Institutio Oratoria

But the ranters confer the title of force on that which is really violence. You may also occasionally find not merely pleaders, but, what is far more shameful, teachers as well, who, after a brief training in the art of speaking, throw method to the winds and, yielding to the impulse of the moment, run riot in every direction, abusing those who hold literature in higher respect as fools without life, courage or vigour, and calling them the first and worst name that occurs to them.

Still let me congratulate these gentlemen on attaining eloquence without industry, method or study. As for myself I have long since retired from the task of teaching in the schools and of speaking in the courts, thinking it the most honourable conclusion to retire while my services were still in request, and all I ask is to be allowed to console my leisure by making such researches and composing such instructions as will, I hope, prove useful to young men of ability, and are, at any rate, a pleasure to myself.

Let no one however demand from me a rigid code of rules such as most authors of textbooks have laid down, or ask me to impose on students of rhetoric a system of laws immutable as fate, a system in which injunctions as to the exordium and its nature lead the way; then come the statement of facts and the laws to be observed in this connexion: next the proposition or, as some prefer, the digression, followed by prescriptions as to the order in which the various questions should be discussed, with all the other rules, which some speakers follow as though they had no