University of Virginia Library

RHETORIC AFTER PLATO

Since the time of Greek antiquity, the definition of
“rhetoric” has changed from century to century as the
idea of “rhetoric” has been expanded to cover the
whole of the art, or contracted to include only a part.
Generally, idea and definition—responding to the po-
litical or intellectual uses to which the art was put—
have moved from considerations of language to the
arguments or the passions expressed by language, to
the effects produced by rhetorical compositions, to the
relationships between such compositions and abstract
concepts (“truth” or “justice”); then back to language.
But whatever the particular definition, the term has
been applied to the use of language (or of special kinds
of language) for the moving, pleasing, or persuading
of readers or auditors to specific judgments, decisions,
or actions.

In the work of Plato, consistently with his general
philosophical method, rhetoric is considered in the
context of other problems, metaphysical or moral, and
has neither the status nor the specification of a separate
art. But between Plato and Isocrates, a number of
technical treatises were produced which, according to
report (none of them have survived), regarded rhetoric
as the art of forensic or political oratory and provided
precepts for the division of a speech into its parts and
for the handling of language and style. Isocrates himself
practiced his art as orator, writer of speeches, and
teacher, at a time when speech-making was an impor-
tant part of the political life of Greece. His main
writings on rhetoric (philosophia or logos) are found
in his early essay Against the Sophists and in his late
speech on the Antidosis; there are also fragments col-
lected from Greek and Roman authors.

Isocrates believes that the end of persuasion is
achieved less through observance of a set of rules or
an “art” than through the possession by the orator of
a wide range of talents, qualities, and knowledge.
Among these are his true moral character and his
native genius for eloquence. That genius must be
developed and directed, from youth, through the model
provided by the tutor's life and practice, through prin-
ciples of ethical and political philosophy, through
technē and logos which treat of rhetorical rules proper:
the choice of the proper forms of discourse, the correct
ordering of the parts, the varying of the thoughts
appropriately to the matter, the achievement of
rhythmical and harmonious diction. But Isocrates in-
sists that eloquence can never be reduced to rule, that
it is akin to poetry in its free search for noble subjects
and elegant language.

Isocrates adds to these ideas the distinction of the
various kinds of oratory—the judicial, the epideictic
(or the rhetoric of display), and the political; he speaks
of the necessity of winning the judges' sympathy; and
he names such particularly rhetorical forms of argu-
ment as probabilities and conjectures. He thereby
completes a schematism for the consideration of
rhetoric that will remain at the basis of the Greek and
Roman tradition. It centers about the effect to be
produced on a specific audience, about the moral char-
acter of the orator, and about the rules for the making
of the speech. In Isocrates these are scattered and
unsystematic ideas; his successors reduce them to sys-
tem and art. Aristotle's Rhetoric (ca. 330 B.C.) is the
earliest complete treatise that we have; it is also the
most systematic. His “art” is not a mere reassemblage
of earlier notions about rhetoric. It is a reorienting and
reorganizing of those notions in a new philosophical
synthesis.

Aristotle defines rhetoric as “the faculty of discover-
ing the possible means of persuasion in reference to
any subject whatever.” This extension to “any subject
whatever” frees rhetoric from the limitation to fixed
and conventional matters, and the concept of the
“possible means of persuasion” opens the way to
Aristotle's idea of the three kinds of rhetorical proofs.
If persuasion is to be effected, it will be persuasion
of certain persons (for Aristotle, the audience is always
a particularized group, never an individual) to opinion
or judgment or action; the moral character, the intel-
lectual capacities, the state of knowledge, and the
emotional potential of those persons will determine the
way in which the speech is made and the arguments
of which it is composed. A first set of proofs (the
“emotional” or “pathetic”) consists of those parts of
the speech that are designed to affect the specific
audience. A second set (the “ethical”) presents to that
audience the apparent moral character of the speaker,
adjusted to the audience in the particular circum-
stances. (This is not the “true” character of the speaker,
as with Isocrates, but “rhetorical” character.) A third
set (the “logical”) is the argument proper, stated in
the forms appropriate to the audience of rhetoric: the
enthymeme (a truncated syllogism or deduction which
omits a premiss) and the example (a kind of rhetorical
induction, or seeing the universal in the particular
case).

