in a style which is, for Aristotle, remarkably easy and flowing; and each part of the subject is adorned with a wealth of illustration which indicates the accumulation of a lifetime.
Several treatises on Rhetoric had appeared in Greece before Aristotle sat down to write about it. Only one of these, but perhaps the best of them, has come down to us. Curiously enough it has been preserved among the works of Aristotle, as if it had been written by him, and it goes by the name of the ‘Rhetoric addressed to Alexander,’ having a spurious dedication to Alexander the Great tacked on to it. It is believed by scholars to be the work of Anaximenes of Lampsacus, an eminent historian and rhetorician contemporary with Aristotle. It is entirely practical in its aim, but it bears traces of the sophistical leaven, and deals overmuch in those tricks of argument and disputation which got the Sophists their bad name. The other lost systems of Rhetoric by Corax, Tisias, Antiphon, Gorgias, Thrasymachus, and others, appear to have been all strictly practical. Aristotle complains[1] that they confined themselves too much to treating of forensic oratory, and to expounding the methods best adapted for working on the feelings of a jury. His own aim is broader and more philosophical: while he defines Rhetoric as “the art of seeing what elements of per-
- ↑ There was another System of Rhetoric, which, perhaps, should not be included in this number—namely, the ‘Rhetoric of Theodectes,’ which Aristotle refers to in his third book (III. ix. 10), as containing a classification of prose periods. There was a tradition that Aristotle contributed an introduction to the ‘Rhetoric of Theodectes.’
