M. CORNELIUS FRONTO
dissembled? By what methods was he wont to disconcert and entrap Protagoras and Polus and Thrasymachus and the other Sophists? When did he meet them without masking his batteries? When not attack them from an ambush? From whom, if not from him, can we say that the inverted[1] form of speech, which the Greeks call εἰρωνεία, took its rise? In what fashion, again, used he to accost and address Alcibiades and the other young men who prided. themselves on birth or beauty or riches? In terms of censure or in terms of suavity?[2] With bitter reproof when they went wrong, or with gentle persuasion? And yet Socrates assuredly had as much seriousness or force as the cynic Diogenes shewed in his habitual brutality. But he saw, in fact, that the dispositions of men in a measure, and of young men in particular, are more easily won over by courteous and sympathetic than by bitter and unrestrained language. And so he did not attack the errors of youths with mantlets and battering rams, but sapped them with mines, and his hearers never parted from him torn, though sometimes teased. For the race of mankind is by nature stiff-necked against the high-handed, but responds readily to coaxing. Therefore we give way more willingly to entreaties than are frightened into submission by violence, and advice rather than denunciation leads us to improve. So we listen to admonition courteously conveyed, but severity of correction makes us contumacious.[3]
- ↑ As when he pretended ignorance (dissimuiatio) to elicit a definition from others.
- ↑ The Greek word = civiliter. cp. urbanitas in the quotation from Quintilian in note on p. 100.
- ↑ Fronto imitates Sallust in the conclusion of this letter. The last words are a good specimen of a Frontonian sententia or γνώμη.
