Institutio Oratoria

The comic poets even accuse Socrates of teaching how to make the worse cause seem the better, while Plato says that Gorgias and Tisias made similar professions.

And to these they add further examples drawn from the history of Rome and Greece, enumerating all those who used their pernicious eloquence not merely against individuals but against whole states and threw an ordered commonwealth into a state of turmoil or even brought it to utter ruin; and they point out that for this very reason rhetoric was banished from Sparta, while its powers were cut down at Athens itself by the fact that an orator was forbidden to stir the passions of his audience.

On the showing of these critics not only orators but generals, magistrates, medicine and

Let us give up eating, it often makes us ill; let us never go inside houses, for sometimes they collapse on their occupants; let never a sword be forged for a soldier, since it might be used by a robber. And who does not realise that fire and water, both necessities of life, and, to leave mere earthly things, even the sun and moon, the greatest of the heavenly bodies, are occasionally capable of doing harm.

On the other hand will it be denied that it was by his gift of speech that Appius the Blind broke off the dishonourable peace which was on the point of being concluded with Pyrrhus? Did not the divine eloquence of Cicero win popular applause even when he denounced the Agrarian laws, [*](i.e. though denouncing laws which would naturally be popular. ) did it not crush the audacious plots of Catiline and win, while he still wore the garb of civil life, the highest honour that can be conferred on a victorious general, a public thanksgiving to heaven?