Ad C. Herennium de ratione dicendi

• [Cicero], Ad C. Herrenium de Ratione Dicendi, also known as Rhetorica ad Herennium, with an English translation by Harry Caplan, London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1954. The Loeb Classical Library, 403. ISBN 9789333471251. Retrieved on 2020-07-11.

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The Greek art of rhetoric was first naturalized at Rome in the time of the younger Scipio, and Latin treatises on the subject were in circulation from the time of the Gracchi. But the books by Cato, Antonius, and the other Roman writers have not come down to us, and it is from the second decade of the first century B.C. that we have, in the treatise addressed to Gaius Herennius, the oldest Latin Art preserved entire. Like Cicero’s incomplete De Inventione, which belongs close to it in time, this work reflects Hellenistic rhetorical teaching. Our author, however, gives us a Greek art in Latin dress, combining a Roman spirit with Greek doctrine. It is a technical manual, systematic and formal in arrangement; its exposition is bald, but in greatest part clear and precise. Indeed the writer’s specific aims are to achieve clarity and conciseness, and to complete the exposition of his subject with reasonable speed. He seeks clarity through the use of Roman terms, and of specially selected examples; he seeks conciseness by keeping practical needs always in view, by scrupulously avoiding irrelevant matter, and by presenting methods and principles, not a host of particular illustrations of a given point.

The fact that the treatise appeared, from Jerome’s time on, as a work by Cicero gave it a prestige which it enjoyed for over a thousand years. Because of its position in the MSS. following De Inventione it was in the twelfth century called Rhetorica Secunda; perhaps because of a belief that Cicero wrote the treatise to replace his juvenile De Inventione, it was later called Rhetorica Nova. But Cicero never refers to any work of his which might be identified with our treatise; the disparaging reference in De Oratore 1.2.5 to those “crude and incomplete” essays of his youth is obviously to the two books De Inventione. The picture we draw of our author does not fit the early Cicero, and his doctrines in many crucial instances, as will be seen later, are in sharp contrast with those of De Inventione. Furthermore, the thought and style of the work are unworthy of the mature Cicero.

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