Aristotle devotes his treatise to an analysis of the
ways in which these proofs are adapted to each of the
kinds of rhetoric (deliberative, forensic, epideictic), and
to a study of the passions, of political circumstances,
and of logical forms. His idea of rhetoric is primarily
an idea of the proofs and arguments useful in the
rhetorical situation, only secondarily an idea of the
style, or language, or expression in which the argument
is stated. But style is important, “for it is not sufficient
to know what one ought to say, but one must also know
how to say it, and this largely contributes to making
the speech appear of a certain character” (III, 1).
Rhetoric is never, for Aristotle, an art of language in
the narrow way in which it was later considered.

In the history of the idea of rhetoric after Aristotle,
those constitutive elements that Aristotle had orga-
nized into a philosophical system became separated
one from another and, as isolated, became the central
subjects of rhetorical treatises. Language and style are
probably the chief and most recurrent of these; but
the order and arrangement of the parts of a speech,
the character of the orator, the nature of the proofs,
or the kinds or classes of speeches frequently serve as
the basic matter. Such shifts are explained by general
philosophical orientations and methods at a given time,
by the place of rhetoric in public life or in the schools,
and by the status of related arts and disciplines.

In the two centuries following the writing of
Aristotle's Rhetoric, oratory in Greece became less a
public performance and more a form of pleading in
the courts; the treatment of rhetoric took the form
of technical manuals and textbooks. As the notions
of ethical and pathetic proofs disappeared, matters of
logical argument, of arrangement of the parts, and
of style came to dominate the treatises. An example of
the end product of that Hellenistic development exists
in the Latin Rhetorica ad Herennium, written around
85 B.C. and apparently derived directly from the Greek
technai. It distinguishes again the three kinds of
speeches, epideictic, deliberative, and judicial, and
divides the art into five faculties: invention (the logical
argument), disposition (the arrangement of the parts),
style, memory, and delivery. Most important of all is
the inventio, which enables the orator to discover the

“types of issue” involved in the individual case and
to develop proofs and refutations (the whole of the
discussion at this point is highly legalistic, rather than
merely logical). Under dispositio, the author lists the
quantitative-parts of a speech in their proper order:
the exordium, the narration, the division, proof and
refutation, the conclusion. The third faculty, that of
elocutio or style, provides the framework for a treat-
ment of the three styles—the grand, the middle, and
the simple—and their cognate defective styles, and of
the figures of thought and of diction, described and
exemplified in great detail.

One of Cicero's earliest writings on rhetoric was the
De inventione (ca. 85 B.C.), the first part of a full
treatise, projected but never written. It is a body of
precepts intended for the speaker in the law courts,
analyzing in detail the various issues, proofs, and
refutations that appertain to the kinds of cases. Cicero's
handling of these materials is similar to that of the Ad
Herennium, as is his division of the speech into its six
consecutive parts. About forty years later (ca. 44 B.C.),
Cicero wrote another “de inventione,” called the
Topica in imitation of Aristotle's Topica since it aims
to inquire into the general sources of argument. It is
hence less closely restricted to legal cases and proofs;
Cicero summarizes the sources of arguments, or
“topics,” as “definition, partition, etymology, conju-
gates, genus, species, similarity, difference, contraries,
adjuncts, consequents, antecedents, contradictions,
causes, effects, and comparison of things greater, less
and equal” (xviii. 71). At about the same date, Cicero's
De partitione oratoria (“of the classification of
rhetoric”) took a broader view of the art of rhetoric,
discussing in detail once again the three functions of
invention, arrangement, and style, the structural divi-
sions of a speech, and the matter at issue. The last of
these sections returns to the materials of the De inven-
tione, studying at length the bases of prosecution and
defense, of evidence and witness, as they may be used
in the law courts.

