Rhetorical Display and Productive Dissonance in Quintilian's Quotations of Poetry

Abstract

Among Latin rhetorical treatises and imperial writers on technical subjects, the Institutio Oratoria stands out for the sheer number of quotations of poetry that Quintilian incorporates into his discussion. Whereas Cicero's De Inuentione has 13 quotations of poetry and the Rhetorica ad Herennium 16, the index locorum in Russell's Loeb edition of the Institutio records 320 quotations from Greek and Latin poets. Despite the distinctive scale of Quintilian's engagement with poetry, scholars have not taken much interest in it, perhaps under the influence of the persistent belief that in the imperial period ‘the introduction of poetry into orations as an ornament of style’ was ‘often a useless affectation’ or that such quotations constitute mere ‘window dressing’. Early twentieth-century treatments such as that of Cole, who evaluated Quintilian's citations of poets for their ‘textual accuracy’, and Odgers, who used the relative infrequency of Quintilian's quotation of Greek literature to establish the limits of Quintilian's knowledge of Greek, set a tone of dismissiveness in relation to any question of how and why Quintilian quotes poetry as he does: Cole and Odgers attribute any ‘discrepancies’ between Quintilian's quotations and those found in the manuscripts of the poets he quoted to a (presumed) tendency to quote from memory that made him ‘rather liable to errors’. Later critics have extrapolated from their findings to attribute to Quintilian the ‘grave deficiency’ of ‘know[ing] little directly of the major Greek writers’ and to diagnose ‘intellectual stagnation’ in his engagement with Latin literature. These negative judgements are, of course, in line with the traditional assessment of Quintilian as ‘neither a great writer nor a great thinker’, one who is ‘more often belittled than understood’.