Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

Further the teachers of rhetoric were regarded by Plato as quite unsuited to their professed task. For they divorced rhetoric from justice and preferred plausibility to truth, as he states in the Phaedrus. [*](267 A, with special reference to Tisias and Gorgias.)

Cornelius Celsus seems to have agreed with these early rhetoricians, for he writes

The orator only aims at the semblance of truth,

and again a little later

The reward of the party to a suit is not a good conscience, but victory.

If this were true, only the worst of men would place such dangerous weapons at the disposal of criminals or employ the precepts of their art for the assistance of wickedness. However I will leave those who maintain these views to consider what ground they have for so doing.

For my part, I have undertaken the task of moulding the ideal orator, and as my first desire is that he should be a good man, I will return to those who have sounder opinions on the subject. Some however identify rhetoric with politics, Cicero [*](de Inv. I. v. 6. ) calls it a department of the science of politics (and science of politics and philosophy are identical terms), while others again call it a branch of philosophy, among them Isocrates.