Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

c. 35 - c. 100 CE · Roman (Hispanic) · Roman Rhetorical Education, Forensic Oratory, Pedagogy, Literary Criticism

A good man skilled in speaking.

Quintilian taught rhetoric in Rome for twenty years and was the first teacher of the art to be paid from the imperial treasury, appointed to a state chair under Vespasian. He had made his name in the courts before he made it in the classroom, and he never let the schoolroom forget the courtroom. When he retired he set out to write not a handbook of tricks but the education of an orator from infancy to mastery — twelve books that begin with how an infant's nurse should speak and end with what kind of man the finished orator must be.

Topics Marcus Fabius Quintilianus addresses

• vir bonus dicendi peritus
• the education of the orator
• nature, art and practice
• imitation of models
• the reading list of Book X
• declamation
• the controversia and the suasoria
• the corruption of eloquence
• invention of arguments
• arrangement of the parts
• the three styles
• the orator's memory
• the memory palace
• delivery and gesture
• gesture and the voice
• figures and tropes
• status theory
• perspicuity
• copia
• decorum
• the grammarian's school
• against corporal punishment
• the teacher's duty
• Ciceronianism

Converse with Marcus Fabius Quintilianus on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Marcus Fabius Quintilianus's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.