Chapter III · THE LAST ROMAN SCHOOLS AND THE COMPENDS (FIFTH TO SEVENTH CENTURIES)

References and Abbreviations

ARP Baldwin (C. S.), Ancient rhetoric and poetic, New York, 1924.

Boissier Boissier (G.), La fin du paganisme, Paris, 1891, 2 vols.

CSE Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum, Vienna.

Glover Glover (T. R.), Life and letters in the fourth century, Cambridge, 1901.

Haarhoff Haarhoff (T.), The Schools of Gaul, Oxford, 1920.

Halm Halm (K.), Rhetores latini minores, Leipzig, 1863.

Keil Keil (H.), Grammatici latini, Leipzig, 1870-1880, 7 vols.

Labriolle Labriolle (P. de), Histoire de la littérature latine chrétienne, Paris, 1920.

Manacorda Manacorda (G.), Storia della scuola in Italia, vol. I, Il medio evo, Milan, 1913 (2 parts in separate volumes).

Manitius Manitius (M.), Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, Munich, 1911, 2 vols. (in Iwan von Mueller’s Handbuch der klassischen Alterthums-Wissenschaft, IX. ii).

Monceaux Monceaux (P.), Histoire de la littérature latine chrétienne, Paris, 1924 (Collection Payot).

MGH Monumenta Germaniæ historica (cited by page of the appropriate volume).

PL Migne, Patrologia latina (cited by volume and column).

Pichon Pichon (R.), Études sur l’histoire de la littérature latine dans les Gaules, Paris (vol. 1), 1906.

Roger Roger (M.), L’enseignement des lettres classiques d’Ausone à Alcuin, Paris, 1905.

A. The Schools of Gaul

The need of the Church and of the Roman world for such forward counsels, the tenacity of sophistic among reactionaries and conformists, are amply exhibited by the last days of Roman Gaul. In the ancient province a cultivated leisure class, living in the twilight of a great past outworn and doomed, cherished the sophistic conception of elegance and the sophistic habit of education by rhetoric[1] as symbols of their Romanism. Provincials, they were sometimes more Catholic than the Pope; their writers and teachers would not risk being thought less literary than the capital of the world. But in fact Gaul of the fifth and sixth centuries was more Roman than Rome. It was the last territory of the ancient world.

1. Ausonius[2]

“The poetical fame of Ausonius,” says Gibbon in a contemptuous postscript to a footnote,[3] “condemns the taste of his age.” Whether or not Gibbon took too seriously the fourth-century habit in compliments, Ausonius at least reflects the taste of his age. Fading, therefore, long since to the shadow of a shade, hardly any longer an author, he is nevertheless an important document. Such fame as he may have had once is hardly even considered. Like the rhetors celebrated by Philostratus,[4] like those at Bordeaux whom he himself commemorates, he has ceased to be even a name. He is a collection of trivial fourth-century verses recalled only because they incidentally record contemporary preoccupations. Expert in the metric and the diction that he taught as grammaticus, he could turn a stanza on anything—on a city, a Cæsar, or a sage. Only he preferred topics that came handily in series: the order of the daily round or of noble cities, twelve Cæsars, seven sages, a roster of Trojan heroes. These are topics for Latin verses in school. Many of his poems are evidently, and others probably, school exercises. This in itself, the acceptance of themes as literature, is eloquent of the literary habit of sophistic.

For the work of Ausonius may be summed up as declamatio.[5] Its being mainly in verse hardly modifies its character beyond emphasizing sententiæ. The conciseness imposed upon some of his work by his predilection for epigrams is the balance and word-play of rhetoric, not the focus of poetry. That poetic was rhetoric applied to verse Ausonius was not the man to doubt. His praise of the Bordeaux rhetors for both alike[6] increases the probability that the two were in fact alike; and this is confirmed by his own verse. It is confirmed also by the appearance of several local celebrities now as grammatici, now as rhetores. The function of the former was traditionally both to teach elegant correctness and to expound the poets; of the latter, to train directly for oratory. But the two functions thus distinguished by Quintilian seem in fourth-century Bordeaux to have been combined, or at least to have been exercised successively by the same person.[7]

Evidently the sophistic conception of style as dilation by decoration and literary allusion was still prevalent. To be literary was to dilate. Of this Ausonius sometimes shows a humorous awareness.

I might tell thee outright; but for more pleasure I will talk in mazes and with speech drawn out get full enjoyment.[8]

But the humor of his address to his stenographer does not make the description of composing the less true to the habit of his time.

