Quintilian and Tacitus

I mentioned last week that Quintilian would be a good place to start in order to reconstruct what I’ve called for convenience the “Bookshelf of the West.” I have to give credit once again to Gilbert Highet for prompting this idea. In the 1950s he recommended that “great books” projects focus more on those authors who were actually most read and cited across the past 3,000 years and less on what we moderns assume our ancestors ought to have read. If we were to take up that challenge, we would find much more of the rhetorical tradition; in fact, we would discover that rhetoric was for centuries considered the queen of the disciplines. Thus, we would have to make a lot of room for Isocrates, Cicero, Quintilian, and many others in the humanist tradition (in the old sense of that much-abused word).

In Quintilian’s supremely important Institutes, we catch him in the act, as it were, of picking up the tradition and handing it on to other teachers and through them to their students. One of my principal goals in compiling The Great Tradition (ISI Books, 2007) was to show the actual connections present over the centuries rather than the imagined, assumed, or preferred ones. I wanted the authors to choose each other to the greatest extent possible, knowing full well that I had to plunge into the stream at some point in the flow and then look upstream and downstream. To change metaphors, I wanted the Great Tradition of liberal education in the West to throw its own party and make up its own guest list. It turned out to be a generous list, but there were also names deliberately excluded. There wasn’t unanimity about who to cross off the list, but some names were consistently excluded, chief among them Machiavelli, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Dewey. Samuel Johnson, of Dictionary fame, even criticized John Milton’s treatise on education for being too enthralled with Bacon. Some of the first readers of my anthology who assumed the collection was meant to offer an overview of the history of educational theory and practice in the West were confused by these exclusions, sometimes to the point of frustration and even heated criticism. I wanted to prove (if my anthology indeed has a thesis) that the Whiggish story of progress from the ancients, through Christendom, through Baconian science and Romantic sentimentalism, and culminating in Progressivism was merely one highly biased and misleading account, presuming, it seemed, that countless generations of teachers had been standing on tiptoe waiting for the advent of John Dewey when all things would be revealed and all the riches of the past would be reduced to mere “precursors” to us wonderful moderns. The only valuable parts of the past would be those blessed enough to have anticipated the future according to this smug, self-satisfying story of human progress. It never occurs to a progressive that the past might have known a thing or two and have had good reasons to reject the kind of “enlightened” and sentimental education (so called) pedaled by utopian reformers.

Before this post turns into an essay on the philosophy of history, I need to return to Quintilian. In Book XII, the final book of the Institutes, he draws directly from Cicero’s works. In particular, he repeats Cicero’s warning that an education that develops skills divorced from moral training would lead to diabolical results. In the voice of his teacher, Crassus, Cicero cautions that “the stronger this faculty [of eloquence] is, the necessary it is to be combined with integrity and supreme wisdom, and if we bestow fluency of speech on persons devoid of those virtues, we shall not have made orators of them but shall have put weapons into the hands of madmen.” Here in one sentence appears the three-legged stool of true education that I talked about in previous posts: wisdom, virtue, eloquence. And keep in mind that the “orator”—Cato’s good man speaking skillfully—was closer to what today we would call a statesman and not a prize-winning public speaker and certainly not a sophist. Quintilian carried this advice forward. After citing Cato’s famous definition of the true orator, he writes that “[being a good man] is essential not merely on account of the fact that, if the powers of eloquence serve only to lend arms to crime, there can be nothing more pernicious than eloquence to public and private welfare alike . . .” A teacher guilty of such negligence would “[render] the worst of service to mankind” and “forge these weapons not for a soldier, but for a robber.”

These are sober warnings. The stakes could not be higher. Our minds immediately think of the murderous masters of persuasion in the twentieth century who left a wide swath of destruction and death behind them and were stopped at incalculable cost. And our own time is not free of this danger. No age is or ever will be. This is why education matters so much. Leaders of wisdom and character must be reared in every generation for the welfare of the city. An inordinate love of wealth, power, and glory is as much a threat today as ever.

This anxiety about the state of society appears forcefully in Tacitus, the great Roman historian. And in Tacitus we find a sense of urgency and almost despair, as befit a man who mounted the loss of what Sallust called the “old Roman morality.” Tacitus was among the old Romans who lamented the republic’s collapse into imperial decadence. Tacitus believed he witnessed the corruption of an entire civilization, and he blamed it all on the abandonment of the kind of education established by Rome’s “forefathers.” They had understood the necessity of combining eloquence and moral philosophy, and they had put that precept into practice. But those exemplars were now being ignored to Rome’s peril. Tacitus’s Rome was plagued with unscrupulous “clever speakers” who were ignorant and contemptuous of the past. Above all, “eloquence is by them degraded, like a discrowned queen, to a few commonplaces and cramped conceits. She who in days of yore reigned in the hearts of men as the mistress of all the arts, encircled by a brilliant retinue, is now curtailed and mutilated, shorn of all her state, all her distinction, I had almost said all her freedom, and is learned like any vulgar handicraft.” These words sound almost like Edmund Burke’s parallel grief in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

I’ll let you draw your own connections to contemporary American politics this campaign season. But please don’t take these complaints, or my repeating them, as a counsel of despair. They ought to brace us for renewed endeavor. They ought to remind us that at its heart education is not about buildings, and facilities, and extracurriculars, and class size, and salaries, and technology, and any other important but secondary matter. Education is now as always about the formation of human beings. Whatever in time, energy, sacrifice, and resources we devote to that end will bear much fruit. Don’t take my word for it. The great tradition has been saying so for 3,000 years.