Institutio Oratoria

I would ask them to consider how great are the powers of the mind of man and how astonishing its capacity for carrying its desires into execution: for has not man succeeded in crossing the high seas, in learning the number and the courses of the stars, and almost measuring the universe itself, all of them accomplishments of less importance than oratory, but of far greater difficulty? And then let them reflect on the greatness of' their aims and on the fact that no labour should be too huge for those that are beckoned by the hope of such reward.

If they can only rise to the height of this conception, they will find it easier to enter on this portion of their task, and will cease to regard the road as impassable or even hard. For the first and greatest of' the aims we set before us, namely that we shall be good

For the precepts that are enjoined upon us are not so complex or so numerous that they may be acquired by little more than a few years' study. It is repugnance to learn that makes such labour long. For if you will only believe it, you will quickly learn the principles that shall lead you to a life of virtue and happiness. For nature brought us into the world that we might attain to all excellence of mind, and so easy is it for those to learn who seek for better things, that he who directs his gaze aright will rather marvel that the bad should be so many.

For as water is the natural element of fish, dry land for creatures of the earth and the circumambient atmosphere for winged things, even so it should be easier to live according to nature than counter to her will. As regards other accomplishments, there are plenty of years available for their acquisition, even though we measure the life of man not by the span of age, but by the period of youth. For in every case order and method and a sense of proportion will shorten our labour.

But the chief fault lies with our teachers, in that they love to keep back the pupils they have managed to lay their hands on, partly from the desire to draw their miserable fees for as long as possible, partly out of ostentation, to enhance the difficulty of acquiring the knowledge which they promise to impart, and to some extent owing to their ignorance or carelessness in teaching. The next most serious fault lies in ourselves, who think it better to linger over what we have learned

For example, to restrict my remarks mainly to the study of rhetoric, what is the use of spending so many years, after the fashion now so prevalent (for I will say nothing of those who spend almost their whole lives), in declaiming in the schools and devoting so much labour to the treatment of fictitious themes, when it would be possible with but slight expenditure of time to form some idea of what the true conflicts are in which the orator must engage, and of the laws of speaking which he ought to follow?

In saying this, I do not for a moment mean to suggest that we should ever omit to exercise ourselves in speaking. I merely urge that we should not grow old over one special form of exercise. We have been in a position to acquire varied knowledge, to familiarise ourselves with the principles that should guide our life, and to try our strength in the courts, while we were still attending the schools. The theory of speaking is of such a nature that it does not demand many years for its acquisition. For any one of the various branches of knowledge which I have mentioned will, as a rule, be found to be comprised in a few volumes, a fact which shows that instruction does not require an indefinite amount of time to be devoted to it. The rest depends entirely on practice, which at once develops our powers and maintains them, once developed.

Knowledge increases day by day, and yet how many books is it absolutely necessary to read in our search for its attainment, for examples of facts from the historians or of eloquence from the orators, or, again, for the opinions of the philosophers and the lawyers, that is to say, if we are content to read merely what is useful without

But it is ourselves that make the time for study short: for how little time we allot to it! Some hours are passed in the futile labour of ceremonial calls, others in idle chatter, others in staring at the shows of the theatre, and others again in feasting. To this add all the various forms of amusement, the insane attention devoted to the cultivation of the body, journeys abroad, visits to the country, anxious calculation of loss and gain, the allurements of lust, wine-bibbing and those remaining hours which are all too few to gratify our souls on fire with passion for every kind of pleasure.

If all this time were spent on study, life would seem long enough and there would be plenty of time for learning, even though we should take the hours of daylight only into our account, without asking any assistance from the night, of which no little space is superfluous even for the heaviest sleeper. As it is, we count not the years which we have given to study, but the years we have lived.

And indeed even although geometricians, musicians and grammarians, together with the professors of every other branch of knowledge, spend all their lives, however long, in the study of one single science, it does not therefore follow that we require several lives more if we are to learn more. For they do not spend all their days even to old age in learning these things, but being content to have learned these things and nothing more, exhaust their length of years not in acquiring, but in imparting knowledge.