A few clever Sicilians developed simple techniques for effective presentation and argumentation in the law courts and taught them to others.
The Stasis Doctrine, proposed by Hermagoras, is an approach to systematically analyze legal cases, which many scholars include in their treatises of rhetoric, most famously in Cicero's "De Inventione.
"[8] Encyclopedia author James Jasinski describes this doctrine as taxonomy to classify relevant questions in a debate and the existence or nonexistence of a fact in law.
[10] In ancient Athens, litigants in a private lawsuit and defendants in a criminal prosecution were expected to handle their own case before the court—a practice that Aristotle approved of.
[11] After the nineteenth century, forensic rhetoric "became the exclusive province of lawyers,” as it essentially remains today.