Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

I think I have now dealt with all the precepts of those who treat oratory as a mystery. But these rules still leave scope for free exercise of the judgment. For although I consider that there are occasions

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when the orator may lawfully employ the syllogism, I am far from desiring him to make his whole speech consist of or even be crowded with a mass of epicheiremes and enthymemes. For a speech of that character would resemble dialogues and dialectical controversies rather than pleadings of the kind with which we are concerned, and there is an enormous difference between the two.

For in the former we are confronted with learned men seeking for truth among men of learning; consequently they subject everything to a minute and scrupulous inquiry with a view to arriving at clear and convincing truths, and they claim for themselves the tasks of invention and judgment, calling the former τοπική or the art of selecting the appropriate material for treatment, and the latter κριτική or the art of criticism.

We on the other hand have to compose our speeches for others to judge, and have frequently to speak before an audience of men who, if not thoroughly ill-educated, are certainly ignorant of such arts as dialectic: and unless we attract them by the charm of our discourse or drag them by its force, and occasionally throw them off their balance by an appeal to their emotions, we shall be unable to vindicate the claims of truth and justice.

Eloquence aims at being rich, beautiful and commanding, and will attain to none of these qualities if it be broken up into conclusive inferences which are generally expressed in the same monotonous form: on the contrary its meanness will excite contempt, its severity dislike, its elaboration satiety, and its sameness boredom.

Eloquence therefore must not restrict itself to narrow tracks, but range at large over the open fields. Its streams must not be conveyed

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through narrow pipes like the water of fountains, but flow as mighty rivers flow, filling whole valleys; and if it cannot find a channel it must make one for itself. For what can be more distressing than to be fettered by petty rules, like children who trace the letters of the alphabet which others have first written for them, or, as the Greeks say, insist on keeping the coat their mother gave them. [*]( The proverb which is also found in Plutarch ( de Alex. Fort. i. 330 B) seems to refer to a child's passionate fondness for some particular garment. ) Are we to have nothing but premises and conclusions from consequents and incompatibles? Must not the orator breathe life into the argument and develop it?

Must lie not vary and diversify it by a thousand figures, and do all this in such a way that it seems to come into being as the very child of nature, not to reveal an artificial manufacture and a suspect art nor at every moment to show traces of an instructor's hand? What orator ever spoke thus? Even in Demosthenes we find but few traces of such a mechanism. And yet the Greeks of to-day are even more prone than we are (though this is the only point in which their practice is worse than ours) to bind their thoughts in fetters and to connect them by an inexorable chain of argument, making inferences where there was never any doubt, proving admitted facts and asserting that in so doing they are following the orators of old, although they always refuse to answer the question who it is that they are imitating. However of figures I shall speak elsewhere. [*](IX. i. ii. iii.)

For the present I must add that I do not even agree with those who hold that arguments should always be expressed in language which is not only pure, lucid and distinct, but also as free as possible from all elevation and ornateness. I readily admit that

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arguments should be distinct and clear, and further that in arguments of a minor character the language and words should be as appropriate and as familiar as possible.

But if the subject be one of real importance every kind of ornament should be employed, so long as it does nothing to obscure our meaning. For metaphor will frequently throw a flood of light upon a subject: even lawyers, who spend so much trouble over the appropriateness of words, venture to assert that the word litus is derived from eludere, because the shore is a place where the waves break in play.