Hermagoras of Temnos (, fl. 1st century BC) was an Ancient Greek rhetorician of the Rhodian school and teacher of rhetoric in Rome, where the Suda states he died at an advanced age.Suda ε 3024
He appears to have tried to excel as an orator (or rather declaimer) as well as a teacher of rhetoric.Quintilian v. .3. § 59, viii. pr. § 3Suda ε 3024 But it is especially as a teacher of rhetoric that he is known to us. The members of his school, among whom numbered the jurist Titus Accius, called themselves Hermagorei. Hermagoras's chief opponents were Posidonius of Rhodes, who is said to have contended with him in argument in the presence of Pompey, and Athenaeus.Plutarch, Pompey, 42
He devoted particular attention to what is called inventio, and made a peculiar division of the parts of an oration, which differed from that adopted by other rhetoricians.Quintilian iii. 1. § 16 Cicero opposes his system,Cicero, de Inventione i. 6 but Quintilian defends it,Quintilian iii. 3. § 9, 5. §§ 4, 16, &c., 6. § 56 though in some parts the latter censures what Cicero approves of.Cicero, de Inventione i. 11Quintilian iii. 6. § 60, &c. But in his eagerness to systematize the parts of an oration, he was said to have entirely lost sight of the practical point of view from which oratory must be regarded.Quintilian iii. 11. § 22Tacitus, de Oratoribus 19
He appears to have been the author of several works which are lost: the Suda mentions (graeca sunt, non leguntur) , , , , and ,Suda On Line epsilon 3024. although perhaps some or all of these should be attributed to his younger namesake, Hermagoras Carion, the pupil of Theodorus of Gadara.
Hermagoras' method of dividing a topic into its "seven circumstances" (who, what, when, where, why, in what way, by what means), which he may have borrowed from Aristotle, provided the roots of the "5 W's" used widely in journalism, education, and police investigation to ensure thoroughness in the coverage of a particular incident or subject matter.
Edition Dieter Mattes (ed.), Hermagorae Temnitae, Testimonia et Fragmenta (Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana), Leipzig: Teubner 1962.
See also Cicero Rhetoric Rhetorica ad Herennium
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