Institutio Oratoria

Nor can I see how we can turn a more honest penny than by performance of the most honourable of tasks and by accepting money from those to whom we have rendered the most signal services and who, if they made no return for what we have done for them, would show themselves undeserving to have been defended by us. Nay, it is not only just, but necessary that this should be so, since the duties of advocacy and the bestowal of every minute of our time on the affairs of others deprive us of all other means of making money.

But we must none the less observe the happy mean, and it makes no small difference from whom we take payment, what payment we demand, and how long we continue to do so. As for the piratical practice of bargaining and the scandalous traffic of those who proportion their fees to the peril in which their would-be client stands, such a procedure will be eschewed even by those who are more than half scoundrels, more especially since the advocate who devotes himself

To conelude, then, the orator will not seek to make more money than is sufficient for his needs, and even if he is poor, he will not regard his payment as a fee, but rather as the expression of the principle that one good turn deserves another, since he will be well aware that he has conferred far more than he receives. For it does not follow that because his services ought not to be sold, they should therefore be unremunerated. Finally, gratitude is primarily the business of the debtor.

We have next to consider how a case should be studied, since such study is the foundation of oratory. There is no one so destitute of all talent as, after making himself thoroughly familiar with all the facts of his case, to be unable at least to communicate those facts to the judge.