Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

I will admit that rhetoric sometimes substitutes falsehood for truth, but I will not allow that it does so because its opinions are false, since there is all the difference between holding a certain opinion oneself and persuading someone else to adopt an opinion. For instance a general frequently makes use of falsehood: Hannibal when hemmed in by Fabius persuaded his enemy that he was in retreat by

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tying brushwood to the horns of oxen, setting fire to them by night and driving the herds across the mountains opposite. [*](See Livy, XXII. xvi.) But though he deceived Fabius, he himself was fully aware of the truth.

Again when the Spartan Theopompus changed clothes with his wife and escaped from custody disguised as a woman, he deceived his guards, but was not for a moment deceived as to his own identity. [*](Probably a king of Sparta, 770–720 B.C.) Similarly an orator, when he substitutes falsehood for the truth, is aware of the falsehood and of the fact that he is substituting it for the truth.

He therefore deceives others, but not himself. When Cicero boasted that he had thrown dust in the eyes of the jury in the case of Cluentius, he was far from being blinded himself. And when a painter by his artistic skill makes us believe that certain objects project from the picture, while others are withdrawn into the background, he knows perfectly well that they are really all in the same plane.