Institutio Oratoria
Quintilian
Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, Volume 1-4. Butler, Harold Edgeworth, translator. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd., 1920-1922.
He stands armed for battle, ever ready for the fray, and his eloquence will no more fail him in the courts than speech will fail him in domestic affairs and the daily concerns of life: and he will never shirk his burden for fear of failing to find words, provided he has time to study his case: for all other knowledge will always be his at command.
The question of the
kind of styleto be adopted remains to be discussed. This was described in my original division [*](II. xiv. 5.) of my subject as forming its third portion: for I promised that I would speak of the art, the artist and the work. But since oratory is the work both of rhetoric and of the orator, and since it has many forms, as I shall show, the art and the artist are involved in the consideration of all these forms. But they differ greatly from one another, and not merely in species, as statue differs from statue, picture from picture and speech from speech, but in genus as well, as, for example, Etruscan statues differ from Greek and Asiatic orators from Attic.
But these different kinds of work, of which I speak, are not merely the product of different authors, but have each their own following of admirers, with the result that the perfect orator has not yet been found, a statement which perhaps may be extended to all arts, not merely because some qualities are more evident in some artists than in others, but because one single form
The first great painters, whose works deserve inspection for something more than their mere antiquity, are said to have been Polygnotus and Aglaopllon, [*]( Of the painters mentioned in this and the following sections Polyglotus of Thasos, son of Aglaophon, painted at Athens in the middle of the 5th century B.C.. Zunis of Heracelea Parrhasius of Ephesus flourished 420–390, while the remainder are painters of the 4th century. Of these Palmphilus of Sicyon was the teacher of Melanthius and Apelles, the latter being the most famous painter of antiquity. ) whose simple colouring has still such enthusiastic admirers that they prefer these almost primitive works, which may be regarded as the first foundations of the art that was to be, over the works of the greatest of their successors, their motive being, in my opinion, an ostentatious desire to seem persons of superior taste.
Later Zeuxis and Parrhasius contributed much to the progress of painting. These artists were separated by no great distance of time, since both flourished about the period of the Peloponnesian war: for example, Xenophon [*](Memoir. III. x. 1. ) has preserved a conversation between Socrates and Parrhasius. The first-mentioned seems to have discovered the method of representing light and shade, while the latter is said to have devoted special attention to the treatment of line.
For Zeuxis emphasised the limbs of the human body, [*](I.e. by giving them roundness and solidity by his treatment of light and shade. ) thinking thereby to add dignity and grandeur to his style: it is generally supposed that in this he followed the example of Homer, who likes to represent even his female characters as being of heroic mould. Parrhasius, on the other hand, was so fine a draughtsman that he has been styled the law-giver of his art, on the ground that all other artists take his representations of gods and heroes as models, as though no other course were possible.