Rhetorum praeceptor

Hunt up obscure, unfamiliar words, rarely used by the ancients, and have a heap of these in readiness to launch at your audience. The many-headed crowd will look up to you and think you amazing, and far beyond themselves in education, if you call rubbing down ‘ destrigillation,’ taking a sun-bath ‘insolation,’ advance payments ‘hansel,’ and daybreak ‘crepuscule.” Sometimes you must yourself make new monstrosities of words and prescribe that an able writer be called fine-dictioned, an intelligent man sage-minded, and a dancer handiwise.[*](According to Lucian himself in the treatise On Dancing (69), the word xe:plcopos (handiwise) was applied to dancers by Lesbonax, a rhetorician, whose son was one of Tiberius’ teachers. Its appropriateness lay in the extensive use of gesture in Greek dancing. ). If you commit a solecism or a barbarism, let shamelessness be your sole and only remedy, and be ready at once with the name of someone who is not now alive and never was, either a poet or a historian, saying that he, a learned man, extremely precise in his diction, approved the expression. As for reading the classics, don’t you do it—either that twaddling Isocrates or that uncouth Demosthenes or that tiresome Plato. No, read the speeches of the men who lived only a little before our own time, and

these pieces that they call ‘exercises,’[*](I.e., declamations. ) in order to secure from them a supply of provisions which you can use up as occasion arises, drawing, as it were, on the buttery.

“When you really must speak, and those present suggest themes and texts for your discussion, carp at all the hard ones and make light of them as not fit, any one of them, fora real man. But when they have made their selection,[*](That is to say, when the audience had selected, from the different topics suggested by individuals, the one that they preferred. ) unhesitatingly say ‘whatever comes to the tip of your unlucky tongue.’[*](A quotation from an unknown poet, which had become a proverb (Athenaeus 5, 217 c). « Proverbial for putting the cart before the horse. ) Take no pains at all that the first thing, just because it really is first, shall be said at the appropriate time, and the second directly after it, and the third after that, but say first whatever occurs to you first ; and if it so happens, don’t hesitate to buckle your leggings on your head and your helmet on your leg.* But do make haste and keep it going, and only don’t stop talking. If you are speaking of a case of assault or adultery at Athens, mention instances in India or Ecbatana. Cap everything with references to Marathon and Cynegeirus, without which you cannot succeed at all. Unendingly let Athos be crossed in ships and the Hellespont afoot; let the sun be shadowed by the arrows of the Medes, and Xerxes flee the field and Leonidas receive admiration; let the inscription of Othryades be deciphered, and let allusions to Salamis, Artemisium, and Plataea come thick and fast. Over everything let those few words of yours run riot and bloom, and let ‘sundry’

and ‘forsooth’ be incessant, even if there is no need of them ; for they are ornamental even when uttered at random.