Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

Upright character, however, and the blamelessness of his past life are always of the utmost assistance to the accused. If no charge is made against his character, counsel for the defence will lay great stress on this fact, while the accuser will attempt to restrict the judge to the sole consideration of the actual issue which the court has to decide, and will say that there must always be a first step in crime and that a first offence is not to be regarded as the occasion for celebrating a feast in honour of the defendant's character.

So much for the methods of reply which will be employed by the prosecution. But he will also in his opening speech endeavour to dispose the judges to believe that it is not so much that he is unable, as that he is unwilling to bring any charge against the character of the accused. Consequently it is better to abstain from casting any slur on the past life of the accused than to attack him with slight or frivolous charges which are manifestly false, since such a proceeding discredits the rest of our argument. Further, the advocate who brings

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no charges against the accused may be believed to have omitted all reference to past offences on the ground that such reference was not necessary, while the advocate who heaps up baseless charges thereby admits that his only argument is to be found in the past life of the accused, and that he has deliberately preferred to risk defeat on this point rather than say nothing at all about it.

As regards the other arguments derived from character, I have already discussed them in connexion with

places

of argument. [*]( v. x. 20, where argumentorum loci are defined as "the dwellings of arguments, where they hide and where we must look for them. ) The next type of proof is derived from causes or motives, such as anger, hatred, fear, greed or hope, since all motives can be classified as species of one or other of these. If any of these motives can be plausibly alleged against the accused, it is the duty of the accuser to make it appear that such motives may lead a man to commit any crime, and to exaggerate the particular motives which he selects for the purpose of his argument.

If no such motive can be alleged, he must take refuge in suggesting that there must have been some hidden motive, or in asserting that, if he committed the act, all enquiry into motive is irrelevant or that a motiveless crime is even more abominable than one which has a motive. Counsel for the defence, on the other hand, will, wherever it be possible, emphasise the point that it is incredible that any act should be committed without a motive. Cicero develops this point with great energy in a number of his speeches, but more especially in his defence of Varenus, who had everything else against him and was as a matter of fact condemned.

But if the prosecution do allege some motive, he will either say that the motive alleged is

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false or inadequate or unknown to the accused. For it is possible that a man may be quite ignorant of motives imputed to him. He may not, for example, have known whether the man whom he is accused of having killed had appointed him his heir or intended to prosecute him. All else failing, we may urge that motives are not necessarily of importance. For what man is there who is not liable to the emotions of fear, hatred or hope, and yet numbers of persons act on these motives without committing crime?

Nor should we neglect the point that all motives do not apply to all persons. For example, although poverty may in certain cases be a motive for theft, it will not have the same force with men such as Curius or Fabricius.