Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

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.)

Cornelius Celsus seems to have agreed with these early rhetoricians, for he writes

The orator only aims at the semblance of truth,

and again a little later

The reward of the party to a suit is not a good conscience, but victory.

If this were true, only the worst of men would place such dangerous weapons at the disposal of criminals or employ the precepts of their art for the assistance of wickedness. However I will leave those who maintain these views to consider what ground they have for so doing.

For my part, I have undertaken the task of moulding the ideal orator, and as my first desire is that he should be a good man, I will return to those who have sounder opinions on the subject. Some however identify rhetoric with politics, Cicero [*](de Inv. I. v. 6. ) calls it a department of the science of politics (and science of politics and philosophy are identical terms), while others again call it a branch of philosophy, among them Isocrates.

The definition which best suits its real character is that which makes rhetoric the science of speaking well. For this definition includes all the virtues of oratory and the character of the orator as well, since no man can speak well who is not good himself.

The definition given by Chrysippus, who

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derived it from Cleanthes, to the effect that it is the science of speaking rightly, amounts to the same thing. The same philosopher also gives other definitions, but they concern problems of a different character from that on which we are now engaged. Another definition defines oratory as the power of persuading men to do what ought to be done, and yields practically the same sense save that it limits the art to the result which it produces.

Areus again defines it well as speaking according to the excellence of speech. Those who regard it as the science of political obligations, also exclude men of bad character from the title of orator, if by science they mean virtue, but restrict it overmuch by confining it to political problems. Albutius, a distinguished author and professor of rhetoric, agrees that rhetoric is the science of speaking well, but makes a mistake in imposing restrictions by the addition of the words on political questions and with credibility; with both of these restrictions I have already dealt.