In rhetoric, the catastasis is that part of a speech, usually the exordium, in which the orator sets forth the subject matter to be discussed.[2]
The term is not a classical one; it was invented by Scaliger in his Poetics (published posthumously in 1561).[3] It "is more or less equivalent to the summa epitasis of Donatus and Latomus and to what Willichius sometimes called the extrema epitasis,"[4] and was first used in 1616 in England.[5]