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ORATORY AND EPISTOLOGRAPHY
of late antiquity, the Carmen de figuris 'Poem on figures of speech', treats the
same subject matter in verse as an aid to memory. Three hexameters are given
to each figure, generally one for definition and two for illustration. Many of the
examples are drawn from classical Greek and Latin writers, adapted in form to
the needs of metre.
Other works on rhetoric are text-books covering the whole subject. They are
impossible to date with certainty, as they never refer to contemporary events.
Among such manuals are the Ars rhetorica of C. Julius Victor, which is based
almost entirely on Quintilian, the Institutiones oratoriae 'Principles of oratory*
of Sulpicius Victor, who claims to follow a certain Zeno (probably Zeno of
Athens, whose manual of rhetoric in ten books does not survive), and the
Artis rhetoricae libri III of C. Chirius Fortunatianus, arranged in the form of
question and answer and drawing its doctrine from Quintilian and its illustrations
from Cicero. The Praecepta artis rhetoricae ' Precepts of the art of rhetoric'
of Julius Severianus, which claims to meet the needs of the practising advocate
and which draws all its examples from Cicero, has been variously dated from
the second to the fifth century. A fragment is preserved of Augustine's De
rhetorica, which formed part of his handbook of the liberal arts (Halm 137—5 0-
Augustine himself had lost most of this handbook by the time he came to write
his Retractationes about 427.
What is striking about all these works, apart from their lack of originality,
is the almost total absence of any Greek influence. The theory of rhetoric
had not stood still in the Greek world. Hermogenes, the erstwhile infant prodigy
turned teacher, wrote at the end of the second century a series of text-books of
rhetoric which because of their orderly arrangement and their clarity of expression
became standard works, commented upon endlessly by Greek schoolmasters
up to the fifteenth century. Following in the wake of Hermogenes,
Menander of Laodicea in Phrygia wrote in the third century a treatise on
epideictic oratory, clear in exposition, copiously illustrated, and answering the
needs of the age. (It survives in two versions, one of which may not be the work
of Menander himself.) In the fourth century Aphthonius of Antioch wrote
a manual of graded preliminary exercises {Progymnasmatd) which partly
replaced those of Hermogenes. And early in the fifth century Nicolaus of Myra
in Lycia wrote a similar manual of Progymnasmata, which, like that of Aphthonius,
was used and commented on by teachers in the Greek world throughout
the Middle Ages. Of all this pedagogical literature, which introduced new
distinctions and new methods of study, there is virtually no trace in the surviving
Latin manuals of the fourth and fifth centuries. Quintilian is still their model,
whether at first or second hand, and Cicero provides most of their illustrative
material. They concentrate on deliberative and forensic oratory, for which
there was little room in late antiquity, and have little to say about the panegyric
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