rhetoric
The Five Canons of Rhetoric
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The orator's whole craft, broken into five tasks: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.
The five canons split a speaker's work into five stages: finding the arguments (inventio), ordering them (dispositio), wording them well (elocutio), committing the speech to memory (memoria), and performing it (pronuntiatio/actio). The scheme grew out of Hellenistic Greek rhetorical teaching, took its lasting Latin form in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero's De Inventione (1st c. BCE), and was then enshrined in Quintilian's great teaching manual (late 1st c. CE). It organized rhetorical education in the West for nearly two thousand years.
Where this idea shows up
5 Greek sourcesWhere to read it
- De Inventione84 BCECicero· Formiae
- On Oratory55 BCECicero· Formiae
- Partitiones Oratoriae43 BCECicero· Formiae