Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

Such abuses occur chiefly in connexion with fabulous stories and are sometimes carried to ludicrous or even scandalous extremes: for in such cases the more unscrupulous commentator has such full scope for invention, that he can tell lies

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to his heart's content about whole books and authors without fear of detection: for what never existed can obviously never be found, whereas if the subject is familiar the careful investigator will often detect the fraud. Consequently I shall count it a merit in a teacher of literature that there should be some things which he does not know.

IX. I have now finished with two of the departments, with which teachers of literature profess to deal, namely the art of speaking correctly and the interpretation of authors; the former they call nethodicē, the latter historiē We must however add to their activities instruction in certain rudiments of oratory for the benefit of those who are not yet ripe for the schools of rhetoric.

Their pupils should learn to paraphrase Aesop's fables, the natural successors of the fairy stories of the nursery, in simple and restrained language and subsequently to set down this paraphrase in writing with the same simplicity of style: they should begin by analysing each verse, then give its meaning in different language, and finally proceed to a freer paraphrase in which they will be permitted now to abridge and now to embellish the original, so far as this may be done without losing the poet's meaning.

This is no easy task even for the expert instructor, and the pupil who handles it successfully will be capable of learning everything. He should also be set to write aphorisms, moral essays (chriae ) and delineations of character (ethologiae ), [*]( The meaning of ethologia is doubtful, but probably means a simple character-sketch of some famous man. ) of which the teacher will first give the general scheme, since such themes will be drawn from their reading. In all of these exercises the general idea is the same, but the form differs: aphorisms are general propositions, while ethologiae

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are concerned with persons

. Of moral essays there are various forms: some are akin to aphorisms and commence with a simple statement

he said
or
he used to say
: others give the answer to a question and begin
on being asked
or
in answer to this he replied,
while a third and not dissimilar type begins,
when someone has said or done something.
Some hold that a moral essay may take some action as its text;