Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

What more would any man have seen who had actually entered the room? So, too, we may move our hearers to tears by the picture of a captured town. For the mere statement that the town was stormed, while no doubt it embraces all that such a calamity involves, has all the curtness of a dispatch, and fails to penetrate to the emotions of the hearer.

But if we expand all that the one word

stormed
includes, we shall see the flames pouring from house and temple, and hear the crash of falling roofs and one confused clamour blent of many cries: we shall behold some in doubt whither to fly, others clinging to their nearest and dearest in one last embrace, while the wailing of women and children and the laments of old men that the cruelty of fate should have spared them to see that day will strike upon our ears.

Then will come the pillage of treasure sacred and profane, the hurrying to and fro of the plunderers as they carry off their booty or return to seek for more, the prisoners driven each before his own inhuman captor, the mother struggling to keep her child, and the victors fighting over the richest of the spoil. For though, as I have already said, the sack of a city includes all these things, it is less effective to tell the whole news at once than to recount it detail by detail.

And we shall secure the vividness we seek, if only our descriptions give the impression of truth, nay, we may even add fictitious incidents of the type which commonly occur. The same vivid impression may be produced

v7-9 p.251
also by the mention of the accidents of each situation:
  1. Chill shudderings shake my limbs
  2. And all my blood is curdled cold with fear;
Aen. iii. 29
or
  1. And trembling mothers clasped
  2. Their children to their breast.
Aen. vii. 518.
Though the attainment of such effects is,

in my opinion, the highest of all oratorical gifts, it is far from difficult of attainment. Fix your eyes on nature and follow her. All eloquence is concerned with the activities of life, while every man applies to himself what he hears from others, and the mind is always readiest to accept what it recognises to be true to nature.

The invention of similes has also provided an admirable means of illuminating our descriptions. Some of these are designed for insertion among our arguments to help our proof, while others are devised to make our pictures yet more vivid; it is with this latter class of simile that I am now specially concerned. The following are good examples:—

  1. Thence like fierce wolves beneath the cloud of night,
Aen. ii. 355.
or
  1. Like the bird that flies
  2. Around the shore and the fish-haunted reef,
  3. Skimming the deep.
Aen. iv. 254.

In employing this form of ornament we must be especially careful that the subject chosen for our simile is neither obscure nor unfamiliar: for anything that is selected for the purpose of illuminating

v7-9 p.253
something else must itself be clearer than that which it is designed to illustrate. Therefore while we may permit poets to employ such similes as:—
  1. As when Apollo wintry Lycia leaves,
  2. And Xanthus' streams, or visits Delos' isle,
  3. His mother's home,
Aen. iv. 143.
it would be quite unsuitable for an orator to illustrate something quite plain by such obscure allusions.

But even the type of simile which I discussed in connexion with arguments [*]( xi. 22. ) is an ornament to oratory, and serves to make it sublime, rich, attractive or striking, as the case may be. For the more remote the simile is from the subject to which it is applied, the greater will be the impression of novelty and the unexpected which it produces.

The following type may be regarded as commonplace and useful only as helping to create an impression of sincerity:

As the soil is improved and rendered more fertile by culture, so is the mind by education,
or
As physicians amputate mortified limbs, so must we lop away foul and dangerous criminals, even though they be bound to us by ties of blood.
Far finer is the following from Cicero's [*](Pro Arch. viii. 19. ) defence of Archias:
Rock and deserts reply to the voice of man, savage beasts are oft-times tamed by the power of music and stay their onslaught,
and the rest.

This type of simile has, however, sadly degenerated in the hands of some of our declaimers owing to the license of the schools. For they adopt false comparisons, and even then do not apply them as they should to the subjects to which they wish them to provide a parallel. Both these faults are exemplified in two similes which were on the lips of everyone

v7-9 p.255
when I was a young man,
Even the sources of mighty rivers are navigable,
and
The generous tree bears fruit while it is yet a sapling.

