Quintilian is the last and perhaps the most distinguished of that school of Spanish writers (Martial, the two Senecas, and Lucan) which played so important a part in the literary history of the first century. Born at Calagurris, a small town on the Upper Ebro, he was educated at Rome, and afterwards returned to his native town as a teacher of rhetoric. There he made the acquaintance of the proconsul Galba (68-9), and was brought back by him to Rome in 68 A.D., where for twenty years he enjoyed the highest reputation as a teacher of eloquence. Among his pupils were numbered Pliny the Younger and the two sons of Flavius Clemens, grand-nephews of Domitian, destined for his successors. In 79 A.D. he was appointed by Vespasian professor of rhetoric, the first teacher who received a regular salary from the imperial exchequer. Domitian (81-96 A.D.) conferred upon him an honorary consulship, and the last ten years of his life were spent in an honoured retirement, which he devoted to recording for the benefit of posterity his unrivalled experience as a teacher of rhetoric.
2. Works.
Institutio Oratoria, the Training of an Orator, in twelve Books. This great work sums up the teaching and criticism of his life, and gives us the complete training of an orator, starting with him in childhood and leading him on to perfection.
Thus:—
Book I gives a sketch of the elementary training of the child from the time he leaves the nursery. Quintilian rightly attaches the greatest importance to early impressions.
Book II deals with the general principles and scope of the art of oratory, and continues the discussion of the aims and methods of education in its later stages.
Books III-VII are occupied with an exhaustive treatment of the matter of oratory, and are highly technical. ‘Now that the formal study of the art of rhetoric has ceased to be a part of the higher education these Books have lost their general interest.’—Mackail.
Books VIII-XI treat of the manner (style) of oratory. In Book X, cap. i, in the course of an enumeration of the Greek and Latin authors likely to be most useful to an orator, Quintilian gives us a masterly sketch of Latin literature, ‘in language so careful and so choice that many of his brief phrases have remained the final words on the authors, both in prose and verse, whom he mentions in his rapid survey.’—Mackail.
Book XII treats of the moral qualifications of a great speaker. The good orator must be a good man.
‘Quintilian with admirable clearness insists on the great truth that bad education is responsible for bad life, and expresses with equal plainness the complementary truth that education, from the cradle upwards, is something which acts on the whole intellectual and moral nature, and that its object is the production of the good man.’—Mackail.