Rhetoric

Reading path

Foundation

Core

Extension

Key terms

The five tasks of the orator

Rhetoric was taught as a fixed list of tasks that a speaker learns in order. What are they, and how does each depend on the one before it?

2 readings

The Rhetorica ad Herennium is the oldest Latin handbook of rhetoric to survive, and the Middle Ages read it under Cicero’s name. It stands at Book I, chapter 2, where the author turns to the orator’s tasks, each given its definition. The list of “invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery” became the order in which the later handbooks and schools set out the art.

Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria is the fullest Roman manual for training a speaker from boyhood. At Book III, chapter 3, he speaks of “five parts” as taught by “most authorities”, and names actio as a second term for delivery. Under this heading it is the Latin of the Empire set beside the handbook’s list.