In every comparison the simile either precedes or follows the subject which it illustrates. But sometimes it is free and detached, and sometimes, a far better arrangement, is attached to the subject which it illustrates, the correspondence between the resemblances being exact, an effect produced by reciprocal representation, which the Greeks style ἀνταπόδοσις. For example, the simile already quoted,

  1. Thence like fierce wolves beneath the cloud of night,
Aen. ii. 355.
precedes its subject. On the other hand, an example of the simile following its subject is to be found in the first Georgic, where, after the long lamentation over the wars civil and foreign that have afflicted Rome, there come the lines:
  1. As when, their barriers down, the chariots speed
  2. Lap after lap; in vain the charioteer
  3. Tightens the curb: his steeds ungovernable
  4. Sweep him away nor heeds the car the rein.
Georg. i. 512.
There is, however, no antapodosis in these similes.

Such reciprocal representation places both subjects of comparison before our very eyes, displaying them side by side. Virgil provides many remarkable examples, but it will be better for me to quote from oratory. In the pro Murena Cicero [*](Pro Mur. xiii. 29. ) says,

As among Greek musicians (for so they say), only those turn flute-players that cannot play the lyre, so here at Rome we see that those who cannot acquire the art of oratory betake themselves to the study of the
v7-9 p.257
law.

There is also another simile in the same speech, [*](Pro Mur. xvii. 36. ) which is almost worthy of a poet, but in virtue of its reciprocal representation is better adapted for ornament:

For as tempests are generally preceded by some premonitory signs in the heaven, but often, on the other hand, break forth for some obscure reason without any warning whatsoever, so in the tempests which sway the people at our Roman elections we are not seldom in a position to discern their origin, and yet, on the other hand, it is frequently so obscure that the storm seems to have burst without any apparent cause.

We find also shorter similes, such as

Wandering like wild beasts through the woods,
or the passage from Cicero's speech against Clodius: [*](Now lost.)
He fled from the court like a man escaping naked from a fire.
Similar examples from everyday speech will occur to everyone. Such comparisons reveal the gift not merely of placing a thing vividly before the eye, but of doing so with rapidity and without waste of detail.

The praise awarded to perfect brevity is well-deserved; but, on the other hand, brachylogy, which I shall deal with when I come to speak of figures, that is to say, the brevity that says nothing more than what is absolutely necessary, is less effective, although it may be employed with admirable results when it expresses a great deal in a very few words, as in Sallust's description of Mithridates as

huge of stature, and armed to match.
But unsuccessful attempts to imitate this form of terseness result merely in obscurity.

A virtue which closely resembles the last, but is on a grander scale, is emphasis, which succeeds

v7-9 p.259
in revealing a deeper meaning than is actually expressed by the words. There are two kinds of emphasis: the one means more than it says, the other often means something which it does not actually say.

An example of the former is found in Homer, [*](Od. xi. 523. ) where he makes Menelaus say that the Greeks descended into the Wooden Horse, indicating its size by a single verb. Or again, there is the following example by Virgil: [*](Aen. ii. 262. )

  1. Descending by a rope let down,
a phrase which in a similar manner indicates the height of the horse. The same poet, [*](Aen. iii. 631. ) when he says that the Cyclops lay stretched
throughout the cave,
by taking the room occupied as the standard of measure, gives an impression of the giant's immense bulk.

The second kind of emphasis consists either in the complete suppression of a word or in the deliberate omission to utter it. As an example of complete suppression I may quote the following passage from the pro Ligario, 4 where Cicero says:

But if your exalted position were not matched by your goodness of heart, a quality which is all your own, your very own—I know well enough what I am saying——
Here he suppresses the fact, which is none the less clear enough to us, that he does not lack counsellors who would incite him to cruelty. The omission of a word is produced by aposiopesis, which, however, being a figure, shall be dealt with in its proper place. [*]( v. 15: The passage goes on, Then your victory would have brought bitter grief in its train. For how many of the victors would have wished you to be cruel! Where then is the suppression? Quintilian is probably quoting from memory and has forgotten the context. ix. ii. 54; iii. 60. )

Emphasis is also found in the phrases of every day, such as

Be a man!
or
He is but mortal,
or
We must live!
So like, as a rule, is nature to art. It is not, however, sufficient for eloquence to set
v7-9 p.261
forth its theme in brilliant and vivid language: there are many different ways of embellishing our style.