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Updated: June 11, 2025
And the Ad Herennium adds a divisio, which defines the issues, between the statement of facts and the proof. Cassiodorus divides the speech into six parts and so does Martianus Capella. Thomas Wilson offers seven. The third part of rhetoric is elocutio, or style, the choice and arrangement of words in a sentence. Quintilian's treatment of style is typical.
Both attained the highest honours that the Republic had to bestow. By a happy chance, their styles were exactly complementary to one another; to hear both in one day was the highest intellectual entertainment which Rome afforded. By this time the rules of oratory were carefully studied and reduced to scientific treatises. One of these, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, is still extant.
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.
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.
Although Aristotle did state in his definition that any subject was the material of rhetoric, in his classification of the varieties of speeches he practically restricts rhetoric as did Hermagoras, Dionysius, and the Ad Herennium; for here he finds but three kinds of oratory: the deliberative, the forensic, and the occasional, ἐπιδεικτικός.
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.
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.
Consequently Hermagoras defines the subject matter of rhetoric as "public questions," Dionysius of Halicarnassus, as "communal affairs," and the Ad Herennium as "whatever in customs or laws is to the public benefit."
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.
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.
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