Institutio Oratoria

A similar method is to be pursued in quoting from the fictions of the poets, though we must remember that they will be of less force as proofs. The same supreme authority, the great master of eloquence, shows us how we should employ such quotations.

For an example of this type will be found in the same speech [*](ib. iii. 8. The allusion is to Orestes, acquitted when tried before the Areopagus at Athens by the casting vote of Pallas Athene. ) :

And it is therefore, gentlemen of' the jury, that men of the greatest learning have

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recorded in their fictitious narratives that one who had killed his mother to avenge his father was acquitted, when the opinion of men was divided as to his guilt, not merely by the decision of a deity, but by the vote of the wisest of goddesses.

Again those fables which, although they did not originate with Aesop (for Hesiod seems to have been the first to write them), are best known by Aesop's name, are specially attractive to rude and uneducated minds, which are less suspicious than others in their reception of fictions and, when pleased, readily agree with the arguments from which their pleasure is derived. Thus Menenius Agrippa [*](See Liv. ii. 32.) is said to have reconciled the plebs to the patricians by his fable of the limbs' quarrel with the belly. Horace [*](Epis I. i. 73. )

also did not regard the employment of fables as beneath the dignity even of poetry; witness his lines that narrate

What the shrewd fox to the sick lion told.

apologues,