Rhetoric to Alexander

The authorship of the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum has been the subject of considerable discussion. The suggestion that it is to be attributed to Anaximenes of Lampsacus, a slightly older contemporary of Aristotle, was first made by Petrus Victorius on the strength of a statement of Quintilian (Inst. Orat., 3:4. 9). This view was adopted by Spengel, who, in an extremely arbitrary manner, altered the text at 1421b 7 and 1432b 8 in defiance of all the MSS., in order to reduce the number of genera of oratory from three to two, so as to harmonize with Quintilian’s account of Anaximenes. These emendations are not only unlikely in themselves, but are contradicted by the whole arrangement of Chapters 1–5 and 34–7, where the author clearly deals with three genera, each with two species, and ‘inquiry’ as an extra species. In view of these facts the MS. reading has been retained in these passage

Filosofia