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Our point at present is that the exhaustive teaching of a language so that it may serve as a key to culture is a second function in the school. Quintilian's conception of education, the reader will remember, was oratory. This aspect of school work was the traditional and logical development of the culture language-teaching.
And the Ad Herennium adds a divisio, which defines the issues, between the statement of facts and the proof. Cassiodorus divides the speech into six parts and so does Martianus Capella. Thomas Wilson offers seven. The third part of rhetoric is elocutio, or style, the choice and arrangement of words in a sentence. Quintilian's treatment of style is typical.
In philosophy he did not so much criticise other schools as detail his own views with concise eloquence. These views were almost certainly Eclectic, though we know on Quintilian's authority that he followed the two Sextii in many important points. The other branches of prose composition were almost neglected in this reign.
It is the folly rather than the wickedness of vice which Horace describes with such playful skill and such keenness of observation. He was the first to mould the Latin tongue to the Greek lyric measures. Quintilian's criticism is indorsed by all scholars, Lyricorum Horatius fere solus legi dignus, in verbis felicissime audax.
I fear that your MSS., and I mean your sermons now, would suffer by any other revisal and publication than your own. With regard to the last suggestion of Quintilian's, I have supposed that it has been fairly before you; but perhaps I have already said more than becomes me.
As a natural result of this conception, so similar to Cicero's demand that the orator must know all things and in line with Aristotle's Rhetoric, Jonson concludes that the poet, like Quintilian's orator, must himself be a good man; for how else will he be able "to informe yong-men to all good disciplines, inflame growne-men to all great vertues, keepe old men in their best and supreme state."
One of Quintilian's own orators has said that a great speaker only gives back to his hearers in flood what they have already given to him in vapour.
Pliny the Younger was among his pupils, and owed much to him; also is there to prove the value of Quintilian's method; for Quintilian turned out Pliny a true gentlman. Prose in those days, that is, rhetoric, was tending ever more to flamboyancy and extravagance: a current which Quintilian stood against valiantly.
His favourite books, Geldenhauer tells us, were Pliny's Natural History, the younger Pliny's Letters, Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, and selections from Cicero and Plato. These were his travelling library, carried with him wherever he went; two of them, Pliny's Letters and Quintilian, he had copied out with his own hand.
He begins by a general discussion of the importance of Grammar, which is the "foundation and root" of reading, teaching, and reflection. Throughout this discussion he refers constantly to Quintilian's "Institutes of Oratory."
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