persuasion.

But does not money likewise persuade? Is not credit, the authority of
the speaker, the dignity of a respectable person, attended with the same
effect? Even without speaking a word, the remembrance of past services,
the appearance of distress, a beautiful aspect, make deep impressions on
minds and are decisive in their favor.

Did Antonius, pleading the cause of M. Aquilius, trust to the force of
his reasons when he abruptly tore open his garment and exposed to view
the honorable wounds he received fighting for his country? This act of
his forced streams of tears from the eyes of the Roman people, who, not
able to resist so moving a spectacle, acquitted the criminal. Sergius
Galba escaped the severity of the laws by appearing in court with his
own little children, and the son of Gallus Sulpitius, in his arms. The
sight of so many wretched objects melted the judges into compassion.
This we find equally attested by some of our historians and by a speech
of Cato. What shall I say of the example of Phryne, whose beauty was of
more service in her cause than all the eloquence of Hyperides; for tho
his pleading was admirable in her defense, yet perceiving it to be
without effect, by suddenly laying open her tunic he disclosed the naked
beauty of her bosom, and made the judges sensible that she had as many
charms for them as for others. Now, if all these instances persuade,
persuasion, then, can not be the end of rhetoric.

Some, therefore, have seemed to themselves rather more exact who, in the
main of the same way of thinking, define rhetoric as the "Power of
persuading by speaking." It is to this that Gorgias, in the book above
cited, is at last reduced by Socrates. Theodectes does not much differ
from them, if the work ascribed to him be his, or Aristotle's. In this