Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, Volume 1-4. Butler, Harold Edgeworth, translator. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd., 1920-1922.

Again if we turn to verbs, who is so ill-educated as not to be familiar with their various kinds and qualities, their different persons and numbers. Such subjects belong to the elementary school and the rudiments of knowledge. Some, however, will find points undetermined by inflexion somewhat perplexing. For there are certain participles, about which there may be doubts as to whether they are really nouns or verbs, since their meaning varies with their use, as for example lectum and sapiens,

while there are other verbs which resemble nouns, such as fraudator and nutritor. [*](lectum may be ace. of lectus, bed, or supine or past part. pass. of legerc, to read ; sapiens may be pres. part. of sapere, to know, or an adj. = wise ; fraudator and nutritor are 2nd and 3rd pers. sing. fut. imper. pass. of fraudo and nutrio. ) Again itur in antiquam silvam [*](Aen. vi. 179: They go into the ancient wood. ) is a peculiar usage. For there is no subject to serve as a starting point: fletur is a similar example. The passive may be used in different ways as for instance in

  1. panditur interea domus omnipotentis Olympi
Aen. x. 1
Meanwhile the house of almighty Olympus is opened.
and in
  1. totis usque adeo turbatur agris.
Ecl. i. 11
  1. There is such confusion in all the fields.
Yet a third usage is found in urbs habitatur, whence we get phrases such as campus curritur and mare navigatur. Pransus and potus [*](Having dined,having drunk. Active in sense, passive in form. ) have a meaning which does not correspond to their form. And what of those verbs which are only partially conjugated? Some (as for instance fero ) even suffer an entire change in the perfect. Others are used only in the third
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person, such as licet and piget, while some resemble nouns tending to acquire an adverbial meaning; for we say dictu and factu [*](Supines.) as we say noctu and diu, since these words are participial though quite different from dicto and facto.

Style has three kinds of excellence, correctness, lucidity and elegance (for many include the all-important quality of appropriateness under the heading of elegance). Its faults are likewise threefold, namely the opposites of these excellences. The teacher of literature therefore must study the rules for correctness of speech, these constituting the first part of his art.

The observance of these rules is concerned with either one or more words. I must now be understood to use verbum in its most general sense. It has of course two meanings; the one covers all the parts of which language is composed, as in the line of Horace:

  1. Once supply the thought,
  2. And words will follow swift as soon as sought
Ars Poetica, 311.
the other restricts it to a part of speech such as lego and scribo. To avoid this ambiguity, some authorities prefer the terms voces, locutiones, dictiones.

Individual words will either be native or imported, simple or compound, literal or metaphorical, in current use or newly-coined. A single word is more likely to be faulty than to possess any intrinsic merit. For though we may speak of a word as appropriate, distinguished or sublime, it can possess none of these properties save in relation to connected and consecutive speech; since when we praise words, we do so because they suit the matter.

There is only one excellence that

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can be isolated for consideration, namely euphony, the Greek term for our uocalitas: that is to say that, when we are confronted with making a choice between two exact synonyms, we must select that which sounds best.

In the first place barbarisms and solecisms must not be allowed to intrude their offensive presence. These blemishes are however pardoned at times, because we have become accustomed to them or because they have age or authority in their favour or are near akin to positive excellences, since it is often difficult to distinguish such blemishes from figures of speech.1 The teacher therefore, that such slippery customers may not elude detection, must seek to acquire a delicate discrimination; but of this I will speak later when I come to discuss figures of speech. [*](cp. § 40. )