Institutio Oratoria

Nor was this all; to enhance my agony the malignity of designing fortune had willed that he should devote all his love to me, preferring me to his nurses, to his grandmother who brought him up, and all those who, as a rule, win the special affection of infancy.

I am, therefore, grateful to the grief that came to me some few months before his loss in the death of his mother, the best of women, whose virtues were beyond all praise. For I have less reason to weep my own fate than to rejoice at hers. After these calamities all my hopes, all my delight were centred on my little Quintilian, and he might have sufficed to console me.

For his gifts were not merely in the bud like those of his brother: as early as his ninth birthday he had put forth sure and well-formed fruit. By my own sorrows, by the testimony of my own sad heart, by his departed spirit, the deity at whose shrine my grief does worship, I swear that I discerned in him such talent, not merely in receiving instruction, although in all my wide experience I have never seen his like, nor in his power of spontaneous application, to which his

He possessed every incidental advantage as well, a pleasing and resonant voice, a sweetness of speech, and a perfect correctness in pronouncing every letter both in Greek and Latin, as though either were his native tongue. But all these were but the promise of greater things. He had finer qualities, courage and dignity, and the strength to resist both fear and pain. What fortitude he showed during an illness of eight months, till all his physicians marvelled at him! How he consoled me during his last moments. How even in the wanderings of delirium did his thoughts recur to his lessons and his literary studies, even when his strength was sinking and he was no longer ours to claim!

Child of my vain hopes, did I see your eyes fading in death and your breath take its last flight? Had I the heart to receive your fleeting spirit, [*]( It was customary for the next-of-kin to receive in the mouth the last breath of the dying to continue the existence of the spirit. ) as I embraced your cold pale body, and to live on breathing the common air. Justly do I endure the agony that now is mine, and the thoughts that torment me.

Have I lost you at the moment when adoption by a consular had given hope that you would rise to all the high offices of state, when you were destined to be the son-in-law of your uncle the praetor, and gave promise of rivalling the eloquence of your grandsire? and do I

But I still live, and must find something to make life tolerable, and must needs put faith in the verdict of the wise, who held that literature alone can provide true solace in adversity. Yet, if ever the violence of my present grief subside and admit the intrusion of some other thought on so many sorrowful reflexions, I may with good cause ask pardon for the delay in bringing my work to completion. Who can wonder that my studies have been interrupted, when the real marvel is that they have not been broken off altogether?

Should certain portions therefore betray a lack of finish compared with what was begun in the days when my affliction was less profound, I would ask that the imperfections should be regarded with indulgence, as being due to the cruel tyranny of fortune, which, if it has not utterly extinguished, has at any rate weakened such poor powers of intellect as I once possessed. But for this very reason I must rouse myself to face my task with greater spirit, since it is easy to despise fortune, though it may be hard to bear her blows. For there is nothing left that she can do to me, since out of my calamities she has wrought for me a security which, full of sorrow though it be, is such that nothing can shake it.

And the very fact that I have no personal interest in persevering with my present work, but am moved solely by the desire to serve others, if indeed anything that I write can be of such service, is a reason

The next subject which I was going to discuss was the peroration which some call the completion and others the conclusion. There are two kinds of peroration, for it may deal either with facts or with the emotional aspect of the case. The repetition and grouping of the facts, which the Greeks call ἀνακεφαλαίωσις and some of our own writers call the enumeration, serves both to refresh the memory of the judge and to place the whole of the case before his eyes, and, even although the facts may have made little impression on him in detail, their cumulative effect is considerable.