In replying, you must meet ambiguous questions by drawing reasonable
distinctions, not by a curt answer. In meeting questions that seem
to involve you in a contradiction, offer the explanation at the outset
of your answer, before your opponent asks the next question or draws
his conclusion. For it is not difficult to see the drift of his
argument in advance. This point, however, as well as the various means
of refutation, may be regarded as known to us from the Topics.

  When your opponent in drawing his conclusion puts it in the form
of a question, you must justify your answer. Thus when Sophocles was
asked by Peisander whether he had, like the other members of the Board
of Safety, voted for setting up the Four Hundred, he said 'Yes.'-'Why,
did you not think it wicked?'-'Yes.'-'So you committed this
wickedness?' 'Yes', said Sophocles, 'for there was nothing better to
do.' Again, the Lacedaemonian, when he was being examined on his
conduct as ephor, was asked whether he thought that the other ephors
had been justly put to death. 'Yes', he said. 'Well then', asked his
opponent, 'did not you propose the same measures as
they?'-'Yes.'-'Well then, would not you too be justly put to
death?'-'Not at all', said he; 'they were bribed to do it, and I did
it from conviction'. Hence you should not ask any further questions
after drawing the conclusion, nor put the conclusion itself in the
form of a further question, unless there is a large balance of truth
on your side.

  As to jests. These are supposed to be of some service in
controversy. Gorgias said that you should kill your opponents'
earnestness with jesting and their jesting with earnestness; in
which he was right. jests have been classified in the Poetics. Some
are becoming to a gentleman, others are not; see that you choose
such as become you. Irony better befits a gentleman than buffoonery;
the ironical man jokes to amuse himself, the buffoon to amuse other
people.

                                19

  The Epilogue has four parts. You must (1) make the audience
well-disposed towards yourself and ill-disposed towards your
opponent (2) magnify or minimize the leading facts, (3) excite the
required state of emotion in your hearers, and (4) refresh their
memories.

  (1) Having shown your own truthfulness and the untruthfulness of
your opponent, the natural thing is to commend yourself, censure
him, and hammer in your points. You must aim at one of two objects-you
must make yourself out a good man and him a bad one either in
yourselves or in relation to your hearers. How this is to be
managed-by what lines of argument you are to represent people as
good or bad-this has been already explained.

  (2) The facts having been proved, the natural thing to do next is to
magnify or minimize their importance. The facts must be admitted
before you can discuss how important they are; just as the body cannot
grow except from something already present. The proper lines of
argument to be used for this purpose of amplification and depreciation
have already been set forth.

  (3) Next, when the facts and their importance are clearly
understood, you must excite your hearers' emotions. These emotions are
pity, indignation, anger, hatred, envy, emulation, pugnacity. The
lines of argument to be used for these purposes also have been
previously mentioned.

  (4) Finally you have to review what you have already said. Here
you may properly do what some wrongly recommend doing in the
introduction-repeat your points frequently so as to make them easily
understood. What you should do in your introduction is to state your
subject, in order that the point to be judged may be quite plain; in
the epilogue you should summarize the arguments by which your case has
been proved. The first step in this reviewing process is to observe
that you have done what you undertook to do. You must, then, state
what you have said and why you have said it. Your method may be a
comparison of your own case with that of your opponent; and you may
compare either the ways you have both handled the same point or make
your comparison less direct: 'My opponent said so-and-so on this
point; I said so-and-so, and this is why I said it'. Or with modest
irony, e.g. 'He certainly said so-and-so, but I said so-and-so'. Or
'How vain he would have been if he had proved all this instead of
that!' Or put it in the form of a question. 'What has not been
proved by me?' or 'What has my opponent proved?' You may proceed then,
either in this way by setting point against point, or by following the
natural order of the arguments as spoken, first giving your own, and
then separately, if you wish, those of your opponent.

  For the conclusion, the disconnected style of language is
appropriate, and will mark the difference between the oration and
the peroration. 'I have done. You have heard me. The facts are
before you. I ask for your judgement.'

                                   -THE END-
.