The Importance of Props to Feebleness

For those writers whose eloquence was simple and directed only towards proving their case are full of comparisons. And I think that these are necessary, not for the same reason which makes them necessary for the poets. They may serve as props to our feebleness, to bring both speaker and listener face to face with the subject under discussion. For example, I am at this very moment reading Sextius. He is a keen man and a philosopher who, though he writes in Greek, has the Roman standard of ethics. One of his similes appealed especially to me, that of an army marching in hollow square,. In a place where the enemy might be expected to appear from any quarter ready for