is quite naturally, then, that of a rhetorician who had been reared in the mediaeval tradition of allegory.
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