Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

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.