Quintilian

When Quintilian says that circumstantial evidence can take the place of a witness, later lawyers took him as authorizing it to be considered as half of a complete proof.

Thus Quintilian assumes the lawyer will appeal to what we might call stereotypes: ‘It is easier to believe brigandage of a man, poisoning of a woman.’

Thus the claim that there is a new concept of evidence in the 1660s is mistaken; wherever we look what we find is nothing but the reworking of Quintilian’s distinctions.

They are discussed in Book 5 of Quintilian’s Institutes of the Orator, a work which dates to the first century CE.

Quintilian’s example of an appeal to circumstance is a made-up one.