Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

Such were the subjects on which the ancients as a rule exercised their powers of speaking, though they called in the assistance of the logicians as well to teach them the theory of argument. For it is generally agreed that the declamation of fictitious themes in imitation of the questions that arise in the law courts or deliberative assemblies came into vogue among the Greeks about the time of Demetrius of Phalerum.

Whether this type of exercise was actually invented by him I have failed to discover, as I have acknowledged in another work. [*]( Probably the lost treatise on The causes of the decline of oratory ( De causis corruptae eloquentiae). ) But not even those who most strongly assert his claim to be the inventor, can produce any adequate authority in support of their opinion. As regards Latin teachers of rhetoric, of whom Plotius was the

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most famous, Cicero [*]( See Cic. de Or. iii. 24, 93. ) informs us that they came into existence towards the end of the age of Crassus.