Book 1
12.18
But he that has enough of the divine spark to conceive the ideal eloquence, he who, as the great tragic poet Pacuvius (Ribbeck, 177). says, regards oratory as the queen of all the world and seeks not the transitory gains of advocacy, but those stable and lasting rewards which his own soul and knowledge and contemplation can give, he will easily persuade himself to spend his time not, like so many, in the theatre or in the Campus Martius, in dicing or in idle talk, to say naught of the hours that are wasted in sleep or long drawn banqueting, but in listening rather to the geometrician and the teacher of music. For by this he will win a richer harvest of delight than can ever be gathered from the pleasures of the ignorant, since among the many gifts of providence to man not the least is this that the highest pleasure is the child of virtue.
12.19
But the attractions of my theme have led me to say overmuch. Enough of those studies in which a boy must be instructed, while he is yet too young to proceed to greater things! My next book will start afresh and will pass to the consideration of the duties of the teacher of rhetoric.
