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An awful burst of parental and literary affliction breaks forth in Quintilian's lamentation, "My wealth, and my writings, the fruits of a long and painful life, must now be reserved only for strangers; all I possess is for aliens, and no longer mine!" We feel the united agony of the husband, the father, and the man of genius!
Now that the formal study of rhetoric has ceased to be a part of the higher education, the more strictly technical parts of Quintilian's work, like those of the Rhetoric of Aristotle, have, in a great measure, lost their relevance to actual life, and with it their general interest to the world at large.
All Cicero's treatises on the subject, and Quintilian's, and those of the pseudo-Tacitus, and of the first Greek from which they have come, fall to the ground as soon as we are told that it must be the purport of the orator to turn the mind of those who hear him either to the right or to the left, in accordance with the drift of the cause.
The precise time of Quintilian's own death is equally inauthenticated with that of his birth; nor can we rely upon an author of suspicious veracity, who says that he passed the latter part of his life in a state of indigence which was alleviated by the liberality of his pupil, Pliny the Younger.
The most interesting passage that has come down to us, dealing with the whole question of the power of the dead to appear to those whom they love in dreams, is undoubtedly Quintilian's Tenth Declamation.
Quintilian's pleas for the purer taste of a former age fell on deaf ears, and despite his warnings orators imitated the style of the poets, and the poets imitated the style of the orators. Gorgias may or may not have learned his style from the ancient poets of Greece, but the poets of the silver age learned from the tribe of Gorgias.
We subjoin a translation of Quintilian's criticism of the chief Roman authors as very important for the student of Latin literature, premising, however, that he judged them solely as regards their utility to one who is preparing to become an orator. As Homer among the Greeks, so Virgil among our own authors will best head the list; he is beyond doubt the second epic poet of either nation.
In fact, Cicero's De inventione is so much like it that some suspect that Cicero's notes which he took in school got into circulation and forced the publication of his professor's lectures. Aristotle's philosophy of rhetoric, Cicero's charming dialog on his profession, Quintilian's treatise on the teaching of rhetoric none of these is a text-book. The rhetoric Ad Herennium is.
Of the extraordinary force and fineness of Ovid's natural genius, there never have been two opinions; had he but been capable of controlling it, instead of indulging it, he might have, in Quintilian's opinion, been second to no Roman poet. In his Medea, the critic adds, he did show some of this self-control; its loss is the more to be lamented.
Quintilian's work consists of lessons on oratory, which he supports by quotations from the great orators, both Greek and Latin, with whose speeches he has made himself familiar. Cicero was to him the chief of orators; so much so that we may almost say that Quintilian's Institutio is rather a lecture in honor of Cicero than a general lesson.
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