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Aristotelian Lexis and Renaissance Elocutio 149 9 Aristotelian Lexis and Renaissance Elocutio Lawrence D. Green This essay concerns the Renaissance reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, a perspective influenced by a view of the work as an ancillary treatise on ethics and dialectic, a tradition of Greek intellectual work in which Aristotle did not necessarily play a major role, and an interest in classical rhetoric whose focus was more Cicero and Quintilian than Aristotle.These three strands do not form the context for a Renaissance understanding of lexis; rather, these strands form the starting points of their understanding of Book 3. For many writers during the Renaissance, the defining characteristic of rhetoric was elocutio. Other aspects of rhetoric, such as invention or disposition, were also important, but they were caught up in larger arguments about whether they belonged to the discipline of rhetoric or more properly to some other discipline, such as logic or ethics. Hardly anyone, however, disagreed about the disciplinary status of elocutio. Indeed, without this fundamental agreement, the pedagogical realignments of Petrus Ramus would have made little sense, just as the earlier reshaping by Erasmus of traditional rhetoric in terms of elocutio would have fallen on deaf ears. Our own age has not been very sympathetic to this Renaissance fascination with elocutio, preferring instead to focus on the relations between rhetoric and logic or choosing to see elocutio in terms of its relations to formal poetics; and only recently have our critical sympathies begun to shift. But Renaissance sympathies meant that when writers began to think about the newly rediscovered text of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, they would see Book 3 as being far more central to the entire rhetorical enterprise than we are apt to see it today. They tried in particular to make sense of Aristotelian lexis in terms of their own rhetorical and philosophical traditions. What they saw is not always what we see today. The Renaissance tradition of elocutio was Latin, Roman, and, more specifically, Ciceronian (Green, 1994b). It was a tradition in which Aristotle’s Rhetoric had played almost no part. The Greek text had dropped from sight during late antiquity , and what little we know of it for over a millennium is through occasional reference in other documents and by its appearance in semitic and Arab contexts. Lawrence D. Green 150 When the Rhetoric finally does reappear in the West, it first does so in partial paraphrases from Arabic. In the thirteenth century, William of Moerbeke provides a complete Latin translation, and scholastic commentary based on that translation demonstrates that the Rhetoric was viewed almost exclusively in the context of Aristotelian ethics and dialectic. Not until the fifteenth century does this situation begin to change, with the exodus of scholars and manuscripts from Byzantium . Neither the Greeks in the East nor the Latins in the West thought that Aristotle’s Rhetoric was a particularly important treatise, but for very different reasons. The Greeks viewed their philosophical and literary tradition as an unbroken continuity in which Aristotle played a significant but still minor role. Hermogenes was their major classical rhetorician, Plato their major classical philosopher , and both were primarily starting points for a lively tradition that continued to the present. The Greek East knew and cared very little about Cicero, while the Latin West knew and cared very little about Hermogenes. Both cared about Aristotle, but in different degrees and for very different reasons, and until the Renaissance, neither cared much about his Rhetoric. These three traditions—Ciceronian, Byzantine, and Aristotelian—provide the contexts for Renaissance efforts to understand the complex materials of Book 3 of the Rhetoric, and all three are present at the rebirth of theRhetoric.When the Greek scholar George of Trebizond emigrated to Italy, his first major project in rhetoric was an amalgamation of Hermogenes with Cicero; his second was a new Latin translation of Aristotle’s Greek Rhetoric. The principal subjects of Book 3 were all of great interest to Renaissance writers: the constituent parts of good diction and grammar, the different kinds of styles, the metaphorical aspects of language, and the organization of parts of an oration. But the same rhetorical traditions and immediate social needs that made these subjects interesting to Renaissance writers also made it difficult to understand Aristotle’s treatment of them.Then, as now, prior theoretical commitments and intentions led commentators to read Aristotle’s text in particular ways, sometimes creating problems where we today see none, and sometimes answering questions that we today...

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