Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

I know that some may perhaps regard hyperbole as a species of amplification, since hyperbole can be

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employed to create an effect in either direction. But as the name is also applied to one of the tropes, I must postpone its consideration for the present. I would proceed to the immediate discussion of this subject but for the fact that others have given separate treatment to this form of artifice, [which employs words not in their literal, but in a metaphorical sense [*](See ch. vi.) ]. I shall therefore at this point indulge a desire now almost universal, and discuss a form of ornament which many regard as the chief, nay, almost the sole adornment of oratory.

V. When the ancients used the word sententia, they meant a feeling, or opinion. The word is frequently used in this sense by orators, and traces of this meaning are still found even in the speech of every day. For when we are going to take an oath we use the phrase ex animi nostri sententia (in accordance with what we hold is the solemn truth), and when we offer congratulations, we say that we do so ex sententia (with all our heart). The ancients, indeed, often expressed the same meaning by saying that they uttered their sensa; for they regarded senses as referring merely to the senses of the body.

But modern usage applies sensus to concepts of the mind, while sentcntia is applied to striking reflexions such as are more especially introduced at the close of our periods, a practice rare in earlier days, but carried even to excess in our own. Accordingly, I think that I ought to say something of the various forms which such reflexions may tale and the manner in which they should be used.

Although all the different forms are included under the same name, the oldest type of sententia, and that in which the term is most correctly applied,

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is the aphorism, called γνώμη by the Greeks. Both the Greek and the Latin names are derived from the fact that such utterances resemble the decrees or resolutions of public bodies. The term, however, is of wide application (indeed, such reflexions may be deserving of praise even when they have no reference to any special context), and is used in various ways. Sometimes it refers merely to things, as in the sentence:

There is nothing that wins the affections of the people more than goodness of heart. [*]( Cic. pro Lig. xii. 37. )

Occasionally, again, they may have a personal reference, as in the following utterance of Domitius Afer:

The prince who would know all, must needs ignore much.