The dating and ascription of the Rhetoric to Alexander present an enigma that still excites the interest of sagacious scholars. Concerning dating, there are two reference points. The first one is the mention in the text of a historical episode situated in 344/343 and the second one is the existence of a papyrus from the third century, known as Papyrus Hibeh 26,18 which gives the terminus ante quem of the work’s composition at about 300. However, the question of the dating of the treatise cannot be separated from the hypotheses made on its ascription as some of these hypotheses suggest that it should be considered as made up of fragments from different sources.
The name of Aristotle appears in the title of the treatise in all of the manuscripts. However, at the end of the dedicatory letter Aristotle and Corax, the semi-mythic inventor of the art of rhetoric, are named. Since Erasmus (in 1531), the ascription of the treatise to Aristotle is almost unanimously rejected for several reasons, the main one being the difference in quality, which I have already mentioned. Shortly after, in 1548, the Florentine humanist Pier Vettori offered the name of Anaximenes of Lampsacus, historian and rhetorician of the fourth century (380-320),19 private tutor to Alexander the Great, and in this respect, a ‘colleague’ of Aristotle. Vettori relied on a passage from Quintilian (3.4.9) lending to Anaximenes a rhetorical system that comprised seven species of oratory. The list of the seven species coincides with that given at the beginning of the Rhetoric to Alexander, notably including the examination speech, never mentioned in the other treatises. However, this hypothesis is not decisive in so far as Quintilian attributes to Anaximenes a rhetorical system in which the seven species are listed next to only two genres, the demegoric and judicial, whereas in the Rhetoric to Alexander, in its present state, there are three genres.
In spite of this difficulty, the ascription of the treatise to Anaximenes of Lampsacus was passionately supported in the middle of the nineteenth century by L. Spengel who went as far as setting aside the mention of the epideictic genre in the text itself to ensure the exact correspondence between the text which had been handed down and that of Quintilian.
In his edition published by Teubner in 1966, M. Fuhrmann adopted the name of Anaximenes as the author of the treatise and borrowed the title invented by Spengel, Tekhnlt rhlttorikit/Ars rhetorica, despite the opposition of scholars like V. Buchheit,20 but without modifying the text. Today the ascription of the text to Anaximenes is widely accepted as settled.
This, to me, seems to be the most likely reconstitution of the history of this text, given the rare sources available. The insertion of a first textual layer of the treatise, which may have been written by Anaximenes, into the period shortly after the middle of the fourth century (c. 340), seems very likely. It is corroborated not only by the objective dating criteria mentioned earlier but also by the elements of proximity with Aristotle listed above. The archaism of a certain number of theoretical points, as well as the convergent opinions on practical issues with the corpus of the Attic orators and with the Athenian institutions at the end of the period of the independence of the Greek cities, cannot be disregarded either. Then the text was circulated and at least one copy was kept in a philosophical library of the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus.21
This is most probably the first layer of text read by Quintilian at the turn of the first century AD. In the third century, under the name of Aristotle, Athenaeus (11.508a) cited a definition of the law that corresponds verbatim to a passage of the apocryphal letter. It seems reasonable to think that by then the Rhetoric to Alexander had been integrated into the Corpus Aristotelicum owing to the attaching of the letter to the treatise that, according to a few other clues, dates back to the second century.22 This is confirmed by its mention in a late list of the works by Aristotle.23 In the fifth century AD, the commentator Syrianus reproduced several passages of the Rhetoric to Alexander, among them the incipit, which he quoted in an almost identical version as Quintilian’s report (seven species, three genres) but which he attributed to Aristotle.
Therefore one may think that it was after Syrianus that the text of the Rhetoric to Alexander was revised and adapted so that it should match the doctrine of its supposed author. The comparison of Papyrus Hibeh 26 with the text inherited from the mediaeval tradition corroborates the hypothesis that the text was amended.24
Such is, in my view, the reconstitution of the circumstances of the origin and transmission of the Rhetoric to Alexander that seems the simplest and most plausible. And that also accounts for my decision to keep in my edition the traditional title and to prefer Pseudo-Aristotle to Anaximenes on the title page: the ascription of the text to Anaximenes is based on only one testimony which is not entirely decisive while the links with Aristotle, at a textual level too, are strong and ancient.
