Institutio Oratoria

I would commend this remark to those who do not think it necessary to avoid obscenity on the ground that no word is indecent in itself and that, if a thing is revolting, its unpleasantness will be realised clearly enough by whatever name it is called. Accordingly, I shall content myself with following the good old rules of Roman modesty and, as I have already replied to such persons, shall vindicate the cause of decency by saying no more on this unpleasant subject.

Let us now pass to consider connected discourse. Its adornment may be effected, primarily, in two ways; that is to say, we must consider first our ideal of style, and secondly how we shall express this ideal in actual words. The first essential is to realise clearly what we wish to enhance or attenuate, to express with vigour or calm, in luxuriant or austere language, at length or with conciseness, with gentleness or asperity, magnificence or subtlety, gravity or wit.

The next essential is to decide by what kind of metaphor, figures, reflexions, methods and arrangement we may best produce the effect which we desire. But, before I discuss ornament, I must first touch upon its opposite, since the first of all virtues is the avoidance of faults.

Therefore we must not expect any speech to be ornate that is not, in the first place,

He desires, therefore, that our words should have a certain weight about them, and that our thoughts should be of a serious cast or, at any rate, adapted to the opinions and character of mankind. These points once secured, we may proceed to employ those expressions which he regards as conferring distinction on style, that is to say, specially selected words and phrases, metaphor, hyperbole, appropriate epithets, repetitions, synonyms and all such language as may suit our case and provide an adequate representation of the facts.

But since my first task is to point out the faults to be avoided, I will begin by calling attention to the fault known as κακέμφατον, a term applied to the employment of language to which perverted usage has given an obscene meaning: take, for example, phrases such as ductare exercitus and patrare bellum, [*](ductare might mean ad libidinem abducere. patrare bellum might mean paedicare formosum. ) which were employed by Sallust in their old and irreproachable sense, but, I regret to say, cause amusement in certain quarters to-day. This, however, is not, in my opinion, the fault of the writer, but of his readers;

still it is one to be avoided, for we have perverted the purity of language by our own corruption, and there is no course left to us but to give ground before the victorious advance of vice. The same term is also applied in the cases where an unfortunate collocation of words produces an obscene suggestion. For example, in the phrase cum hominibus notis loqui, unless hominibus is placed between cum and notis, we shall commit ourselves to a phrase

I might quote other collocations of words which are liable to the same objection, but to discuss them in detail would be to fall into that very fault which I have just said should be avoided. A similar offence against modesty may be caused by the division of words, as, for example, by the use of the nominative of intercapedinis. [*](interccapedo, of which the last two syllables might give rise to unseemly laughter; pedo = break wind. )