Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria Book VI, A Brief Summary

Book VI

Here, Quintilian discusses how the peroration, a part of a speech, consists of both the factual and emotional and how facts and emotions are used and appealed to. Both speech and action can provoke tears, but attempting to arouse tears shouldn’t be done by the unskilled because the reward is either tears or laughter. And laughter when a speaker wants tears is failure. [We’ve all seen movies like this. I wonder if this is why movies sometimes seem cheesy: a director wants viewers to be moved to tears or some other tender emotion but fails and the audience is instead moved to laughter. I am suddenly reminded of Monuments Men, a movie I once saw during which I felt the director was trying to force me to be emotional. Have you experienced this? What media were you watching or reading?]

Quintilian continues by saying that while proofs may make people think something, emotions make them want a thing. Emotions are effective in persuasion because people tend to believe the things that they want. Quintilian writes, “For as soon as they [listeners of a speech] begin to be angry or to feel favourably disposed, to hate or to pity, they fancy that it is now their own case that is being pleaded, and just as lovers cannot judge beauty because their feelings anticipate the perception of their eyes, so also a judge who is overcome by his emotions gives up any idea of inquiring into truth; he is swept along by the tide, as it were, and yields to the swift current” (6.2.6). But emotions function on the part of the speaker as well as on the audience. A speaker who is dry and shows no emotion is no fun to listen to, just as an audience who doesn’t feel much emotion may not be as persuaded as one that does. Hence, Quintilian writes, “The life and soul of oratory, we may say, is in the emotions” (6.2.8). Without emotion, everything else is dull, pale, and dry.

There are two kinds of emotion: pathos and ethos. Some say ethos is permanent, while pathos is temporary, and this belief is somewhat right for Quintilian. Ethos is whatever is said and done about what should be done or what is honorable. The ethos we want to see in a speaker is goodness. A “speaker’s character shines through his speech” (6.2.14).

A speaker who wishes to arouse emotions must be aroused by them also. Yet emotions are not completely in our own power. Speakers who have the greatest power have cultivated what the Greeks call phantasiai, which could be called “visions.” It is like the imagination, where one can see before one’s eyes things that aren’t present. So, to some degree speakers can will emotions via imagination and practice. [Isn’t this also what actors do?]