Latin 520 ('Schooling the Emperor'):
Assignment for Week 3 (11-17 April)
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria Books 4 and 5 (we'll devote Monday to Book 4 and Wednesday to Book 5)
Continuing with the Domitian theme, come prepared to offer your thoughts on 4.proem.2-5.
You are a Part of a Speech. And as such, you will need to explain yourself in roughly 10 minutes (on Monday) -- or rather, you need to summarize for your fellow Parts of a Speech what, according to Quintilian, your function and purpose are, your elements, your characteristics, etc. You should also pick two or three points Q. makes about you that you feel are especially significant. Make notes; give references as needed; and, like any good orator, plan the explanation of yourself in advance. You are (these divisions are admittedly not entirely equitable!):
Danny is Proemium (4.1)
Megan is Narratio pt.1 (4.2.1-60)
Chad is Narratio pt. 2 (4.2.61-132)
Emma is Digressio (4.3)
Anna is Propositio (4.4)
Luo is Partitio (4.5)
You will recall (I hope) that Q. covered the 'Parts of a (forensic) Speech' at 3.9ff. In Books 4 and 5 he examines each of these partes in more detail, but on Monday we'll concentrate on Book 4.
In Book 5 (on Wednesday), much of which is devoted to a discussion of kinds of 'proofs' (argumenta), I'd like to look closely at Chap. 11 (we'll probably translate some of it), part of which is devoted to paradeigmata or exempla. We have mentioned 'exemplarity' before -- and while what you read here may not seem to have much to do with 'exemplarity' as we usually conceive of it, the principle enunciated by Q. is the same. Or is it? Is there an 'ethical' component to Q.'s discussion/conception of exempla? When and why does Q., believe it appropriate to deploy exempla? In the same chapter, because he believes these things to be related, he discusses poeticae fabulae and auctoritas. What do these have in common with exempla proper -- and how do they differ?
And a related, idle thought: can you think of any passages in what you've read of Q. where he deploys any of these three sorts of 'proof' -- exempla, poeticae fabulae, or auctoritas?
For Wednesday please have read G. Kennedy, 'An Estimate of Quintilian,' AJP 83.2 (1962) 130-46. This is available through JSTOR (bear in mind you have to be connected through the UW Libraries to use this important resource). Click here. It is also available in hard copy on the seminar room -- I'll put the relevant copy on a reserve shelf in the seminar room.
I'm asking you to read this for 'historical' reasons. Kennedy was one of the leading scholars of ancient rhetoric of his generation, and authored a number of important books on the subject, including A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton 1994) and (my personal favorite) The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World 300 BC-AD 300 (Princeton 1972) (there are companion volumes on both Greek and later 'Christian' rhetoric). His interest in rhetoric stemmed from (among other things) an interest in Quintilian, on whom he published a book in 1969, entitled Quintilian, which remains one of the very few books devoted exclusively to Quintilian. (This is perhaps time to mention one of the great contributions to the scholarship on Quintilian, Jean Cousin's massive two volume Études sur Quintilien, Amsterdam 1935-36, reissued 1967.) Prior to this, however, Kennedy published this short article on Quintilian in AJP that sketched out several of the issues he would address in the book a few years later. While it won't necessarily provided you with a snapshot of current thinking about Q., it will give you some perspective on important earlier work on him. And, as you'll see, Kennedy touches on a couple of issues we've already been talking about.
If you're curious, there's an interesting sort of 'retrospective' on Kennedy (who was also a longtime editor of AJP and thus an influential person in American classical scholarship) to be found here. And in the interest of full disclosure: Kennedy was one of my undergraduate professors.