Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

But while the major premise and the reason

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may both be true and the conclusion false, yet if both are false, the conclusion can never be true.

Some call the enthymeme a rhetorical syllogism, while others regard it as a part of the syllogism, because whereas the latter always has its premises and conclusion and effects its proof by the employment of all its parts, the ethymeme is content to let its proof be understood without explicit statement.

The following is an example of a syllogism:

Virtue is the only thing that is good, for that alone is good which no one can put to a bad use: but no one can make a bad use of virtue; virtue therefore is good.

The enthymeme draws its conclusion from denial of consequents.

Virtue is a good thing because no one can put it to a bad use.

On the other hand take the following syllogism.

Money is not a good thing; for that is not good which can be put to a bad use: money may be put to a bad use; therefore money is not a good thing.

The enthymeme draws its conclusion from incompatibles.

Can money be a good thing when it is possible to put it to a bad use?

The following argument is couched in syllogistic form:

If money in the form of silver coin is silver, the man who bequeathed all his silver to a legatee, includes all money in the form of coined silver: but he bequeathed all his silver: therefore he included in the bequest all money in the form of coined silver.

But for the orator it will be sufficient to say,

Since he bequeathed all his silver, he included in his bequest all his silver money.

I think I have now dealt with all the precepts of those who treat oratory as a mystery. But these rules still leave scope for free exercise of the judgment. For although I consider that there are occasions

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when the orator may lawfully employ the syllogism, I am far from desiring him to make his whole speech consist of or even be crowded with a mass of epicheiremes and enthymemes. For a speech of that character would resemble dialogues and dialectical controversies rather than pleadings of the kind with which we are concerned, and there is an enormous difference between the two.

For in the former we are confronted with learned men seeking for truth among men of learning; consequently they subject everything to a minute and scrupulous inquiry with a view to arriving at clear and convincing truths, and they claim for themselves the tasks of invention and judgment, calling the former τοπική or the art of selecting the appropriate material for treatment, and the latter κριτική or the art of criticism.

We on the other hand have to compose our speeches for others to judge, and have frequently to speak before an audience of men who, if not thoroughly ill-educated, are certainly ignorant of such arts as dialectic: and unless we attract them by the charm of our discourse or drag them by its force, and occasionally throw them off their balance by an appeal to their emotions, we shall be unable to vindicate the claims of truth and justice.

Eloquence aims at being rich, beautiful and commanding, and will attain to none of these qualities if it be broken up into conclusive inferences which are generally expressed in the same monotonous form: on the contrary its meanness will excite contempt, its severity dislike, its elaboration satiety, and its sameness boredom.

Eloquence therefore must not restrict itself to narrow tracks, but range at large over the open fields. Its streams must not be conveyed

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through narrow pipes like the water of fountains, but flow as mighty rivers flow, filling whole valleys; and if it cannot find a channel it must make one for itself. For what can be more distressing than to be fettered by petty rules, like children who trace the letters of the alphabet which others have first written for them, or, as the Greeks say, insist on keeping the coat their mother gave them. [*]( The proverb which is also found in Plutarch ( de Alex. Fort. i. 330 B) seems to refer to a child's passionate fondness for some particular garment. ) Are we to have nothing but premises and conclusions from consequents and incompatibles? Must not the orator breathe life into the argument and develop it?

Must lie not vary and diversify it by a thousand figures, and do all this in such a way that it seems to come into being as the very child of nature, not to reveal an artificial manufacture and a suspect art nor at every moment to show traces of an instructor's hand? What orator ever spoke thus? Even in Demosthenes we find but few traces of such a mechanism. And yet the Greeks of to-day are even more prone than we are (though this is the only point in which their practice is worse than ours) to bind their thoughts in fetters and to connect them by an inexorable chain of argument, making inferences where there was never any doubt, proving admitted facts and asserting that in so doing they are following the orators of old, although they always refuse to answer the question who it is that they are imitating. However of figures I shall speak elsewhere. [*](IX. i. ii. iii.)