Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

Emphasis may be numbered among figures also, when some hidden meaning is extracted from some phrase, as in the following passage from Virgil:

  1. Might I not have lived,
  2. From wedlock free, a life without a stain,
  3. Happy as beasts are happy?
Aen. iv. 550.
For although Dido complains of marriage, yet her
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passionate outburst shows that she regards life without wedlock as no life for man, but for the beasts of the field. A different kind of emphasis is found in Ovid, where Zmyrna confesses to her nurse her passion for her father in the following words:
  1. O mother, happy in thy spouse!
Met. x. 422.

Similar, if not identical with this figure is another, which is much in vogue at the present time. For I must now proceed to the discussion of a class of figure which is of the commonest occurrence and on which I think I shall be expected to make some comment. It is one whereby we excite some suspicion to indicate that our meaning is other than our words would seem to imply; but our meaning is not in this case contrary to that which we express, as is the case in ironq, but rather a hidden meaning which is left to the hearer to discover. As I have already pointed out, [*](IX. i. 14.) modern rhetoricians practically restrict the name of figure to this device, from the use of which figured controversial themes derive their name.

This class of figure may be employed under three conditions: first, if it is unsafe to speak openly; secondly, if it is unseemly to speak openly; and thirdly, when it is employed solely with a view to the elegance of what we say, and gives greater pleasure by reason of the novelty and variety thus introduced than if our meaning had been expressed in straightforward language.

The first of the three is of common occurrence in the schools, where we imagine conditions laid down by tyrants on abdication and decrees passed by the senate after a civil war, and it is a capital offence to accuse a person with what is past, what is not

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expedient in the courts being actually prohibited in the schools. But the conditions governing the employment of figures differ in the two cases. For we may speak against the tyrants in question as openly as we please without loss of effect, provided always that what we say is susceptible of a different interpretation, since it is only danger to ourselves, and not offence to them, that we have to avoid.