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Full Idea
How wonderful is the power of eloquence! It enables us to learn and to teach. We use it to exhort and persuade, to comfort the unfortunate, to distract the timid and calm the passionate. It unites us in law and society, and raises us from savagery.
Gist of Idea
Eloquence educates, exhorts, comforts, distracts and unites us, and raises us from savagery
Source
M. Tullius Cicero (On the Nature of the Gods ('De natura deorum') [c.44 BCE], 2.147)
Book Ref
'The Stoics Reader', ed/tr. Inwood,B/Gerson,L.P. [Hackett 2008], p.76
A Reaction
[compressed] Cicero would have been well aware of the doubts about rhetoric felt by Socrates (and possibly Plato). Cicero was probably the greatest Roman orator.