[14]
For whereas in deliberative oratory
the senate demand a certain loftiness and the people
a certain impetuosity of eloquence, the public cases
of the courts and those involving capital punishment
demand a more exact style. On the other hand, in
private deliberations and lawsuits about trifling sums
of money (and there are not a few of these) it is more
appropriate to employ simple and apparently unstudied language. For we should be ashamed to
demand the repayment of a loan in rolling periods, or
to display poignant emotion in a case concerned with
water-droppings, or to work ourselves into a perspiration over the return of a slave to the vendor.
But I am wandering from the point.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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