But if in other pursuits also men would select all that was found most sensible from many sources, instead of devoting themselves to one fixed leader, they would err less on the side of arrogance; they would not persist so much in error, and they would make less enormous mistakes through ignorance.  And if we had as deep an acquaintance with this art as he had with that of painting, perhaps this work of ours might appear as admirable in its kind as his picture did.  For we have had an opportunity of selecting from a much more copious store of models than he had.  He was able to make his selection from one city, and from that number of virgins only which existed at that time and place; but we have had opportunity of making our selection from all the men who have ever lived from the very first beginning of this science, being reduced to a system up to the present day, and taking whatever we thought worth while from all the stores which lay open before us.

And Aristotle, indeed, has collected together all the ancient writers on this art, from the first writer on the subject and inventor of it, Tisias, and has compiled with great perspicuity the precepts of each of them, mentioning them by name, after having sought them out with exceeding care; and he has disentangled them with great diligence and explained their difficulties; and he has so greatly excelled the original writers themselves in suavity and brevity of diction, that no one is acquainted with their precepts from their own writings, but all who wish to know what maxims they have laid down, come back to him as to a far more agreeable expounder of their meaning.

And he himself has set before us himself and those too who had lived before his time, in order that we might be acquainted with the method of others, and with his own.  And those who have followed him, although they have expended a great deal of labour on the most profound and important portions of philosophy, as he himself also, whose example they were following, had done, have still left us many precepts on the subject of speaking.  And other masters of this science have also come forward, taking their rise, as it were in other springs, who have also been of great assistance in eloquence, as far at least as artificial rules can do any good.  For there lived at the same time as Aristotle, a great and illustrious rhetorician, named Isocrates, though we have not entirely discovered what his system was.

But we have found many lessons respecting their art from his pupils and from those who proceeded immediately afterwards from this school.

III.  From these two different families, as it were, the one of which, while it was chiefly occupied with philosophy, still devoted some portion of its attention to the rhetorical science, and the other was wholly absorbed in the study and teaching of eloquence, but both kinds of study were united by their successors, who brought to the aid of their own pursuits those things which appeared to have been profitably said by either of them, and those and the others their predecessors are the men whom we and all our countrymen have proposed to ourselves as models, as far as we were able to make them so, and we have also contributed something from our own stores to the common stock.