[a] We are told by Quintilian, that Demosthenes, the great orator of
Greece, was an assiduous hearer of Plato: _Constat Demosthenem,
principem omnium Græciæ oratorum, dedisse operam Platoni._ Lib. xii.
cap. 2. And Cicero expressly says, that, if he might venture to call
himself an orator, he was made so, not by the manufacture of the
schools of rhetoric, but in the walks of the Academy. _Fateor me
oratorem, si modo sim, aut etiam quicumque sim, non ex rhetorum
officinis, sed ex Academiæ spatiis extitisse. Ad Brutum Orator_, s.
12.