it
our own when we put it into a book. The originality is regarded as being
in the language, not in the thought. But to the Roman, when he found the
thought floating about the world in the Greek character, it was free for
him to adopt it and to make it his own. Cicero, had he done in these
days with this treatise as I have suggested, would have been guilty of
gross plagiarism, but there was nothing of the kind known then. This
must be continually remembered in reading his essays. You will find
large portions of them taken from the Greek without acknowledgment.
Often it shall be so, because it suits him to contradict an assertion or
to show that it has been allowed to lead to false conclusions. This
general liberty of translation has been so frequently taken by the Latin
poets--by Virgil and Horace, let us say, as being those best known--that
they have been regarded by some as no more than translations. To them to
have been translators of Homer, or of Pindar and Stesichorus, and to
have put into Latin language ideas which were noble, was a work as
worthy of praise as that of inventing. And it must be added that the
forms they have used have been perfect in their kind. There has been no
need to them for close translation. They have found the idea, and their
object has been to present it to their readers in the best possible
language. He who has worked amid the bonds of modern translation well
knows how different it has been with him. There is not much in the
treatise De Inventione to arrest us. We should say, from reading it,
that the matter it contains is too good for the production of a youth of
twenty-one, but that the language in which it is written is not
peculiarly fine. The writer intended to continue it--or wrote as though
he did--and therefore we may imagine that it has come to us from some
larger source. It is full of standing cases, or examples of the law
courts, which are brought up to show the way in which these things are
handled. We can imagine that a Roman youth should be practised in such
matters, but we cannot imagine that the same youth should have thought
of them all, and remembered them all, and should have been able to
describe them.

The following is an example: "A certain man on his journey encountered a
traveller going to make a purchase, having with him a sum of money. They
chatted along the road together, and, as happens on such occasions, they
became intimate. They went to the same inn, where t