Institutio Oratoria

For my own part I regard the practice of rhetoric which so many have adopted in the past and still follow to-day, as either no art at all, or, as the Greeks call it, ἀτεχνία (for I see numbers of speakers without the least pretension to method or literary training rushing headlong in the direction in which hunger or their natural shamelessness calls them); or else it is a bad art such as is styled κακοτεχνία. For there have, I think, been many persons and there are still some who have devoted their powers of speaking to the destruction of their fellow-men.

There is also an unprofitable imitation of art, a kind of ματαιοτεχνία which is neither good nor bad, but merely involves a useless expenditure of labour, reminding one of the man who shot a continuous stream of vetch-seeds from a distance through the eye of a needle, without ever missing his aim, and was rewarded by Alexander, who was a witness of the display, with the present of a bushel of vetch-seeds, a most appropriate reward.