Editing Rhetoric (section)

===Rome===

====Cicero====
[[File:Thorvaldsen Cicero.jpg|thumb|upright=0.8|Bust of Marcus Tullius Cicero]]
{{Main|Cicero|Asiatic style|De Inventione|De Oratore|Brutus (Cicero)|De Optimo Genere Oratorum|De Partitionibus Oratoriae}}

For the Romans, oration became an important part of public life. [[Cicero]] ({{BCE|106–43}}) was chief among Roman rhetoricians and remains the best known ancient orator and the only orator who both spoke in public and produced treatises on the subject. ''[[Rhetorica ad Herennium]]'', formerly attributed to Cicero but now considered to be of unknown authorship, is one of the most significant works on rhetoric and is still widely used as a reference today. It is an extensive reference on the use of rhetoric, and in the [[Middle Ages]] and [[Renaissance]], it achieved wide publication as an advanced school text on rhetoric.

Cicero charted a middle path between the competing [[Atticism|Attic]] and [[Asiatic style]]s to become considered second only to [[Demosthenes]] among history's orators.<ref>{{cite book|first=Gesine|last=Manuwald|chapter=Relevance of Demosthenes and Atticism|title=Cicero, Philippics 3–9|volume=1|location=Berlin|publisher=Walter de Gruyter|year=2007|pages=129ff}}</ref> His works include the early and very influential ''[[De Inventione]]'' (On Invention, often read alongside ''Ad Herennium'' as the two basic texts of rhetorical theory throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance), ''[[De Oratore]]'' (a fuller statement of rhetorical principles in dialogue form), ''[[Topica (Cicero)|Topics]]'' (a rhetorical treatment of common topics, highly influential through the Renaissance), ''[[Brutus (Cicero)|Brutus]]'' (a discussion of famous orators), and ''[[Orator (Cicero)|Orator]]'' (a defense of Cicero's style). Cicero also left a large body of speeches and letters which would establish the outlines of Latin eloquence and style for generations.

The rediscovery of Cicero's speeches (such as [[Pro Archia Poeta|the defense of Archias]]) and letters ([[Epistulae ad Atticum|to Atticus]]) by Italians like [[Petrarch]] helped to ignite the Renaissance.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Petrarch {{!}} Western Civilization |url=https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-herkimer-westerncivilization/chapter/petrarch/ |access-date=2024-04-10 |website=courses.lumenlearning.com}}</ref>

Cicero championed the learning of Greek (and Greek rhetoric), contributed to Roman ethics, linguistics, philosophy, and politics, and emphasized the importance of all forms of appeal (emotion, humor, stylistic range, irony, and digression in addition to pure reasoning) in oratory. But perhaps his most significant contribution to subsequent rhetoric, and education in general, was his argument that orators learn not only about the specifics of their case (the ''hypothesis'') but also about the general questions from which they derived (the ''theses'').{{citation needed|reason=|date=September 2023}} Thus, in giving a speech in defense of a poet whose Roman citizenship had been questioned, the orator should examine not only the specifics of that poet's civic status, he should also examine the role and value of poetry and of literature more generally in Roman culture and political life. The orator, said Cicero, needed to be knowledgeable about all areas of human life and culture, including law, politics, history, literature, ethics, warfare, medicine, and even arithmetic and geometry. Cicero gave rise to the idea that the "ideal orator" be well-versed in all branches of learning: an idea that was rendered as "liberal humanism", and that lives on today in liberal arts or general education requirements in colleges and universities around the world.<ref>{{cite book|author=Cicero|title=De Inventione|at=I.35}}</ref>

====Quintilian====
{{Main|Quintilian|Byzantine rhetoric}}

{{unreferenced section|date=July 2010}}

Quintilian ({{CE|35–100}}) began his career as a pleader in the courts of law; his reputation grew so great that [[Vespasian]] created a chair of rhetoric for him in Rome. The culmination of his life's work was the ''[[Institutio Oratoria]]'' (''Institutes of Oratory,'' or alternatively, ''The Orator's Education''), a lengthy treatise on the training of the orator, in which he discusses the training of the "perfect" orator from birth to old age and, in the process, reviews the doctrines and opinions of many influential rhetoricians who preceded him.

In the ''Institutes'', Quintilian organizes rhetorical study through the stages of education that an aspiring orator would undergo, beginning with the selection of a nurse. Aspects of elementary education (training in reading and writing, grammar, and literary criticism) are followed by preliminary rhetorical exercises in composition (the {{transliteration|grc|[[progymnasmata]]}}) that include maxims and fables, narratives and comparisons, and finally full legal or political speeches. The delivery of speeches within the context of education or for entertainment purposes became widespread and popular under the term "declamation".

This work was available only in fragments in medieval times, but the discovery of a complete copy at the [[Abbey of St. Gall]] in 1416 led to its emergence as one of the most influential works on rhetoric during the Renaissance.

Quintilian's work describes not just the art of rhetoric, but the formation of the perfect orator as a politically active, virtuous, publicly minded citizen. His emphasis was on the ethical application of rhetorical training, in part in reaction against the tendency in Roman schools toward standardization of themes and techniques. At the same time that rhetoric was becoming divorced from political decision making, rhetoric rose as a culturally vibrant and important mode of entertainment and cultural criticism in a movement known as the "[[Second Sophistic]]", a development that gave rise to the charge (made by Quintilian and others) that teachers were emphasizing style over substance in rhetoric.