Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

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

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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

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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.