Boethius and Invention

Boethius was a rhetorician who took Aristotle's rhetorical components of style, memory, invention, delivery, and disposition and applied them to his own work. Aristotle believed that each of these components held its own importance and that one should not be held above the other. However, when Boethius brings up these rhetorical elements in his own writings, he doesn't directly say that invention is above the rest of these elements, but he implies that invention is more important than style, memory, delivery, and disposition by talking about invention and the elements within invention for two and a half out of four of his books. The elements within invention are introduction, proof, argument, partition, refutation, and peroration. Boethius seems to justify spending the majority of his work on these elements of invention that he came up with himself by giving each one of the elements its own significance that seems to match the significance of the original five elements that Aristotle talked about. Aristotle focused on spoken rhetoric. By adding these new elements to invention, Boethius was focusing on written rhetoric. His argument for adding these elements to invention was that they each are something that needs to be invented while creating a written rhetorical work. For example, the introduction needs to be invented by the writer before it can be utilized. After the introduction is invented, the argument needs to be invented or else the piece of writing would be incomplete. This logic continues with each one of these elements.

I think the reason why Boethius added these elements to invention is because of the vastly different nature of writing in comparison to speech. Writing has a different level of organization than speech does, and thus requires more specific detail than just invention itself.