Kitap 3
5.58
I am aware that another explanation is given by Cicero in the first book of his Rhetorica de Inv. i. xi. 14. of the species known as practical, where he says that it is the department under which we consider what is right according to civil usage and equity: this department is regarded by us as the special sphere of the lawyer.
5.59
But I have already mentioned de Inv. i. xi. 14. what his opinion was about this particular work. The Rhetorica are simply a collection of school-notes on rhetoric which he worked up into this treatise while quite a young man. Such faults as they possess are due to his instructor. In the present instance he may have been influenced by the fact that the first examples given by Hermagoras of this species are drawn from legal questions, or by the fact that the Greeks call interpreters of the law πραγματικοί.
5.60
But for these early efforts Cicero substituted his splendid de Oratore and therefore cannot be blamed for giving false instruction. I will now return to Hermagoras. He was the first rhetorician to teach that there was a basis concerned with competence, although the elements of this doctrine are found in Aristotle, Rhet. II. xv. 8. without however any mention of the name.
