Anonymous Prolegomena to Aphthonius

The Prolegomena to Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata open with the four questions every inquiry falls into: whether it is, what it is, of what sort it is, and why it is. Rhetoric’s existence is then defended against sophisms (there was a time when rhetoric was not; if it treats particulars it is not political; if it treats all common things it is either ignorant or redundant). The writer answers that rhetoric already exists in act because cities exhort, prosecute, and praise.

Greeks, he says, invent a myth: Hermes gave men rhetoric — panegyric to praise the good, deliberative to seek the useful, judicial to end quarrels. More truly, God himself used it: deliberative in “let us make man,” judicial when he judged Adam, panegyric when he saw that it was very good. Rhetoric is then defined as the art concerning the power of speech in a political matter, whose end is to speak persuasively as far as possible — not “to persuade,” as the doctor is still a doctor when the disease is stronger than the art.

The book’s aim is to train for the three species of rhetoric and the four parts of the political speech. The slot is that Byzantine introduction, not a missing Aphthonius.