as a pupil of Professor E. Leonhard for piano, Professor Herzog for organ and J. J. Maier for counterpoint. After leaving the School he had private lessons from Franz Lachner, and was appointed a professor in the conservatorium in succession to Leonhard in 1859. In 1860 he became professor of composition, and was appointed organist of the Michelskirche, a post he held till 1866. In 1877 he succeeded Wüllner as Hofkapellmeister, and from that time his attention was largely devoted to sacred music. His compositions include works of importance in every form, from the operas Die sieben Raben (Munich, 1869) and Türmers Töchterlein (Munich, 1873) and the oratorio Christoforus, op. 120, to the-well-known quartet for piano and strings in E flat, op. 38, the nonet for wind and strings, op. 139, and the seventeen organ sonatas, which form notable additions to the literature of the instrument. He died in November 1901.
RHEINE, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province of
Westphalia, situated on the Ems, at the point where it becomes
navigable, 29 m. W. by rail of Osnabrück, and at the junction
of main lines to Münster, Rotterdam and Emden. Pop. (1905)
12,801. It is an old-fashioned town with a pronounced Dutch
aspect, and has pretty gardens and promenades. Rheine is the
seat of cotton industries, has manufactures of jute, machinery,
tobacco and flour, and a considerable river trade in agricultural
produce. It received municipal rights in 1327. About a mile
north of Rheine is the castle of Bentlage, the family seat of the
princes of Rheina-Wolbeck.
RHENANUS, BEATUS (1485–1547), German humanist, was
born in 1485 at Schlettstadt in Alsace, where his father, named
Bild, a native of Rheinau (hence the surname Rhenauus), was a
prosperous butcher. He received his early education at the
famous Latin school of Schlettstadt, and afterwards (1503) went
to Paris, where he came under the influence of Tacobus Faber
Stapulensis, an eminent Aristotelian. In 1511 he removed to
Basel, where he became intimate with Desiderius Erasmus, and
took an active share in the publishing enterprises of Joannes
Froben (q.v.). In 1526 he returned to Schlettstadt, and devoted
himself to a life of learned leisure, enlivened with epistolary
and personal intercourse with Erasmus (the printing of whose
more important works he personally superintended) and many
other scholars of his time. He died at Strassburg on the 20th of
July 1547.
His earliest publication was a biography of Geiler of Kaisersberg (1510). Of his subsequent works the principal are Rerum Germanicarum Libri III. (1531), and editions of Velleius Paterculus (ed. princeps, from a MS. discovered by himself, 1522); Tacitus (1519, exclusive of the Histories); Livius (1535); and Erasmus (with a life, 9 vols. fol., 1540–41).
See A. Horawitz, Beatus Rhenanus (1872), and by the same, Des Beatus Rheuanus literarische Tätigkeil (2 vols., 1872); also the notice by R. Hartfelder in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie.
RHETICUS, or Rhaeticus (1514–1576), a surname given to George Joachim, German astronomer and mathematician, from his birth at Feldkirch in that part of Tirol which was anciently the territory of the Rhaeti. Born on the 15th of February 1514, he studied at Tiguri with Oswald Mycone, and afterwards went to Wittenberg where he was appointed professor of mathematics in 1537. Being greatly attracted by the new Copernican theory, he resigned the professorship in 1539, and went to Frauenberg to associate himself with Copernicus, Nicolaus (q.v.), and superintended the printing of the De Orbium Revolutione
which he had persuaded Copernicus to complete. Rheticus
now began his great treatise, Opus Palatinum de Triangulis, and continued to work at it while he occupied his old chair at Wittenberg, and indeed up to his death at Cassovia in Hungary, on the 4th of December 1576. The Opus Palatinum of Rheticus was published by Valentine Otho, mathematician to the electoral
prince palatine, in 1596. It gives tables of sines and cosines, tangents, &c., for every 10 seconds, calculated to ten places. He had projected a table of the same kind to fifteen places, but did not live to complete it. The sine table, however, was afterwards published on this scale under the name of Thesaurus Mathematicus (Frankfort, 1613) by B. Pitiscus (1561–1613), who himself carried the calculation of a few of the earlier sines to twenty-two places. He also published Narratio de Libris Revolutionum Copernici (Gedenum, 1540), which was subsequently added to editions of Copernicus's works; and Ephemerides until 1551, which were founded on the Copernican doctrines. He projected numerous other Works, as is shown by a letter to Peter Ramus in 1568, which Adrian Romanus inserted in the preface to his Idea of Mathematics.
