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rhetoric

To Prepon (Decorum / Fittingness)

τὸ πρέπον

Fitting what you say, and how you say it, to the speaker, subject, audience, and occasion.

To prepon (Latin decorum) is the principle that style and content must suit the subject, the audience, the speaker's character, and the moment — grand language for grand themes, plain language for humble ones. The idea reaches back to the Sophists and is treated by Aristotle in the Rhetoric (4th c. BCE), but it became a cornerstone of style in Cicero's Orator and Horace's Ars Poetica, and the supreme regulator of style in Quintilian. It governed both rhetoric and literary criticism for centuries.

Where this idea shows up

9 Greek sources

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