. . . . be softened and so more effectually without any friction enter into the minds of hearers. And these are actually the things which you think crooked and insincere and laboured1 and by no means reconcilable with true friendship! But I think all speech without these conventions rude and rustic and incongruous, in a word, inartistic and inept.2 Nor, in my opinion, can philosophers dispense with such artifices any more than orators. In support of my contention I will adduce not "family" evidence, as the phrase is, from oratory, but I will call upon the most outstanding philosophers, the most ancient and excellent poets, in fact, the everyday practice and usage of life and the experience of all the arts.
What, then, have you to say about that master of eloquence no less than of wisdom, Socrates?—for him, first and foremost, I have subpoenaed as witness before you—did he cultivate a style of speech in which there was nothing crooked, nothing at times dissembled? By what methods was he wont to disconcert and entrap Protagoras and Polus and Thrasymachus and the other Sophists? When did he meet them without masking his batteries? When not attack them from an ambush? From whom, if not from him, can we say that the inverted3 form of speech, which the Greeks call εἰρωνεία, took its rise? In what fashion, again, used he to accost and address Alcibiades and the other young men who prided. themselves on birth or beauty or riches? In terms of censure or in terms of suavity?4 With bitter reproof when they went wrong, or with gentle persuasion? And yet Socrates assuredly had as much seriousness or force as the cynic Diogenes shewed in his habitual brutality. But he saw, in fact, that the dispositions of men in a measure, and of young men in particular, are more easily won over by courteous and sympathetic than by bitter and unrestrained language. And so he did not attack the errors of youths with mantlets and battering rams, but sapped them with mines, and his hearers never parted from him torn, though sometimes teased. For the race of mankind is by nature stiff-necked against the high-handed, but responds readily to coaxing. Therefore we give way more willingly to entreaties than are frightened into submission by violence, and advice rather than denunciation leads us to improve. So we listen to admonition courteously conveyed, but severity of correction makes us contumacious.5
Fronto to Marcus Aurelius as Caesar
143 A.D.
To my Lord.