Cicero's three treatises represent a narrower view
of rhetoric, one that concentrates upon technicalities
of structure and argument and that sees these as related
to the instruction or the practice of the courtroom
orator. In other writings on rhetoric, Cicero expressed
his larger vision of the art, more broadly based both
philosophically and historically. Most important of
these was the De oratore (in three books, composed
in 55 B.C.), which breaks away from the tradition of
the Greek manuals and seeks its orientations in Roman
public life of the time. Like Isocrates, it conceives of
the orator as a man of great natural gifts who is soundly
educated in all areas of philosophy (especially ethics
and politics) and of science. He knows at least as much
of these disciplines as he must in order to sway his
listeners through a combination of emotional and
intellectual appeals. He must be a master of language:
eloquence of diction will impose the speaker's ideas
upon his audience, will move it to the kind of action
or decision that he wishes. The notion of oratory as
dominating its listeners is typically Ciceronian,
typically Roman; and issues and arguments or topics,
the kinds of speeches and the arrangements of parts,
are seen as less effective instruments—therefore less
important—than the genius, the knowledge, the expe-
rience of the orator and his command of language.

In his Brutus (46 B.C.), Cicero wrote a history of
Roman oratory and a defense of the tradition that had
culminated in his own performance. Like the Brutus,
Cicero's Orator (late 46 B.C.) was written as a polemical
document, defending his own rhetorical practice (and
his own idea of rhetoric) against the new school of
“Atticists” who proposed a return to the plain and clear
style, to instruction rather than the arousing of the
emotions, to severe logic. Cicero devotes the major part
of the letter to elocutio or diction, and within that
category, to the placing of words and the establishment
of prose rhythms. In so doing, he indicates one of the
main directions that rhetorical theory will take in the
century following.

Between Cicero and Quintilian, the next great
Roman theorist, rhetorical theory flourished in the
Greek or the Greco-Roman schools whose activity was
centered in Athens, in Alexandria, even in Rome. It
was dominated by the “Alexandrian” mode, the tend-
ency to apply philological techniques to detailed mat-
ters of expression. Style in all its aspects—the several
“styles,” the figures, rhythms, and harmonies—came
to constitute the very stuff of rhetoric. An example
is the De compositione verborum (“on the arrangement
of words”) of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (ca. 30 B.C.),
devoted largely to matters of rhythm in verse and in
prose. The De elocutione (“on style”) of Demetrius (ca.
A.D. 70), after beginning with such a discussion of
rhythmic structures, pursues primarily an analysis of
the “styles.” Demetrius distinguished four styles: the
elevated, the elegant, the plain, and the forcible; for
each one, he indicates the subject matter to which it
is appropriate, the kinds of words and arrangements
that characterize it, the figures that are most useful,
and (continuing a long tradition) the correlative vice.
As examples are drawn from every kind of writing in
Greece, verse and prose, the treatise is no longer
classifiable as a work on oratory, but belongs to
“rhetoric” viewed broadly as “effective expression.”

The treatise On the Sublime, supposedly by an
unknown “Longinus” and dating from the first century
A.D., is also pseudo-rhetorical. Its main relationship to

rhetoric comes in the way it considers the triad of
author-work-reader with respect to the effect produced
by the “sublime” or the elevated style. Longinus places
that effect squarely in the special talents or the genius
of the writer—in whatever literary form he may choose
to operate. “Character” is replaced by the real and
permanent faculties of the writer, “persuasion” by an
irresistible ecstasy felt by the audience at given mo-
ments in its experience of the work. Thus the principal
locus of the rhetorical effect shifts from the audience
(where it had been in Aristotle) and from style (where
it had been in Demetrius) to the genius of the writer.
Similarly, argument disappears as structure disappears;
the effect of sublimity is the instantaneous product of
sublimity in the soul of the writer as it selects and
presents a sublime object through appropriate artistic
means.

In Quintilian's Institutio oratoria (ca. A.D. 90) the
movement of the idea of rhetoric towards the idea of
the rhetorician comes to fulfillment. The real total
being of the orator is here the center of attention: the
treatise is an institutio since it aims to form and educate
the orator; his education will pursue two goals, the
production of the “good man” and the provision of
those kinds of knowledge and those techniques that
will make him “skilled in speaking.” Because the good
man is the virtuous man, a necessary part of his educa-
tion will be an education in philosophy, ethics, politics;
and these he must know fully and substantially—rather
than to the limited degree required by a particular
“case.” “Skill in speaking” means a mastery of all the
component parts of the art of rhetoric: in this connec-
tion, Quintilian reintroduces, examines, expands, and
reduces to precept all the technical principles long
since developed in the Greco-Roman tradition. While
some heed is given to the nature of the audience and
much to the construction of arguments, fundamentally
it is the moral person of the orator that achieves the
ends of oratory.

