Rhetoric for Herenia

" Rhetoric for Herenius " (lat. Rhetoricon ad Herennium libri IV ; 4 books of rhetoric dedicated to Herenius) - an anonymous ancient Roman composition dating back to about 86-82 years BC. e. Authorship has often been attributed to Cicero , but this view is largely rejected by science. A composition is a summary of well-known parts of rhetoric . It is the oldest known Latin composition on rhetoric of a similar level.

The work contains the first known description of the so-called locus method ( mnemonic technique ). The composition formulates three possible styles of oral rhetoric and six stages of argumentation. Various Greek speakers, from Demosthenes to Aeschines , are repeatedly quoted in the text of the work, however, there are many references to Roman speakers, including Guy Gracchus and Lucius Licinius Crassus .

The presentation is distinguished by independence, brevity (the author first of all has practical needs in mind) and the clarity achieved by tagging terminology and well-chosen examples. The identity of the author, as well as that of Guy of Guerenius , to whom he devoted his work, is unknown. Before, beginning with the blessed Jerome of Stridon , the composition was attributed to Cicero, since it has much in common with his composition “ De inventione ”; but in all likelihood, Cicero and the author of "Rhetoric ..." had only a common Greek source that arose in the Rhodes school of eloquence. For the first time, the authorship of Cicero began to be disputed at the end of the 15th century, although in France as early as 1835 this work was published in the collected works of the latter. Science also rejected the belonging of the work to the famous rhetoric Cornificius , from the name of Quintilian , with whose name it was often published.

“Rhetoric ...” was repeatedly copied by hand (and subsequently reprinted) in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance , being the basic textbook of rhetoric ^[1] ; about 100 medieval manuscripts of this work have survived to this day. One of the lists of works - Corbiensis (IX-X centuries) - is stored in the St. Petersburg Public Library . The work was published by the Vienna professor Marx (Leipzig, 1894).