Note 195 — BOOK II
Reading edition
Under this heading we have the chief effort of ancient rhetoric to be helpful to the defense in cases brought before the courts. The term status meant the crucial point in a case, and its subdivisions are intended to include the chief kinds of crucial points upon which the advocate must base his speech. The inference in both Isidore and Cassiodorus is that there is only one status in a case, but Quintilian (3, 6, 21) expressly says that there are more than one, and that the chief status in a case “is the strongest point in it on which the whole matter chiefly turns.”
In this section Isidore borrows from Cassiodorus almost without change in the wording. In one case he has made a serious blunder in copying: the subdivisions that Cassiodorus places under qualitas, Isidore has placed under finis. (Cass., De Rhet., Halm, p. 496.)