Abstract

Central to an understanding of the history and theory of classical rhetoric is an understanding of the keywords the ancients used to discuss their art. Keywords are those terms which are integral to a text's argument and which often resonate with complex denotations and connotations (Welsch). Keywords carry a heavy freight of meaning that simple, single-word definitions often cannot render. Furthermore, single-word conceptualizations tend to foist the reader's own associations onto the ancient and foreign words. The solution to this problem is not to translate