Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

Moreover, most of our orators delight in devices of the pettiest kind, which seriously considered are merely ludicrous, but at the moment of their production flatter their authors by a superficial semblance of wit. Take, for instance, the exclamation from the scholastic theme, where a man, after being ruined by the barrenness of his land, is shipwrecked and hangs himself:

Let him whom neither earth nor sea receives, hang in mid air.

A similar absurdity is to be found in the declamation, to which I have already referred, in which a father poisons his son who insists on tearing his flesh with his teeth:

The man who eats such flesh, deserves such drink.

Or again, take this passage from the theme of the luxurious man who is alleged to have pretended to starve himself to death:

Tie a noose
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for yourself: you have good reason to be angry with your throat. 'rake poison: it is fit that a luxurious man should die of drink!

Others are merely fatuous, such as the remark of the declaimer who urges the courtiers of Alexander to provide him with a tomb by burning down Babylon.

I am burying Alexander. Shall any man watch such a burial from his housetop?

As if this were the climax of indignities! Others fail from sheer extravagance. For example, I once heard a rhetorician who was declaiming about the Germans, say:

I know not where they carry their heads,

[*]( Is this a suggestion that the Germans are monsters whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders or that they are so tall that their heads are lost in the clouds? ) and again when belauding a hero,

He beats back whole wars with the boss of his shield.

However, I shall never come to an end if I try to describe every possible form of this kind of absurdity. I will therefore turn to discuss a point of more importance. Rhetoricians are divided in opinion on this subject: some devote practically all their efforts to the elaboration of reflexions, while others condemn their employment altogether. I cannot agree entirely with either view.