26 t e c hni c a l r he t or i c

studies written for themselves. These works will be discussed in detail in

Chapter 5.
Handbooks and technical treatises were written on a variety of other
subjects in antiquity. The earliest are medical works, originating in the
school of Hippocrates in the fth century; some, for example On Airs,
Waters, and Places, are theoretical, but others, for example On Wounds
to the Head, are practical handbooks for physicians and surgeons.
Fourth-century technical handbooks include Xenophons works On
Horsemanship and On the Duties of a Cavalry Commander. Greek works
on geometry and grammar appeared in the third and second centuries
b.c.; the most famous, Euclids Elements of Geometry, dates from around
300. The earliest grammar book to have survived is that by Dionysius
Thrax, written in the middle of the second century and used in Greek
schools for over fteen hundred years. There were also technical works
on agriculture, astronomy, architecture, military tactics, music, the in-
terpretation of dreams, and other subjects. For the history of rhetoric,
however, the most important handbooks other than those directly con-
cerned with public speaking were the progymnasmata, which describe
the system of teaching prose composition that developed in the Hellen-
istic period and continued in use until early modern times.
Progymnasmata
The Greek word progymnasmata means preliminary exercises, prelim-
inary, that is, to declamation as practiced in schools of rhetoric. The
word occurs once in Rhetoric for Alexander (28.1436a25), suggesting that
some exercises in written composition were already in use in the fourth
century, and two of the common exercises are mentioned in Rhetoric for
Herennius, written in the early rst century b.c. (narrative in 1.12 and
maxim in 4.5657). Four Greek handbooks on composition survive, and
there is a Latin discussion of the subject in Quintilians rhetorical trea-
tise (2.4). Practice in composition began in grammar schools with the
simplest narrative exercises, followed by gradually more dicult assign-
ments involving proving or disproving something, and were sometimes
continued in the early years of the study of rhetoric.

The earliest surviving treatment of progymnasmata is the work of

Aelius Theon, a teacher in Alexandria in the middle of the rst century