Hermagoras of Temnos

Hermagoras of Temnos was an important Greek teacher of speech . He lived in the 2nd century BC. Chr.

The geographer Strabo attests that Hermagoras comes from Temnos (near Pergamon ) .

His six-book work on rhetoric with the title Téchnai rhetorikaí became the basic book of rhetorical teaching in the Roman Republic because of its clear systematic order . Although the work is lost, it can be largely reconstructed from Cicero's De inventione and from Quintilian's Institutio oratoria . Hermagoras put eloquence in the service of the state coexistence of the people, which is why the court speeches are in the foreground with him. He justified the thesis theory (a system of legal cases) and the stasis theory , which analyzes possible questions for prosecution, defense and judgment. In general, the processing of legal questions in ancient Greece fell to the rhetoricians, because there was no elaborate jurisprudence and legal experts in the style of Rome .

Tradition has it that Hermagoras asked the speaker to have five qualities: a good nose, a sense of order, a sophisticated style, a good memory and an expressive presentation.

Although his own work was judged by Cicero in his work Brutus and by Tacitus in his Dialogus de oratoribus to be unusually boring and thin as a straw, Hermagoras' influence on the Roman rhetoric that soon afterwards was extremely great.

literature

Nicolas Wiater: Hermagoras von Temnos and the stasis teaching. In: Bernhard Zimmermann , Antonios Rengakos (Hrsg.): Handbook of the Greek literature of antiquity. Volume 2: The Literature of the Classical and Hellenistic Period. CH Beck, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-61818-5 , pp. 871-873.
Werner Eisenhut : Introduction to ancient rhetoric and its history. Darmstadt 1977, ISBN 978-3-534-18993-9 .
Manfred Fuhrmann : The ancient rhetoric. An introduction (= Artemis introductions. 10). Artemis, Munich et al. 1984, ISBN 3-7608-1304-6 (6th, revised edition. Artemis & Winkler, Mannheim 2011, ISBN 978-3-538-07325-8 ). Pp. 81 ff., 99 ff.
Wilfried Stroh : The Power of Speech: A Little History of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece and Rome. Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3550087530 .

Individual evidence

↑ Uwe Wesel : History of the law. From the early forms to the present . 3rd revised and expanded edition. Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-47543-4 . Marg. 125.

personal data
SURNAME	Hermagoras of Temnos
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Greek speech teacher
DATE OF BIRTH	3rd century BC BC or 2nd century BC Chr.
DATE OF DEATH	2nd century BC BC or 1st century BC Chr.

[1] Uwe Wesel : History of the law. From the early forms to the present . 3rd revised and expanded edition. Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-47543-4 . Marg. 125.