 The argumentative patterns Aristotle associated with cases generally involve inferring a sentence containing adverbial or declined forms from another sentence containing different forms of the same word stem: “if what is useful is good, then what is done usefully is done well and the useful person is good”. In Hellenistic grammatical usage, ptôsis meant “case” (e.g. nominative, dative, accusative); Aristotle’s use here is obviously an early form of that.