Institutio Oratoria

The nature of the questions into which enquiry is made in the courts is obvious. As regards those matters which do not come before a judge, they must necessarily be concerned either with the past or the future. We praise or denounce past actions, we deliberate about the future.

Again everything on which we have to speak must be either certain or doubtful. We praise or blame what is certain, as our inclination leads us: on the other hand where doubt exists, in some cases we are free to form our own views, and it is here that deliberation comes in, while in others, we leave the problem to the decision of others, and it is on these that litigation takes place.

Anaximenes regarded forensic and public oratory as genera but held that there were seven species :— exhortation, dissuasion, praise, denunciation,

I say nothing of Protagoras, who held that oratory was to be divided only into the following heads: question and answer, command and entreaty, or as he calls it εὐχωλή. Plato in his Sophist [*](222 o.) in addition to public and forensic oratory introduces a third kind which he styles προσομιλητική, which I will permit myself to translate by

conversational.