poetic they are woven into the movement of the plot. Oratory, like poetry,
is emotional, as Longinus asserts.[81] Cicero phrases the aim of the
orator as "docere, delectare, et movere," to prove, to delight, to move
emotionally.[82] The vividness and emotion, as well as the charm, of
poetic are indispensable in attaining the ultimate aim of rhetoric--
persuasion. The orator must be himself moved, according to Quintilian,[83]
just as the poet, according to Aristotle.[84] That essential quality,
indeed, of poetic, the realization of character and situation which
presents vividly a situation or event to the mind's eye of the reader or
hearer so that he seems to participate in the action and vicariously live
through it, was incorporated into rhetoric as ἐνέγεια, a figure of speech.
There petrified in an alien substance, this characteristic quality of
poetic was transmitted to another age which knew of it through no other
source.[85] Thus a successful orator narrated with descriptive vividness
the circumstances, for instance, of a cruel murder, and even dramatized,
speaking now in the person of one actor, now of another, the situation
which he was endeavoring to realize for his audience. He was thus enabled
better to carry his audience with him to his ultimate goal of persuasion.

But though rhetoric might for the moment thus borrow poetic, and though
poetic might borrow rhetoric, the two remained distinct in the large, each
conceived as having its own movement, its composition, distinct from that
of the other.




Chapter IV

Classical Blending of Rhetoric and Poetic