The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World

This work though the nature of the subject has somewhat altered the form and increased the size, I hope it will be useful to a similar audience: students of classics and of speech seeking an overall picture of the history of rhetoric in the classical age of Rome. I have sought to present the main lines of development, to outline and perhaps occasionally to solve some problems, and to furnish a factual and bibliographical basis for further study. M. L. Clarke's Rhetoric at Rome has for nearly twenty year furnished a brief introduction to the subject: I have tried to give greater depth, particularly by adding a picture of Greek developments and by giving more historical background, and I have advanced some different hypotheses. My basic theme is that the Romans imitated from the Greeks an art of peruasion which gradually developed into an art often more concerned with what I call the secondary characteristics of rhetoric: not peruasion, but style and artistic effect But in the empire an effort was made by a number of writer to recover some of the power of peruasion and some orator found new causes to plead in philosophy, Hellenism, and religion.