This reading was incredibly frustrating for me, because it seemed as though Ramus views himself as all-knowing and that his predecessors were wrong or had too many opinions. For example, Ramus cites many of Quintilian's viewpoints surrounding rhetoric as a virtue. He then says, "it must be seen that each of these statements of Quintilian's opinion is false" (685). And all this time, I didn't think opinions could be wrong... Ramus is incredibly critical of most of the major players that have come before him, but his distaste clearly lies with Quintilian. "Now Quintilian follows Aristotle's and Cicero's confusion of dialectic and rhetoric. Indeed he makes it worse by fabrications of his own, and by including in his teachings all the disputes concerning all the arts he had read or heard something about-- grammar, mathematics, philosophy, drama, wrestling, rhetoric" (681). He goes on to further criticize Quintilian as he claims that he "fails to write about the topic of invention, or to make clear any method of arrangement; he expands the whole subject with mere trifles" (691).
The point I'm trying to make is that Ramus seems to just be throwing a tantrum about something over which he has no control. In this way, he loses ethos and pathos as it makes me question not only his personal credibility, but also his values. While he claims to know all about oration and rhetoric, he has entirely lost my interest and furthermore, my trust.
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