Quintilian

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1416, the scholar Poggio Bracciolini found a complete copy of a lost Roman masterpiece in the Abbey of Saint Gall. It was the work of Quintilian, a teacher of public speaking whose full name was Marcus Fabius Quintilianus. Poggio found the manuscript in a filthy dungeon, where it lay, in his words, "buried in rubbish and dust." The news raced to Italy, and one celebrated scholar there answered with open delight. Why would learned men in the Renaissance greet a Roman schoolmaster as if he were a long-lost friend? How did that teacher make a living and keep his head under a string of emperors, some of them dangerous? And what did he believe a speaker owed to the people who listened?

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• 2. A Spaniard in Rome

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  Calagurris, the town now called Calahorra in La Rioja, is where Quintilian was born around 35 AD. His father was a well-educated man who sent the boy to Rome to study rhetoric. That journey came early in the reign of Nero. In Rome, Quintilian cultivated a friendship with the orator Domitius Afer, who died in 59. Afer appears to have become his model. As one scholar describes the custom, "It had always been the custom … for young men with ambitions in public life to fix upon some older model of their ambition … and regard him as a mentor."

  Quintilian listened to Afer speak and plead cases in the law courts. Afer has been described as more austere and more classical than many speakers of the age of Seneca the Younger. His manner was closer to that of Cicero, so he may have inspired Quintilian's own love of Cicero.

  Sometime after Afer's death, Quintilian went back to Hispania, possibly to practice law in the courts of his own province. In 68 he returned to Rome in the retinue of Emperor Galba, the short-lived successor of Nero. He does not seem to have been a close advisor to the emperor. That distance probably explains why he survived Galba's assassination in 69.

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• 3. The Public Classroom

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  Rome in the Year of the Four Emperors was chaotic, and that is when Quintilian opened a public school of rhetoric. Among his students was Pliny the Younger, and perhaps also Tacitus. Emperor Vespasian made him a consul and gave him a subsidy. A scholar says of Vespasian that he "in general was not especially interested in the arts, but … was interested in education as a means of creating an intelligent and responsible ruling class." The money let Quintilian give more time to the school. He also kept appearing in the law courts, arguing on behalf of clients.

  In 88 AD, during the reign of Domitian, Quintilian retired from both teaching and pleading. He may have reached financial security and wished to live as a gentleman of leisure. The reigns of Vespasian and Titus had been relatively peaceful, but Domitian had a reputation for cruelty and paranoia. Quintilian may have chosen to withdraw quietly from that atmosphere. Domitian does not seem to have taken offence. In 90 AD the emperor made Quintilian tutor to his two grand-nephews.

  Quintilian is believed to have died around 100 AD, not long after Domitian was assassinated in 96. Of his private life, little is known. He mentions a wife who died young and two sons who died before him. What little we know of his family comes from his own book, the Institutio Oratoria.

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• 4. The Surviving Textbook

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  Twelve volumes make up the Institutio Oratoria, usually called the Institutes of Oratory in English. Quintilian wrote it around 95 AD, and it is the only work of his that survives. The book covers the theory and practice of rhetoric. It also follows the education of the orator, offering advice that runs from the cradle to the grave.

  An earlier text, De Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae, meaning "On the Causes of Corrupted Eloquence," has been lost. It is believed to have been "a preliminary exposition of some of the views later set forth in Institutio Oratoria." Two sets of declamations, the Declamationes Maiores and the Declamationes Minores, have also been attributed to him. Their authorship is disputed. As one scholar puts it, "Some modern scholars believe that the declamations circulated in his name represent the lecture notes of a scholar either using Quintilian's system or actually trained by him."

  Quintilian wrote the Institutio in the last years of Domitian's rule. By then, the emperor was in the harshest period of his reign, and almost no one dared to voice an idea unlike his. Quintilian did. He spoke as an orator in the tradition of Cicero, a kind of voice not heard since the early reign of Augustus. Rather than pleading cases, he spoke in broad terms about how sound rhetoric shapes the education of the people. The book's most famous claim concerns the speaker's character rather than his technique.

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• 5. The Good Man Theory

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  Cato the Elder's phrase vir bonus, dicendi peritus, "the good man skilled at speaking," lies at the heart of Quintilian's definition of rhetoric. He cites many authors before offering his own definition. His conclusion is that the perfect orator is first a good man and only then a good speaker. A speech must stay faithful to a message that is "just and honorable." This became known as his good man theory. If a person cannot be genuinely good, he cannot be a good speaker for the people. A good man, in this view, works for the good of the people and the prosperity of society.

  Quintilian puts the ideal this way: "I should like the orator I am training to be a sort of Roman Wise Man." Yet he insists that his orator is no philosopher. The philosopher does not treat taking part in civic life as a duty. For Quintilian, as for Isocrates and Cicero, that duty defines the orator.

