Institutio Oratoria

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.

He, thanks to his length of days, for he lived to a hundred and nine, flourished as the contemporary of many rhetoricians, was consequently the rival of those whom I have just mentioned, and lived on to survive Socrates.