I ponder works of generous scope; and thick and fast like hail the words tumble off my tongue.... I declaim, as now, at greatest speed, talking in circles round my theme....[9]

The typical declamator appears in Exuperius, “majestic in gait and in great words.”[10] Literary tags, especially in panegyric, come thick.

Who like you can approach the charm of Æsop, the sophistic perorations of Isocrates, the arguments of Demosthenes, the Tullian richness, or the felicity of our own Maro?[11]

The speeches and poems of these men, and of Ausonius himself,[12] are typically occasional. Their ideal of aptness is sought by following the recipes for encomium. Literature, long fixed, was to be attained by expert conformity.

Evidently too these encomiasts still had their reward.[13] As official spokesmen they were appointed to public office. Ausonius himself rose with the fortunes of Gratian. From being his tutor he mounted by the steps of comes and quæstor to be in 378 præfectus Galliarum. Such a position dispenses a man from writing for posterity, and effectually prevents him from questioning the permanence of an order of life and thought already spent. Until the Roman world fell apart, it was satisfyingly enclosed in the schools of Bordeaux.

2. Sidonius Apollinaris

Cherishing of the past, rhetorical education, obsession of style—all this is embodied in the Roman prefect and Christian bishop Sidonius Apollinaris.[14] His letters and poems, current through the middle age as models of style, are consistently in the modes of sophistic. Commemorations, addresses of welcome or congratulation, above all panegyrics, they follow the tradition of declamatio;[15] and their allusions abundantly exemplify both the school practise of his day and the literary preoccupations.

Sending to Perpetuus his discourse at Bourges, Sidonius apologizes for its defects of style.

Neither rhetorical division, nor oratorical urgency, nor the figures of grammatica have contributed to it appropriate ornament and virtuosity. For I did not give myself the pleasure of adjusting, after the habit of those who file their perorations, the weight of narrative, or the figures of poetry, or the sparks of the cadences practised in school.[16]

A long letter to Domitius, describing villa life in detail most interesting to the historian, contains a lively passage of description.

How pleasant the sound of crickets chorusing at midday, frogs prating as twilight broods, swans and geese trumpeting their matings at night, cocks in concert crowing untimely!

So far Sidonius sounds as if he had a respite from style. The picturesqueness seems to spring from observation. But habit is too strong to let him either stop there or dispense with literary allusions. He goes on:

ominous ravens thrice saluting the ruddy torch of rising Aurora, and at daybreak Philomela whispering among the bushes, Progne chirping among the posts. To this symphony you may add the shepherds’ reed music, which in rivalry of songs by night the unsleeping Tityri of our mountains practise among herds whose bells echo through the cropped pastures. But all the various melodies of voices and of songs will the more caressingly lure your sleep.[17]

Balance has never been pursued more anxiously. The teaching of Probus is praised for handing down:

the loftiness of the epic poet and the wit of the comic, the lyrist’s tunefulness and the orator’s declamation, the historian’s truth and the satirist’s figure, the grammarian’s regularity and the panegyrist’s plausibility, the sophist’s seriousness and the epigrammatist’s liberty, the commentator’s lucidity and the barrister’s obscurity.[18]

The letter of welcome to Constans has a similar series of balanced contrasts.

For days there was in each mind the paradox that your person, with the weight of age and the frailty of illness, lofty in rank and venerable in religion, with mind bent only on giving pleasure, broke so many bars, so many difficulties in the way of your coming: the journey’s length, the shortness of the days; the snows’ abundance, the poverty of provisions; deserts’ wideness, narrowness of lodgings; in the roads chasms miry with the wetting of showers or rutted with the dryness of frosts; besides, either banks rough with rocks or rivers frozen slippery, hills rugged to climb or valleys scoured by the frequency of landslides. Through all these discomforts, because you sought not your private comfort, you brought back the public love.[19]

Such contrasts in series are sometimes made even more artificial by word-play.

