Sublimity is the image of greatness of soul. The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport. Skill in invention, and due order and arrangement of matter, emerging as the hard-won result not of one thing nor of two, but of the whole texture of the composition, whereas Sublimity flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt, and at once displays […]
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“On the Ideal Orator” by Cicero
[Original Latin Title: De Oratore] Eloquence Forms a Unity For since all discourse is made up of content and words, the words cannot have any basis if you withdraw the content, and the content will remain in the dark if you remove the words. All the universe above and below us is a unity and is bound together by a single, natural force and harmony. For there is nothing in […]
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“As reason is the glory of man, so the lamp of reason is eloquence.” The Origin and History of Oratory In “Brutus“, Cicero traces the origin and history of oratory in ancient Greece and Rome, and provides a concise and astute critique of various classes of individual orators, ranking their achievements in the five components of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, diction/expression, action/delivery and memory). Demosthenes is considered the greatest among the […]
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