It will be sufficient, however, to answer that “Everything perfected by art has its source in nature.”  If it were not so, we should exclude medicine from the catalog of arts, the discovery of which was owing to observations made on things conducive or harmful to public health, and in the opinion of some it is wholly grounded on experiments.  Before it was reduced to an art, tents and bandages were applied to wounds, rest and abstinence cured fever; not that the reason of all this was then known, but the nature of the ailment indicated such curative methods and forced men to this regimen.  In like manner architecture can not be an art, the first men having built their cottages without its direction.  Music must undergo the same charge, as every nation has its own peculiarities in dancing and singing.  Now, if by rhetoric be meant any kind of speech, I must own it prior to art; but if not everyone who speaks is an orator, and if in the primitive ages of the world men did not speak orator-like, the orator, consequently, must have been made so by art, and therefore could not exist before it.

RHETORIC AND MISREPRESENTATION

The next objection is not one so much in reality as it is a mere cavil; that “Art never assents to false opinions, because it can not be constituted as such without precepts, which are always true; but rhetoric assents to what is false, therefore it is not an art.”  I admit that sometimes rhetoric says false things instead of true, but it does not follow that it assents to what is false.  There is a wide difference between assenting to a falsehood, and making others assent to it.  So it is that a general of an army often has recourse to stratagems.  When Hannibal perceived himself to be blocked up by Fabius, he ordered faggots of brush-wood to be fastened about the horns of some oxen, and fire being set to the faggots, had the cattle driven up the mountains in the night, in order to make the enemy believe he was about to decamp.  But this was only a false alarm, for he himself very well knew what his scheme was.  When Theopompus the Spartan, by changing clothes with his wife, made his escape out of prison, the deception was not imposed upon himself, but upon his guards.  Thus, when an orator speaks falsehood instead of truth, he knows what he is about; he does not yield to it himself, his intention being to deceive others.  When Cicero boasted that he threw darkness on the minds of the judges, in the cause of Cluentius, could it be said that he himself was unacquainted with all the intricacies of his method of confusing their understanding of the facts?  Or shall a painter who so disposes his objects that some seem to project from the canvas, others to sink in, be supposed not to know that they are all drawn on a plain surface?

THE OBJECT OF A SPEECH