Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

XI. The comic actor will also claim a certain amount of our attention, but only in so far as our future orator must be a master of the art of delivery. For I do not of course wish the boy, whom we are training to this end, to talk with the shrillness of a woman or in the tremulous accents of old age.

Nor for that matter must he ape the vices of the

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drunkard, or copy the cringing manners of a slave, or learn to express the emotions of love, avarice or fear. Such accomplishments are not necessary to an orator and corrupt the mind, especially while it is still pliable and unformed. For repeated imitation passes into habit.

Nor yet again must we adopt all the gestures and movements of the actor. Within certain limits the orator must be a master of both, but he must rigorously avoid staginess and all extravagance of facial expression, gesture and gait. For if an orator does command a certain art in such matters, its highest expression will be in the concealment of its existence. What then is the duty of the teacher whom we have borrowed from the stage?

In the first place he must correct all faults of pronunciation, and see that the utterance is distinct, and that each letter has its proper sound. There is an unfortunate tendency in the case of some letters to pronounce them either too thinly or too fully, while some we find too harsh and fail to pronounce sufficiently, substituting others whose sound is similar but somewhat duller.

For instance, lambda is substituted for rho, a letter which was always a stumbling-block to Demosthenes; our l and r have of course the same value. [*]( The mis-spelling of flagro as fraglo exemplifies the confusion to which Quintilian refers. A similar, though correct, substitution is found in lavacrum for lavaclum, etc. See Lindsay, Lat. Langu., pp. 92 ff. ) Similarly when c and g are not given their full value, they are softened into t and d.

Again our teacher must not tolerate the affected pronunciation of s [*]( Quintilian perhaps alludes to the habit of prefixing i to initial st, sp, sc found in inscriptions of the later Empire. See Lindsay, op. cit. p. 102. ) with which we are painfully familiar, nor suffer words to be uttered from the depths of the throat or

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rolled out hollow-mouthed, or permit the natural sound of the voice to be over-laid with a fuller sound, a fault fatal to purity of speech; the Greeks give this peculiarity the name καταπεπλασμένον (plastered over), a term applied to the tone produced by a pipe,

when the stops which produce the treble notes are closed, and a bass note is produced through the main aperture only.

He will also see that final syllables are not clipped, that the quality of speech is continuously maintained, that when the voice is raised, the strain falls upon the lungs and not the mouth, and that gesture and voice are mutually appropriate.

He will also insist that the speaker faces his audience, that the lips are not distorted nor the jaws parted to a grin, that the face is not thrown back, nor the eyes fixed on the ground, nor the neck slanted to left or right. For there are a variety of faults of facial expression. I have seen many, who raised their brows whenever the voice was called upon for an effort,