Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) was a teacher of rhetoric and an orator at Rome in the late first century A.D. His only surviving work, Institutio Oratoria (The Education of the Orator, ca. A.D. 92-A.D. 94), asserts the educational ideal of the perfect orator, which he sums up in Cato the Censor's phrase "vir bonus dicendi peritus" (a good man skilled in speaking, 12.1.1). In a treatment of unprecedented scope, Quintilian sets out to describe both the characteristics and the development of this ideal orator from cradle through retirement. In doing so he presents a rare and influential discussion of primary education, provides the most coherent single treatment of the course of formal education in Rome, offers an indispensable compendium of theoretical and practical information about classical rhetoric and oratory, and, through the readings he suggests as models of style, proffers brief but long-enduring judgments about standard Greek and Roman authors who preceded him.
