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, their epigrams, the sole objects of their quest, seem all the more striking because of the dreariness and squalor of their context, since flashes are more clearly seen against a background, not of mere

shade,

as Cicero [*](de Or. III. xxvi. 101. ) says, but of pitchy darkness. Well, let the world credit them with as much genius as it pleases, so long as it is admitted that such praise is an insult to any man of real eloquence.

None the less it must be confessed that learning does take something from oratory, just as the file takes something from rough surfaces or the whetstone from blunt edges or age from wine; it takes away defects, and if the results produced after subjection to the polish of literary study are less, they are less only because they are better.