Rhetor

Via Rhetorica

This course is a two-year apprenticeship in classical rhetoric, built so that any educator who knows the tradition recognizes it as the real thing — the progymnasmata, the five canons, the Roman masters, declamation. Year One opens with a framework unit — the three appeals, the five canons, the parts of an oration — and then climbs the progymnasmata, the ancient graded sequence of fourteen composition-and-speaking exercises in the order Aphthonius and the Renaissance schoolrooms used them: fable, narrative, chreia, maxim, refutation, and onward. Each unit follows the same rhythm: the concept taught, a classical model read closely and annotated, the student's own written version drafted and revised, and then the piece delivered aloud as a declamation.

The pedagogy comes from Rome's own schools, which aimed at the vir bonus dicendi peritus — the good man skilled in speaking, Cato's phrase made the creed of Quintilian's curriculum. The art and the character are treated as one thing, so a more confident, articulate student is not a side effect but the entire classical point. The course assumes the sentence-level command built in Schola Grammatica and the argumentative skill built in Ars Logica, and it ends where the whole ladder has been pointing: a delivered original oration.

The full course opens September 1. Founding Families watch the ladder fill in — at a price that never moves.