Servatus Lupus (805-862), Abbot of Ferrieres and a learned man, was unusual in his scholarship; for he knew not only the rhetoric Ad Herennium which was believed to be Cicero's but also the De oratore and fragments of Quintilian.[[155]] The current rhetorical treatises of the middle ages were Cicero's De inventione, and the Ad Herennium. The De oratore was used but slightly, and the Brutus and the Orator not at all.[[156]] What little classical rhetoric there is in Stephen Hawes was derived from the Ad Herennium.
The survival and popularity of the Ad Herennium during this period is one of the most interesting phenomena of rhetorical history. Of the classical treatises on rhetoric which survive to-day it undoubtedly arouses the least interest and can contribute the least to modern education or criticism. Yet it is the most characteristic Latin rhetoric we possess. It is a text-book of rhetoric which was used in the Roman schools. In fact, Cicero's De inventione is so much like it that some suspect that Cicero's notes which he took in school got into circulation and forced the publication of his professor's lectures. Aristotle's philosophy of rhetoric, Cicero's charming dialog on his profession, Quintilian's treatise on the teaching of rhetoric--none of these is a text-book. The rhetoric Ad Herennium is. It is clear and orderly in its organization. It defines all the technical terms which it uses, and illustrates its principles. As one might expect, it delights in over-analysis, in categories and sub-categories, the four kinds of causes, the three virtues of the narratio. In the hands of a skilled teacher of composition, however, and with much class-room practice, it undoubtedly would get rhetoric taught more effectively than would more philosophical or literary treatises. Thus in Guarino's school at Ferrara (1429-1460) the Ad Herennium was regarded as the quintessence of pure Ciceronian doctrine of oratory, and was made the starting point and standing authority in teaching rhetoric. In more advanced classes it was supplemented by the De oratore, Orator, and what was known of Quintilian.[[157]] The Ciceronianus of Erasmus testifies that by the next century the scholarship of the renaissance had discovered that the Ad Herennium was not from the pen of Cicero, and that the De inventione was considered apologetically by its famous author, who wrote his De oratore to supersede the more youthful treatise.[[158]] But six years after the publication of the Ciceronianus of Erasmus, the edition of Cicero's Opera published in Basel in 1534 still incorporates the Ad Herennium, and Thomas Wilson in England owes most of his first book and part of the second of his Arte of Rhetorique to its anonymous author, whom he believed to be Cicero. For instance in his section on Devision as a part of a speech, Wilson says, "Tullie would not have a devision to be made, of, or above three partes at the moste, nor lesse then three neither, if neede so required."[[159]]
"Tullie" says no such thing. Indeed, Cicero never considers divisio as one of the parts of a speech. But the Ad Herennium does make divisio a part of a speech,[[160]] and does require not over three parts.[[161]] As late as 1612, Thomas Heywood quotes the authority of "Tully, in his booke Ad Caium Herennium."[[162]]
The relative importance of Cicero's rhetorical works to the middle ages is well illustrated by a count of the manuscripts preserved. In the libraries of Europe today there exist seventy-nine manuscripts of the De inventione, eighty-three of the Ad Herennium, forty of the De oratore, fourteen of the Brutus, and twenty of the Orator.[[163]] Thus in the University of Bologna the study of rhetoric was based on the De inventione and the Ad Herennium.[[164]] The De inventione is the source for Alcuin's rhetorical writings, and was the only Ciceronian rhetoric known to Abelard or Dante. Brunette Latini translated seventeen chapters of it into Italian.[[165]] Although mutilated codices of the De oratore and the Orator were known to Servatus Lupus and John of Salisbury, complete manuscripts of these most important works were not known previous to 1422.[[166]] The Ad Herennium and the De inventione were first printed by Jenson at Venice in 1470. The first book printed at Angers (1476) was the Ad Herennium under the usual mediaeval title of the Rhetorica nova. The first edition of the De oratore was printed in the monastery of Subaco about 1466. The Brutus first appeared in Rome (1469) in the same year which witnessed the first edition of the Orator.[[167]] Before its first printing the Orator was used as a reference book for advanced students by Guarino in his school at Ferrara.
