Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

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.

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

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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.