De figuris: Rediscovering Publius Rutilius Lupus

The authors present a Latin text—with a facing English translation—of the first-century-CE rhetorician Publius Rutilius Lupus’s De figuris sententiarum et elocutionis based on David Ruhnken’s 1768 edition as revised by C. H. Frotscher (1831) and collated with variant readings adopted by others, especially Karl Halm’s 1863 edition. This first-ever English translation begins with an introduction that presents two stages of the text’s reception history: its impact on the profusion of rhetorical compendiums in the sixteenth century and the treatment that it received in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, which led twentieth-century scholars to marginalize the treatise as missing the figures of thought promised by its title. The authors challenge this uncharitable interpretation, concluding that this early example of the genre of the compendium of rhetorical figures indeed includes figures of both speech and thought (the latter being topical in nature). Understanding De figuris as primarily a pedagogical text in the spirit of late Hellenistic rhetorical educational practices that employed both Attic and Asianist models, they suggest that we should also read the text as protreptic, as urging students to study this sequence of figures under the expert guidance of Rutilius and his school and in the process become both wise and eloquent.