D. A. Russell

Quintilian : the orator's education

Quintilian, born in Spain about A.D. 35, became a widely known and highly successful teacher of rhetoric in Rome. The Orators Education (Institutio Oratoria), a comprehensive training program in twelve books, draws on his own rich experience. It is a work of enduring importance, not only for its insights on oratory, but for the picture it paints of education and social attitudes in the Roman world. Quintilian offers both general and specific advice. He gives guidelines for proper schooling (beginning with the young boy); analyses the structure of speeches; recommends devices that will engage listeners and appeal to their emotions; reviews a wide range of Greek and Latin authors of use to the orator; and counsels on memory, delivery, and gestures. Donald Russells new five-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of The Orators Education, which replaces an eighty-year-old translation by H. E. Butler, provides a text and facing translation fully up to date in light of current scholarship and well tuned to todays taste. Russell also provides unusually rich explanatory notes, which enable full appreciation of this central work in the history of rhetoric.

On Reading Plutarch's Lives

This of course was Renaissance enthusiasm. The fame and influence which Plutarch enjoyed in the days of the rediscovery of antiquity could not survive the revolutions in historical and scholarly attitudes that marked the nineteenth century. Instead of being thought of as a mirror of antiquity and of human nature, he became a ‘secondary authority’, to be used where the ‘primary sources’ failed, himself to be quarried by the Quellenforscher and left a ruin. The present neglect of the Lives in education is a consequence of this. And yet it should be obvious that, for the very historical purposes for which the book is now chiefly studied, it is misleading and dangerous to use what is plainly one of the most sophisticated products of ancient historiography without constant regard to the plans and purposes of its author. Fortunately, a good deal has been written, especially in the last twenty years, to redress the balance.

Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus

I am concerned in this paper with Plutarchs treatment of the story of Coriolanus, not with the historical truth of the legend or with its development before Plutarchs time. I start from the hypothesis that the Life is, in its essentials, a transposition into biographical form of the historical narrative in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities , Books V to VIII. This has long been the common view. It was held and defended by Hermann Peter, Mommsen, and Eduard Schwartz. A careful reading of the two texts side by side tempts me to call it certain, so exact and frequent are the echoes. It is at any rate probable enough to justify an attempt to follow out its consequences by treating the differences between Dionysius and Plutarch, in default of other evidence, as Plutarchs constructions, to be explained in terms of his literary purposes and methods. This is what I shall do in the main part of this paper. I preface the details, however, by a few more general considerations.

Rhetoric and Criticism

The words ‘rhetoric’ and ‘rhetorical influence’ come readily enough to the tongue when people talk of Greek and Latin literature, but all too often a great vagueness hangs about them; one is seldom sure whether they are being used historically with reference to certain facts of ancient education or as terms of abuse for some ‘insincerity’ or ‘artificiality’ in literature which the speaker invites us to deplore. My object here is to supply a few facts about the ancient rhetoricians and their intentions, and then to add some observations about the relevance of what they were doing to our own understanding of the ancient writers. Most of what I say is about Greek rather than Latin rhetoric, but I shall of course draw on Latin material, which, for some parts of the subject, is both more abundant and more intelligent than what survives hi Greek. Richard Volkmann, on whose great book we still depend, confessed that the only way by which he came to understand what rhetoric meant to the ancients, and to feel that he had in his hands an ‘Ariadnes thread’ to the labyrinth, was by the repeated reading of Quintilian.

An Anthology of Latin prose

This anthology fills a gap which has been widely felt. It gives students - at sixth-form, undergraduate or junior graduate level - the opportunity of sampling a very wide variety of Latin prose texts, chosen to illustrate both development and generic differences. Each of the 96 passages is accompanied by a short introduction, and there are brief notes explaining difficult words and drawing attention to linguistic and stylistic points occurring in the extracts. The extracts range from the second century BC to the fifth century AD: Cato the Censor, C. Gracchus, and the annalists; Cicero (oratory, letters, philosophical treatises); the historians (Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus); non-historical prose (Seneca, Vitruvius, Pliny, Apuleius, Tertullian); and finally some early Patristic texts and extracts from the Vulgate.