Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

But I have already mentioned [*](de Inv. i. xi. 14. ) what his opinion was about this particular work. The Rhetorica are simply a collection of school-notes on rhetoric which he worked up into this treatise while quite a young man. Such faults as they possess are due to his instructor. In the present instance he may have been influenced by the fact that the first examples given by Hermagoras of this species are drawn from legal questions, or by the fact that the Greeks call interpreters of the law πραγματικοί.

But for these early efforts Cicero

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substituted his splendid de Oratore and therefore cannot be blamed for giving false instruction. I will now return to Hermagoras. He was the first rhetorician to teach that there was a basis concerned with competence, although the elements of this doctrine are found in Aristotle, [*](Rhet. II. xv. 8. ) without however any mention of the name.

The legal questions were according to Hermagoras of five kinds. First the letter of the law and its intention; the names which he gives to these are κατὰ ῥητόν and ὑπεξαίρεσις, that is to say the letter of the law and the exceptions thereto: the first of these classes is found in all writers, but the term exception is less in use. The number is completed by the ratiocinative basis and those dealing with ambiguity and contradictory laws.