[32]
For my own part, I have
included both under the same generally accepted
term, since we cannot imagine a speech without we
also imagine a person to utter it. But when we lend
a voice to things to which nature has denied it, we
may soften down the figure in the way illustrated
by the following passage: “For if my country, which
is far dearer to me than life itself, if all Italy, if the
whole commonwealth were to address me thus,
'Marcus Tullius, what dost thou?”1 A bolder
figure of the same kind may be illustrated by the
following: “Your country, Catiline, pleads with you
thus, and though she utters never a word, cries to
you, 'For not a few years past no crime has come
to pass save through your doing!'”2
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.