Institutio Oratoria

Brevity and copiousness are determined not so much by the nature as by the compass of the subject. For, just as in deliberations the question is generally less complicated, so in forensic cases it is often of less importance. Anyone who is content to read not merely speeches, but history as well, in preference to growing grey over the notebooks of the rhetoricians, will realise the truth of what I say: for in the historians the speeches delivered to the people and the opinions expressed in the senate often provide examples of advice and dissuasion.

he will find an avoidance of abrupt openings in deliberatire speeches and will note that the forensic style is often the more impetuous of the two, while in both cases the words are suited to the matter and forensic speeches are often shorter than deliberative.

Nor will he find in them those faults into which some of our declaimers fall, namely a coarse abuse of those who hold opposite opinions and a general tendency to speak in such a way as to make it seem that the speaker's views are in opposition to those of the persons who ask his advice. Consequently their aim seems to be invective rather than persuasion.

I would have my younger readers realise that these words are penned for their special benefit that they may not desire to adopt a different style in their exercises from that in which they will be required to speak, and may not be hampered by having to unlearn what they have acquired. For the rest if they are ever summoned to take part in the counsels of their friends, or to speak their opinions in the senate, or advise the emperor on some point on which he

IX. I now come to the forensic kind of oratory, which presents the utmost variety, but whose duties are no more than two, the bringing and rebutting of charges. Most authorities divide the forensic speech into five parts: the exordium, the statement of facts, the proof, the refutation, and the peroration. To these some have added the partition into heads, proposition and digression, the two first of which form part of the proof.