Gentlemen of Verona was the earlier play? To be able fully to appreciate such differences is no small result of a literary education; and though the rhetoric of each language is in a large degree special to that language, it is notwithstanding true that our western literatures are closely interrelated—that they should continually be compared and contrasted—and that modern literary theory can gain much in stimulus and suggestion from that ancient literary theory which had its origin in Greece, and which by way of Rome (where Dionysius taught Greek literature in the age of Horace) was transmitted to the modern world.

In the present edition an endeavour has been made to suggest some of the many points at which Dionysius’ principles and precepts are applicable to the modern languages and literatures. Efforts, too, have been made to smooth away, by means of the Glossary and the English Translation, those technical difficulties which might easily deter even the advanced Greek student (not to mention the wider of cultivated readers generally) from seeking in the de Compositione that literary help which it is so well able to give. The edition has been many years in preparation; and special pains have been taken with the English Translation, as it is the first to be published and as its execution presents great and obvious difficulties. The Glossary will show how rich and varied is Dionysius’ rhetorical terminology, and it may also serve as a contribution towards that new Lexicon of Greek and Roman Rhetoric which is a pressing need. It seems not unnatural to treat thus fully a work of which no annotated edition in any language has appeared for a hundred years. For the constitution of the Greek text, on the other hand, the recent critical edition of Dionysius’ literary essays by Usener and Radermacher is of the highest importance. The present editor desires here to acknowledge the debt he owes to their admirable apparatus criticus, the exhaustiveness of which he has not attempted to equal, though he has thought it desirable to report (with their aid) a good many seemingly insignificant errors or variants which may serve to throw some light on the comparative value of the chief documentary authorities. He may add that he has himself collated, for the purposes of the present recension, the best Paris manuscript (P 1741, which contains Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, Demetrius de Elocutione, Dionysius de Compositione Verborum and Ep. ii. ad Amm., etc.), and that he has explained on pages 56-60 his views with regard to some of the textual problems presented by the treatise.

It is a pleasure further to acknowledge the ever ready aid he has received from his personal friends—-from Dr. A. S. Way, who has not only contributed the verse-translations throughout the treatise but has given help of unusual range and worth in other directions also, and from Mr. L. H. G. Greenwood, Mr. G. B. Mathews, Mr. P. N. Ure, and Professor T. Hudson Williams, who have read the proofs and made most valuable suggestions. Nor should the great care shown in the printing of the book by Messrs. R. & R. Clark’s able staff of compositors and readers be passed over without a word of grateful mention.

It may perhaps not be out of place to state in conclusion that the editor hopes next to publish, in continuation of this series of contributions to the study of the Greek literary critics, a number of essays and dissertations grouped round the Rhetoric of Aristotle. The Rhetoric is a remarkable product of its great author’s maturity, in reading which constant reference should be made to Aristotle’s other works, to the writings of his predecessors, and to those later Greek and Roman critics who illustrate it in so many ways. Studies of the kind indicated ought to contain much of modern and permanent interest. Not long ago a distinguished man of science wrote, ‘one literary art, the art of rhetoric, may be weakened and lost when the scientific spirit becomes predominant—that sort of rhetoric, I mean, which may be fitly described as insincere eloquence. Rhetoric seeks above all to persuade, and in a completely scientific age men will only allow themselves to be persuaded by force of reason.’ The writer seems to recognize that there may be a good as well as a bad rhetoric, but perhaps it hardly falls within his scope to make it clear that the Greeks, from whom the art and the term come, were themselves well aware of this fact, even though the age in which they lived might not be completely scientific. The vicious type of rhetoric which he justly censures is exemplified in the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum. In this book—for whose date the antiquity of a recently-discovered manuscript (published in the Hibeh Papyri i. 114 ff.) suggests the age of Aristotle, though Aristotle himself is certainly not the author—the aim of rhetoric is assumed to be persuasion at any price. But how different is the spirit of Plato in the Phaedrus and the Gorgias, and of Aristotle in the Rhetoric. To take Aristotle only. He looks at rhetoric with the sincerity of a lover of truth and with the breadth of a lover of wisdom. He recognizes that the art may be abused; but ‘so may all good things except virtue itself, and particularly the most useful things, such as strength, health, wealth, generalship.’ Its function is ‘not to persuade, but to ascertain in any given case the available means of persuasion.’ Mental self-defence is a duty no less than physical self-defence; but though it is necessary to know bad arguments in order to be ready to parry them, we must not use them ourselves (for ‘one must not be the advocate of evil’), nor must we try to warp the feelings of the judge (for this would be like ‘making crooked a carpenter’s rule which you are about to use’). Season must be our weapon, and we must have confidence that the truth will prevail (for ‘truth and justice are by nature stronger than their opposites’ and ‘what is true and better is by nature the easier to prove and the more convincing’). The whole work is conceived in the same spirit—that of attention to truth rather than to mere persuasion, to matter rather than to manner, to the solid facts of human nature rather than to the shallow blandishments of style. The author of the most scientific treatise that has yet been written on rhetoric manifestly held a lofty view of his subject; and so far from commending an insincere eloquence, he says less than we could wish about literary beauties and the arts of style. Here Dionysius, in his various critical works, happily serves to supplement him. Though he has the art of speaking specially in view, Dionysius draws his literary illustrations from so wide a field that the art of literature may be regarded as his theme. The method he inculcates is that which every literary aspirant follows, consciously or unconsciously, in regard to his own language—the reading and imitation of the great writers by whom its capacities have been enlarged. To us, no less than to his Roman pupil Rufus, the practice and the precepts of those Greeks who attained an unsurpassed excellence in the art of literature have an enduring interest. For they help the fruitful study of our own literature; and that literature, we all rejoice to think, has not only a great past behind it but a great future in store for it.

The University, Leeds,
December 6, 1909.