[7]
There is a different type of question where the
dispute is concerned with the term to be applied,
which depends on the letter of the law: it is a form
of question which can only arise in the courts from
the actual words on which the dispute turns. Take
as examples the questions, whether suicide is a form
of homicide, or whether the man who forces a tyrant
to kill himself can be considered a tyrannicide, or
whether magical incantations are equivalent to the
crime of poisoning. In all these cases there is no
doubt about the facts, for it is well known that there
is a difference between killing oneself and killing
another, between slaying a tyrant and forcing him
to suicide, between employing incantations and
administering a deadly draught, but we enquire
whether we are justified in calling them by the
same name.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.