Though rhetoric is necessary to every educated man for effective communication, and especially to every aspiring youth (_laudis cupidus_), how rare are good orators! The reason is the wide scope. Oratory demands knowledge not only as eruditio, but also in relation to human will (_animorum motus_). It demands expressiveness in a wide range of style and delivery. What more noble? The orator is a principal supporter of the State. So begins Crassus (I. i-viii); but Scævola demurs, unwilling to grant either that states have been established and maintained by orators or that the orator is accomplished in every sort of utterance and of culture.[5] Here the question is posed, Is oratory a special art or a comprehensive study? Though abstractly it may be both, though the one view does not exclude the other absolutely, practically the emphasis of the training will be determined by a choice between the two. As if to forestall restriction, Crassus begins with the widest extension. He will not agree to exclude[6] from the scope of oratory public management, instruction, even research. Of the Greeks who urge this, he says, Plato is a refutation of his own doctrine, being himself an orator. Democritus, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Carneades, show the force of oratory; Chrysippus, the lack of it. Sound without substance is folly.[7] Even legal pleading demands more than is taught by the rhetoricians. The orator’s effectiveness depends on knowledge of human emotions; and they are a field of philosophy. Though he may leave it to the philosophers as _cognitio_, he must know it[8] as applied to presentation. To make philosophy effective, you must have rhetoric. [Does this finally leave the point, which is that rhetoric needs philosophy?] “What the philosophers dispute in their corners without any urgency of application, and so in thin and feeble talk, the orator will set forth in such a way as to please and move.”[9] Socrates used to say[10] ‘Everybody is eloquent enough on what he knows’; but the truth is rather that neither can any one be eloquent on what he does not know, nor can he be eloquent on what he does know unless he know also the art of rhetoric. “Therefore,[11] if we seek to define and embrace the force of oratory as both general and special, he methinks is an orator, worthy of so responsible a title, who will say whatever falls to him for presentation with wise forecast of the whole, order, style, memory, and a certain dignity of delivery.” It is disconcerting to arrive, after all, at the traditional parts of rhetoric. For the definition resolves itself into this: