Abstract
This article attempts to demonstrate that the so-called Special Topics in Aristotle's Rhetoric are neither idia/eidē, endoxa, the traditional logos, nor pisteis as these terms are typically understood within the Aristotelian texts. After an analysis of these important technical terms, I conclude that the material in Rhetoric 1.4–15 is neither of these. Then, analyzing 1.4 as an example section, I argue that the bulk of the material in 1.4–15 is to be understood as previously independent texts, much of which was written for a non-rhetorical context, that were then inserted into a text that has become our Rhetoric by an editor who also added his own (awkward) transitions in order to try to seam these previously independent texts into a more coherent whole. This conclusion suggests that there may not have been a systematic or coherent conception of rhetoric within the Peripatetic school even as late as the first-century BCE when Andronicus edited Aristotle's texts—including the Rhetoric—into their form that has since been transmitted to us.