Institutio Oratoria

I quite realise that there is a further question as to whether eloquence derives most from nature or from education. This question really lies outside the scope of our inquiry, since the ideal orator must necessarily be the result of a blend of both. But I do regard it as of great importance that we should decide how far there is any real question on this point.

For if we make an absolute divorce between the two, nature will still be able to accomplish much without the aid of education, while the latter is valueless without the aid of nature. If, on the other hand, they are blended in equal proportions, I think we shall find that the average orator owes most to nature, while the perfect orator owes more to education. We may take a parallel from agriculture. A thoroughly barren soil will not be improved even by the best cultivation, while good land will yield some useful produce without any cultivation; but in the case of really rich land cultivation will do more for it than its own natural fertility.

Had Praxiteles attempted to carve a statue out of a millstone, I should have preferred a rough block of Parian marble to any such statue. On the other hand, if the same artist had produced a finished statue from such a block of Parian marble, its artistic value would owe more to his skill than to the material. To conclude, nature is the raw material for education: the one forms, the other is formed. Without material art can do nothing, material without art does possess a certain value, while the perfection of art is better than the best material.

More important is the question whether rhetoric is to be regarded as one of the indifferent arts, which in themselves deserve neither praise nor blame, but are useful or the reverse according to the character of the artist; or whether it should, as not a few even among philosophers hold, be considered as a virtue.

For my own part I regard the practice of rhetoric which so many have adopted in the past and still follow to-day, as either no art at all, or, as the Greeks call it, ἀτεχνία (for I see numbers of speakers without the least pretension to method or literary training rushing headlong in the direction in which hunger or their natural shamelessness calls them); or else it is a bad art such as is styled κακοτεχνία. For there have, I think, been many persons and there are still some who have devoted their powers of speaking to the destruction of their fellow-men.