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.

But if the things which are set forth in these books deserved to
be selected with such great eagerness and care as they were, then
certainly, neither we ourselves nor others will repent of our
industry. But if we appear either rashly to have passed over some
doctrine of some one worth noticing, or to have adopted it without
sufficient elegance, in that case when we are taught better by some
one, we will easily and cheerfully change our opinion. For what is
discreditable is, not the knowing little, but the persisting foolishly
and long in what one does not understand, because the one thing is
attributed to the common infirmity of man, but the other to the
especial fault of the individual.

Wherefore we, without affirming anything positively, but making
inqui