The Five Canons of Rhetoric

The five canons split a speaker's work into five stages: finding the arguments (inventio), ordering them (dispositio), wording them well (elocutio), committing the speech to memory (memoria), and performing it (pronuntiatio/actio). The scheme grew out of Hellenistic Greek rhetorical teaching, took its lasting Latin form in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero's De Inventione (1st c. BCE), and was then enshrined in Quintilian's great teaching manual (late 1st c. CE). It organized rhetorical education in the West for nearly two thousand years.