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 makes it even clearer that the complete attainment of this art is impossible without the knowledge of justice, an opinion in which I heartily concur. Had this not been his view, would he have ever written the Apology of Socrates or the Funeral Oration [*](Menexenus.) in praise of those who had died in battle for their country, both of them works falling within the sphere of oratory.

It was against the class of men who employed their glibness of speech for evil purposes that he directed his denunciations. Similarly Socrates thought it incompatible with his honour to

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make use of the speech which Lysias composed for his defence, although it was the usual practice in those days to write speeches for the parties concerned to speak in the courts on their own behalf, a device designed to circumvent the law which forbade the employment of advocates.

Further the teachers of rhetoric were regarded by Plato as quite unsuited to their professed task. For they divorced rhetoric from justice and preferred plausibility to truth, as he states in the Phaedrus. [*](267 A, with special reference to Tisias and Gorgias.)