Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

Some, on the ground that rhetoric is a virtue, make the material with which it deals to be the whole of life. Others, on the ground that life regarded as a whole does not provide material for every virtue, since most of them are concerned only with departments of life (justice, courage and self-control each having their own duties and their own end), would consequently restrict oratory to one particular department of life and place it in the practical or pragmatic department of ethics, that is to say the department of morals which deals with the business of life.

For my own part, and I have authority to support me, I hold that the material of rhetoric is composed of everything that may be placed before it as a subject for speech. Plato, if I read him aright, makes Socrates [*](Gorg. 449 E. ) say to Gorgias that its material is to be

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found in things not words; while in the Phaedrus [*](Phaedr. 261 A. ) he clearly proves that rhetoric is concerned not merely with law-courts and public assemblies, but with private and domestic affairs as well: from which it is obvious that this was the view of Plato himself.