Institutio Oratoria
Quintilian
Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, Volume 1-4. Butler, Harold Edgeworth, translator. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd., 1920-1922.
In fact, if we break up and disarrange any sentence that may have struck us as vigorous, charming or elegant, we shall find that all its force, attraction and grace have disappeared. Cicero in his Orator breaks up some of his own utterances in this way:
Neque me divitiae movent, quibus omnes Africanos et Laelios multi venalicii mercatoresque superarunt. Change the order but a little so that it will run multi superarunt mercatores venaliciique,[*](Or. 70, 232. Nor do riches move me, in which many a merchant and slave-dealer has surpassed all such great men as Africanus and Laelius. ) and so on. Disarrange these periods in such a manner, and you will find that the shafts you have hurled are broken or wide of the mark.
Cicero also corrects passages in the speeches of Gracchus where the structure appears to him to be harsh. For Cicero this is becoming enough, but we may content ourselves with testing our own power of welding together in artistic form the disconnected words and phrases which present themselves to us. For why should we seek elsewhere for examples of faults which we may all of us find in our own work? One point, however, it is enough simply to notice—that the more beautiful in thought and language the sentence which you deprive of such structural cohesion, the more hideous will
Accordingly, although I admit that artistic structure, at any rate in perfection, was the last accomplishment to be attained by oratory, I still hold that even primitive orators regarded it as one of the objects of their study, as far at least as the rudeness of their attainments permitted. For even Cicero for all his greatness will never persuade me that Lysias, Herodotus and Thucydides were careless in this respect.
They may not perhaps have pursued the same ideals as Demosthenes and Plato, and even these latter differed in their methods. For it would never have done to spoil the fine and delicate texture of Lysias by the introduction of richer rhythms, since he would thus have lost all that surpassing grace which he derives from his simple and unaffected tone, while he would also have sacrificed the impression of sincerity which he now creates. For it must be remembered that he wrote his speeches for others to deliver, so that it was right that they should suggest a lack of form and artistic structure: indeed his success in producing this effect actually shows his mastery of structure.