At the opposite pole to Quintilian's orator-centered
Institutio is the group of style-centered works by
Hermogenes (ca. A.D. 170); they represent fully the
Alexandrian mode. Neither orator nor audience is of
interest to Hermogenes, whose treatises are devoted
either to cases and arguments (On Legal Issues, On
the Invention of Arguments) or to style (On the Various
Kinds of Style)—that is, to the internal construction
of the speech. His long book on the “characters” or
“ideas” of the various styles (he distinguishes seven,
some of which are variants of the three major styles,
the perspicuous, the great or sublime, the elaborate
or beautiful) perhaps represents his major concern.
After setting up a mechanism of eight constituent parts
for each “idea”—argument, diction, method or order
of presentation, arrangement of words, figures or
tropes, numbers, periods, and clauses—Hermogenes
proceeds to discover what particular form each of the
parts must take in each of the styles. Contrary to most
earlier theorists, he considers the “ideas” as open and
flexible and as capable of being combined.

In the millennium that comprises the Middle Ages,
roughly the fourth to the fourteenth centuries, a
significant change came about in the idea of rhetoric.
Whereas in the classical period rhetoric had been
variously considered in relationship to its public func-
tions—in the forum, in the courts, in the open letter—
with the end of the Roman Empire those functions
either ceased to exist or were so transformed as to
demand a redefining of the art. Most of the theoretical
treatises were lost; they would be rediscovered only
in the Renaissance. Those that remained, Cicero's De
inventione, the Ad Herennium, and Quintilian (in some
parts), emphasized the more mechanical aspects of the
art: precepts for organization of the argument, recom-
mendations for expression and style. But this does not
mean that rhetoric as a way of thinking and of writing
disappeared; rather, it came to pervade all intellectual
pursuits during the Middle Ages, to give them their
basic forms and orientations. In order to see it properly
during this millennium, one must consider it not as a
separate art or discipline, not as a distinct part of the
university curriculum, but as an approach to the intel-
lectual disciplines that was almost universal in its
application.

In the domain of civil philosophy, the Ciceronian
distinction of deliberative, demonstrative, and judicial
oratory provided the basis for speaking on all the
matters pertinent to civil affairs. Theologians discov-
ered in rhetoric the devices for interpreting theological
writings; the recognition of the four possible “senses”
of a work (literal, allegorical, moral, anagogic) resulted
from a transposition into the spiritual domain of inter-
pretative techniques developed for mundane works.
The Augustinians thus made of rhetoric an instrument
of theology. As a part of logic, largely in the Aris-
totelian tradition, rhetoric took on the function of
treating “probable” (as opposed to “necessary”) mat-
ters, producing for those matters the kinds of proofs
of which it was especially capable. It could therefore
accompany logic and dialectic as instruments for the
various branches of rational philosophy. In its own
right, narrowly reduced to a simple art of words,
rhetoric pursued its inquiry into questions of style, the
figures, and the general concerns of “elocution.” It
became slowly assimilated to poetry, insofar as poetry
was regarded as a form of discourse using a special
kind of language and achieving distinct kinds of per-
suasion.

The achievement of rhetoric in the Middle Ages has
been summarized as follows by Richard McKeon:

(1952, pp. 295-96).

Conceived and applied in so many different ways,
rhetoric approached in the Middle Ages the status of
a universal science.

In the Renaissance, the situation of rhetoric was
further complicated by the rediscovery and rein-
terpretations of a number of ancient treatises (Greek,
Hellenistic, Alexandrian, Roman). Much humanistic
and scholarly effort was devoted to this enterprise.
Since some of these documents treated primarily the
matter of style and the figures, they reinforced recent
tendencies to regard rhetoric as an art of words and
expression (for example, Demetrius On Style and
Hermogenes). In so doing, they established a link be-
tween rhetoric and poetic that was to persist through
the Renaissance and beyond. Already in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, the so-called “arts of poetry”
had devoted much of their attention to the rhetorical
figures; these were parts of the “art” that could be
understood, reduced to rule, and taught without wor-
rying about more philosophical aspects. At the same
time, as the Ciceronian parts of “invention, disposition,
and elocution” had been extended to all forms of
composition, a common ground was seen for poetic
and rhetoric in the matter of style. Cicero's “elocu-
tion,” the figures and styles of the rhetoricians, and
Aristotle's “diction” (in the Poetics) became the single
subject of treatises devoted to expression and style.

