[12]
Under
the same heading as the appeal to public or personal
interest comes the plea that the act in question
prevented the occurrence of something worse. For
in a comparison of evils the lesser evil must be
regarded as a positive good: for example, Mancinus
may defend the treaty made with the Numantines
on the ground that it saved the army from annihilation. This form of defence is called ἀντίστασις by
the Greeks, while we style it defence by comparison.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
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.