Quintilian. M. Fabius Quintilianus was born about 35 A.D. at Calagurris (Calahorra), in Spain, and attended in Rome the prelections of Domitius Afer, who died in 59. After this date, however, he revisited Spain, whence he returned in 68 to Rome, in the train of Galba, and began to practise as a pleader in the courts, in which capacity his reputation became considerable. He was more distinguished, however, as a teacher than as a practitioner of the oratorical art, and his instructions came to be the most eagerly sought after among all his contemporaries, his pupils including Pliny the Younger and the two grandnephews of Domitian. As a mark of this emperor's favour he was invested with the insignia and title of consul; while he also holds the distinction of being the first public teacher who benefited by the endowment of Vespasian, and received a fixed salary from the imperial exchequer. His professional career as a teacher of eloquence commenced probably about 72, but after twenty years of labour as advocate and teacher he retired into private life, and died probably soon after 96. His reputation rests securely on his great work entitled De Institutione Oratoria Libri XII., a complete system of rhetoric, which he dedicates to his friend Victorius Marcellus, himself a court favourite and orator of distinction. It was written—as he tells us in his preface to his publisher Trypho—after he had ceased to be a public teacher, and was the fruit of two years' labour. In the first book he discusses the preliminary training through which a youth must pass before he can begin those studies which are requisite for the orator, and he gives us an elaborate outline of the mode in which children should be educated in the interval between the nursery and the final instructions of the grammarian. The second book treats of the first principles of rhetoric, and contains an inquiry into the essential nature of the art. The subjects of the five following books are invention and arrangement; while that of the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh is style (locutio), with memory and delivery. Of these the eighth and ninth discuss the elements of a good style; the tenth, the practical studies requisite; the eleventh, appropriateness, memory, and delivery. The last, and in the author's view most important, book is devoted to the various requisites for the formation of a finished orator, such as his manners, his moral character, his mode of undertaking, preparing, and conducting causes, the style of eloquence most advantageous to adopt, the age at which pleading should be begun, and at which it should be left off, and other allied topics. The entire work is remarkable for its sound critical judgments, its purity of taste, admirable form, and the perfect familiarity it exhibits with the literature of oratory. The condensed survey of Greek and Roman literature with which the tenth book commences has always been admired for its clearness, width of intellectual sympathy, and vigour. Quintilian's own style is excellent, for though he is not free from the love of florid ornament and poetic metaphor characteristic of his age, he was saved from its extremes by his good sense, which refused to sacrifice clearness and simplicity to effect, and still more, by his wholesome admiration for Cicero. The style of Seneca he discusses almost as fully as he does that of Cicero, denouncing it as a dangerous model for the orator to follow. He makes an obvious effort to be fair in balancing his praise and blame, but a careful reader detects an undertone of dislike, whether to Seneca's philosophy or his person. Nineteen longer and 145 shorter Declamations (ed. C. Ritter, 1885), which have been ascribed to him, are now believed to be spurious, as they evidently belong to different authors, and even different epochs.
The best edition of Quintilian's works is that of Burmann (1720); of the Institutio Oratoria, those by Spalding, completed by Zumpt and Bonnell (1798-1834), the last volume (vi.) containing a lexicon, Halm (1868-69), and the hand-edition by Meister (1886-87). Of Book x. alone there are editions by Professor J. E. B. Mayor (1872, incomplete), Hild (Paris, 1885), Frieze (New York, 1889), and Principal Peterson (Oxford, 1891). There are English translations by Guthrie (1805) and the Rev. J. S. Watson (Bohn, 1855-56). See Karl Pilz, Quintilianus: ein Lehrerleben aus der römischen Kaiserzeit (1863), and C. Ritter, Die Quintilianischen Declamationen (1881).