Institutio Oratoria

The emotion of love and longing for our friends and connexions is perhaps of an intermediate character, being stronger than ethos and weaker than pathos. There is also good reason for giving the name of ethos to those scholastic exercises [*](cp. I. ix. 3. ) in which we portray rustics, misers, cowards and superstitious persons according as our theme may require. For if ethos denotes moral character, our speech must necessarily be based on ethos when it is engaged in portraying such character.

Finally ethos in all its forms requires the speaker to be a man of good character and courtesy. For it is most important that he should himself possess or be thought to possess those virtues for the possession of which it is his duty, if possible, to commend his client as well, while the excellence of his own character will make his pleading all the more convincing and will be of the utmost service to the cases which he undertakes. For the orator who gives the impression of being a bad man while he is speaking, is actually speaking badly, since his words seem to be insincere owing to the absence of ethos which would otherwise have revealed itself.

Consequently the style of oratory employed in such cases should be calm and mild with no trace of pride, elevation or

The pathos of the Greeks, which we correctly translate by emotion, is of a different character, and I cannot better indicate the nature of the difference than by saying that ethos rather resembles comedy and pathos tragedy. For pathos is almost entirely concerned with anger, dislike, fear, hatred and pity. It will be obvious to all what topics are appropriate to such appeals and I have already spoken on the subject in discussing the exordium and the peroration. [*](IV. i and VI. i.)

I wish however to point out that fear is of two kinds, that which we feel and that which we cause in others. Similarly there are two kinds of invidia (hatred, envy), to which the two adjectives invidus (envious) and invidious (invidious, hateful) correspond. The first supplies an epithet for persons, the second for things, and it is in this latter connexion that the orator's task is even more onerous. For though some things are hateful in themselves such as parricide, murder, poisoning, other things have to be made to seem hateful.

This latter contingency arises when we attempt to shew that what we have suffered is of a more horrible nature than what are usually regarded as great evils. Vergil will provide an example in the lines [*](Aen. iii. 321. ) :—

1. blest beyond all maidens Priam's child,
2. Beneath Troy's lofty bulwarks doomed to die
3. Upon the tomb of him that was thy foe.