Rhetoric

…is by Aristotle in his Rhetoric:

” Aristotle’s Rhetoric both recorded contemporary practice and sought its reform through fitting it into its proper category among the arts. One of the masterstrokes of Aristotle’s thought on the subject is his teaching that rhetoric itself is not a productive art of making but is an…

Aristotle’s Rhetoric and similar works by others have, indeed, served as model texts for Western scholars and students from antiquity to the present day.

…to Aristotle, who in the Rhetoric distinguished between ethos (natural bent, disposition, or moral character) and pathos (emotion) displayed in a given situation. And the Latin rhetorician Quintilian, in the 1st century ce, noted that ethos is akin to comedy and pathos to tragedy. The distinction is important to Renaissance…

…works on literary subjects, the Rhetoric, and above all, the Poetics, had an immense effect on literary theory after the Renaissance. In the ancient world, Aristotelian doctrine was known mainly through the works of his successor Theophrastus (c. 372–288/287), now lost except for two books on plants and a famous…