Rhetoric and Criticism

Abstract

The words ‘rhetoric’ and ‘rhetorical influence’ come readily enough to the tongue when people talk of Greek and Latin literature, but all too often a great vagueness hangs about them; one is seldom sure whether they are being used historically with reference to certain facts of ancient education or as terms of abuse for some ‘insincerity’ or ‘artificiality’ in literature which the speaker invites us to deplore. My object here is to supply a few facts about the ancient rhetoricians and their intentions, and then to add some observations about the relevance of what they were doing to our own understanding of the ancient writers. Most of what I say is about Greek rather than Latin rhetoric, but I shall of course draw on Latin material, which, for some parts of the subject, is both more abundant and more intelligent than what survives hi Greek. Richard Volkmann, on whose great book we still depend, confessed that the only way by which he came to understand what rhetoric meant to the ancients, and to feel that he had in his hands an ‘Ariadne's thread’ to the labyrinth, was by the repeated reading of Quintilian.