PAPERS ON RHETORIC X

Three papers of this collection were presented as a panel at the Conference: all of them are concerned with the same rhetorical concept of probability (eijkov~), explored, however, in three different areas: Francesca Piazza highlights its argu¬mentative use in Aristotle and in the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, Mauro Serra concentrates on its occurrences in Plato’s Phaedrus and Timaeus and Salvatore Di Piazza aims to shed light to its importance in the Corpus Hippocraticum. Also the articles of Pierre Chiron and Charles Guérin were part of a panel. Pierre Chiron analyses how this happens in Alexandros’ handbook of the doctrine of the figures, whereas Char¬les Guérin points out the different aims of Cicero and Seneca the Elder in their quotations of orators or declaimers.As to the other articles, they were just ‘individual’ researches. As to the Latin authors Alfredo Casamento and Marcus Heckenkamp consider Cicero’s Pro Milone: the first to call attention on its paradigmatic function in later rhet¬orical texts, the second to highlight Cice¬ro’s himself emotional involvement when delivering it. Antonino Milazzo devotes a very detailed analysis to the argumentative strategy used in Cicero’s De provinciis consularibus. One more essay is concerned with Cicero: Jaewon Ahn offers an absolutely new and interesting investigation about similarities and differences between Cicero’s understanding of the orator perfectus and Confucius’ rex perfectus. More traditionally Giuseppe La Bua takes into account Seneca the Elder to explore “the relationship between writing and oral performance in the declamatory exercises”; a wider range of authors, rhetoricians, gram¬marians and jurists, is the basis for Gualtiero Calboli’s analysis of the use of definition in inventio and elocutio and Sulpicius Victor is considered by Ramón Gutiérrez González who focuses on his discussion of the dif¬ference between general questions (qevsei~) and particular questions (uJpoqevsei~). Several papers, moreover, concern Greek texts. Marie-Pierre Noël wants to stress Gorgias’ and Isocrates’ different approach to the question of the praise of Helen; Harvey Yunis argues that Plato in the Phaedrus considered dialectic as “an essential element of the art of rhetoric” because of its role of providing arguments; Carla Castelli plays on the topical relationship between pictura and rhetorica to analyse a passage of Dionysius of Halicarnassus; Silvana Celentano follows step by step Theocritus’ description of Polyfemus’ and Galatea’s love to underline the use of the rhetorical tool of the evidentia, Robert Gaines bases on the text of Diogenes Laertius a new understanding of the notion of ‘sofist’ and Lawrence Green lets us know how several Renaissance authors dealt with the Aristotelian topoi.