This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
Rhetoric then
may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in
reference to any subject whatever. This is the function of no other of the arts,
each of which is able to instruct and persuade in its own special subject; thus,
medicine deals with health and sickness, geometry with the properties of
magnitudes, arithmetic with number, and similarly with all the other arts and
sciences. But Rhetoric, so to say, appears to be able to discover the means of
persuasion in reference to any given subject. That is why we say that as an art
its rules are not applied to any particular definite class of things.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.