He responds as Pythagoras, discriminates as Socrates; evolves as Plato, involves as Aristotle; as Æschines soothes, as Demosthenes provokes; as Hortensius is in spring, as Cethegus in summer; hurries as Curio, lingers as Fabius; simulates as Crassus, dissimulates as Cæsar; has the suasion of Cato, the dissuasion of Appius, the persuasion of Cicero.[20]

This is the “pomp of Roman speech.”[21]

The aristocracy bent on discarding the scales of Celtic speech was indoctrinated now with the style of oratory, now with the modes of the Muses.[22]

Sidonius feels himself the representative of a great tradition.[23] That tradition was generally ceremonious regard for usage and a certain anxiety to exhibit culture by literary allusions and by command of the technic of style. Generally, that is, the literary tradition of Gaul was sophistic. Specifically it was declamatio.[24] The school tradition celebrated by the elder Seneca, and made by him and by the declamatores after him the exemplar of oratory, is seen in the pages of Sidonius equally to monopolize the schools and the platforms of Gaul. This is rhetoric, and there is no other. It is fully displayed in the long letters to Lupus[25] and to Claudianus Mamertius,[26] not only in conclusive evidence of detail, but as a conception that is pervasive because it is exclusive. As in the letter above to Probus, there is frequent use of the words declamatio, declamare, controversia, etc.

I remember that your boyhood was competently taught in the liberal schools; and I have satisfied myself that you often declaimed before an orator ardently and eloquently.[27]

Now blows the epos of tragedies, now soothes gay comedy, now flame satires and the oratory of debates on tyrants.[28]

He would vary prosopopœia according to the quality of person, time, and place, and that in words not ordinary, but thought out as great and beautiful. In debate assignments [he was] strong and muscular.[29]

The most extended reference is the letter to Remigius about the collection which had originally, perhaps, been his desk-book at Rheims, and which had been revised and copied for imitation.

A certain Auvergnat on his way to Belgium ... filched from your scribe or bookseller, whether you will or not, at a price very large, though doubtless inadequate, the first draft of your Declamationes. When he came back to us ... I took care to have them all copied. It was the universal opinion that few such can now be spoken. For few, if any, bring to such assignments even an approximately equal ... aptness in examples, authority in evidence; propriety in epithets, urbanity in figures; force in argument, weight in appeal; flow of words, stroke of cadence. The structure, moreover, is strong and firm, the very clever transitions woven with pauses that cannot be resolved. Nor is it the less smooth, light, every way rounded, and such as aptly to speed a reader’s tongue without making it stumble, or stutter over rough combinations, or twist into the chamber of the palate. Finally all is liquid, ductile, as when the finger runs without a scratch over a surface of crystal or onyx.... There is no man now living whose discourse your skill cannot easily outdistance and surpass.[30]

Interesting as is the glimpse of the transmission and traffic of books, it is quite overshadowed by the significance of such a collection. Evidently it was regarded not only as a storehouse for imitation in school, but as a work of literature. Similarly were collected early in the sixth century the declamationes of Ennodius, Bishop of Pavia.[31] The letter of Sidonius specifies, moreover, those literary excellences which were sought alike in teaching and in professional practise. What he means, for instance, by firmness of structura is not cogency of composition, but smoothness of style; and revision to this end involves meticulous adjustment to tongue and ear.

Other references show equally that the exercises of the schools were carried, as in the earlier imperial centuries, into public speaking and literature. The orator’s achievement is not the persuasion of his fellow men; it is his own virtuosity.

He spoke with order, weight, ardor, with great keenness, greater fluency, greatest skill.[32]

The climax of the praise is his disciplina. Declamatio teaches boys to develop an outline at length.

So providing boys’ themes with pieces to weave in, they understood that for youth expression consists rather in working out what is brief than in cutting down what is extended.[33]

But this is no less the achievement of the finished orator.

So a great orator, if he essays an affair that is small, shows the more convincingly that his talent is large.[34]

The habit of dilation is carried into poetry. Is it not sanctioned by Horace?

But if any one suggests that a poem so diffuse is to be blamed for exceeding the sparseness of epigram, he exposes himself as not having read the Etruscan baths, nor the Hercules of Sorrento, nor the locks of Flavius Earinus, nor the Tibur of Vopiscus, nor anything at all from the Silvæ of our Papinius; for all these ecphrases are not confined by the poet thus prejudged within the narrow bounds of distichs or quatrains. Rather as Horace, though a lyrist, teaches in his volume on the poetic art, he appropriately extends the matter he has undertaken by many, yes, and purple, patches from the common store.[35]

Horace is so misapplied because declamatio tends to merge poetic in rhetoric.[36] The poems of Sidonius differ from his prose in little but verse. Three of the longer ones are panegyrics; all are occasional; all show the same habits of style. The literary tags used to sum up the teaching of Probus[37] assign to poetry a kind of appropriateness which belongs to rhetoric. Sapaudus owes his literary reputation to his training in declamatio under Pragmatius, who used to “break the rhetoric benches” with a peroration.[38]

In short, the rhetoric and the poetic of fifth-century Gaul are seen in Sidonius to be following faithfully the sophistic tradition of declamatio. He knows all its recipes. From correctness conceived as archaism and elegance conceived as ceremony, through dilation by the Gorgian figures and by literary allusion, he is constant to the sophistic ideal of expert impressiveness.[39] Augustine had been the pioneer of the Christian future of rhetoric; Sidonius was a complacent reactionary of its decadent Roman past.

