[36]
But though the orator
will as a rule maintain what is true, this will not
always be the case: there are occasions when the
public interest demands that he should defend what
is untrue.
The following objections are also put forward in
the second book of Cicero's de Oratore:1—“Art deals
with things that are known. But the pleading of an
orator is based entirely on opinion, not on knowledge,
because he speaks to an audience who do not know,
[p. 343]
and sometimes himself states things of which he has
no actual knowledge.”
1 II. vii. 30.
Quintilian. With an English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1920.
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