ABSTRACT
Ancient rhetorical teaching, at all stages, was based on a combination of theory and practice. From the beginning, for each type of exercise, boys had been told what the rules for treatment were, before they wrote out and read aloud their own versions of the subjects prescribed. As the preliminary exercises became more advanced, they had begun to approximate — as in the Impersonation and the Thesis — to miniature speeches in themselves. The rhetoric course proper, on which students now embarked, was concerned with full-scale speeches, in which there were often opportunities to incorporate such features as the maxim, the commonplace, and the description, which had been studied at an earlier stage. Here, too, there was both theory and practice; speeches were first written, but the delivery of them aloud, the real declamation, became all-important. The theory for the full-scale speech was systematically set out in the textbooks, or ‘arts’ (technai) of rhetoric, of which many, offering substantially the same doctrines, but differing in individual detail and emphasis, were in constant circulation. In Greek, the textbook of Hermagoras long survived, and was utilized as late as St Augustine; considerable fragments and references enable an outline reconstruction of it to be made. [1] In Latin, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, which, unlike Cicero's De Inventione, covers the whole field, is an excellent example from the Republican period, [2] and represents traditional teaching even better than the Partitiones Oratoriae, which Cicero composed for his son, for this is more philosophically-influenced, and reflects much of the teaching of rhetoric in the New Academy. [3] After Cicero's time, the long since lost Greek textbooks of Apollodorus of Pergamum, who taught Octavian, and Theodorus of Gadara, who taught Tiberius, had a considerable vogue; [4] that of Apollodorus was translated into Latin by Valgius, and that of Theodorus was still in use in Juvenal's day. [5] Among Latin rhetorical manuals of the first century known to Quintilian may be mentioned that of Cornelius Celsus, which formed part of his encyclopaedia, [6] and that of Verginius Flavus, who taught Persius; the latter was specifically designed for school use, and Quintilian thought well of it. [7] But in scope, breadth of outlook, and detail of treatment, Quintilian's own work far surpassed these rather utilitarian productions of his predecessors.