3. Textbooks

a. GRAMMATICA AND DIALECTICA

In this period were written the Latin grammars authoritative throughout the middle age, those of Donatus and Priscian.[40] The former, used generally in two parts as an introductory manual, was so current, indeed, as to become common property and to reduce its author’s name to a common noun.[41] Priscian came to be used as a second book.[42]

The ancient tradition including in the scope of grammatica not only meters and some of the figures of speech, but also the study of poetry through prælectiones,[43] is recognized in several of the preliminary definitions.

What is grammatica? The lore of interpreting poets and story-writers and the theory of writing and speaking correctly.[44]

St. Augustine refers to this induction into poetry as habitual.

Without some training in poetic you would not dare to attempt the function of grammarian. Asper, Cornutus, Donatus, and others without number are required, that any poet whose verse appears to seek the applause of the theater may be understood.[45]

For such teaching the favorite author was Vergil; the favorite authority, the “Ars Poetica” of Horace.

From this period come also the standard medieval textbooks of logic. The logic of Aristotle was mediated to the whole middle age by the translations and commentaries of Boethius. “He translated the Εἰσαγωγή of Porphyry and the whole of Aristotle’s Organon. He wrote a double commentary on the Εἰσαγωγή and commentaries on the Categories and the De interpretatione of Aristotle, and on the Topica of Cicero. He also composed original treatises on the categorical and hypothetical syllogism, on Division and on Topical Differences.”[46] The medieval order of studies was: Porphyry’s Introduction, the Categories, Interpretation, Syllogisms, Topics.

b. RHETORICA

Quintilian was known to both Ausonius and Sidonius, and doubtless generally to the rhetors of Gaul.[47] But his work is addressed rather to teachers than to pupils. More available for the schools was Cicero’s youthful compend De inventione. The early and continued use of this is widely attested. Its contents are as follows:

Book I. i-vi scope, function, and relations of rhetoric; vii its five parts; viii-xiii investigation (with status and quæstio); xiv the parts of a speech; xv-xviii exordium; xix-xxi statement of facts; xxii-xxiii division; xxiv-xli proof (with adaptation to the persons and the case, and with the kinds of argument); xlii-li rebuttal; lii-lv conclusion (with appeal to feeling).

Book II (expansion of I in pleading). i-iv introductory review, the Aristotelian type and the Isocratean type, the fields of oratory, the determining of the issue (status); v-xvi issues of fact (status coniecturalis) in relation to motive, person, evidence; xvii-xx issues of terms (status definitivus); xxi-xxxvi issues involving more general considerations (status generalis); xxxvii-xxxix profit (præmium) in relation to advantages in themselves and to the person concerned, in general and with reference to particular opportunities; xl-li disputed written evidence; lii typical subjects of deliberative oratory; liii-lvii honor, utility, necessity; lix encomium and invective.

To this was added in general medieval use the Rhetorica ad Herennium, probably by Cornificius, but thought throughout the middle age to be Cicero’s.[48] When this began its medieval vogue is difficult to determine. Since it is not mentioned by either Cassiodorus or Isidore, it may not have been generally current before the Carolingian revival. Meantime the fourth century added, besides the commentary of Victorinus on the De inventione, the compendious catechism of Fortunatianus;[49] and the fifth century, the longer work of Julius Victor.[50]

B. The Trivium in Compends of the Seven Liberal Arts

The relations of rhetoric to grammar on the one hand and to logic on the other must be considered in determining its function at any period of its history. The ancient grammatica, for instance, included at its best not only metric and some of the figures of speech, but a certain induction into poetry. Its field of composition was pretty definitely marked out in traditional elementary exercises.[51] Rhetorica as conceived by Aristotle or by Cicero concerns itself of necessity with logic. With Quintilian not only proof and refutation, but that estimate of the whole line of argument for which he provides systematic analysis under the traditional head of status, are largely logical. Logic may be used for analysis without presentation. This, indeed, is abstractly its proper function, and indicates its relation to philosophy; but in actual practise, or in a given system of teaching, its relation may be rather to rhetoric, and conversely rhetoric, by yielding its field of inventio to logic, may be reduced to the study of style.

