[17]
But it is surely the orator who will have the greatest
mastery of all such departments of knowledge and
the greatest power to express it in words. And if ever
he had reached perfection, there would be no need
to go to the schools of philosophy for the precepts of
virtue. As things stand, it is occasionally necessary
to have recourse to those authors who have, as I
said above, usurped the better part of the art of
oratory after its desertion by the orators and to
demand back what is ours by right, not with a view
to appropriating their discoveries, but to show them
that they have appropriated what in truth belonged
to others.
Quintilian. With an English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1920.
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