Quintilian: Who He Was and His Model for the Complete Orator

Who Was Quintilian

Marcus Fabius Quintilian was born at Calagurris, present-day Calahorra, in Spain, between 35 and 40 CE: the sources give no single year, only this span. He was brought to Rome still young, perhaps still a child, by his father, himself a rhetorician. In Rome he completed his training under two teachers, the grammarian Remmius Palaemon and the advocate-rhetorician Domitius Afer, before returning to Spain in 59 CE.

He came back to Rome in 68 CE, at the order of Emperor Galba. There he practiced law and opened a private school of oratory, which became a public school in 74 CE. It was Vespasian who granted him an unprecedented recognition for the time, the first salary the Roman state ever paid to a teacher of rhetoric. Later he was also given the honor of consular rank, a high-ranking title rather than the actual office of consul. He was also entrusted with educating two boys, grandsons of Domitilla, sister of an emperor, who were destined to become emperors themselves: an assignment that shows how far he had risen in Flavian Rome, the same century that saw the Roman Empire at its height.

Quintilian taught rhetoric for twenty years, a figure that, according to Treccani, he reports himself in the proem of the first book of his major work.

The Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian’s Treatise for the Orator

Writing the Institutio Oratoria took Quintilian just over two years. The sources disagree on when: Treccani places the work, alternatively, between 89 (or 90) and 92 CE, or between 93 and the autumn of 95 CE.

The work is divided into twelve books, grouped into four blocks. The first covers a child’s education from an early age and elementary instruction, grammar, before any rhetorical training proper, ground that Roman schooling shared with the Roman ideal of humanitas. The second book deals with choosing a tutor and the teaching method itself; it also introduces the first rhetorical exercises, the progymnasmata. From the third book onward comes the more technical part, on rhetorical doctrine proper, after a historical survey of Greek and Roman teachers. The last book, the twelfth, changes subject: technique is already settled in the books before it, so here Quintilian turns to the personal and moral qualities a complete orator needs.

According to Treccani, among surviving ancient works, the Institutio Oratoria is the only complete, systematic treatise on ancient pedagogy to come down to us.

Vir Bonus Dicendi Peritus, Skill and Character Together

At the opening of Book XII, Quintilian borrows a definition of the orator coined centuries earlier by Cato: vir bonus dicendi peritus, an honest man who speaks well. Quintilian puts moral character first: he treats it as the foundation an orator needs before any technique, rating rhetorical mastery on its own as insufficient. In his system, moral goodness is a necessary condition, not an optional one, for being a genuinely complete orator.

The Teaching Method, From the Nurse to Play

For Quintilian, language learning starts long before school, with the choice of a nurse: she is the first person a child hears speak, and the first words a child tries to copy are hers. Quintilian sides with those who think a young child’s mind should never be left idle: he wants stimulation to begin early, well before the conventional age for starting instruction. In ancient Greek education, training a future citizen also began early, though with a different emphasis.

Practical example: Quintilian suggests turning study into play for a young child, with questions, praise and the satisfaction of getting something right. If the child refuses to learn, he also recommends teaching the same lesson to another child: competition, in his view, can be enough to bring back the will to learn.

The Legacy of the Institutio Oratoria

During the Middle Ages, the complete text of the Institutio Oratoria was thought lost and circulated only in incomplete form. It was the humanist Poggio Bracciolini who, in 1416, found a complete copy at the monastery of St. Gall: a discovery that returned Quintilian to the center of European culture.

Centuries later, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Desiderius Erasmus also built his own idea of rhetorical imitation from classical manuals, including Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, before giving it a Christian stamp of his own.