Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

Isocrates was an exponent of a different style of oratory: he is neat and polished and better suited to the fencingschool than to the battlefield. He elaborated all the graces of style, nor was he without justification. For lie had trained himself for the lecture-room and not the law-courts. He is ready in invention, his moral ideals are high and the care which he bestows upon his rhythm is such as to be a positive fault.

I do not regard these as the sole merits of the orators of whom I have spoken, but have selected what seemed to me their chief excellences, while those whom I have passed over in silence were far from being indifferent. In fact, I will readily admit that the

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famous Demetrius of Phalerum, [*]( Governed Athens as Cassander's vicegerent 317–307: then tied to Egypt, where he died in 283. ) who is said to have been the first to set oratory on the downward path, was a man of great talent and eloquence and deserves to be remembered, if only for the fact that he is almost the last of the Attic school who can be called an orator: indeed Cicero [*](de Or. ii. 95. Orat. 92. The intermediate style is that which lies between the grand and the plain styles. ) prefers him to all other orators of the intermediate school.

Proceeding to the philosophers, from whom Cicero acknowledges that he derived such a large portion of his eloquence, we shall all admit that Plato is supreme whether in acuteness or perception or in virtue of his divine gift of style, which is worthy of Homer. For he soars high above the levels of ordinary prose or, as the Greeks call it, pedestrian language, and seems to me to be inspired not by mere human genius, but, as it were, by the oracles of the god of Delphi.