[104]
This type of argument may
reasonably be described as drawn from circumstances, there being no other word to express the
Greek περίστασις or from those things which are
peculiar to any given case. For instance, in the
case of the priest who having committed adultery
desired to save his own life by means of the law1
which gave him the power of saving one life, the
appropriate argument to employ against him would
run as follows: “You would save more than one
guilty person, since, if you were discharged, it would
not be lawful to put the adulteress to death.” For
such an argument follows from the law forbidding
the execution of the adulteress apart from the
adulterer.
1 This law and those which follow are imaginary laws invented for the purposes of the schools of rhetoric.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1921.
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