Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/205

Rh Q U I Q U I 187 ment. The counter-revolution of 1823 again drove him from office, to which he was once more restored after the death of the king in 1833. In 1835 he was made a senator and peer; and in 1855, at a meeting of the cortes, a laurel crown was placed on his head by Queen Isabella II., whose "governor" he had been during her minority. He died at Madrid on March 11, 1857. The works of Quintana form the 19th volume in Ribadaneyra's Biblioleca de Autores Espanolcs (1852). The third and last volume of the Vidas appeared in 1833. The biographies of ISTufiez de Bilboa, Pizarro, The Cid, Guzman el Bueno, Gonsalvo de Cordova, and one or two others have been translated into English. QUINTILIAN (M. FABIUS QUINTILIANUS) was born in the obscure Spanish town of Calagurris (Calahorra), on the Ebro, in the country of the Vascones, not later than 35 A.D. Concerning his family and his life but few facts remain. His father taught rhetoric, with no great success, at Rome, and Quintilian must have come there at an early age to reside, and must have there grown up to manhood. The years from 61 to 68 he spent in Spain, probably attached in some capacity to the retinue of the future emperor Galba, with whom he returned to the capital. Quintilian must have brought back with him a considerable reputation as a rhetorician. For at least twenty years after the acces- sion of Galba he was at the head of the foremost school of oratory in Rome, and may fairly be called the Isocrates of his time. He also gained some but not a great repute as a pleader in the courts. His greatest speech appears to have been a defence of the queen Berenice, on what charge is not known. For a member of a learned profession his circumstances were easy ; but the question of Juvenal, " How is it that Quintilian owns so many estates? " ought perhaps not to be accepted as evidence of great wealth. Vespasian created for him a professorial chair of rhetoric, liberally endowed with public money, and from this time he was unquestionably, as Martial calls him, " the supreme controller of the restless youth." About the year 88 Quintilian retired from teach- ing and from pleading, to compose his great work on the training of the orator (Institutio Oratorio). After two years' retirement he was entrusted by Domitian with the education of two grand-nephews, whom he destined as suc- cessors to his throne. Quintilian gained the titular rank of consul, and probably died not long before the accession of Nerva (96 A.D.). A good many years earlier his wife had died at the age of nineteen, leaving him two sons, one of whom died when seven years old, the other in his eleventh year, while the father was engaged upon his great work. Such is the scanty record that remains of Quintilian's uneventful life. But it is possible to determine with some accuracy his relation to the literature and culture of his time, which he powerfully influenced. His career brings home to us the vast change which in a few generations had passed over Roman taste, feeling, and society. In the days of Cicero rhetorical teaching had been entirely in the hands of the Greeks. Even Cicero, when he wrote his rhetorical works, was driven to plead that it could not be disgraceful to teach what it was not disgraceful to learn. The Greek language, too, was in the main the vehicle of instruction in rhetoric. The first attempt to open a Latin rhetorical school, in 94 B.C., was crushed by authority, and not until the time of Augustus was there any professor of the art who had been born to the full privileges of a Roman citizen. The appointment of Quintilian as professor by the chief of the state marks the last stage in the emancipation of rhetorical teaching from the old Roman prejudices. During the hundred years or more which elapsed between the death of Cicero and the birth of Quintilian education all over the Roman empire had spread enor- mously, and the education of the time found its end and climax in rhetoric. Mental culture was for the most part acquired, not for its own sake, but as a discipline to- develop skill in speaking, the paramount qualification for a public career. Rome, Italy, and the provinces alike resounded with rhetorical exercitations, which were pro- moted on all sides by professorships, first of Greek, later also of Latin rhetoric, endowed from municipal funds. The mock contests of the future orators roused a vast amount of popular interest. In Gaul, Spain, and Africa these pursuits were carried on with even greater energy than at Rome. The seeds of the existing culture, such as it was, bore richer fruit on the fresh soil of the Western provinces than in the exhausted lands of Italy and the East. While Quintilian lived, men born in Spain domin- ated the Latin schools and the Latin literature, and he died just too soon to see the first provincial, also of Spanish origin, ascend the imperial throne. As an orator, a teacher, and an author, Quintilian set himself to stem the current of popular taste which found its expression in what we are wont to call silver Latin. In his youth the influence of the younger Seneca was dominant. But the teacher of Quintilian was a man of another type, one whom he ventures to class with the old orators of Rome. This was Domitius Afer, a rhetorician of Nimes, who rose to the consulship. Quintilian, however, owed more to the dead than to the living. His great model was Cicero, of whom he speaks at all times with unbounded eulogy, and whose faults he could scarce bring himself to mention; nor could he well tolerate to hear them mentioned by others. The reaction against the Ciceronian oratory which had begun in Cicero's own lifetime had acquired overwhelming strength after his death. Quintilian failed to check it, as another teacher of rhetoric, equally an admirer of Cicero, had failed the historian Livy. Seneca the elder, a clear-sighted man who could see in Cicero much to praise, and was not blind to the faults of his own age, condemned the old style as lacking in power, while Tacitus, in his Dialogue on Orators, includes Cicero among the men of rude and " unkempt " antiquity. The great movement for the poetization of Latin prose which was begun by Sallust ran its course till it culminated in the monstrous style of Fronto. In the courts judges, juries, and audiences alike demanded what was startling, quaint, or epigrammatic, and the speakers practised a thousand tricks to satisfy the demand. Oratory became above all things an art whose last thought was to conceal itself. It is not surprising that Quintilian's forensic efforts won for him no great reputation. The Institutio Oratorifi is one long protest against the tastes of the age. Starting with the maxim of Cato the Censor that the orator is " the good man who is skilled in speaking," Quintilian takes his future orator at birth and shows how this goodness of character and skill in speaking may be best produced. No detail of training in infancy, boyhood, or youth is too petty for his attention. The parts of the work which relate to general education are of great interest and importance. Quintilian postulates the widest culture ; there is no form of knowledge from which something may not be extracted for his purpose ; and he is fully alive to the importance of method in education. He ridicules the fashion of the day, which hurried over preliminary cultivation, and allowed men to grow grey while declaiming in the schools, where nature and reality were forgotten. Yet he develops all the technicalities of rhetoric with a fulness to which we find no parallel in ancient literature. Even in this portion of the work the illustrations are so apposite and the style so dignified and yet sweet that the modern reader, whose initial interest in rhetoric is of necessity faint, is carried along with much