Cicero’s five canons of rhetoric still work; they will always work. Invention, he says, is the drafting of good arguments; disposition is the arrangement of those arguments for best effect; style is giving the argument shape in language; memory is recall in an age before autocue; pronunciation is delivery on the day. Cicero also identified three styles. The plain style should be used to teach, the ornate middle style to please, and the grand style to arouse the emotions. But De oratore was more than a book of instructions on how to talk. It was a book of statecraft as well: the subjects were
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