In order that my young students (and I call them mine, because the young student is always dear to me) may form a clearer conception of this second kind of definition, I will once more quote a fictitious controversial theme.
[29]
I will, however, quote a passage from the pro Caecina1 in which
Cicero includes brief proofs drawn from origins,
causes, effects, antecedents and consequents: “Why
then did they fly? Because they were afraid. What
were they afraid of? Obviously of violence. Can you
then deny the beginning, when you have admitted
the end?” But he also argued from similarity:2
“Shall not that which is called violence in war be
called violence in peace as well” Arguments may
also be drawn from contraries, as for instance in the
question whether a love-potion can be a poison, in
view of the fact that a poison is not a love-potion.
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.