Institutio Oratoria
Quintilian
Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, Volume 1-4. Butler, Harold Edgeworth, translator. Cambridge, Mass; London: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd., 1920-1922.
The minds of such an audience are not to be moved by discoursing on the nature of virtue, which they ignore, but by praise, by appeals to popular opinion, and if such vanities are of no avail, by demonstration of the advantage that will accrue from such a policy, or more effectively perhaps by pointing out the appalling consequences that will follow the opposite policy.
For quite apart from the fact that the minds of unprincipled men are easily swayed by terror, I am not sure that most men's minds are not more easily influenced by fear of evil than by hope of good, for they find it easier to understand what is evil than what is good.
Sometimes again we urge good men to adopt a somewhat unseemly course, while we advise men of poor character to take a course in which the object is the advantage of those who seek our advice. I realise the thought that will immediately occur to my reader:
Do you then teach that this should be done or think it right?Cicero [*]( The letter is lost. the argument of the quotation is as follows. The policy which I advise is honorable, but it would be wrong for me to urge Caesar to follow it, since it is contrary to his interests. ) might clear me from blame in the matter; for he writes to Brutus in the following terms, after setting forth a number of things that
Should I be a good man to advise this? No. For the end of him who gives advice is the advantage of the man to whom he gives it. But, you say, your advice is right. Certainly, but there is not always room for what is right in giving advice.However, this is a somewhat abstruse question, and does not concern deliberative oratory alone. I shall therefore reserve it for my twelfth and concluding book. [*](Chap. xii.)
For my part I would not have anything done dishonourably. But for the meantime let us regard these questions as at least belonging to the rhetorical exercises of the schools: for knowledge of evil is necessary to enable us the better to defend what is right.
For the present I will only say that if anyone is going to urge a dishonourable course on honourable man, he should remember not to urge it as being dishonourable, and should avoid the practice of certain declaimers who urge Sextus Pompeius to piracy just because it is dishonourable and cruel. Even when we address bad men, we should gloss over what is unsightly. For there is no man so evil as to wish to seem so.