Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

Some on the other hand think they have done their duty to their clients by an ostentatious and fatiguing display of elaborate declamation and straightway march out of court attended by an applauding crowd and leave the desperate battle of debate to uneducated performers who often are of but humble origin.

As a result in private suits you will generally find that different counsel are employed to plead and to prove the case. If the duties of advocacy are to be thus divided, the latter duty must surely be accounted the more important of the two, and it is a disgrace to oratory that inferior advocates should be regarded as adequate to render the greater service to the litigants. In public cases at any rate the actual pleader is cited by the usher as well as the other advocates. [*]( The allusion is obscure. But Quintilian's point seems to he merely that the pleader is officially regarded as being of at least equal importance with the other advocates. )

For debate the chief requisites are a quick and nimble understanding and a shrewd and ready judgment. For there is no time to think; the advocate must speak at once and return the blow almost before it has been dealt by his opponent. Consequently while it is most important for every portion of the case that the advocate should not merely have given a careful study to the whole case, but that he should have it at his fingers' ends, when he comes to the debate it is absolutely necessary that he should possess a thorough acquaintance with all the persons, instruments and circumstances of time and place involved: otherwise he will often be reduced

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to silence and forced to give a hurried assent to those who prompt him as to what he should say, suggestions which are often perfectly fatuous owing to excess of zeal on the part of the prompter. As a result it sometimes happens that we are put to the blush by too ready acceptance of the foolish suggestions of another.

Moreover, we have to deal with others beside these prompters who speak for our ear alone. Somego so far as to turn the debate into an open brawl. For you may sometimes see several persons shouting angrily at the judge and telling him that the arguments thus suggested are contrary to the truth, and calling his attention to the fact that some point which is prejudicial to the case has been deliberately passed over in silence.