Opening: silence preferred, eight years without oratory, and fear before Origen

Silence is a splendid thing — for many others in many cases, and for me now most of all. Willing or unwilling, I keep my mouth shut and am forced to be quiet. I am unpracticed and wholly raw in those elegant and ornate speeches that are uttered or composed with a continuous, unstumbling flow of chosen and approved names and words. Perhaps nature itself fitted me poorly for working out this graceful and truly Greek craft.

And already it is the eighth year since I myself have delivered any speech, short or long, or written one; nor have I heard anyone else either writing privately, or history, or publicly declaiming panegyric speeches and controversies — except these admirable men who have embraced the beautiful philosophy. For them the care of elocution and elegance of words is lesser. Setting words aside, they want to investigate and declare the things themselves, accurately and one by one, as they are. Not that they refuse the other gift, I think; rather they greatly desire to express their splendid and exact thoughts in a splendid speech free of every falsehood. But perhaps they cannot do both so readily: on the one hand to unfold the sacred and divine faculty in their own conceptions, and on the other to bring forward a speech trimmed and fitted in words — and to grasp, in one and the same little human mind, the prerogative proper to each of two men — especially since the manner of each is different and utterly contrary.

For silence is somehow the friend of thought and of finding things out, and a partner in the work. But the faculty of speaking, and the dignity of delivery, you will not find elsewhere than in words and in their constant meditation and use. Besides, another discipline occupies the mind fiercely and binds the mouth and tongue if I even want to say a little in the Greek voice: I mean our marvelous laws, by which the affairs of all who now obey the Roman Empire are governed. They are neither framed nor grasped without labor and trouble; and they are wise and pious and varied and to be respected — and, to say it in one word, most Greek. Yet they are set out and handed down in the Roman tongue, a speech wonderful and magnificent and fitted to the majesty of empire, but still heavy and hard for me. I would never say that I could or would feel otherwise.

And since our words are nothing else than certain images of the concepts and notions of our mind, it must be granted that those who have strength in the faculty of speaking may paint, like painters most skilled in art and richest in colors, not only likenesses but varied and, for beauty, most lovely pictures by a thick mixing of flowers — without any hindrance.

But we, like certain poor men lacking these various cosmetics — who either never had them in our craft, or perhaps threw them away — try to sketch the first senses of our mind with charcoal alone, or with the potsherds of common names and words, painting with whatever voices remain. We fashion the characters of the mind's types, if not clear or adorned for show, then as charcoal pictures are made, trying somehow to represent them; and if anything graceful and eloquent offers itself, we reject it of our own will, as people who scorn such things.

Yet there is still a third thing that hinders and calls us away, and holds us back far more than the rest, and bids us use silence: namely the subject itself. I was eager to speak of it, but now I am forced to hesitate and stick fast. For I have set out to speak of a man who seems to be a human being and appears as such; yet to those who can look at the greatness of his bearing and his ways, he seems equipped with greater ornaments, and almost divine ones.