No systematic theoretical presentation of persuasive language practice has ever been so comprehensive, so minutely articulated, or so phenomenally influential over such a long period of time as the Greco-Roman rhetorical system. Its dependence upon imports from (or its exports to) dialectic, ethics, grammar, and its uniquely practical theaters of embodiment, gave it a central position in Greco-Roman culture, and because these links and these theaters continued to be important in medieval and Renaissance societies, it never quite lost its Greco-Roman centrality in those societies.
Rhetoric was perhaps the best equipped of the seven liberal arts on which medieval education is often claimed to have been based (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy). The base texts used in the other arts compare unfavorably in scope, elegance, and caliber with rhetorical and oratorical works such as those of Cicero and his subsequent admirer Quintilian; the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium; the Rhetores Latini Minores (‘‘Minor Latin Rhetoricians’’; cf. Miller, Prosser, and Benson 1973: 1-127); Boethius’ De Topicis Differentiis (On Different Topics); Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Teaching); and a whole range of practical exemplars from Vergil and Lucan to Ennodius (474-521 ce), as well as a host of other poets, practitioners, and letter-writers. Despite such texts, rhetoric was a ‘‘difficult’’ art for the post-Roman era. It was a potentially dangerous art in the early Christian era because it taught one to persuade others that the ‘‘not-true’’ might indeed be ‘‘true,’’ and it was closely associated with a cultural world - that of late republican Rome - which many contemporaries felt had disappeared or had lost its relevance for ever. At the least, that cultural world required a formidable apparatus of philological knowledge to comprehend properly, an apparatus that was only gradually available, and not systematically, until Renaissance humanism came to the fore in fifteenth-century Italy.
The two major directions or emphases late antique rhetoric bequeathed to the medieval period were the nonmetrical (but rhythmic) spoken art of the Forum and declamatory display-room on the one hand, and (rhetoricized) poetry on the other,
That is, metrical compositions for private circulation or declamatory display. The distinction is an important one. Not only does it propose an inherent interrelationship between grammar, poetics and rhetoric, but it also corresponds, perhaps, to the distinction between rhetoric as a technical art (in Greek techne) and rhetoric as powerfully persuasive, almost magical, language (in Greek dunamis) - that is, rhetoric as control and rhetoric as subversion.
On the technical side, the ambit of ‘‘rhetoric’’ must include related and derived systematic treatises aimed at persuasion, or the interpretation of what is persuasive (literary criticism, hermeneutics), in fields such as letter-writing and preaching. Indeed, the major new theoretical genres exploiting the classical rhetorical legacy in medieval times were: letter-writing and document composition in prose (ars dicta-minis, ars epistolandi); poetic composition (the ars poetriae, dependent both upon the Ad Herennium and Horace’s Ars Poetica); and the arts of preaching and praying (ars predicandi, ars precandi). Many other modes of persuasion having to do with dress, behavior, silence, court etiquette, and memory also secured treatment in manuals during the Middle Ages, but the influence of classical rhetorical theory and practice was less marked here.
Classical rhetorical theory survived into the Middle Ages, not in the form of texts that Augustine himself was influenced by (such as Cicero’s Orator) but in the form of the so-called Ciceronian “juvenilia” (the De Inventione Rhetorica and the Rhetorica ad Herennium), which from the Carolingian period (ca. 750-900 ce) onward become the preferred texts for beginners in the art. Both these texts reflected the Greek-influenced instructive methods of Cicero’s youth (see chapters 6, 13). The now anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium went mysteriously into recess between the time of its composition and the fourth century ce, when, according to one theory, Augustine himself, during his career as a teacher of rhetoric (in Carthage, Rome, and Milan 374-84 ce and following), found it on the bookshelves of his friend and patron the African Romanianus, and put it back into circulation as the completed rhetorical work that Cicero envisaged at the end of his De Inventione. Augustine’s teacher Victorinus wrote the most important of all commentaries on the De Inventione of Cicero toward 350 ce before his resignation from the chair of rhetoric at Rome and before his conversion to Christianity (ca. 355 ce). The major emphases of rhetorical instruction in later antiquity are better indicated by the Rhetores Latini Minores, which seem preoccupied on the whole with the classification of legal issues relevant to contemporary court practice (under the heading of judicial inventio, ‘‘finding of arguments’’) and with issues of prose style (under the heading of elocutio, ‘‘style’’).
World History
