E. M. Cope, Commentary on the Rhetoric of Aristotle

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‘Such divisions, if any one choose to make them, will be pretty much the same as the inventions of Theodorus and his school, that is, to distinguish narration from after-narration and fore-narration, and refutation and per-re-refutation’. In this compound word ἐπί ‘in addition’ is represented by re, and ἐξ, ‘out and out’, ‘outright’, ‘thoroughly’, ‘completely’ by per. διά and per in composition are the more usual and direct exponents of ‘thoroughness’ or ‘complete carrying through’, of a thing. On ἐπιδιήγησις, repetita narratio, see Quint. IV 2. 128, res declamatoria magis quam forensis. He accepts it as a division, but thinks it should be rarely used. Plato, Phaedr. 266 D seq., in speaking of these same superfluous divisions of Theodorus, leaves out ἐπι- and προ-διήγησις, and introduces πίστωσιν καὶ ἐπιπίστωσιν in their place. These plainly correspond to the other pair ἔλεγχος and ἐπεξέλεγχος, the one being confirmatory, the other refutatory arguments. See Camb. Journ. of Cl. and Sacred Phil. No. IX. Vol. III p. 285, and Thompson's notes on the Phaedrus.

The general drift of the last clause is this; if you introduce such divisions at all, you may go on dividing and subdividing for ever, as Theodorus does in his τέχνη. This is followed by the statement of the true principle of division: the foundation of my own twofold division, hints Ar. ‘But a name (like one of these, the class-name, or, as here, the name of a division) should be given to mark a kind and a specific difference’. It is the genus plus the specific (εἰδοποιός, species-making) difference that constitutes the distinct species or kind. Now these names, though supposed to mark distinct kinds, have no specific differences which thus distinguish them. A special name demands a real distinction of kinds. Waitz ad Categ. 1 b 17. Trendelenburg, El. Log. Ar. § 59.

‘Otherwise they become empty and frivolous, such as Licymnius' inventions in his art, the names which he coins, ἐπούρωσις, ἀποπλάνησις and ὄζοι’. On Licymnius and his productions, see Heindorf ad Phaedr. u. s. p. 242, and Camb. Journ. of Cl.and Sacred Phil. No. IX. Vol. III pp. 255—7; where an attempt is made to explain these three obscure names. Licymnius was a dithyrambic poet, supra III 12. 2, as well as a rhetorician, and his prose style seems to have participated in the dithyrambic character. ἐπούρωσις I take to be a word coined by Licymnius for his own purposes: it is a ἅπαξ λεγόμενον. It seems to be formed from ἐπουροῦν, a synonym of ἐπουρίζειν, ‘to speed onward by a fair gale’, also συνεπουρίζειν, Hist. Anim. VIII 13. 9, de Caelo, III 2. 17: Polybius has ἐπουροῦν II 10. 6, and κατουροῦν, I 44. 3, 61. 7, both as neut. The Schol. quoted by Spengel, Artium Scriptores p. 89, defines ἐπόρουσις (ἐπούρωσις) τὰ συνευπορίζοντα καὶ βοηθοῦντα τοῖς ἐνθυμήμασι, καὶ ἁπλῶς ὅσα λέγονται βοηθοῦντα τῇ ἀποδείξει. All which seems to favour the notion that the figurative rhetorician represented ‘subsidiary’ or ‘confirmatory arguments’, Theodorus' πίστωσις and ἐπιπίστωσις, under the image of ‘a fair wind astern’. ἀποπλάνησις is no doubt, as in Plato Polit. 263 C, ‘a digression’, wandering off from the main subject, Schol. τὰ ἔξω τοῦ πράγματος; and ὄζοι, ‘branches’, most likely means places in which the discourse ‘branches off’ in different directions, ‘ramifications’: unless the same Scholiast's explanation be preferred, τὰ ἄκρα, ἤτοι τὰ προοίμια καὶ τοὺς ἐπιλόγους. This would mean the ‘branches’ opposed to the stock or trunk, as something extraneous, or at all events non-essential. (I think this is preferable.)