Chapter IX: Book III: studies the speech itself. Book I having presented rhetoric from

the view of the speaker, and Book II from the view of the audience, Book III now applies it directly to the speech.[36]

Since rhetoric must treat systematically three things: (1) what
the means of persuasion are to be, (2) the diction,[37] (3)
how to arrange[38] the parts of the speech, ... [the first has
been discussed]. We have next to speak of the diction. For it
is not enough to know what we ought to say; we must also know
how we ought to say it, and this contributes much to the effect
of the speech. The first subject of our inquiry [(1) above]
was naturally that which comes first by nature, the facts
themselves—in what aspects they are persuasive. The second is
the expression of these in the diction. The third [_not_ (3)
above], which is of very great importance, is the delivery.

The threefold division sketched here seems at first sight to coincide, so far as it goes, with the one that afterward became traditional. Classical rhetoric as a whole assumes a fivefold division: (1) εὕρεσις, _inventio_, the gathering and analysis of the material; (2) τάξις, _dispositio_, _collocatio_, the arrangement, sequence, or movement in the large; (3) λέξις, _elocutio_, the diction, or the choice of words and their combination in phrases, clauses, and sentences, the movement in detail; (4) ὑπόκρισις, _pronuntiatio_, delivery, or “elocution”; (5) μνήμη, _memoria_, memory. But Aristotle’s division neither corresponds to this nor is consistent with itself. The first item is the same in both. Aristotle’s second item is clearly the same as the later third, and has the same name (λέξις, diction). The third item of his opening sentence seems equivalent to the traditional second (τάξις), and uses the corresponding verb (τάξαι); but below he makes his third item instead delivery (ὑπόκρισις), which is the fourth item of the traditional division, and then proceeds in the same chapter to include delivery, by implication, under diction.[39] In a word, the opening division of