QUINTINUS, Saint, Martyr
A thief saved by St. Q. Episodes from the saint’s legend, detail from a French art panel of the early 16th century – Paris, Louvre, formerly Revoli collection.
The study of the rules for the formation of the orator, expounding the concept and value of rhetoric; Books II, III–VII, after a brief historical summary of rhetorical theories and their masters in Greece and Rome, treat the technique of oratory, *inventio* and *dispositio*; Books VII, VIII–XI, *elocutio*, *memoria* and *actio*; Book XII, the part “by far the most important,” the methodology, insofar as it concerns the qualities of the orator, his literary and scientific culture, the practical rules for the exercise of advocacy, and the worthy occupations after retirement from professional practice. In Book X there is a noteworthy list of Greek and Latin authors to be read and studied, judged however solely from the standpoint of their utility to the orator.
Of his other works: the *De causis corruptae eloquentiae* (in which he opposed the extremisms of the classicists and the uncompromising modernizers, marking out for eloquence the middle path of a just evolution suited to the times and circumstances); the *Declamationes* that go under his name are largely not his, being inconsistent with the style and precepts he sets forth 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 desire for glory; while the others circulating under his name (as also the two books *De arte rhetorica*), spread by the ill-considered zeal of his pupils (ibid., proem. 7), he does not acknowledge as his own.
QUINTINUS, Saint, Martyr
He is commemorated in the Hieronymian and Roman Martyrologies on 31 October. His cult was already flourishing in the 6th century, as attested by St Gregory of Tours (In glor. Martyr., 72), but the details of his martyrdom come from a highly suspect *Passio*.
According to this, Q. was a Roman, son of a certain senator Zeno, and around 245, together with other missionaries, went to Gaul to preach Christianity and settled at Amiens. Arrested by Ricius Varus, tortured, imprisoned, but miraculously freed, he continued his preaching; then, recaptured, he was beheaded at Verranda and his body was thrown into the Somme. Around 340 a Roman woman named Eusebia, warned by a vision, sought the martyr’s body, found it intact, laid it in a tomb over which she built a small oratory. This was later enlarged and embellished in the 5th, 7th and 9th centuries; from this time the cult of Q. spread widely in France, collections of miracles obtained at his tomb were compiled, and the city of Vermand took his name.