QUINTILIANUS, MARCUS FABIUS. - Orator and teacher of eloquence, b. at Calahorra (Calagurris) in Spain between 35-40 A.D., d. at Rome ca. 96.
Having completed his oratorical training at Rome and returned to his homeland, the emperor Galba summoned him back to Rome in 68. There he devoted himself to advocacy and for twenty years to his school of eloquence, with an annual state salary, earning universal esteem and approval. He was the teacher of Pliny the Younger and of the two great-nephews of Domitian on the side of his sister Domitilla; he held the consular dignity and acquired wealth, but also suffered family misfortunes. « Post impetratam studiis... veniam » (Inst. or., proem., 1), at the request of many and in order to remedy the harm done by notes of his lectures published by his editors, he undertook his principal work: the Institutio oratoria, in twelve books, dedicated to Victorius Marcellus, into which he poured the result of his studies and experiences. « Vagae moderator summe juventae/gloria romanae, Quintiliane, togae » (Martial, Epigr., II, 90), he was above all the type of the teacher and the educator; his work, which is not a systematic treatise on rhetoric and pedagogy, but a labor, concerning these two arts, of an upright mind, of good sense, of long preparation through readings and authors, was a common textbook in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and remains still very useful in our own days.
Starting from Cicero's maxim: « orator vir bonus, dicendi peritus », the orator at whom Q. aims is the perfect sage, of whom Roman tradition always thought: « sit igitur orator vir talis qualis vere sapiens appellari possit », who has a high civil and human mission, which must have as its indispensable prerequisite moral perfection. He therefore makes the reader traverse the whole itinerary from infancy to the formation of the orator, complete in every respect. According to the division proposed by the author himself, book I treats of elementary instruction, and is rich in observations on the qualities of the pedagogue, on the moment and the manner of beginning instruction, giving preference to the public school over the private one, because the public one better arouses emulation and the acquisition of independence and self-mastery; the author wants the teacher to study the character of the children, to know how to transform the school into a ludus, to avoid the physical punishments of the rod and the whip, because they are degrading and counterproductive, and to seek to replace them with admonition and persuasion: « quo saepius monuerit, rarius castigabit ». Book II begins the study of the norms for the formation of the orator, setting out the concept and the value of rhetoric; books III-VII, after a brief historical summary of rhetorical theories and their masters in Greece and at Rome, treat the technique of oratory, the inventio and the ordo; books VIII-XI, the elocutio, the memoria and the actio; book XII, the part of all « longe gravissima », methodology, insofar as it concerns the qualities of the orator, his literary and scientific culture, the practical norms for the exercise of advocacy, the worthy occupations after retirement from the practice of the profession. In book X the list of Greek and Latin authors to be read and studied is noteworthy, judged, however, only from the point of view of the orator's usefulness.
Of his other works: the De causis corruptae eloquentiae (in which he combated the extremisms of the classicists and of the modernizers to the bitter end, marking out for eloquence the middle path of a just evolution, consonant with the times and circumstances); the Declamationes, which go under his name, are for the most part not his, because they are at variance with the style and the precepts that he sets out in the Institutio. As for the Orationes, he himself mentions, among the many he must have delivered, only three (Inst. orat., IV, 1, 19; VII, 2, 24; IX, 3, 73), of which he published only one out of a desire for glory; while of the others, current under his name (as also of the two books De arte rhetorica) and divulged by the inconsiderate zeal of his pupils (ibid., proem. 7), he does not acknowledge the authorship.
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