Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

Well, then, if any man should, in addition to the actual virtues which the great orator Demosthenes

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possessed, show himself to be the possessor of others, that either owing to his own temperament or the laws of Athens [*]( See II. xvi. 4. Quintilian alludes to an alleged law forbidding Athenian oratos, to appeal to the emotions in the law courts. ) Demosthenes is thought to have lacked, and should reveal in himself the power of strongly stirring the emotions, shall I hear one of these critics protesting that Demosthenes never did this? And if he produces something rhythmically superior (an impossible feat, perhaps, but let us assume it to be so), are we to be told that it is not Attic? These critics would show finer feeling and better judgement, if they took the view that Attic eloquence meant perfect eloquence.

Still I should find this attitude less intolerable if it were only the Greeks that insisted on it. For Latin eloquence, although in my opinion it closely resembles the Greek as far as invention, arrangement, judgement and the like are concerned, and may indeed be regarded as its disciple, cannot aspire to imitate it in point of elocution. For, in the first place, it is harsher in sound, since our alphabet does not contain the most euphonious of the Greek letters, one a vowel and the other a consonant, [*](φ alio γ . ) than which there are none that fall more sweetly on the ear, and which we are forced to borrow whenever we use Greek words.

The result of such borrowing is, for some reason or other, the immediate accession to our language of a certain liveliness and charm. Take, for example, words such as sephyri and zophori: [*](Friezes.) if they were spelt according to the Latin alphabet, they would produce a heavy and barbarous sound. For we replace these letters by others of a harsh and unpleasant character, [*]( F and U; zefuri and zofori. ) from which Greece is happily immune.

For the sixth letter in our alphabet is represented by a sound which can scarcely be

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called human or even articulate, being produced by forcing the air through the interstices of the teeth. Such a sound, even when followed by a vowel, is harsh enough and, as often as it clashes ( frangit ) with a consonant, [*](cp. I. iv. 11. ) as it does in this very word frangit, becomes harsher still. Then there is the Aeolic digamma whose sound occurs in words such as our servus and cervus; for even though we have rejected the actual form of the letter, we cannot get rid of that which it represents. [*](A sound approximating to our W.)