Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

For the same reason the uninstructed sometimes appear to have a richer flow of language, because they say everything that can be said, while the learned exercise discrimination and self-restraint. To this must be added the fact that such persons take no trouble to prove their contentions, and consequently steer clear of the chilly reception given in our decadent law-courts to arguments and

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questions and seek only for such themes as may beguile the ears of the public even at the cost of appealing to the most perverted tastes.

Again, their epigrams, the sole objects of their quest, seem all the more striking because of the dreariness and squalor of their context, since flashes are more clearly seen against a background, not of mere

shade,
as Cicero [*](de Or. III. xxvi. 101. ) says, but of pitchy darkness. Well, let the world credit them with as much genius as it pleases, so long as it is admitted that such praise is an insult to any man of real eloquence.

None the less it must be confessed that learning does take something from oratory, just as the file takes something from rough surfaces or the whetstone from blunt edges or age from wine; it takes away defects, and if the results produced after subjection to the polish of literary study are less, they are less only because they are better.

But these creatures have another weapon in their armoury: they seek to obtain the reputation of speaking with greater vigour than the trained orator by means of their delivery. For they shout on all and every occasion and bellow their every utterance

with uplifted hand,
to use their own phrase, dashing this way and that, panting, gesticulating wildly and wagging their heads with all the frenzy of a lunatic.

Smite your hands together, stamp the ground, slap your thigh, your breast, your forehead, and you will go straight to the heart of the dingier members of your audience. [*](pullatus = wearing dark clothes, i.e. the common people, as opposed to the upper classes wearing the white or purple bordered toga. ) But the educated speaker, just as he knows how to moderate his style, and to impart variety and artistic form to his speech, is an equal adept in the matter of delivery and will suit his action to the tone of each

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portion of his utterances, while, if he has any one canon for universal observance, it is that he should both possess the reality and present the appearance of self-control.