This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
Table of Contents:
[10]
Another method, suitable for the accuser, is to
praise something unimportant at great length, and to condemn something important
concisely; or, putting forward several things that are praiseworthy in the
opponent, to condemn the one thing that has an important bearing upon the case.
Such methods1 are most artful and unfair; for by their use men
endeavor to make what is good in a man injurious to him, by mixing it up with
what is bad.
Another method is common to both accuser and defender. Since the same thing may
have been done from several motives, the accuser must disparage it by taking it
in the worse sense, while the defender must take it in the better sense. For
instance, when Diomedes chose Odysseus for his companion, it may be said on the
one hand that he did so because he considered him to be the bravest of men, on
the other, that it was because Odysseus was the only man who was no possible
rival for him, since he was a poltroon. Let this suffice for the question of
prejudice.
Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 22, translated by J. H. Freese. Aristotle. Cambridge and London. Harvard University Press; William Heinemann Ltd. 1926.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.