Institutio Oratoria

Further, I would not even tolerate the affectation of those who insist that their friends, and not themselves, should be instructed in the facts of the case, though this is a less serious evil, if the friends can be relied upon to learn and supply the facts correctly. But who can give such effective study to the case as the advocate himself? How can the intermediary, the go-between or interpreter, devote himself whole-heartedly to the study of other men's cases, when those who have got to do the actual pleading do not think it worth while to get up their own?

On the other hand, it is a most pernicious practice to rest content with a written statement of the case composed either by the litigant who betakes himself to an advocate because he finds that his own powers are not equal to the conduct of his case, or by some member of that class of legal advisers [*](Advocatus is here used in its original sense. By Quintilian's time it had come also to mean advocate, and is often so used by him elsewhere. ) who admit that they are incapable of pleading, and then proceed to take upon themselves the most difficult of all the tasks that confront the pleader. For if a man is capable of judging what should be said, what concealed, what avoided, altered or even invented, why should he not appear as orator himself, since he performs the far more difficult feat of making