So the estimate of the rhetoric or the poetic of a given period must consider the contemporary view of the whole Trivium. This obligation is obvious where the Trivium is conceived as a unified group of studies; but it is no less important where the three studies are pursued without explicit relations. Indeed, one of the measures of effective functioning in any one of them is the fostering or the ignoring of their relations. A survey of the history of the Trivium in this aspect distinguishes the lingering of ancient educational traditions in the fourth and fifth centuries and their lapse in the sixth and seventh, then that increasing range of cathedral and especially monastic schools which received its historic impulse from Charlemagne. The great monastic schools come to their prime in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; in the thirteenth they yield to the universities. The dominant member of the Trivium in the earliest of these periods is the rhetorica of decadent antiquity; from the seventh into the tenth it is grammatica; from the eleventh on, it is dialectica.

1. Martianus Capella

The division of studies into seven liberal arts came to the middle age from Varro’s Disciplina largely through Martianus Capella.[52] His Marriage of Philology and Mercury was widely current for centuries. The allegory implied by his title is carried out in ornate verse and prose through two books. In the other seven books allegory is reduced to the conventional description introducing each of the arts in turn with appropriate costume, symbols, and speech. Thus the work divides sharply into a grandiose allegorical prelude of two books, with a similar prelude to each following book, and a sober, concise, pedestrian compend of grammatica (III), dialectica (IV), rhetorica (V), geometria (VI), arithmetica (VII), astronomia (VIII), and harmonia (IX).

Grammatica, the first of the language studies, claims its ancient territory, including the exposition of poetry. The subsequent treatment is conventional and incomplete.[53]

The Lady Dialectica is more assertive.

I claim jurisdiction over whatsoever the other arts utter; for evidently neither Grammatica herself, whom your ears have approved, nor the second sister, renowned for the skill of rich utterance, nor she who reduces to line varieties of forms ... can be explained without my theories. Nay, in my domain and jurisdiction abide six norms, to which the other disciplines conform. For the first concerns naming; the second, defining; the third, affirming; the fourth, concluding; the fifth, judging, which bears upon the interpretation of poets and their poems; the sixth, diction, which is adapted to rhetors.[54]

The fifth norma annexes that part of grammatica which was most remote from logic; the sixth trenches on rhetorica. The actual extension of dialectica into the ancient domain of rhetoric during the high middle age[55] may have found here some warrant. But Martianus himself does not include these items either in the prospectus immediately following or in the subsequent compend.[56]

Rhetorica enters Book V with such pomp and noise as to frighten some of the minor symbols.

But while the crowd of gods terrestrial was thus disconcerted, behold a woman of loftiest stature and great assurance, with countenance of radiant splendor, made her solemn entry. Helmeted and crowned with royal majesty, she held ready for defense or for attack weapons that gleamed with the flash of lightning. Beneath her armor the vesture draped Roman-wise about her shoulders glittered with the various light of all figuræ, all schemata; and she was cinctured with most precious colores for jewels. The clatter of her weapons as she moved was as if thunder in the crash of a cloud aflame broke with leaping echoes. Nay, it seemed as if, like Jove, she herself could hurl the thunderbolt. For as queen in control of all things she has shown power to move men whither she pleased, or whence, to bow them to tears, to incite them to rage, to transform the mien and feeling as well of cities as of embattled armies and all the hosts of the peoples.[57]

After this fanfare Rhetorica settles down to drill. Though the predilection for declamatio transpires now and then even in this, the compend covers all five parts of the ancient program, and gives to inventio and dispositio more than twice the space granted to elocutio. There is room not only for character and the feelings (ἤθη and πάθη), but for status and analysis of types of argument. Most of the examples are from Cicero. The rhetoric that Martianus preaches is quite distinct from that which he practises. Its proportions are those of the better ancient tradition. It does not even dilate on colores.[58] For all the rodomontade with which it is introduced, the ancient program is still comprehended.

