Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

Accordingly on a large number of questions I shall be found in agreement with Cicero and shall deal more briefly with those points which admit of no dispute, while there will be certain subjects on which I shall express a certain amount of disagreement. For, though I intend to make my own views clear, I shall leave my readers free to hold their own opinion.

I am well aware that there are certain writers who would absolutely bar all study of artistic structure and contend that language as it chances to present itself in the rough is more natural and even more manly. If by this they mean that only that is natural which originated with nature and has never received any subsequent cultivation, there is an end to the whole art of oratory.

For the first men did not speak with the care demanded by that art nor in accordance with the rules that it lays

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down. They knew nothing of introducing their case by means of an exordium, of instructing the jury by a statement of facts, of proving by argument or of arousing the emotions. They lacked all these qualifications as completely as they lacked all knowledge of the theory of artistic structure. But if they were to be forbidden all progress in this respect, they ought equally to have been forbidden to exchange their huts for houses, their cloaks of skin for civilised raiment and their mountains and forests for cities.

What art was ever born fullgrown? What does not ripen with cultivation? Why do we train the vine? Why dig it? We clear the fields of brambles, and they too are natural products of the soil. We tame animals, and yet they are born wild. No, that which is most natural is that which nature permits to be done to the greatest perfection.