[38]
In the schools, on the other
hand, such an enquiry is mere waste of time, since
the prosecution and the defence are indifferently
permitted to state a case and refute it in the same
declamation. But in the majority of controversial
themes it is not even possible to discover who
should speak first, as for instance in the following:
“A certain man had three sons, an orator, a
philosopher and a physician. In his will he divided
his property into four portions, three of which he
distributed equally among his sons, while the fourth
was to go to the son who rendered the greatest
service to his country.”
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.