Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

Justice is either natural or conventional. Natural justice is found in actions of inherent worth.

Under this head come the virtues of piety, loyalty, self-control and the like. To these some add the rendering of like for like. But this view must not be adopted without consideration: for to retaliate, or meet violence with violence on the one hand, does not imply injustice on the part of the aggressor, while on the other hand it does not follow that the first act was just merely because the two acts were alike. In cases where there is justice on both sides, the

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two parties must both come under the same law and the same conditions, and it would not perhaps be untrue to say that things can never be spoken of as like if there is any point in which they are dissimilar. Convention, on the other hand, is to be found in laws, customs, legal precedents and agreements.

There is another form of defence by which we defend an act in itself indefensible by arguments drawn from without. [*](i. e. from motives derived from facts lying outside the actual case. ) This the Greeks call κατ᾽ ἀντίθεσιν by opposition. Here again there is no Latin equivalent, since we call it defence by assumption.

The strongest line to take in this form of defence is to defend the act forming the subject of the charge by appealing to its motive. An example of this is provided by the defence put forward on behalf of Orestes, Horatius or Milo. The term ἀντέγκλημα, or counter-accusation, is employed when our defence consists entirely in accusing the person whom our opponents are seeking to vindicate.

He was killed, but he was a robber; he was blinded, but he was a ravisher.