Among the tasks of the Lyceum Institute is a restoration of forgotten traditions and texts. Newly produced within this initiative is our republication of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a classic work in Roman oratory, in the English translation by Harry Caplan. This text, from roughly 80BC, informed the study of rhetoric in the days of Cicero, Quintilian, and was used to educate Scholastic and Renaissance thinkers as well. It forms not only an important historical piece, however, but can continue to serve as an excellent introduction to the art of rhetoric. It is our pleasure, therefore, to bring this volume back into an affordable print copy.
The Rhetorica ad Herennium
As books in rhetoric go, the flourishes provided by the unknown author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium are few and far between. The text reads much more as a manual—in want of supplementation by practical applications of the lessons it teaches. But despite this succinct form of its presentation, the Rhetorica nevertheless provides us with the outlines of both structure and style, and will be a useful instrument in the hands of any committed student to rhetoric.
As with all our republications, we have priced it affordably: a mere $10. Intended, as all our reprints are, to be a working copy, this text ought to be on the shelves of anyone seriously studying language and wishing to improve his facility with its use.
We have also made the text freely available in PDF here. Please consider donating if you download our work!
The Rhetorica ad Herennium remains the oldest surviving complete Latin manual of rhetoric and one of the most influential works on persuasive speech in Western thinking. This Lyceum Institute reprint presents the 1954 public domain English translation by Harry Caplan, edited for modern readers, students, and scholars. Caplan’s clear, accessible English preserves the precision and practical insight of the original treatise, guiding readers through the fundamentals of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. From judicial advocacy to deliberative counsel and epideictic praise and blame, this edition illuminates the enduring techniques of classical rhetoric that shaped Cicero, Quintilian, and the entire tradition of rhetorical education in the Latin West and into the vernacular languages of the Renaissance.
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