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Then said Gawain, of his courtesy, "Marcellus, when you greet Quintilian deep in hell, tell him, I pray, that you have found the Britons as bold as their boast. Tell him that they plead the law with blows, and bite more fiercely than they bark." Gawain called upon his companions, Guerin and Boso, by their names, to turn them about, and enter the lists with their pursuers.
While it is not generally realized, Spain was, as we have pointed out, the province of the Roman Empire in the West that advanced most in culture before the breaking up of the Empire. The Silver Age of Latin literature owes all of its geniuses to Spain. Lucan, the Senecas, Martial, Quintilian, are all Spaniards.
Quintilian, writing about the same time, goes into detail, as becomes an old schoolmaster. "It is an admirable practice that the boy's reading should begin with Homer and Virgil. The tragic writers also are useful; and there is much benefit to be got from the lyric poets also. But here you must make a selection not of authors only, but a part of authors."
Now, an orator, as you know, is a great speaker. An orator is a man who has the excellent and influential gift of public speech. And on great occasions in public life when people are to be instructed, and impressed, and moved, and won over, then the great orator sets up his platform. Quintilian teaches us in his Institutes that it is only a good man who can be a really great orator.
From this inconstancy, it seems to me, arises the greatest obstacle to the production of perfect works of art." A passage of Quintilian, containing a concise outline of the history of ancient art, also deserves to be pointed out as an important document in this domain.
Ovid often mentions this poem with admiration; he calls Varro the poet of the sail-tossing sea, says no age will be ignorant of his fame, and even thinks the ocean gods may have helped him to compose his song. Quintilian with better judgment notes his deficiency both in originality and copiousness, but allows him the merit of a careful translator.
Quintilian, describing the depraved influences which surrounded even the infancy of a Roman child, said, "From these arise first familiarity, then nature." No one has laid down the principle more emphatically than Seneca himself. Take, for instance, the following passage from his Letters, on evil conversation.
"Does the perusal of works of fiction act favourably or unfavourably on the moral character?" At his farewell interview with Mr. Dale he was asked, as he writes to his father, what books he had read, and replied with a pretty long list, including Quintilian and Grotius. Mr.
Quintilian, after he had spoken of the satire of Lucilius, adds what follows: "There is another and former kind of satire, composed by Terentius Varro, the most learned of the Romans, in which he was not satisfied alone with mingling in it several sorts of verse."
The truculent landlord creeping in and finding that everything was as he wished it; and the moneyless man going off in the dark, leaving his dead bedfellow behind him as the landlord had intended that he should form all the incidents of a stock piece for rehearsal rather than the occurrence of a true murder. The same may be said of other examples adduced, here as afterward, by Quintilian.
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