Nature & Animals Quote by Theophrastus

Speech, in Theophrastus' view, is power that needs steering. "An orator without judgment is a horse without a bridle" lands because it flatters rhetoric and indicts it in the same breath: the animal is strong, admired, built to move crowds (or armies), but without restraint it becomes a danger to itself and everyone nearby. The metaphor is bluntly Greek in its moral engineering. It assumes eloquence is not a quaint art but a civic technology, one that can pull a city toward justice or stampede it into vanity, faction, and war.

Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor at the Lyceum, writes in the long shadow of Athens' democratic experiment and its recurring vulnerability to persuasive men. By his time, the classical fear wasn't that people wouldn't speak well; it was that they would speak well for the wrong ends. Judgment here isn't just "common sense". It's phronesis: practical wisdom, the ability to read circumstances, weigh consequences, and know when not to perform. The bridle is ethics plus self-control plus a sense of the public good.

Subtext: persuasion is not automatically virtuous, and charisma is not evidence of truth. The line also contains a quiet warning about audiences. If a community rewards speed, volume, and spectacle, it effectively unbridles the horse. Theophrastus isn't anti-rhetoric; he's insisting that eloquence must answer to something sturdier than applause.