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 art and the character are treated as one thing, which is why a student who finishes is not merely more persuasive but harder to fool and harder to push — the aim is someone worth listening to, not someone skilled at winning. The order is deliberate for that reason: a student learns to tell true from false, sees how influence is worked on him, and can build an argument that holds, before he is handed the tools for moving other people. It ends where the whole route has been pointing: a delivered original oration, argued on its merits in front of people who are free to disagree.

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