[67]
The first of the three is of common occurrence in
the schools, where we imagine conditions laid down
by tyrants on abdication and decrees passed by the
senate after a civil war, and it is a capital offence
to accuse a person with what is past, what is not
[p. 417]
expedient in the courts being actually prohibited
in the schools. But the conditions governing the
employment of figures differ in the two cases. For
we may speak against the tyrants in question as
openly as we please without loss of effect, provided always that what we say is susceptible of a
different interpretation, since it is only danger to
ourselves, and not offence to them, that we have to
avoid.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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