Elocutio provided a basis for joining poetic and
rhetoric on the level of language; the relationship was
extended, through inventio and dispositio, to the whole
of the two arts. Rhetoric became the art that directed
the discussion and the practice of poetry. In Italy,
Alessandro Vellutello, a sixteenth-century commentator
on Petrarch, considered the whole of the Canzoniere
as a single poem whose exordium was contained in the
first sonnet, its narration in the sonnets and other poems
following, its conclusion (in the form of a prayer) in
the final canzone. In France, such writers of arts of
poetry as Thomas Sebillet, Jacques Peletier, and Pierre
de Ronsard organized their discussions around the
categories of invention, disposition, and elocution,
making of the first an equivalent to plot, the second
a way of regarding order in the poem, and the third
a synonym of style. When, about 1550, Aristotle's
Poetics came to be generally studied, it was assimilated
both to Horace's Ars poetica (read rhetorically in terms
of its res:verba distinction) and to the analytical devices
found in the De inventione and the Ad Herennium.

Rhetoric also flourished again as an independent art
of public oratory. One of the favorite exercises of the
humanists was the set speech, in Latin or Italian or
French, for the great occasion; they wrote such pieces
of epideictic oratory either on the models of Cicero
and Demosthenes or according to the precepts found
in the formal treatises. Aristotle's Rhetoric, rediscov-
ered, translated, and commented by many scholars,
enriched the conception of the art throughout the late
Renaissance; and although it did not alter funda-
mentally the Ciceronian directions, it led to more
philosophical considerations with respect to the nature
and the functioning of rhetoric. The new arts of
rhetoric written during the sixteenth century were
mostly Ciceronian in inspiration; but some, using the
dialogue form of Plato (or Cicero) or imitating the
Aristotelian treatise, tried to achieve a broader and
more inclusive vision of the art. Still others, starting
from one of the ancient treatises, either expanded upon
it or raised objections to its basic positions: so Peter
Ramus in his Rhetoricae distinctiones in Quintilianum
(1559), where he attacks Quintilian's theory as an
overextension of the idea of rhetoric and proposes,
instead, a notion of the discipline restricted to “elocu-
tion” and “action.” Writers like Ramus thought of
rhetoric as a living and practical art, primarily for the
teaching of writing in all literary and philosophical
forms, secondarily for the formation of orators.

A tendency to restrict the art of rhetoric, rather than
to expand and diversify it, proved hardly acceptable to
the seventeenth century; theorists and writers then
wished to develop encyclopedic attitudes (inherited
from the Renaissance) that would unite and unify the
various arts. In France, the prevalent Ciceronian and
Quintilianesque modes, restated in the new “rhetorics”
(cf. René Bary and Le Sieur Le Gras), were modified
to adjust them to a contemporary situation in which
deliberative, judicial, and epideictic oratory had been
replaced by the “eloquence of the courts” and the
“eloquence of the pulpit.” Later, in René Rapin for
example, the notion of “eloquence” (the current
equivalent of rhetoric) was extended to all forms of
expression, in poetry, in history, in philosophy as well
as in oratory. Rapin saw eloquence in all areas as
seeking the dual ends of instruction and pleasure, with

the latter serving the former. But it achieved them,
not by applying innumerable technical rules, but by
appealing to the taste and judgment of the audience.

Taste and judgment, in this idea of rhetoric, were
found in the author as well as in the public. The author
applied them in every choice that he made during the
process of composition; the public applied them at
every moment of its exposure to the work. In all, these
qualities were formed by the kind of education that
Quintilian had outlined. Both the shift from rules to
taste and the loss of the idea of a separate art, in the
seventeenth century, were significant modifications of
the idea of rhetoric; they were the beginnings of a
break with the classical-Renaissance tradition. In spite
of the persistence of Horace, Cicero, and Quintilian
in the manuals and in the schools, the way was being
prepared for essentially new conceptions.

