Discusses Pythagoras and Thales, Anximander, Anaximines, Anaxagoras, Archelaus and links whole chain to Socrates. Breaks with Plato, by arguing someday body and soul will be reunited, rejects transmigration of the soul. After St. Augustine many treatises on rhetoric are written, but few advance its theory. In fact, because the Church dominates thinking and deliberative and forensic oratory attenuate, theory focuses on sermonics. In a truth based society, rhetoric is reduced to ornament.
Rhetoric is used for the masses.
B. Averroes does this in the Moslem community using the Koran as his basis. C. Hugh of St. Victor and St. Thomas Aquinas treated rhetoric the same way in the Christian community using the Bible as a basis. There were major speakers during this time, though they were exceptions. A. St. Antony led a group we might call the Mystics. He drew audiences of up to 30,000.