Institutio Oratoria

There are still some critics who deny that any form of eloquence is purely natural, except that which closely resembles the ordinary speech of everyday life, which we use to our friends, our wives, our children and our slaves, a language, that is to say, which contents itself with expressing the purpose of the mind without seeking to discover anything in the way of elaborate and far-fetched phraseology.

Such language may be compared to the bodies of athletes, which although they develop their strength by exercise and diet, are of unnatural growth and abnormal in appearance. For what, say these critics, is the good of expressing a thing by periphrasis or metaphor (that is, either by a number of words or by words which have no connexion with the thing), when everything has been allotted a name of its own?

Finally, they urge that all the earliest orators spoke according to the dictates of nature, but that subsequently there arose a class of speakers resembling poets rather than orators, who regarded false and artificial methods of expression as positive merits; they were, it is true, more sparing than the poets in their use of such expressions, but none the less worked on similar lines. There is some truth in this contention, and we should therefore be careful not to depart from the more exact usage of ordinary speech to the extent that is done by certain orators.