L’antirrhesis da esercizio preparatorio a genere oratorio: in margine alle orazioni polemiche di Elio Aristide

In some rhetorical treatises of the Late Antiquity we find traces of a debate on a specific form of speech, the ἀντίρρησις or ‘replay speech’, whose characteristics allowed some rhetoricians to consider it an autonomous rhetorical form, and others even a fourth genus, so challenging the ‘aristotelian’ division into three categories: judiciary, deliberative and epideictic. In this paper we discuss how this debate was strictly connected with another debate relating to the genre of a speech in particular, namely Aelius Aristides’ or. 3 To Plato in defence of the Four, which was written in response to the charges appearing in Plato’s Gorgias against Pericles, Cimon, Miltiades, and Themistocles. Although readable only through partial and often second-hand quotations, the debate on the ἀντίρρησις is to be seen as an attempt, by late antique rhetoricians, to update the rhetorical theory in the face of a series of innovations in the field of oratory which took place starting from the early imperial age and found in Aristides one among its major interpreters.