Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

Let us pursue the matter further and see if we can discover any additional arguments. How is that to be done? I am deliberately imitating the actual train of thought of one

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who is engaged in such an enquiry with a view to showing how such enquiry should be conducted. I shall therefore put aside the more showy kind of composition, and concern myself solely with such as may be of real profit to the student. So far we have derived all our questions from the character of the claimant. But why should we not make some enquiries into the character of the father? Does not the law say that whoever fails to appear for his father is to be disinherited?

Why should we not try asking whether this means that he is to be disinherited, whatever the character of the father for whom he failed to appear? Such a course is often adopted in those controversial themes in which we demand that sons who fail to maintain their parents should be cast into prison: take for example the case of the mother who gave evidence against her son when accused of being an alien, or of the father who sold his son to a procurer. What, then, is there in the present case that we lay hold of as regards the character of the father?

He was condemned. But does the law apply only to those cases where the father is acquitted? At first sight the question is difficult. But let us not despair. It is probable that the intention of the legislator was that innocent parents should secure the support of their children. But the uneducated son will be ashamed to produce this argument, since he acknowledges that his father was innocent.

There is, however, another line of argument which may be drawn from the enactment that the person condemned for treason should be banished together with his advocate. It seems almost impossible that in one and the same case a son should incur a penalty,

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both if he appeared in his father's defence and if he did not appear. Further, exiles are outlaws. Therefore the letter of the law cannot conceivably apply to the advocate of the condemned man.