Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian

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

At this point there has been much disagreement, as to whether these are parts or duties of rhetoric, or, as Athenaeus believes, elements of rhetoric, which the Greeks call στοιχεῖα But they cannot correctly be called elements. For in that case we should have to regard them merely as first-principles, like the moisture, fire, matter or atoms of which the universe is said to be composed. Nor is it correct to call them duties, since they are not preformed by others, but perform something themselves. We must therefore conclude that they are parts.

For since rhetoric is composed of them, it follows that:, since a whole consists of parts, these must be parts of the whole which they compose. Those who have called them duties seem to me to have been further influenced by the fact that they wished to reserve the name of parts for another

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division of rhetoric: for they asserted that the parts of rhetoric were, panegyric, deliberative and forensic oratory. But if these are parts, they are parts rather of the material than of the art.

For each of them contains the whole of rhetoric, since each of them requires invention, arrangement, expression, memory and delivery. Consequently some writers have thought it better to say that there are three kinds of oratory; those whom Cicero [*](de Or. I. xxxi. 141; Top. xxiv. 91. ) has followed seem to me to have taken the wisest course in terming them kinds of causes.