On nous reprochera peut-être de voir la Rhétorique
partout. Et si, par hasard, elle y était vraiment?

Basil Muntéano ¹

Having carried the story of rhetoric from the past to the present,
from Homer to the works of living novelists, I now link the
present to the future, and suggest what might be hoped for in
rhetoric studies, and what not.

To start with the negative side, we might by now expect that
the significance of rhetoric in the classical world would be
clearly recognized, given its importance in politics, law,
philosophy, poetry, history, and literary criticism, and indeed
as one of the main preservers of classical culture. Yet in two
recent compilations from our ancient universities rhetoric is
nowhere given adequate treatment, either as a cultural
phenomenon or as a discipline affecting all forms of literary
composition. In The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, ²
neither the Greek nor Latin volume treats rhetoric as a subject in
its own right, with a continuous history. There are references to
it, unavoidably so, as concerns Cicero (ten pages out of over
nine hundred in the Latin volume), Quintilian (three pages, his
'grave deficiencies' apparently including a sketchy knowledge
of Greek literature, his 'narrow vision' and 'scant historical
sense' having created canons 'which have constricted the study
of Latin literature over the last five hundred years'--with the
grudging admission that his influence 'has been beneficent as
well as stultifying'), and oratory under the later principate
(seven pages). In the Greek volume Aristotle's Rhetoric receives
one page, where it is virtually dismissed as being 'now of largely

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