In Book Two, Chapters
16 through 20, Quintilian defends rhetoric against all comers. First, he takes
on Plato’s complaint that rhetoric can be used as easily for ill as for good
with a bit of satire.
“In the hands of physicians poisons have been found, and
among those who abuse the name of philosophers have been occasionally detected
the most horrible crimes. We must reject food, for it has often given rise to
ill health; we must never go under roofs, for they sometimes fall upon those
who dwell beneath them; a sword must not be forged for a soldier, for a robber
may use the same weapon.”
His deeper argument,
however, is to question the definition of rhetoric as persuasion, redefining it
is eloquence. Though this sets him up for Ramus’s attack later, it allows him
to connect rhetoric to virtue.
"But these points may perhaps be left to the consideration of
those who think that the substance of eloquence lies in the power to persuade.
But if eloquence be the art of speaking well (the definition which I adopt), so
that a true orator must be, above all, a good man, it must assuredly be acknowledged
that it is a useful art."
As yet, Quintilian hasn’t
explained why it requires a good man to be a rhetorician, other than the “true”
rhetoric argument. But, that’s what Weaver argues Plato is actually arguing in “Phaedrus.”
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