Cicero, Orations Vol. 1

And he alone satisfied all parts of Latin eloquence, and he did not fail to leave behind any kind of monument for posterity. He published very many orations in every genre and large volumes of letters. But he was also not alien to the Muses, since he most easily surpassed all Latin poets who had come before him, and he could perhaps have progressed much further had the splendor of some greater glory not snatched him toward itself. In addition to this, lest he seem to begrudge the youth those things which he had produced for himself with great labor and the keenest study, he thought he should also write on the art of speaking. In these books, while neglecting the vulgar precepts of the rhetoricians and saying that there was some other path to eloquence, he showed that what was said by him was true by the very fact that he spoke most elegantly on these very subjects (which no teachers of speaking could ever have done), and in handing down the precepts of eloquence, he employed every power of eloquence. Nor indeed did he hold the river of his abundant genius within these boundaries; but flowing far more broadly, he was carried into almost all the bays of philosophy, and finally restored eloquence to its ancestral possession, from which he had very often complained it had been ejected by no right; and having extracted it from narrow confines, he placed it back in its paternal kingdom, and taught that it is proper for an orator to be able to speak both ornately and aptly on any proposed subject whatsoever. But truly, the excellence of orators can be known from no other thing more than from that which is accomplished by them in speaking. And that seems to me to have been rightly said: just as in the lyre, the skill of the one who plucks it is perceived from the sound that is returned, so the power of eloquence is perceived primarily from those movements which