The Institutio Oratoria is Quintilian’s major work. Its declared goal is to outline the instruction required to produce an orator as close to perfection as possible, drawing on everything written in the field of rhetoric during the previous 500 years. The ideal orator envisioned by Quintilian, however, is not just someone who has mastered all the rhetorical devices but rather is a man who has also acquired a vast knowledge of culture both philosophical and literary, who is gifted with a high moral sense, and who puts this entire legacy to the service of his community through the successful practice of rhetoric in public life (see Inst. 12.1.26, where political leadership is mentioned as the ideal orator’s supreme function). Quintilian brings new life to Cato the Censor’s famous formula of the vir bonus dicendi peritus (‘‘good man skilled in the art of speaking,’’ 12.1.1), but his ideal also has its roots in Isocrates, includes elements of Stoicism (see Walzer 2003), and is further influenced by Cicero’s rhetorical writings, particularly the dialogue De Oratore, which is quoted over sixty times throughout the Institutio.
The Institutio was arranged by Quintilian in twelve books, each of which is divided into as many as 115 self-contained chapters; modern editions of the Latin text are about 700 pages long. At its most general structural level the Institutio can be divided in three parts. The first part covers issues prior to the teaching of rhetoric, mainly early education and the definition of rhetoric (1-3.5). The second section presents the system of rhetoric, which is presented in lengthy discussions organized according to the orator’s five officia (‘‘traditional tasks’’), a scheme common in other Greek and Roman handbooks and traceable back to Aristotle; these officia are inventio (3.6-6.5), dispositio (7.1-10), elocutio (8.1-11.1), memoria (11.2) and actio (11.3). The third part discusses moral and other aspects concerning the practice of rhetoric in society (12.1-11).
Quintilian’s bold and comprehensive vision for his work encompasses not just rhetoric and its related subjects but also human culture and society in general. Skill in public speaking was the main focus of ancient education; this means that all areas of ancient culture were rhetoricized to some degree. Rhetorical training should be regarded not just as acquisition of knowledge and technique but as a more complex and wide-ranging ‘‘process of acculturation’’ (cf. Habinek2005: 60-78). Quintilian’s Institutio provides modern readers with a sound guide to what he considers the proper process of acculturation that Roman members of the ruling class should undergo.
Such a broad conception obliges Quintilian to define explicitly and carefully what he understands as rhetoric and to place his discipline within the cultural context ofhis time. It is in book 2 where the issue of how rhetoric should be defined is addressed. Quintilian presents the different views available in the tradition from Plato onward (2.14-15) and aligns himself on the side of those who see in rhetoric something more than a mere art of persuasion. The wording of his definition, according to which rhetoric is bene dicendi scientia (‘‘the discipline of speaking well,’’ 2.15.34; cf. 3.3.12), underlines the moral dimension with which he wishes to endow the discipline and is closely linked with the more extensive treatment of rhetoric and morality to be found in book 12. During the discussion Quintilian explains (2.18) that rhetoric is a ‘‘practical’’ techne, that is, one whose essence is ‘‘action,’’ even though it shares traits with two other Aristotelian kinds of techne, ‘‘theoretical’’ and ‘‘poetic’’; he then upholds the position that the subject matter of rhetoric is everything that is submitted to it for speaking (materiam esse rhetorices iudico omnes res quaecumque ei ad dicen-dum subiectae erunt, 2.21.4). He ends book 2 by addressing the question whether rhetoric can also be considered a virtue (2.20). Although Quintilian admits the existence of ‘‘wrong’’ forms of rhetoric, that is, those that are artless, trivial, or morally reprehensible, he maintains that ‘‘real’’ rhetoric, the kind of rhetoric he has in mind, is a virtue - an idea that many even among the philosophers maintain ( sit, ut compluribus etiam philosophorum placet, virtus, 2.20.1; cf. 8 praefi. 6).
This conception of rhetoric, undetached from ethics and with its all-inclusive subject matter, cannot avoid the issue of its relationship with philosophy, the other discipline that also devoted itself to the broad fields of knowledge and morals. Here too Quintilian’s conception of the desirable relationship between eloquence and philosophy is explicitly linked to Cicero’s ideal: both disciplines are naturally joined together (1 praef. 13) and only the course of history has opened a gap between them. Quintilian takes pains in the proem to book 1 to show that it is philosophers who are on the wrong side of this gap, for the mission he has in mind for his ideal orator (regere consiliis urbes, fundare legibus, emendare iudiciis, ‘‘to rule cities with his counsel, to give them a firm base with his laws, to correct them with his judgments,’’ 1 praef. 10) conflicts with that usually assumed by philosophers. Quintilian is well aware that his battle to bestow cultural and educational hegemony upon rhetoric is a difficult one and he devotes much energy to discrediting philosophers in this crucial opening section of the work. Quintilian’s attack is based predominately on two grounds: (1) the very matter of philosophy cannot be the object of a technical discipline since it is something of general interest and even the subject of common conversation (1 praef. 16); and (2) philosophers, as they are found now in society, cannot be considered as models of moral behavior no matter what illustrious ancestors they may claim to have (1 praef. 15).
World History
