Acquire wide knowledge... or just create it?

Though perhaps a slightly atypical view of Cicero's De Oratore, I keep coming back to the Sophistic notion of the creation of knowledge within it. It might seem at first this writing shuns the notion; Cicero talks extensively about the importance of wide, honest knowledge for an orator to be effective. (Among numerous other places, pg. 312, "...that by the spoken word no man can kindle the feelings of his hearers, or quench them when kindled...unless he has gazed into the nature and the depths of everything, including human characters and motives..."

And yet repeated references instead lend a nearly godlike power to orators.

On page 313 Antonius voices that "the orator however by his words greatly magnifies and exaggerates the grievousness of such things as in everyday life are thought evils and troubles to be shunned, while he enlarges upon and beatifies by his eloquence whatever is commonly deemed delectable and desired..."
Though presented as more a method of the orator to an audience's pathos, it rings in a parallel context with notes of the creative writer embellishing and readjusting reality (or, even further removed, his or her perception of reality) into a new creation. In this case, however, the consequences are a bit direr, as this is not a work of fiction, but a speaker of perceived authenticity, spreading a personal view as truth.

On page 316 he continues of law: "...that learned lawyer was bound to come off victorious, who had been upheld, not by his own dexterity but by a stranger's, that is to say, not by legal knowledge but by eloquence..." In this example I feel what is essentially being demonstrated is that one individual's 'translation' of reality (i.e., the orator's understanding of the lawyer's situation) is taken to be the general truth when another, perhaps even more 'knowledgeable' translation (in this case the lawyer who obviously knows the letter of the law backward and forward).

These examples point to some of the reasons why I think I'm feeling that the overarching opinion within the voices of De Oratore is not that knowledge makes for a good rhetor, as is outwardly displayed, but instead that eloquence and rhetoric make knowledge, through the ability to spread opinions or views (whether wholly true or not) as the more readily accepted general truth than truth itself. (See Mitch's most recent post, on science writing and writing about science, too.)


(ps. As many others are focusing on the scope of pathos in this text...
 Interestingly, on page 330 the discussion focuses on emotions needing to be authentically felt by an orator for an audience to feel them also. In some ways one could look at this as an orator being able to present a personal or false view as truth, but only if he or she personally believes it. Of course, the waters only muddy from there, as actors and liars {maybe the best orators of all?} can fake this so called 'required authenticity of belief', to achieve the same end as honest believers.)