Quintilian: "A Rich Harvest of Delight"

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, whom we know today as Quintilian, wrote one of the most influential and durable treatises on education every produced. Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond continued to seek his wisdom. The twelve books of his Institutes reflect the heart and mind of a teacher of vast experience paired with a clear vision of the ultimate ends of education.

Like Cicero before him, he refused to separate the philosopher from the orator. The two must be united in theory and practice. The true orator—the truly educated human being—must wed an excellent character to his highly developed intellect and skills. No teacher ought to divide ethics from knowledge and from the tools of persuasion, and ethics itself must be more than knowing about right conduct; it must model and strive to inculcate good character, knowing the whole time that virtue cannot be simply implanted in a student. And while Quintilian focused on the “big picture,” he didn’t neglect instruction on good penmanship, spelling, and phonetics.

His rigorous “great books” list included Greeks and Romans, poets and playwrights, historians, philosophers, and orators. We find him recommending Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Isocrates, Plato, Xenophon, Chrysippus, Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, Horace, Sallust, Livy, and many others. Quintilian would be a good place to start to reconstruct the Bookshelf of the West as it looked in the first century A.D.

I will have occasion next week to say more about Quintilian before moving on to the Roman historian Tacitus. For now, I’d like to entice you read Quintilian by offering a few quotations from the Institutes.

All previous ages have toiled that we might reap the fruits of wisdom.

Above all things we must take care that the child, who is not yet old enough to love his studies, does not come to hate them and dread the bitterness which he has once tasted, even when the years of infancy are left behind.

I hold that no one can be a true orator unless he is also a good man and, even if he could be, I would not have it so.

It is held that schools corrupt the morals. It is true that this is sometimes the case. But morals may be corrupted at home as well.

My ideal pupil will absorb instruction with ease and will even ask some questions; but he will follow rather than anticipate his teacher. Precocious intellects rarely produce sound fruit.

Study depends on the good will of the student, a quality that cannot be secured by compulsion.

For by [his studies] he will win a richer harvest of delight than can ever be gathered from the pleasures of the ignorant, since among the many gifts of providence to man not the least it this that the highest pleasure is the child of virtue.

And finally, a longer reflection on the ideal teacher:

Let him…adopt a paternal attitude to his pupils, and regard himself as the representative of those who have committed their children to his charge. Let him be free from vice himself and refuse to tolerate it in others. Let him be strict but not austere, genial but not too familiar: for austerity will make him unpopular, while familiarity breeds contempt. Let his discourse continually on what is good and honorable; the more be admonishes, the less he will have to punish. He must control his temper without however shutting his eyes to faults requiring correction: his instruction must be free from affectation, his industry great, his demands on his class continuous, but not extravagant. . . . In correcting faults he must avoid sarcasm and above all abuse; for teachers whose rebukes seem to imply positive dislike discourage industry.

These are just some of the treasures you will find in Quintilian. If you are struggling to find motivation for the upcoming school year, or if you need to remember why you wanted to be a teacher in the first place, spend some time with Quintilian. His reflections on teachers and students will never seem distant from your own experience. Indeed, you will see clearly that the fundamentals of liberal education really haven’t changed.