ABSTRACT
The earliest formal system of stases, or issues, that has come down to us is found in the work of Hermagoras of Temnos, who considered political questions under two heads, those relating to reasoned discourse and those relating to law and customs. Under the first, Hermagoras listed the four stases of conjecture, definition, quality, and objection or substitution; under the second, he discussed four types of legal questions without, so far as we know, using the term stasis in connection with them. In this chapter, the author supports the theory that the actual analytical method of the rhetorical stases was developed from and reflects characteristic uses by the ancients of the four Aristotelian predicables of genus, definition, property, and coincident, and uses of the four Stoic categories of body, of a particular kind, in a particular state, in a particular relation.
