Teaching Violence in the Schools of Rhetoric

In a recent paper published in Rhetorica, A.F. Stone argues that two twelfthcentury orations by Eustathios of Thessalonica show clear indications of having been influenced by the rhetorical theory of Hermogenes, who lived some 900 years earlier.1 Stone’s argument is convincing. It also adds credence to the prevailing opinion of students of the history of rhetoric that scholars in the Byzantine world were unfamiliar with Aristotle’s dialectical treatises and “Hermogenes, not Aristotle, was their major classical author on Rhetoric.”2