Institutio Oratoria
Quintilian
Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, Volume 1-4. Butler, Harold Edgeworth, translator. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd., 1920-1922.
As to commonplaces (I refer to those in which we denounce vices themselves such as adultery, gambling or profligacy without attacking particular persons), they come straight from the courts and, if we add the name of the defendant, amount to actual accusations. As a rule, however, the general character of a commonplace is usually given a special turn: for instance we make our adulterer blind, our gambler poor and our profligate far advanced in years. Sometimes too they entail
for we may speak on behalf of luxury or love, while a pimp or a parasite may be defended in such a way that we appeal as counsel not for the character itself, but to rebut some specific charge that is brought against him.
Theses on the other hand are concerned with the comparison of things and involve questions such as
Which is preferable, town or country life?or
Which deserves the greatest praise, the lawyer or the soldier?These provide the most attractive and copious practice in the art of speaking, and are most useful whether we have an eye to the duties of deliberative oratory or the arguments of the courts. For instance Cicero in his pro Murena [*](Pro Mur. ix. 21 sqq. ) deals very fully with the second of the two problems mentioned above.
Other theses too belong entirely to the deliberative class of oratory, as for instance the questions as to
Whether marriage is desirableor
Whether a public career is a proper object of ambition.Put such discussions into the mouths of specific persons and they become deliberative declamations at once.
My own teachers used to prepare us for conjectural cases by a form of exercise which was at once useful and attractive: they made us discuss and develop questions such as
Why in Sparta is Venus represented as wearing armour?[*]( The reason according to Lactantius ( Inst. Div. i. 20) was the bravery of the Spartan women in one of the Messenian wars. ) or
Why is Cupid believed to be a winged boy armed with arrows and a torch?and the like. In these exercises our aim was to discover the intention implied, a question which frequently occurs in controversial declamations. Such themes may perhaps be regarded as a kind of chria or moral essay.
That certain topics such as the question as to
This practice— for I am not going to postpone expressing my judgment on it—I used to regard a confession of extreme weakness. For how can such men find appropriate arguments in the course of actual cases which continually present new and different features? How can they answer the points that their opponents may bring up? how deal a rapid counterstroke in debate or cross-examine a witness? if, even in those matters which are of common occurrence and crop up in the majority of cases, they cannot give expression to the most familiar thoughts except in words prepared so far in advance.
And when they produce the same passage in a number of different cases, they must come to loathe it like food that has grown cold or stale, and they can hardly avoid a feeling of shame at displaying this miserable piece of furniture to an audience whose memory must have detected it so many times already: like the furniture of the ostentatious poor, it is sure to shew signs of wear through being used for such a variety of different purposes.
Also it must be remembered that there is hardly a single commonplace of such universal application that it will fit any actual case, unless some special link is provided to connect it with