Institutio Oratoria

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.

There is also an unprofitable imitation of art, a kind of ματαιοτεχνία which is neither good nor bad, but merely involves a useless expenditure of labour, reminding one of the man who shot a continuous stream of vetch-seeds from a distance through the eye of a needle, without ever missing his aim, and was rewarded by Alexander, who was a witness of the display, with the present of a bushel of vetch-seeds, a most appropriate reward.

It is to such men that I would compare those who spend their whole time at the expense of much study and energy in composing declamations, which they aim at making as unreal as possible. The rhetoric on the other hand, which I am endeavouring to establish and the ideal of which I have in my mind's eye, that rhetoric which befits a good man and is in a word the only true rhetoric, will be a virtue.

Philosophers arrive

and if there are virtues, of which nature has given us some rudimentary sparks, even before we were taught anything about them, as for instance justice, of which there are some traces even among peasants and barbarians, it is clear that man has been so formed from the beginning as to be able to plead on his own behalf, not, it is true, with perfection, but yet sufficiently to show that there are certain sparks of eloquence implanted in us by nature.

The same nature, however, is not to be found in those arts which have no connexion with virtue. Consequently, since there are two kinds of speech, the continuous which is called rhetoric, and the concise which is called dialectic (the relation between which was regarded by Zeno as being so intimate that he compared the latter to the closed fist, the former to the open hand), even the art of disputation will be a virtue. Consequently there can be no doubt about oratory whose nature is so much fairer and franker.

I should like, however, to consider the point more fully and explicitly by appealing to the actual work of oratory. For how will the orator succeed in panegyric unless he can distinguish between what is honourable and the reverse? How