Well, here's a thing. The first Latin author to be honoured with an Oxford Handbook all to himself is … Quintilian. It is a suitably hefty tome, with 22 substantial chapters by a good range of better- and less-well-known Quintilianians from around Europe and the USA. Editors van der Poel, Edwards and Murphy have laudably preferred not ‘to impose a standardized view of Quintilian’ (p. 3), though some standardisation on other points might have been a good idea: some chapters cite him in Latin with translations, others only in English; one chapter introduces ‘the doctrine of status’ (pp. 108–11), the next ‘the theory of issues’ (pp. 121–2), without any hint that these are the same thing, still less a cross-reference. The editors’ introduction is brief and to the point, even if it is hard to imagine Quintilian giving high marks for logic or style to a line like ‘Undoubtedly thanks to its comprehensiveness and its eminently practical focus, the Institutio probably received soon after its publication the status of a key work on rhetoric’ (p. 1); their hardest graft lurks in the end matter, three long and useful indexes.
Hardest graft qua editors, that is: two of them also serve as contributors, supplying four chapters in all. Van der Poel launches the vessel with a chapter on Quintilian's life, reporting on the reconstructions of H. Dodwell (Annales Quintilianei [1698]) and others before giving his own solutions to the various uncertainties. That evidently involved plenty of reading in the Rare Books Room and the digital archives, homework also put to use in Chapter 2, a history of the Institutio in print notable for its diligence and critical neutrality (the Bipontine edition gets no more or less acclaim than Winterbottom's OCT). Those two chapters constitute Part 1 (‘Life of Quintilian, and Quintilian Editions and Translations’); Murphy then opens Part 2 (‘Quintilian's Rhetoric: The Institutio Oratoria in Detail’) with a lively introduction to Quintilian's work featuring full precis and winning enthusiasm, to the point of claiming that it runs to 700,000 words (p. 59), about four times what I make it. It is apt that the opening Epistle to Trypho features at this early juncture, surprising that Murphy considers it ‘merely a transmission letter’ (p. 68) not intended for inclusion, and more surprising still that he maintains (p. 69) that the Institutio was written to help Quintilian's friend Marcellus with educating his son and published only as an afterthought: some more reflection on Roman paratexts and didactic conventions might be worthwhile. Van der Poel returns to present Quintilian's ‘educational programme’, attending primarily to Books 1–2, before four chapters on technical matters – definitions of rhetoric (G. Manuwald); inventio and dispositio (L. Calboli Montefusco); style (J. Fahnestock); memory and delivery (D.S. Levene) – escort us through Books 3–9 and 11. (Book 10, we later find, is held over for a later chapter, leaving Book 12 a poor relative, despite its importance as ethical, and in parts technical, climax.)
Most of the seven chapters in Part 3, ‘Quintilian in Context’, range more widely in the Institutio: R.L. Enos on Quintilian in the rhetorical tradition, tuned especially to the Greek heritage and with apt and interesting focus on Isocrates; T. Zinsmaier on Quintilian's style (a welcome inclusion that left me wanting more by way of close reading and of syncrisis with other early imperial prose); F. Chico Rico on ‘Quintilian as a Literary Critic’, essentially, as you might guess, a reading of Inst. 10.1; B. Breij on declamation, a superb introduction to the phenomenon and Quintilian's nuanced response to it, and to scholarly responses; O. Tellegen-Couperus on the law; L. Díaz Marroquín on the ‘performing arts’ or, rather, on oratory as performance, covering inter alia theatricality, vocal technique and acoustics; J. Masséglia on visual art (i.e., for the most part, the famous catalogue of artists in Inst. 12.10).
That leaves Part 4, ‘Quintilian in History’, whose seven chapters add up to a substantial (nearly 200 of the 500 pages of main text), richly textured and uniformly impressive account of the reception of the Institutio from Lactantius to the 2010s. From late antiquity (C. Schneider, with a prodigious bibliography) we proceed to the twelfth century (E. Kuhl), then the Renaissance both in Italy (V. Cox) and north of the Alps (P. Mack). T. Schirren covers the eighteenth to twentieth centuries in Europe, R.A. Katula and C. Wiese the same period in the USA; finally, W.J. Dominik (‘Modern Assessments of Quintilian’) presents a bravura, telegraphic Sammelrezension of around half the 600-odd scholarly publications (and several ‘pseudo-scholarly’ ones, p. 465) on Quintilian between 1980 and 2016; they range beyond the usual languages into tongues as diverse as Ukrainian, Armenian and Japanese (most of these last, it is true, on Wikipedia).
The Handbook is well written, well presented and well produced, and will make a useful and reliable point of entry for readers new to Quintilian as well as an excellent bibliographical tool. In line with much scholarship on the Institutio (the Minor Declamations still occasionally attributed to him get only the briefest mention, and the later Major Declamations not much more), radical arguments are scarce: it is no surprise to learn that Quintilian was well versed in the rhetorical tradition and in Roman law, or that he draws colourful comparisons between orators and actors; the value of chapters on these and other topics lies rather in clear and careful exposition of the details. There is good broad balance in coverage too, again representative in its emphases; but I am struck by three (relative) absences. First, Cicero. It goes without saying that Quintilian constructs a neo-Ciceronian manifesto; but there is a very great deal to be said about how he handles Cicero's oratory, his theoretical works and his reputation. To be sure, he is mentioned often enough here, as the index attests; but the most systematic treatment runs to just two pages on ‘Cicero's Rhetorica to Quintilian's Institutio’ (pp. 187–9). Second, the Flavian context, in two senses. There is the social and literary scene. The names of Martial and Statius, for instance, crop up, but only incidentally, and no one mentions, still less pursues, A. Barchiesi's interesting attempt (in: M. Paschalis [ed.], Roman and Greek Imperial Epic [2005]) to bring Quintilian into dialogue with either of them, nor is there any enquiry into who might have constituted his reading public: in these respects as in others, there is rather little attempt besides Murphy's reading of the prefatorial matter to approach the Institutio as ‘literature’. And there is the political scene. I do not so much mean pointless moralising about Quintilian's personal debt to his lord and master (though it is a shame that Domitian's death is misdated, p. 77). Rather, the great unanswered question of the Institutio: how does the ideal neo-Ciceronian orator really serve a state where law, like all else, is servant to an absolute monarch?
That question, as you may hear, leads to my third absence. The hefty Part 4 does good and, once again, representative work (reception has been big business in Quintilian studies for a while), calling in on the likes of Augustine (interestingly light on Quintilian), Stephen of Rouen, epitomising the Institutio in the twelfth century, Lorenzo Valla, editing it in the fifteenth, and John Quincy Adams, lecturing on it at Harvard in the nineteenth; there is even some fan-fiction from the twenty-first, Robert Kurland's The Trials of Quintilian: Three Stories of Rome's Greatest Detective (sic). But why start with Lactantius, two centuries after Quintilian? Tacitus’ Dialogus is as immediate and sharp a response to the Institutio as you could hope for, and a reply of a different sort soon came in the Epistles of Quintilian's ex-pupil Pliny the Younger. But let me not be parochial (C. Whitton, The Arts of Imitation in Latin Prose [2019]) and instead give my question about Lactantius its obvious answer: here, as in so much, the Handbook faithfully represents the state of scholarship on Quintilian, in which early reception is routinely forgotten or ignored.
Every reader will have their absences, and that is not to diminish the presences, many, varied and valuable: here is a book that (as Quintilian might have put it) promises not just good intentions, but much usefulness.