RHETORIC (Gr. ῥητορικὴ τέχνη, the art of the orator), the
art of using language in such a way as to produce a desired
impression upon the hearer or reader. The object is strictly
persuasion rather than intellectual approval or conviction;
hence the term, with its adjective “rhetorical,” is commonly
used for a speech or writing in which matter is subservient
to form or display. So in grammar, a “rhetorical question” is
one which is asked not for the purpose of obtaining an answer,
but simply for dramatic effect. The power of eloquent speech
is recognized in the earliest extant writings. Homer describes
Achilles as a “speaker of words, as well as a doer of deeds”:
Nestor, Menelaus and Odysseus are all orators as well as statesmen
and soldiers. Again the brilliant eloquence of Pericles is
the theme of Aristophanes and Eupolis. Naturally the influence
wielded by the great orators led to an investigation of
the characteristics of successful rhetoric, and especially from the
time of Aristotle the technique of the art ranked among the
recognized branches of learning.
A lost work of Aristotle is quoted by Diogenes Laertius (viii. 57) as saying that Empedocles “invented” (εὑρεῖν) rhetoric; Zeno, dialectic (i.e. logic, the art of making a logical argument, apart from the style). This is certainly not to be understood as meaning that Empedocles composed the first “art” of rhetoric. It is rather to be explained by Aristotle's, own remark, cited by Laertius from another lost treatise, that Empedocles was “a master of expression and skilled in the use of metaphor”—qualities which may have found scope in his political oratory, when, after the fall of Thrasydaeus in 472 B.C;, he opposed the restoration of a tyranny at Agrigentum. The founder Of rhetoric as an art was Corax of SyracuseEarly Greek rhetoric—Corax. (c. 466 B.C.). In 466 a democracy was established in Syracuse. One of the immediate consequences was a mass of litigation on claims to property, urged by democratic exiles who had been dispossessed by Thrasybulus, Hiero or Gelo. Such claims, going many years back, would often require that a complicated series of details should be stated and arranged. It would also, in many instances, lack documentary support, and rely chiefly on inferential reasoning. Hence the need of professional advice. The facts known as to the “art” of Corax perfectly agree with these conditions. He gave rules for arrangement, dividing the speech into five parts,—proem, narrative, arguments (ἀγῶνες), subsidiary remarks (παρέκβασις) and peroration. Next he illustrated the topic of general probability (εἰκός), showing its two-edged use: e.g., if a puny man is accused of assaulting a stronger, he can say, “Is it likely that I should have attacked him?” If vice versa, the strong man can argue, “Is it likely that I should have committed an assault where the presumption was sure to be against me?” This topic of εἰκός, in its manifold forms, was in fact the great weapon of the earliest Greek rhetoric. It was further developed by Tisias, the pupil of Corax, as we see from Plato’s Phaedrus, in an “art” of rhetoric which antiquity possessed, but of which we know little else. Aristotle gives the εἰκός a place among the topics of the fallacious enthymeme which he enumerates in Rhet. ii. 24, remarking that it was the very essence of the treatise of Corax; he points out the fallacy of omitting to distinguish between abstract and particular probability, quoting the verses of Agatho,—“Perhaps one might call this very thing a probability, that many improbable things will happen to men.” Gorgias (q.v.) of Leontini captivated the Athenians in 427 B.C. by his oratory (Diod. xii. 53), which, so far as we can judge, was
