Lost rhetoric found. Non-extant rhetorical handbooks of rhetoricians and sophists from the pre-P~platonic time until late Hellenism as literary sources in Suda

Abstract

This article touches an area of the history and technical disposition of rhetoric, which has not been considered a subject or research on rhetoric so far. Under the marginalized and rather frustrating condition of lost works of rhetoric we can see that the research concerning the history of rhetoric stops at the point where the ground of evidential rhetorical handbooks is not available. We will present rhetorical textbooks mostly unknown, since a documentation exists for them only in titles of the writings, while the books got lost. This work is a contribution to the historical development of rhetoric. We will discuss it as far as possible, since the authorship and chronological relation is in many cases not clear.