CHAPTER IV.
Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’ and ‘Art of Poetry.’
We have seen how Aristotle, when a young man, during his first residence at Athens, opened a school of Rhetoric, in rivalry to the veteran Isocrates. During his second residence, he presided over a school, not of Rhetoric alone, but of Philosophy and of all knowledge. Yet it is said that in the Peripatetic school “Rhetoric was both scientifically and assiduously taught.”[1] Rhetoric had now, however, become for Aristotle merely one in that wide range of sciences, each of which he had set himself, as far as possible, to bring to perfection. He turned to it, in due course, from his achievements in Logic, and produced his great treatise on this subject. Goethe said of his ‘Faust’ that “he had carried it for twenty years in his head, till it had become pure gold.” The first part of the ‘Rhetoric’ of Aristotle bears marks of having gone through a similar process. The outlines of its arrangement are characterised by luminous simplicity, the result of long analytic reflection; the scientific exposition is made
- ↑ Professor Jebb’s ‘Attic Orators,’ ii. 431. See Diog. Laert., V. i. 3.