Those new conceptions in the eighteenth century
were not without earlier sources. In Diderot and
D'Alembert's Encyclopédie (1751-80), the place of
rhetoric under the faculty of reason (in the Table of
Human Knowledge) and its definition as “the science
of the qualities [or of the “ornaments”] of discourse”
were both derived from Francis Bacon's Advancement
of Learning (1605). Bacon, to be sure, had assigned
rhetoric to the imagination; but its use, he said, was
“to apply and recommend the dictates of reason to
the imagination, in order to excite the affections and
will” (Advancement, Book VI, Ch. III). The section
on rhetoric in the Discours préliminaire of the
Encyclopédie, however, explains the change: rhetoric
serves for the communication of passions, not of ideas;
it is the product of genius, not of rules or precepts;
and hence any idea of a separate art or science of
rhetoric should be abandoned. For the main ideas in
the article “Rhétorique” in the Encyclopédie, the au-
thor went back to Bernard Lamy's La Rhétorique, ou
l'art de parler (1668), a treatise which had extended
the art to the whole field of belles-lettres or “philol-
ogy.” Largely a work on the nature and origins of
language and on the character of figurative expression,
Lamy's Rhétorique was bound to be attractive to the
philosophes who, in all areas, including rhetoric, wished
to go to the “nature,” the “origins,” the “causes” of
human activities.

Although the French were, in theory, destroying
rhetoric as an art, the English were, in their practice,
demonstrating its powers and its excellence; this was
the century of Burke and Pitt, whose tradition was
continued by such nineteenth-century orators as
Gladstone. The practice, in both periods, was a conse-
quence of the kinds of general education offered in
the schools and universities, not of any particular at-
tention to the art. With the ancient theorists forgotten
or discarded (except for a few classical scholars),
rhetoric became, both in England and in America, the
schoolbook study of writing and composition, indistin-
guishable from simple rules of grammar and syntax.
In France, the deterioration reached the point where
the term rhétorique meant an undesirable hiding of
meaning, in anything written, by excessive and
meretricious ornament; this sense is still current in
certain French circles. Yet something like a return to
an idea of rhetoric as the marshalling and presentation
of persuasive arguments has flourished in the debating
societies in the British universities and in American
university departments of speech and public address.
Especially in the latter, “rhetoric” is sometimes
extended to embrace persuasive public action as well
as persuasive public speaking; so that the art returns
again to the realm of politics, where it had begun.

In England and America also, in a more strictly
literary development, critics have applied the general
tenets of rhetorical analysis to many kinds of works
that are normally considered to be nonrhetorical. Their
basis for so doing is the assumption that however
“pure” a work may be, it contains certain features that
are directed towards influencing its audience in specific
ways. These may be statements meant to give a “char-
acter” to the writer or the narrator; or they may be
alterations of the argument (in a philosophical work);
or they may be appeals to an audience's tastes or
knowledge or predilections: in a word, the whole of
the traditional rhetorical trilogy. Wayne Booth's The
Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) is typical of this approach
as used for narrative writing. There have recently been
discussions of the “rhetoric of philosophy” (Kenneth
Burke), of rhetorical devices used by philosophers such
as Descartes, Pascal, and Bayle, by poets such as
Ronsard. In this contemporary movement, the idea of
rhetoric has been refined and specialized as an instru-
ment for the analysis of all literary forms; and this has
led to an expansion of its usefulness and a renewed
sense of its validity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C. S. Baldwin, Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic (New York,
1924); idem, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (New York, 1928).
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961).
D. L. Clark, Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education (New York,
1957); idem, Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance (New
York, 1922). H. M. Davidson, Audience, Words, and Art:
Studies in Seventeenth-Century French Rhetoric (Columbus,
Ohio, 1965). J. H. Freese, Introduction to Aristotle's The
“Art” of Rhetoric, Loeb Classical Library (London and
Cambridge, Mass., 1926). O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring
Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance
Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1962). G.

Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton, 1963).
R. McKeon, “Rhetoric in the Middle Ages,” Critics and
Criticism: Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago,
1952). E. Olson, “The Argument of Longinus' On the
Sublime,” Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, ed.
R. S. Crane (Chicago, 1952). B. Weinberg, A History of
Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1961).

BERNARD WEINBERG

[See also Analogy; Education; Genius; Platonism, Rhetoric
and Literary Theory in; Style; Taste.]