There is also an unprofitable imitation of art, a kind of ματαιοτεχνία which is neither good nor bad, but merely involves a useless expenditure of labour, reminding one of the man who shot a continuous stream of vetch-seeds from a distance through the eye of a needle, without ever missing his aim, and was rewarded by Alexander, who was a witness of the display, with the present of a bushel of vetch-seeds, a most appropriate reward.

It is to such men that I would compare those who spend their whole time at the expense of much study and energy in composing declamations, which they aim at making as unreal as possible. The rhetoric on the other hand, which I am endeavouring to establish and the ideal of which I have in my mind's eye, that rhetoric which befits a good man and is in a word the only true rhetoric, will be a virtue.

Philosophers arrive at this conclusion by a long chain of ingenious arguments; but it appears to me to be perfectly clear from the simpler proof of my own invention which I will now proceed to set forth. The philosophers state the case as follows. If self-consistency as to what should and should not be done is an element of virtue (and it is to this quality that we give the name of prudence), the same quality will be revealed as regards what should be said and what should not be said,

and if there are virtues, of which nature has given us some rudimentary sparks, even before we were taught anything about them, as for instance justice, of which there are some traces even among peasants and barbarians, it is clear that man has been so formed from the beginning as to be able to plead on his own behalf, not, it is true, with perfection, but yet sufficiently to show that there are certain sparks of eloquence implanted in us by nature.

The same nature, however, is not to be found in those arts which have no connexion with virtue. Consequently, since there are two kinds of speech, the continuous which is called rhetoric, and the concise which is called dialectic (the relation between which was regarded by Zeno as being so intimate that he compared the latter to the closed fist, the former to the open hand), even the art of disputation will be a virtue. Consequently there can be no doubt about oratory whose nature is so much fairer and franker.