The Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero and the origin of the progymnasmata

Abstract

This paper aims to shed light on the earliest stages of the teaching tradition of the “preliminary exercises” (progymnasmata). The evidence provided by Cicero (especially in De inventione) and the Rhetorica ad Herennium, although it can also be traced back to the field of rhetorical exercitatio, offers no proof of the existence of a well-defined “series” of exercises at the beginning of the 1st century BC – exercises conceived as the first stage of oratorical training in preparation for declamations. This suggests that the issue around the earliest dating of such training should be left open, acknowledging the limits that the fragmentary nature of the sources imposes on our ability to reconstruct in de-tail the history of the development of these exercises.