2. Cassiodorus

The survey included by the monk Cassiodorus[59] in his Institutiones is hardly more than an enumeration. The seven arts are not considered in their larger aspects; and the Trivium is merely sketched. Rhetorica, after being summarily distinguished from dialectica and divided into its typical considerations and objects, is hastened through the parts of a speech into the emotions. Then defining it anew and dividing it into its traditional five parts, Cassiodorus enumerates status, reverts to the parts of a speech, cites Quintilian and Fortunatianus, and classifies arguments. The meager summary is not even clear. Nevertheless the influence of Cassiodorus in carrying forward the idea of the seven arts is attested by frequent reference.[60]

3. Isidore

In the seventh century, and for centuries afterward, a chief purveyor of the lore of the seven arts was the Etymologiæ, or Origines, of the Spanish bishop Isidore of Seville.[61] The work is an aggregation of summaries, not only of the seven arts, which occupy only three books of the twenty, but of medicine, law, holy writ, history, the hierarchy celestial and terrestrial, zoölogy, geography, metallurgy, agriculture, and crafts. Though it has no single guiding scheme, its brief chapters are grouped under headings fairly convenient for reference. It is a guide-book, rendering its first service when books were few and hard to get, and long continuing in vogue. In the thirteenth century Vincent of Beauvais,[62] undertaking more systematically a compend hardly less comprehensive, his vast Speculum, transferred to it whole passages from Isidore.

Isidore appealed to the earlier middle age as a mediator not only of manifold lore, but especially of ancient tradition.

The disciplines of the liberal arts are seven: first grammatica, i.e., skill in speaking; second, rhetorica, for the splendor and abundance of its eloquence deemed necessary especially in political questions;[63] third, dialectica, surnamed logica, which by subtlest arguments distinguishes the true from the false. I. ii.

Isidore’s grammatica has the usual contents, including schemata, tropi, and metric.[64] Fabula and historia reflect the ancient elementary exercises.[65] His second book contains both rhetorica and dialectica.

“Rhetorica is the lore of speaking well on political questions to persuade [men of what is] just and good. It is called by a Greek name ἀπὸ τοῦ ῥητορίζειν, i.e., from wealth of speech. For in Greek speech is called ῥῆσις, and an orator ῥήτωρ. Rhetorica, moreover, is connected with grammatica. In the one we learn the lore of speaking correctly; in the other we perceive how to utter what we have learned. II. i.

“This discipline was invented by the Greeks—Gorgias, Aristotle, Hermagoras, and transferred to Latin by Cicero and Quintilian.... The perfect knowledge of this discipline makes the orator. ii.

“The orator, then, is a good man skilled in speaking: good, i.e., in nature, breeding, education; skilled in speaking, i.e., in expert eloquence. This consists of five parts (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio) and in the function of persuading.”... iii.

In the same summary fashion Isidore treats the three fields, status, simple or compound proposition, the four parts of a speech, the five sorts of cases, syllogisms, law, apothegm, proof and disproof, the school exercises prosopopœia and ethopœia, questions abstract and concrete. The remainder of the section, somewhat more than one third, is devoted to elocutio: the three styles, the division into phrase, clause, and period, the typical faults of phrasing, and the figures. As to the last he makes a distinction lost on his later medieval readers. “Of these most have been noted above under grammatica as the schemata of Donatus. Therefore only those should find place here which hardly occur in a poem, but freely in a speech.” II. xxi.

“Dialectica is the discipline designed for the discussion of cases (ad disserendas causas). It is that species of philosophy which is called logica, i.e., the theory controlling definition, investigation and discussion. For it teaches in many forms of questions how by discussion the true may be distinguished from the false.... Therefore dialectica follows the discipline of rhetorica because they have many things in common.” II. xxii.

To distinguish the two, Isidore quotes from Varro a metaphor often quoted from Zeno; dialectica is the closed fist, rhetorica the open hand. The one is the more acute in discussing, the other the more fluent in imparting; the one is of the schools, the other of the forum; the one for scholars, the other for the people. xxiii.

A chapter (xxiv) inserted here groups all the seven arts under philosophia, which is threefold:[66] (1) naturalis (physica), (2) moralis (ethica), (3) rationalis (logica), “in which is discussed how in the causes of things or in the conduct of life truth itself may be sought.” Isidore does not, however, pursue this larger scope of logica. Though he cites additionally Plato’s use of the term to include both dialectica and rhetorica, he goes on to enumerate other divisions of philosophy, and then (xxv) to the usual items of dialectica as presented by Boethius: Porphyry’s Introduction, Aristotle’s Categories, interpretation, syllogisms, division and definition, topics.

The program for the Trivium keeps in the main the ancient proportions. Some usurpation of composition by dialectica, some leaning of rhetorica toward dilation and decoration, may be read into it; but each of the two studies clearly has its own function, and work enough for serious occupation. As in other parts of his aggregation, Isidore makes his summary of the Trivium a list of studies, not a group. He attempts no unified plan. Therefore his putting of rhetorica before instead of after dialectica should hardly be pressed for significance.

FOOTNOTES: