BOOK III. XXIII. 33-38
Well! but isn't there such a thing as the right style for exhortation?—Why yes, who denies that? Just as there is the style for refutation, and the style for instruction. Who, then, has ever mentioned a fourth style along with these, the style of display?[1] Why, what is the style for exhortation? The ability to show to the individual, as well as to the crowd, the warring inconsistency in which they are floundering about, and how they are paying attention to anything rather than what they truly want. For they want the things that conduce to happiness, but they are looking for them in the wrong place. 35To achieve that must a thousand benches be placed, and the prospective audience be invited, and you put on a fancy cloak, or dainty mantle, and mount the speaker's stand, and paint a word-picture of—how Achilles died? By the gods, I beseech you, have done with discrediting, as far as it is in your power to discredit, words and actions that are noble! There is nothing more effective in the style for exhortation than when the speaker makes clear to his audience that he has need of them.[2] Or tell me, who that ever heard you reading a lecture or conducting a discourse felt greatly disturbed about himself, or came to a realization of the state he was in, or on going out said, "The philosopher brought it home to me in fine style; I must not act like this any longer"? But doesn't he say to a companion, if you make an unusually fine impression, "That was beautiful diction in the passage about Xerxes"; and doesn't the other answer, "No, I preferred the one about the battle of Thermopylae"?[3] Is this what listening to a philosopher amounts to?
- ↑ That is, as a style appropriate to philosophers, for the epideictic, or style of display was a well-recognized branch of oratory in general—and not entirely unknown, perhaps, among certain popular preachers even to-day.
- ↑ As God needs the universe in which to exercise and display His power, so the teacher needs pupils, the speaker an audience. There is a mutual need, therefore, each of the other.
- ↑ A typical rhetorum campus, as Cicero calls it (De Officiis, 1, 61).
