ABSTRACT
Throughout its long career, rhetoric has been put to the most diverse uses. Originally called on to codify speeches in legal disputes, adapted by the Greeks and Romans for both legal and civic uses, moving from the law court to the forum and thence to the schoolroom, it permeated many areas of medieval culture and experienced a full-scale revival in the Renaissance. 1 In the four centuries since then it has been applied to all literary genres, to architecture, painting, music, and dance, to acting and singing, and to such unlikely practices as double-entry bookkeeping. 2 It has worked with, and on occasion been rejected by, neoclassicism, romanticism, and realism, and no doubt naturalism, surrealism, and modernism. Every age, every school, it almost seems, has adapted rhetoric to its own ends, remade it in its own image. Rhetoric is the chameleon of the human sciences.
