Institutio Oratoria
Institutio Oratoria
Training a great orator means training a genuinely good person from childhood onward, because rhetorical skill without moral character produces only an effective liar, and Rome needs orators who are, in Quintilian's famous formula, good men skilled in speaking.
- oratory training inseparable from moral character formation
- 'a good man skilled in speaking' as the guiding formula
- covers education from early childhood through mature practice
- rediscovered complete in 1416, shaping Renaissance humanist curricula
A twelve-book treatise on the complete education of an orator, from a child's earliest schooling through the mature practice of public speaking, composed by the first publicly salaried professor of rhetoric in Rome after decades of teaching and courtroom practice. Quintilian covers curriculum, memory training, style, delivery, and the ethics of persuasion in exhaustive practical detail, but the work's organizing claim, following and expanding Cato the Elder's formula 'vir bonus dicendi peritus,' a good man skilled in speaking, is that technical rhetorical training cannot be separated from moral formation, since an orator without integrity is merely a more dangerous liar. Written partly as a corrective to what Quintilian saw as decadent, overly ornamental contemporary rhetoric, the treatise became, once rediscovered in a complete manuscript in 1416, hugely influential on Renaissance humanist education.
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