The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

an
objection, you are felt to have been worsted. You cannot ask a
series of questions owing to the incapacity of the audience to
follow them; and for this reason you should also make your
enthymemes as compact as possible.
    In replying, you must meet ambiguous questions by drawing
reasonable distinctions, not by a curt answer. In meeting questions
that seem to involve you in a contradiction, offer the explanation
at the outset of your answer, before your opponent asks the next
question or draws his conclusion. For it is not difficult to see
the drift of his argument in advance. This point, however, as well
as the various means of refutation, may be regarded as known to us
from the Topics.
    When your opponent in drawing his conclusion puts it in the form
of a question, you must justify your answer. Thus when Sophocles
was asked by Peisander whether he had, like the other members of
the Board of Safety, voted for setting up the Four Hundred, he said
‘Yes.’-’Why, did you not think it wicked?’-’Yes.’-’So you committed
this wickedness?’ ‘Yes’, said Sophocles, ‘for there was nothing
better to do.’ Again, the Lacedaemonian, when he was being examined
on his conduct as ephor, was asked whether he thought that the
other ephors had been justly put to death. ‘Yes’, he said. ‘Well
then’, asked his opponent, ‘did not you propose the same measures
as they?’-’Yes.’-’Well then, would not you too be justly put to
death?’-’Not at all’, said he; ‘they were bribed to do it, and I
did it from conviction’. Hence you should not ask any further
questions after drawing the conclusion, nor put the conclusion
itself in the form of a further question, unless there is a large
balance of truth on your side.
    As to jests. These are supposed to be of some service in
controversy. Gorgias said that you should kill your opponents’
earnestness with jesting and their jesting with earnestness; in
which he was right. jests have been classified in the Poetics. Some
are becoming to a gentleman, others are not; see that you choose
such as become you. Irony better befits a gentleman than
buffoonery; the ironical man jokes to amuse himself, the buffoon to
amuse other people.
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    The Epilogue has four parts. You must (1) make the audience
well-disposed towards yourself and ill-disposed towards your
opponent (2) magnify or minimize the leading facts, (3) excite the
required state of emotion in your hearers, and (4) refresh their
memories.
    (1) Having shown your own truthfulness and the untruthfulness of
your opponent, the natural thing is to commend yourself, censure
him, and hammer in your points. You must aim at one of two
objects-you must make yourself out a good man and him a bad one
either in yourselves or in relation to your hearers. How this is to
be managed-by what lines of argument you are to represent people as
good or bad-this has been already explained.
    (2) The facts having been proved, the natural thing to do next
is to magnify or minimize their importance. The facts must be
admitted before you can discuss how important they are; just as the
body cannot grow except from something already present. The proper
lines of argument to be used for this purpose of amplification and
depreciation have already been set forth.
    (3) Next, when the facts and their importance are clearly
understood, you must excite your hearers’ emotions. These emotions
are pity, indignation, anger, hatred, envy, emulation, pugnacity.
The lines of argument to be used for these purposes also have been
previously mentioned.
    (4) Finally you have to review what you have already said. Here
you may properly do what some wrongly recommend doing in the
introduction-repeat your points frequently so as to make them
easily understood. What you should do in your introduction is to
state your subject, in order that the point to be judged may be
quite plain; in the epilogue you should summarize the arguments by
which your case has been proved. The first step in this reviewing
process is to observe that you have done what you undertook to do.
You must, then, state what you have said and why you have said it.
Your method may be a comparison of your own case with that of your
opponent; and you may compare either the ways you have both handled
the same point or make your comparison less direct: ‘My opponent
said so-and-so on this point; I said so-and-so, and this is why I
said it’. Or with modest irony, e.g. ‘He certainly said