[64]
since, as he was writing to Trebatius,1 he preferred
to draw his examples from law. I have chosen my
illustrations as being more obvious. Properties have
relation to questions of fact as well; for instance,
it is the property of a good man to act rightly, of an
angry man to be violent in speech or action, and
consequently we believe that such acts are committed by persons of the appropriate character, or
[p. 237]
not committed by persons of inappropriate character.
For just as certain persons possess certain qualities,
so certain others do not possess certain qualities,
and the argument is of precisely the same nature,
though from opposite premises.
1 A famous lawyer, cp. III. xi. 18. v. 17.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1921.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
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.