QUINTILIAN [MARCUS FABIUS QUINTILIANUS] (c. A.D. Roman rhetorician, was born at Calagurris in Spain. The years from 61 to 68 he spent in Spain, probably in the retinue of the future emperor Galba, with whom he returned to the capi tal. For at least 20 years after the accession of Galba he was at the head of the foremost school of oratory in Rome. Vespasian created for him a chair of rhetoric. About the year 88 Quin tilian retired from teaching and from pleading, to compose his great work on the training of the orator (Institutio Oratorio). After two years' retirement he was entrusted by Domitian with the education of two grand-nephews, whom he destined as suc cessors to his throne. Quintilian gained the titular rank of con sul, and probably died not long before the accession of Nerva (A.D. 96). A wife and two children died early. His great work, the Institutio Oratorio, is in form a manual on the training of a public speaker; in fact it is the outline of a liberal education. As an orator, a teacher and an author, Quintilian set himself to stem the current of popular taste which found its expression in what we are wont to call silver Latin; but apparently he did not attempt to modify the primary cause of it—the excessive con centration on poetry in the early stages of literary training. In his youth the influence of the younger Seneca was dominant. But the chief teacher of Quintilian was a man of another type, one whom he ventures to class with the old orators of Rome. This was Domitius Afer, a rhetorician of Nimes, who rose to the con sulship. His great model was Cicero, of whom he speaks at all times with unbounded eulogy, and whose faults he could scarce bring himself to mention ; nor could he well tolerate to hear them mentioned by others. The reaction against the Ciceronian oratory which had begun in Cicero's own lifetime, had acquired over whelming strength after his death. Quintilian failed to check it, as another teacher of rhetoric, equally an admirer of Cicero, had failed—the historian Livy. The great movement for the poetiza tion of Latin prose which was begun by Sallust ran its course till it culminated in the monstrous style of Fronto. The teachers and audiences in the schools of declamation, and in the courts the judges, juries and audiences alike, demanded the startling, quaint or epigrammatic, and the speakers practised a thousand tricks to satisfy the demand.
Starting with the maxim of Cato the Censor that the orator is "the good man who is skilled in speaking," Quintilian takes his future orator at birth and shows how this goodness of character and skill in speaking may be best produced. The scheme followed is the standard division into three periods, supervised by the litterator, the grammaticus, and the rhetor respectively. Under
the first the child receives elementary instruction, under the sec ond he is grounded in literary criticism and scholarship generally as well as in what we call grammar, especial emphasis being laid on poetry; the third stage studied much the same authors, though more attention was given to prose, but with a direct view to the practice of oratory. The parts of the work which relate to general education are of great interest and importance. Quintilian postu lates the widest culture ; there is no form of knowledge from which something may not be extracted for his purpose ; and he is fully alive to the importance of method in education. Yet he develops all the technicalities of rhetoric with a fulness to which we find no parallel in ancient literature. Even in this portion of the work the illustrations are so apposite and the style so digni fied and yet sweet that the modern reader, whose initial interest in rhetoric is of necessity faint, is carried along with much less fatigue than is necessary to master most parts of the rhetorical writings of Aristotle and Cicero. The passages which review Greek and Latin literature are the most famous of all. There is a con siderable traditional element in these, greater on the Greek than on the Latin side ; but substantially posterity has concurred in his judgment. In the divine government of the universe he seems to have had a more than ornamental faith, though he doubted the im mortality of the soul. As to politics Quintilian, like others of his time, felt free to eulogize the great anti-Caesarian leaders of the dying republic, but only because the assumption was universal that the system they had championed was gone for ever.
The Latin of Quintilian is not always free from the faults of style which he condemns in others. It also exhibits many of the usages and constructions which are characteristic of the silver Latin. But no writer of the decadence departs less widely from the best models of the late republican period. The language is on the whole clear and simple, and varied without resort to rhetorical devices and poetical conceits.
Besides the Institutio Oratoria, there have come down to us under Quintilian's name 19 longer (ed. Lehnert, 19o5) and 145 shorter (ed. Ritter, 1884) Declamationes, or school exercitations on themes like those in the Controversiae of Seneca the elder. The longer pieces are certainly not Quintilian's. The shorter were probably published, if not by himself, at least from notes taken at his lessons. Editio princeps, Campames (Rome, 1470). Of the editions of the whole works the chief is that by Burmann (1720) ; of the Institutio Oratoria that by Spalding, completed by Zumpt and Bonnell (1798-1834, 5th ed., Meister, 1882).