[18]
Let us then understand a cause in the sense of
the Greek hypothesis or subject, and a matter in the
sense of the Greek peristasis or collection of circumstances. But some, however, have defined a cause in
the same way that Apollodorus defines a matter.
Isocrates1 on the other hand defines a cause as some
definite question concerned with some point of civil affairs,
or a dispute in which definite persons are involved; while
Cicero2 uses the following words:—“A cause may be
known by its being concerned with certain definite
persons, circumstances of time and place, actions, and
business, and will relate either to all or at any rate to
most of these.”
VI.3 Since every cause, then, has a certain essential
basis4 on which it rests, before I proceed to set forth
how each kind of cause should be handled, I think I
[p. 409]
should first examine a question that is common to all
of them, namely, what is meant by basis, whence it
is derived and how many and of what nature such
bases may be. Some, it is true, have thought that
they were peculiar merely to forensic themes, but
their ignorance will stand revealed when I have
treated of all three kinds of oratory.
1 Fr. 13 Sheehan.
2 Top. xxi. 80.
3 This chapter is highly technical and of little interest for the most part to any save professed students of the technique of the ancient schools of rhetoric. Its apparent obscurity will, however, he found to disappear on careful analysis. The one passage of general interest it contains is to be found in the extremely ingenious fictitious theme discussed in sections 96 sqq.
4 There is no exact English equivalent for status. Basis or ground are perhaps the nearest equivalents.
Quintilian. With an English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1920.
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