Cicero: The Picturing of a Rhetoric
Paulo Martins
Homologies between verbal and non-verbal discourses are frequent in Classical Antiquity. Plutarch in the Glory of the Athenians, 346 F, quotes Simonides of Ceos: “painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks. ...”. Aristotle in his Poetics establishes similarities between painting and poetry when mentioning Pauson’s, Polignoto’s, Dionysius’ and Zeuxis’ painting techniques (Poetics, 361). This text aims to discuss the homology, created by Cicero in De Inuentione (Book II), between his project of Rhetoric and Zeuxis’s painting. After establishing the genre of painting performed by Zeuxis, revising the material culture of the period and observing the textual references about his work, we will propose a new interpretation about this first project of Cicero’s for a Rhetoric.
