href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@10140@[email protected]#foot60" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">60] The parts are capable of further analysis. Consequently most writers of the classical period subdivide the proof proper into probatio, or affirmative proof, and refutatio, or refutation.[61] And the Ad Herennium adds a divisio, which defines the issues, between the statement of facts and the proof.[62] Cassiodorus divides the speech into six parts[63] and so does Martianus Capella.[64] Thomas Wilson (1553) offers seven.[65]

The third part of rhetoric is elocutio, or style, the choice and arrangement of words in a sentence. Quintilian's treatment of style is typical. Words should be chosen which are in good use, clear, elegant, and appropriate. The sentences should be grammatically correct, artistically arranged, and adorned with such figures as antithesis, irony, and metaphor.[66] Correctness is usually presupposed by the rhetoricians. To the sound of sentences all classical treatises give an attention that seems amazing if we forget that in Greece and Rome all literature was spoken or read aloud. The sentence or period was considered more rhythmically than logically, and subdivided in speech into rhythmical parts called commas and cola. The end of the sentence was to be marked not by a printer's sign, but by the falling cadence of the rhythm itself. Furthermore, great care should be taken to avoid hiatus between words, as when the first word ends and the word following begins with a vowel. But the glory of style to the classical rhetorician lay in its use of figures. Here rhetoric vindicated its practicality by a preoccupation with the impractical; and here, as in analysis, rhetoric bore the seeds of its own decay. Although Aristotle devoted relatively little space to the rhetorical figures, later treatises emphasized them more and more until in post-classical and in mediaeval rhetoric little else is discussed. The figures of course had to be classified. First there were the figurae verborum, or figures of language, which sought agreeable sounds alone or in combination, such as antitheses, rhymes, and assonances. Then the figurae sententiarum, or figures of thought, such as rhetorical questions, hints, and exclamations.[67] Quintilian classifies as tropes words or phrases converted from their proper signification to another. Among these are metaphor, irony, and allegory. In our day we consider as figures of speech only the classical tropes, and indeed Aristotle pays little attention to the others. He says that in prose one should use only literal names of things, and metaphors, or tropes[68]--which therefore are not literal names but substituted names. For instance in this metaphor, which Aristotle quotes from Homer, "The arrow flew,"[69] "flew" is not the literal word to express the idea. Only birds fly, reminds the practical person. Max Eastman has pertinently called attention to the fact that it is only to rhetoric, which is a practical activity, that these figures are indirect expressions, or substituted names. Apostrophe is not a turning away in poetic, because in poetic there is no argument to turn away from. Rather in poetic it is a turning toward the essential images of realization, as metaphor in poetic is direct, not indirect, because in poetic a word that suggests the salient parts or qualities of things will always stand out over the general names of things.[70]

The last two parts of rhetoric, memoria and pronuntiatio, are really not permanent parts of rhetoric, but only of the rhetoric of spoken address. Memoria, the art of memory, did not mean to the Greeks and Romans the art of learning by heart a written speech, but rather the art of keeping ready for use a fund of argumentative material, together with the features of the case which the speaker might be pleading. The discussion of it in the treatises is usually an exposition of the mnemonic system of visual association, the discovery of which is ascribed to Simonides. Cicero deliberately leaves a discussion of memoria out of his Orator, because as he says, it is common to many arts;[71] and the Dutch scholar Vossius in the renaissance denied that it was a part of rhetoric.[72] Pronuntiatio, or delivery, has also been found hardly an integral part of rhetoric. It is concerned with the use both of the voice and of gesture. Quintilian, for instance, records the effectiveness of clinging to the judge's knees, or of bringing into the court room the weeping child of the accused.[73] Aristotle discusses only the use of the voice.[74]

Thus classical rhetoric was almost exclusively restricted to the practical oratory of persuasion. In the republics of Greece and Rome a mastery of rhetoric gave its possessor political power; for by persuasive public speech a public man could gain a following by defending his clients in the law courts, and influence the destinies of the state by his deliberations in the legislative assembly. As long as these republican institutions prevailed, the theory and practice of rhetoric continued to be sound and practical.

4. Rhetoric as Part of Poetic

Implicit in Aristotle and throughout classical literary criticism there is a clear-cut distinction between poetic and rhetoric. Aside from the metrical form of poetic, accepted by all but Aristotle as a distinguishing characteristic, and the non-metrical form of rhetoric, the essentially practical nature of rhetoric marked it off to the Greeks and Romans as something quite different from poetic and infinitely more important in education and public life. But however clear-cut this distinction may be in principle, in practical application there is rarely to be found such ideal isolation.

Aristotle, for instance, carries rhetoric bodily over into poetic by including Thought, διάνοιᾰ, as the third in importance of the constituent elements of tragedy.[