ABSTRACT
Classical accounts of the origins of Greek rhetoric emphasize two very different and very distinct points: first, they specify that the occasion for the development of rhetoric as discipline was the flood of litigation in Magna Graecia after the fall of the tyrants; second, they claim that the essential strategy of rhetorical training was to infuse the prosaic genres-forensic, deliberative, celebratory—with the strengths of poetry: rhetoric stipulated the mastery of intonation and rhythm, of visual and aural figuration. Recently, however, the usefulness of this intellectualist initiative in accounting for poetic performance has been challenged. In a most perspicacious article on “The Significance of Terza Rima,” John Freccero has hypothesized that in Dante’s Divine comedy this relation of form and theme is reversed; Freccero claims that the intricate entrelacements of rhyme scheme and triadic verse structures privilege thematic entrelacement, trinitarian formulations.
