47. Cicero.—In all Cicero’s works we find scarcely a line relative to education. And yet the great orator exclaims: “What better, what greater service can we of to-day render the Republic than to instruct and train the young?”[43] But he was content with writing fine discourses on philosophy for his country, abounding more in eloquence than in originality.
48. Varro.—A less celebrated writer, Varro, seems to have had some pedagogic instinct. He wrote real educational works on grammar, rhetoric, history, and geometry. Most of these have been lost; but if we may trust his contemporaries, they were instrumental in the education of several generations.
49. Quintilian (35-95 A.D.).—After the age of Augustus, education became more and more an affair of oratory. The chief effort in the way of education was a preparation for a career in the Forum. But from these vulgar rhetoricians, occupied with the exterior artifices of style, these “traffickers in words,” as Saint Augustine called them, we must distinguish a rhetorician of a higher order, who does not separate rhetoric from a general culture of the intelligence. This is Quintilian, the author of the Institutes of Oratory.
Appointed at the age of twenty-six to a chair of eloquence, the first that was established by the Roman state, and called at a later period by the Emperor Domitian to direct the education of his grand-nephews, Quintilian was practically acquainted with both public and private instruction.
50. The Institutes of Oratory.—This work, under the form of a treatise on rhetoric, is in parts a real treatise on education. The author, in fact, begins the training of the future orator from the cradle; he gives counsel to its nurse, and “not blushing to descend to petty details,” he follows step by step the education of his pupil. Let us add, that in the noble ideal which he conceives, eloquence never being considered apart from wisdom, Quintilian was led by his very subject to treat of moral education.
51. His General Plan of Education.—The first book entire is devoted to education in general, and its teachings might be applied indifferently to all children, whether destined or not to the practice of oratory.
“Has a son been born to you? From the first conceive the highest hopes of him.” Thus Quintilian begins. He thinks that we cannot have too high an opinion of human nature, nor propose for it too high a purpose. Minds that rebel against all instruction are unnatural. Most often it is the training which is at fault; it is not nature that is to blame.
52. The Early Education of the Child.—The child’s nurses should be virtuous and prudent. Quintilian does not demand that they shall be learned, as the stoic Chrysippus would have them; but he requires that their language shall be irreproachable. The first impressions of the child are very durable: “New vases preserve the taste of the first liquor that is put into them; and wool, once colored, never regains its primitive whiteness.”
By an illusion analogous to that of the literary men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who would have the little French boy first learn Latin, Quintilian teaches his pupil Greek before making him study his native tongue.