De Inventione Rhetorica
- Language:
- Latin
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Some scanning errors (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand) · 6 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~410,000 words · 1,939 passages
Cite this work
- APACicero. (n.d.). De Inventione Rhetorica. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/de-inventione-rhetorica-llati-original
- MLACicero. De Inventione Rhetorica. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/de-inventione-rhetorica-llati-original.
- ChicagoCicero. De Inventione Rhetorica. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/cicero/de-inventione-rhetorica-llati-original.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Cicero's youthful treatise on invention — that is, on how the arguments of a speech are found: the original Latin text.
Context and history
He wrote it very young and later disowned it himself: in the De oratore he calls it schoolboy notes that got away from him. That is worth keeping in mind, but not as a reason to dismiss it — it was among the most widely read rhetorical handbooks of the whole Middle Ages, far more so than the works Cicero preferred, and much of medieval rhetoric was learned from it.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
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