Book 3
23
What then! is there not in speaking a style and manner of exhortation? Who denies it? Just as there is a manner of confutation and of instruction. But who ever, therefore, added that of ostentation for a fourth? For in what doth the hortatory manner consist? In being able to show, to one and all, the contradictions in which they are involved; and that they care for everything rather than what they mean to care for; for they mean the things conducive to happiness, but they seek them where they are not to be found. To effect this, must a thousand seats be placed, and an audience invited; and you, in a fine robe or cloak, ascend the rostrum, and describe the death of Achilles? Forbear, for Heaven’s sake! to bring, so far as you are able, good works and practices into disgrace. Nothing, to be sure, gives more force to exhortation than when the speaker shows that he has need of the hearers; but tell me who, when he hears you reading or speaking, is solicitous about himself; or turns his attention upon himself; or says, when he is gone away, The philosopher hit me well? Instead of this, even though you are in high vogue, one hearer merely remarks to another, He spoke finely about Xerxes! No, says the other; but on the battle of Thermopylae! Is this the audience for a philosopher?
That we ought not to be affected by things not in our own power.
