[19]
Again, when we have depicted some horrible
circumstance in such colours as to raise the detestation of our audience to its height, we then proceed
to make light of them in order that what is to follow
may seem still more horrible: consider the following
passage from Cicero:1 “These are but trivial offences
for so great a criminal. The captain of a warship
from a famous city bought off' his threatened scourging for a price: a humane concession! Another
paid down a sum of money to save his head from
the axe:”
1 Verr. 5, 44, 177.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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.