Institutio Oratoria

We shall achieve lucidity and clearness in our statement of facts, first by setting forth our story in words which are appropriate, significant and free from any taint of meanness, but not on the other

This latter virtue is disregarded by the majority of speakers who are used to the noisy applause of a large audience, whether it be a chance gathering or an assembly of claqueurs, and consequently are unnerved by the attentive silence of the courts. They feel that they have fallen short of eloquence, if they do not make everything echo with noise and clamour; they think that to state a matter simply is suited only to everyday speech such as falls within the capacity of any uneducated man, while all the time it is hard to say whether they are less willing or less capable of performing a task which they despise on account of its supposed easiness.

For even when they have tried everything, they will never find anything more difficult in the whole range of oratory than that which, once heard, all think they would have said,— a delusion due to the fact that they regard what has been said as having no merit save that of truth. But it is just when an orator gives the impression of absolute truth that he is speaking best.

As it is, when such persons as these get a fair field for stating their case, they select this as the precise occasion for affected modulations of the voice, throwing back their heads, thumping their sides and indulging in every kind of extravagance of statement, language and style. As a result, while the speech, from its very monstrosity, meets with applause, the case remains unintelligible. However, let us pass to another subject; my aim is to win favour for

The statement of facts will be brief, if in the first place we start at that point of the case at which it begins to concern the judge, secondly avoid irrelevance, and finally cut out everything the removal of which neither hampers the activities of the judge nor harms our own case.

For frequently conciseness of detail is not inconsistent with length in the whole. Take for instance such a statement as the following:

I came to the harbour, I saw a ship, I asked the cost of a passage, the price was agreed, I went on board, the anchor was weighed, we loosed our cable and set out.

I sailed from the harbour.

Consequently when it is possible to say

I have a young son,

Being desirous of children I took a wife, a son was born whom I acknowledged and reared and brought up to manhood.