Castiglione's indebtedness to the De oratore is well known, but few notice that his first paragraphs are a close paraphrase of Cicero's dedicatory paragraphs of the Orator.
But in England the first reference to the Orator appears in Ascham's Scholemaster (1570) one hundred years after its first printing.[[168]] Thus the Ciceronian rhetoric of the middle ages was derived from the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium and from the youthful De inventione, not from the best rhetorical treatises of Cicero as we know them. Moreover the mediaeval tradition persisted in England for over a hundred years after it had been displaced in Italy.
The Rhetoric of Aristotle was known to the middle ages only through a Latin translation by Hermanus Allemanus (c. 1256) of Alfarabi's commentary. The Greek text was first published in the Aldine Rhetores Graeci (1508), and was for the first time incorporated in the works of Aristotle published in Basel, 1531. As early as 1478, however, the Latin version by George of Trebizond had been published in Venice.[[169]] This was frequently reissued in the Opera of Aristotle together with the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, long believed to be the work of Aristotle, in the Latin translation by Filelfo, and the Poetics in Pazzi's translation. As the true Rhetoric of Aristotle, known to the renaissance as the Ars rhetoricorum ad Theodecten, was so frequently published with the spurious Rhetorica, references to Aristotle's Rhetoric in the sixteenth century are likely to be confusing. Thus it is difficult to tell whether the Rhetoric required to be read by Oxford students in the fifteenth century[[170]] is the one or the other. The surprising thing is, however, with all the editions and translations of Aristotle which were available, that the Rhetoric of Aristotle had so slight an influence on English rhetorical theory.
The De institutione oratoria of Quintilian was too long to be preserved intact. From the fourth to the seventh centuries, however, it was well known and highly valued by Hilary of Poitiers, St. Jerome, and Rufinus, and closely followed and abridged in their rhetorical works by Cassiodorus, Julius Victor, and Isidore of Seville. From the eighth century until Poggio discovered the complete manuscript at St. Gall in 1416, the world knew only mutilated fragments of the text. On the basis of an incomplete manuscript Etienne de Rouen prepared in the twelfth century an abridgment of Quintilian, and soon after an anonymous enthusiast made a selection of the Flores Quintilianei.[[171]] Thus, while the rhetorical works of Aristotle were practically unknown, and the Ciceronian tradition rested on the De inventione and the Ad Herennium, the rhetorical ideas of Quintilian, as preserved in abridgments and in the treatises of Cassiodorus and Isidore, passed current throughout the middle ages. When the first edition was published by Campano in 1470, the world of scholars welcomed a familiar friend.
Other classical critical treatises filtered into England even more slowly. The De compositione verborum of Dionysius of Halicarnassus received its first printing at the hands of Aldus in 1508 and was edited again by Estienne in 1546, and by Sturm in 1550. Yet had Ascham not been a friend of Sturm's, it might not have been heard of in England as early as 1570, when the Scholemaster was published. Ascham says it is worthy of study, but shows no great familiarity with the text.[[172]]
The De sublimitate of pseudo-Longinus has a similar history in England. Published by Robortelli in Basel in 1554, it was reissued three times, once with a Latin translation, before Langhorne edited it (1636) at Oxford. No Elizabethan writer alludes to it or seems to have been aware of its existence until Thomas Farnaby cites it as an authority for his Index Rhetoricus (1633). The advance of classical scholarship in England is indeed no better illustrated than by a comparison of Farnaby's cited sources with those of Thomas Wilson (1553). Wilson knew and used Cicero, Quintilian, Plutarch, Basil the Great, and Erasmus. Farnaby cites an imposing list of sources.