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,

Similar to these is that class of proverb which may be regarded as an abridged fable and is understood allegorically:

The burden is not mine to carry,

the ox is carrying panniers.

Simile has a force not unlike that of example, more especially when drawn from things nearly equal without any admixture of metaphor, as in the following case:

Just as those who have been accustomed to receive bribes in the Campus Martius are specially hostile to those whom they suspect of having withheld the money, so in the present case the judges came into court with a strong prejudice against the

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accused.

For παραβολή, which Cicero [*](de Inv. i. 30. ) translates by

comparison,

But if those who have just come into harbour from the high seas are in the habit of showing the greatest solicitude in warning those who are on the point of leaving port of the state of the weather, the likelihood of falling in with pirates, and the nature of the coasts which they are like to visit (for it is a natural instinct that we should take a kindly interest in those who are about to face the dangers from which we have just escaped), what think you should be my attitude who am now in sight of land after a mighty tossing on the sea, towards this man who, as I clearly see, has to face the wildest weather?

Further, since similar objects often take on a different appearance when viewed from a different angle, I feel that I ought to point out that the kind of comparison which the Greeks call εἰκών, and which expresses the appearance of things and persons (as for instance in the line of Cassius [*]( Probably the epigrammatist Cassius of Parma. lanipedis =bandaged for the gout. Regius emended to planipedis, a dancer who performed barefoot. ) —

1. Who is he yonder that doth writhe his face
2. Like some old man whose feet are wrapped in wool?)