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[5]
On the other hand, it is a most
pernicious practice to rest content with a written
statement of the case composed either by the litigant
who betakes himself to an advocate because he finds
that his own powers are not equal to the conduct of
his case, or by some member of that class of legal
advisers1 who admit that they are incapable of pleading, and then proceed to take upon themselves the
most difficult of all the tasks that confront the pleader.
For if a man is capable of judging what should be
said, what concealed, what avoided, altered or even
invented, why should he not appear as orator himself,
since he performs the far more difficult feat of making
[p. 431]
an orator?
1 Advocatus is here used in its original sense. By Quintilian's time it had come also to mean “advocate,” and is often so used by him elsewhere.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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