If we had to choose only two authors to provide us with as complete a picture of Roman rhetoric as possible, they would undoubtedly be Cicero and Quintilian. Cicero is often portrayed as the incarnation of Roman eloquence, both as an accomplished orator and as a theorist and historian of rhetoric. Quintilian, on the other hand, provides us with the largest handbook on rhetoric that has survived from antiquity: the Institutio Oratoria. The fact that Quintilian’s work deals with the entire spectrum of rhetoric’s technical aspects in a thorough and systematic way as well as with rhetoric’s wider moral, social, and educational contexts makes it still more relevant. He is, moreover, able to make critical judgments on the oratory of the Ciceronian period from a historical perspective; his assessments may well be biased but they nevertheless offer us some fascinating insights. All this makes the Institutio a privileged window onto the panorama of ancient rhetoric, an invaluable witness to the ancient perception of ancient literature, and an excellent source for several related issues such as education in the Roman world and the practice of advocacy.
Nevertheless, Quintilian and his Institutio have been surprisingly neglected by modern scholarship, and the attention that they have received tends to focus on just a few specific areas: his discussion of pedagogy in book 1, the review of ancient literature in book 10, and his portrait of the ideal orator in book 12 (see Adamietz 1986: 2226). There are two main reasons for this: the sheer length of the Institutio, which goes far beyond that of most handbooks (a feature that also led to its limited readership in the Middle Ages; see Ward 1995b), and the post-Romantic discrediting of rhetoric as a discipline that generated the more mechanical and empty ornamental traits ofimperial literature. Quintilian’s work was viewed within the history of Roman culture mainly as an ardent defense of Ciceronian style against innovations represented by Seneca. It was also regarded as a symptom of the rhetorical excesses that affected literature, as if rhetoric and literature were clearly distinguishable from each other in antiquity.
World History
