[3]
Domitius
Afer was by far the greatest of all the orators whom
it has been my good fortune to know, and I saw
him, when far advanced in years, daily losing something of that authority which his merits had won
for him; he whose supremacy in the courts had once
been universally acknowledged, now pleaded amid
the unworthy laughter of some, and the silent
blushes of others, giving occasion to the malicious
saying that he had rather “faint than finish.”1
1 By “finish” is meant “retire from pleading.”
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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