Institutio Oratoria

The builder and the musician will, however, speak on the subject of their respective arts, if there should be any technical point which requires to be established. Neither will be an orator, but he will perform his task like an orator, just as when an untrained person binds up a

Is it suggested that such topics never crop up in panegyric, deliberative or forensic oratory? When the question of the construction of a port at Ostia came up for discussion, had not the orator to state his views? And yet it was a subject requiring the technical knowledge of the architect.

Does not the orator discuss the question whether livid spots and swellings on the body are symptomatic of ill-health or poison? And yet that is a question for the qualified physician. Will he not deal with measurements and figures? And yet we must admit that they form part of mathematics. For my part I hold that practically all subjects are under certain circumstances liable to come up for treatment by the orator. If the circumstances do not occur, the subjects will not concern him.

We were therefore right in asserting that the material of rhetoric is composed of everything that comes before the orator for treatment, an assertion which is confirmed by the practice of everyday speech. For when we have been given a subject on which to speak, we often preface our remarks by calling attention to the fact that the matter has been laid before us.

Gorgias indeed felt so strongly that it was the orator's duty to speak on every subject, that he used to allow those who attended his lectures to ask him questions on any subject they pleased. Hermagoras also asserted that the material of oratory lay in the cause and the questions it involved, thereby including every subject that can be brought before it.

If he denies that general questions [*](See III V. 12–16.) are the concern of oratory, he disagrees with me: but if they do concern rhetoric, that

Aristotle [*](Rhet. I. iii. 3. ) himself also by his tripartite division of oratory, into forensic, deliberative and demonstrative, practically brought everything into the orator's domain, since there is nothing that may not come up for treatment by one of these three kinds of rhetoric.

A very few critics have raised the question as to what may be the instrument of oratory. My definition of an instrument is that without which the material cannot be brought into the shape necessary for the effecting of our object. But it is not the art which requires an instrument, but the artist. Knowledge needs no instruments, for it may be complete although it produces nothing, but the artist must have them. The engraver cannot work without his chisel nor the painter without his brush. I shall therefore defer this question until I come to treat of the orator as distinct from his art.

IN the second book the subject of inquiry was the nature and the end of rhetoric, and I proved to the best of my ability that it was an art, that it was useful, that it was a virtue and that its material was all and every subject that might come up for treatment. I shall now discuss its origin, its component parts, and the method to be adopted in handling and forming our conception of each. For most authors of text-books have stopped short of this, indeed Apollodorus confines himself solely to forensic oratory.

I know that those who asked me to write this work were specially interested in that portion on which I am now entering, and which, owing to the necessity of examining a great diversity of opinions, at once forms by far the most difficult section of this work, and also, I fear, may be the least attractive to my readers, since it necessitates a dry exposition of rules.

In other portions of this work I have attempted to introduce a certain amount of ornateness, not, I may say, to advertise my style (if I had wished to do that, I could have chosen a more fertile theme), but in order that I might thus do something to lure our young men to make themselves acquainted with those principles which I regarded as necessary to the study of rhetoric: for I hoped that by giving them something which was not unpleasant to read I might induce a greater readiness to learn those rules which I feared

Lucretilus has the same object in mind when he states that he has set forth his philosophical system in verse; for you will remember the well known simile which he uses [*](iv. 11. See also i. 936.) :—

1. And as physicians when they seek to give
2. A draught of bitter wormwood to a child,
3. First smear along the edge that rims the cup
4. The liquid sweets of honey, golden-hued,

But I fear that this book will have too little honey and too much wormwood, and that though the student may find it a healthy draught, it will be far from agreeable. I am also haunted by the further fear that it will be all the less attractive from the fact that most of the precepts which it contains are not original, but derived from others, and because it is likely to rouse the opposition of certain persons who do not share my views. For there are a large number of writers, who though they are all moving toward the same goal, have constructed different roads to it and each drawn their followers into their own.

The latter, however, approve of the path on which they have been launched whatever its nature, and it is difficult to change the convictions implantted in boyhood, for the excellent reason that everybody prefers to have learned rather than to be in process of learning.

But, as will appear in the course of this book, there is an infinite diversity of opinions among writers on [his subject, since some have added their own discoveries to those portions of the art which were still shapeless and unformed,

The first writer after those recorded by the poets who is said to have taken any steps in the direction of rhetoric is Empedocles. But the earliest writers of text-books are the Sicilians, Corax and Tisias, who were followed by another from the same island, namely Gorgias of Leontini, whom tradition asserts to have been the pupil of Empedocles.