Other theories, diverging more or less markedly from this scenario, have been offered in recent years. G. La Bua25 made an astute supposition, though a little paradoxical, that the anomaly lay not in the three genres in the Rhetoric to Alexander but rather in the testimonies of Quintilian and Syrianus who lent two genres to Anaximenes. The aim of that erroneous doxography could have been to make Aristotle the protos heuretls of the doctrine of the three genres.
Relying on a minute study of the signs of terminological and theoretical discrepancies, M. Patillon26 came to the conclusion that the treatise, in its current state, was the fruit of the work of a late compiler who brought together two fragments (chaps. 1-28 and 29-38). The first piece is close to Aristotle (Theodecteia?), the second one is ‘Coraxian’, in other words, a product of the earliest rhetorical tradition. Though I agree with the idea that, like most rhetorical treatises, the Rhetoric to Alexander is made up of a combination of different sources, I would hesitate to adhere fully to that reconstruction. Indeed it means the loss of an entire section of the treatise on the parts of speech and its substitution with an adventitious piece on the same subject.
Besides, it underestimates the carefully thought out unifying structure that was imposed onto the text. On several occasions the figure ‘seven’ was mentioned in the above presentation, and the central section (chaps. 7-28), which leaves aside the reference to the seven species, is constructed like a triptych (as is the entire treatise) of series, each comprising seven headings. It includes a first series of seven different means of persuasion and is followed by another four series. The three following notions of anticipation, request, and recapitulation (chaps. 18-21) further complete another series of seven. The rest of the second part (chaps. 22-28) deals with the refinement of the expression, the length of the speeches, the arrangement of the words, the binary pattern ofexpression, clarity, antitheses, parisoses and paromoioses. If one pays attention to the fact that binary expression and clarity come under the same heading of excellence of the expression (1435a2), then one can observe that there are seven headings altogether. The very stratagem used to reach that figure seems to reveal an extremely well devised organisation (the rhetorician gets seven topics of deliberation only by arbitrarily separating war and peace, and religious legislation from the rest of the question of the laws, while Aristotle has five).
Whatever its meaning, and even if the number of three genres would seem to fit the text better, it remains difficult to imagine that a late compiler would force himself to give the text such a strong elaborate structure. It should be added that the extant documents on Corax as well as on Aristotle’s Theodecteia do not definitely confirm M. Patillon’s hypothesis.
R. Velardi,27 on the other hand, has imagined a sophisticated scenario following the tradition of the ascription of the text to Anaximenes but aimed at explaining why it was wrongly attributed to Aristotle. According to him, Anaximenes might have determined to sacrifice himself for the sake of his work, pretending Aristotle wrote it in order to ensure that it was more widely circulated.
This hypothesis is based on two main elements: firstly, an allegorical interpretation of the dedicatory letter. In it, Aristotle says that Alexander has requested him not to divulge his work. This passage is followed by a comparison with fathers of illegitimate children who sacrifice their offspring while legitimate parents are prepared to sacrifice themselves. The second element is Anaximenes’ reputation as a forger. The story (from Theopompus) goes that he circulated a pamphlet, which was designed to discredit its author, in the three major Greek cities, Athens, Sparta, and Thebes (Pausanias 6.18.5). This hypothesis suffers from its lack of plausibility and, above all, from the fact that it dismisses the numerous signs proving that the dedicatory letter dates back to a much later period than the fourth century.
Despite all those uncertainties, the Rhetoric to Alexander is nonetheless an invaluable source for all the historians of ancient rhetoric and among them those who are specifically interested in the links between rhetoric, the sophistic tradition and philosophy. Moreover, for all those interested in the art of eloquence for its own sake, it is a gold mine of techniques,28 which are still relevant today.29
World History
