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for searching only. 28 SMALL LATINE AND LESSE GREEKE
Vives is thus an Aristotelian, and gives his advice upon the best
texts available.
Next Vives turns to rhetoric.
With regard to these matters, unless I am greatly mistaken, confused and unordered directions, ill-suited for use, were formerly drawn up by our ancestors. Nevertheless much material may be gathered from them by a careful tutor, namely, from the rhetorical books of Cicero, from the Institutions of Oratory of Quintilian, from Hermogenes (de Dictionum Formis), especially from his fifth book, which deals with forms of oratory, and from George of Trebizond, for the most part the expositor of Hermogenes. Demetrius Phaleraeus also teaches much "concerning the forms of speech" in his book crept Apti, pefas and Aelius Aristides in his crept sou AoXeru oii Xl yov. For the latter deals with the simple speech as does that of Apsines of Gadara. Dionysius Halicarnasseus undertook the task of handing down certain precepts concerning the kinds of speeches, or of their arguments, according as they concerned panegyrics, epithalamiums, epitaphs and such like. Then (the pupil) will take into his hands, from the Latin writers, the fifth book of Martianus Capella, Rutilius Lupus on the Figures of Speech, which work, they say, was translated from Gorgias, not Gorgias Leontinus, but another Gorgias. Julius Ruffsnianus and Romanus Aquila have bequeathed to posterity books on the same subject. Sulpitius Victor has writ-ten certain precepts on the rhetorical art. From all these the teacher himself will pluck, as it were, the blossoms, and arrange a posy to present to his scholars, or he will quote to them extracts from these works when he gives them an account of the old teachers of the art. Should he need at first any easy and short compendium of the art, let him use such as that of Martianus Capella or that of Philip Melanchthon; or the four books of Rhetoric to Herennius, ascribed by some writers to Cicero, though I do not understand the grounds of their opinion. It seems more likely that they were taken from the works of Quintilian and put together by Cornificius. Then should be read the five books of Quintilian, namely, the third, fourth, eighth, ninth and tenth, the Orator of Cicero, and the Rhetoric to Theodectes of Aristotle, a work of great ability and art as is always the case with this author, and one of great utility for aiding sound perception, and wisdom in matters of ordinary life. The youth himself will read for his private study the rest of Quintilian, the Partitiones of Cicero addressed to his son, the de Oratore and the Brutus, the Rhetorica (addressed to Alexander) of Aristotle (or whoever may have been the author), and the treatise of George of Trebizond.72
Here is the theoretical presentation of the conventional system in logic and rhetoric, which the schoolmasters had to put into practicable form. Upon objectives there was fair agreement; it was upon the methods of presentation that the experts disagreed most.
n Watson, Vises: On Education, pp. 182-i83.
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