34 - Rhetoric and scholarship

Summary

QUINTILIAN

Quintilian, the leading rhetor, ‘teacher of rhetoric’, of the Flavian period, fostered and, in his own writing, represented a reaction in literary taste against the innovations of Seneca, Lucan, and their contemporaries. There was no major revision of rhetorical theory: the difference lay rather in practice, in preference for older and, as Quintilian believed, better models, notably Cicero. This shift of attitude can be associated with a wider social change, recorded by Tacitus (Ann. 3.55), who says that the extravagances of Nero's times gave way on Vespasian's accession to more sober fashions, partly because new men, from Italy and the provinces, rose to prominence and reintroduced stricter codes of conduct. Quintilian, who had his origins in Spain, belongs amongst them. He was a man of wealth and influence, favoured by the ruling dynasty, and probably the first to obtain a state chair of Latin rhetoric (Suet. Vesp. 18). That he flatters Domitian (10.1.91–2) or talks of him in courtly terms (4 praef. 2–5) is neither blameworthy nor remarkable, but his bitter hostility towards contemporary philosophers (1 praef. 15, 12.3.12) raises interesting questions. Perhaps he honestly considers them depraved and pernicious (cf. Juvenal passim), but he may also be paying politic deference to the emperor's prejudices, as arguably he does in his conventionally scathing remark about the Jews (3.7.21). No doubt he saw himself as the latter-day champion of rhetoric in its ancient quarrel with philosophy. He concedes that the orator requires a knowledge of ethics, and therefore wants moral philosophy to be absorbed in (indeed subordinated to) the study of rhetoric (12.2.6ff.). He finds some support for this idea in the De oratore, but the intolerance which he here displays is utterly alien to Cicero.