Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

And indeed even although geometricians, musicians and grammarians, together with the professors of every other branch of knowledge, spend all their lives, however long, in the study of one single science, it does not therefore follow that we require several lives more if we are to learn more. For they do not spend all their days even to old age in learning these things, but being content to have learned these things and nothing more, exhaust their length of years not in acquiring, but in imparting knowledge.

However, to say nothing of Homer, in whom we may find either the perfect achievements, or at any rate clear signs of the knowledge of every art,

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and to pass by Hippias of Elis, who not merely boasted his knowledge of the liberal arts, but wore a robe, a ring and shoes, all of which he had made with his own hands, and had trained himself to be independent of external assistance, we accept the universal tradition of Greece to the effect that Gorgias, triumphant over all the countless ills incident to extreme old age, would bid his hearers propound any questions they pleased for him to answer.

Again in what branch of knowledge worthy of literary expression was Plato deficient? How many generations' study did Aristotle require to embrace not merely the whole range of philosophical and rhetorical knowledge, but to investigate the nature of every beast and plant. And yet they had to discover all these things which we only have to learn. Antiquity has given us all these teachers and all these patterns for our imitation, that there might be no greater happiness conceivable than to be born in this age above all others, since all previous ages have toiled that we might reap the fruit of their wisdom.

Marcus Cato was at once a great general, a philosopher, orator, historian, and an expert both in law and agriculture, and despite his military labours abroad and the distractions of political struggles at home, and despite the rudeness of the age in which he lived, he none the less learned Greek, when far advanced in years, that he might prove to mankind that even old men are capable of learning that on which they have set their hearts.

How wide, almost universal, was the knowledge that Varro communicated to the world! What of all that goes to make up the equipment of an orator was lacking to Cicero? Why should I say

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more, since even Cornelius Celsus, a man of very ordinary ability, not merely wrote about rhetoric in all its departments, but left treatises on the art of war, agriculture and medicine as well. Indeed the high ambition revealed by his design gives him the right to ask us to believe that he was acquainted with all these subjects.

But, it will be urged, to carry out such a task is difficult and has never been accomplished. To which I reply that sufficient encouragement for study may be found in the fact, firstly, that nature does not forbid such achievement and it does not follow that, because a thing never has been done, it therefore never can be done, and secondly, that all great achievements have required time for their first accomplishment.