  In Book II, Quintilian sides with Plato's claim in the Phaedrus that a rhetorician must be just. He writes, "In the Phaedrus, Plato makes it even clearer that the complete attainment of this art is even impossible without the knowledge of justice, an opinion in which I heartily concur." One scholar sums up the shared view: for both men, "'speaking well' means speaking justly."

  No author wins more praise in the Institutio than Cicero. Quintilian asks, "For who can instruct with greater thoroughness, or more deeply stir the emotions? Who has ever possessed such a gift of charm?" Like Cicero, he thinks history and philosophy can enrich an orator's command of copia, or abundance of expression, and of style. Where they differ is that Quintilian puts the character of the orator alongside the art. He asks for imitation, but he also urges the orator to use what he learns to inspire his own original invention. Praise for Cicero was matched by sharper words for a more recent writer, Seneca.

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• 6. Seneca and Martial

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  Seneca the Younger was the principal figure of the imperial style that Quintilian hoped to modify with his book. Seneca was more recent than many authors Quintilian discusses. His standing within the later style made it impossible to leave him out. Quintilian's verdict was that Seneca's "style is for the most part corrupt and extremely dangerous because it abounds in attractive faults." Because the style could charm, Seneca counted as doubly dangerous. This reading of Seneca "has heavily coloured subsequent judgments of Seneca and his style."

  The Latin poet Martial paid Quintilian a different kind of attention. In 86 AD he addressed a short poem to him. It opens, "Quintilian, greatest director of straying youth, / you are an honour, Quintilian, to the Roman toga." Those two lines are the ones usually quoted. But Martial was known for sly and witty insults, so the praise should not be taken at face value.

  The rest of the poem contains a line such as "A man who longs to surpass his father's census rating." That hints at an ambitious side of Quintilian, with a drive for wealth and position. Soon after his death, his pupil Pliny and the poet Juvenal would offer their own, more admiring portraits.

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• 7. Lost and Found

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  Pliny, Quintilian's pupil, and Juvenal, who may have been another student, mentioned him "as an example of sobriety and of worldly success unusual in the teaching profession." From the 3rd to the 5th centuries, his influence reached Christian writers. Augustine of Hippo drew on him in his discussion of signs and figurative language. Jerome, the editor of the Vulgate Bible, shaped his theories of education in ways that clearly echo Quintilian.

  Knowledge of the Institutio Oratoria then declined in the Middle Ages, because the surviving manuscripts were fragmented. Italian humanists revived interest once a full text turned up. Leonardo Bruni, considered the first modern historian, wrote to his friend Poggio with barely contained joy. He exclaimed, "Oh! what a valuable acquisition! What an unexpected pleasure!" He asked whether he would at last see Quintilian "whole and entire." He added that "all the nations of Italy ought to assemble to bid him welcome."

  Petrarch addressed one of his letters to the dead to Quintilian. For many, Quintilian "provided the inspiration for a new humanistic philosophy of education." The enthusiasm spread with humanism itself and reached northern Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. Martin Luther "claimed that he preferred Quintilian to almost all authors, 'in that he educates and at the same time demonstrates eloquence, that is, he teaches in word and in deed most happily.'" Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had studied at Steyn, also shows Quintilian's mark on the depth of humanism.

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• 8. Later Admirers

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  Leipzig, where Johann Sebastian Bach served from 1723 to 1750, gives a surprising chapter in Quintilian's afterlife. Bach's duties included teaching Latin, and his early training had included rhetoric. The musicologist Ursula Kirkendale has argued that Bach's Das musikalische Opfer, The Musical Offering, BWV 1079, was closely connected with the Institutio Oratoria. Johann Matthias Gesner, rector of the Leipzig Thomasschule, published a substantial edition of Quintilian with a long footnote in Bach's honor. Bach had composed a cantata for Gesner in 1729.

  After that high point, interest in Quintilian seems to have eased. Alexander Pope still wrote in An Essay on Criticism, "In grave Quintilian's copious works we find / The justest rules and clearest method join'd." Montaigne and Lessing mention him often. Yet by the nineteenth century he was, in one scholar's words, "rather little read and rarely edited."

  John Stuart Mill pushed back in his Autobiography. He admitted that Quintilian was little read because of "his obscure style and ... the scholastic details of which many parts of his treatise are made up." But Mill said he was "seldom sufficiently appreciated." He called the book "a kind of encyclopaedia of the thoughts of the ancients on the whole field of education and culture." Thomas De Quincey went further. He wrote that for elegance and as a practical model, "neither Aristotle, nor any less austere among the Greek rhetoricians, has any pretensions to measure himself with Quintilian."

  In more recent times, Quintilian has risen again. Anthologies of literary criticism often include him, and he is a fixture in the history of education. He is believed to be the "earliest spokesman for a child-centered education." Students of speech, professional writing, and rhetoric still turn to his detailed account of the rhetorical system. His discussions of tropes and figures also underlie modern theories of figurative language, including post-structuralist and formalist ones. Jacques Derrida's argument that language fails to deliver the truth of the objects it represents rests on Quintilian's assumptions about how figurative language works.

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