Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

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.

If they are crowded too thick together, such reflexions merely stand in each other's way, just as in the case of crops and the fruits of trees lack of room to grow results in a stunted development. Again in pictures a definite outline is required to throw objects into relief, and consequently artists who include a number of objects in the same design separate them by intervals sufficient to prevent one casting a shadow on the other. Further,