Quintilian
The Biographical Tradition
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23403170 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Marc van der Poel (Radboud University Nijmegen, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Pages | 7-23 |
| Publication date | 2021-12-08 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Oxford Handbook of Quintilian (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198713784.013.2 |
| OpenAlex | W4200048814 |
| ISBN | 9780198713784 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 3 |
In addition to the biographical testimonies in Martial (Epigrams 2.90.2), Ausonius (Professors of Bordeaux 1.7), and Jerome (Chronicon, notes at year 68 and 88), there are some autobiographical remarks in Quintilian’s Institutio, most of which are difficult to mark with a date. Using this scant evidence, scholars from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards have attempted to construct the life of Quintilian. The most extensive and probably most influential biography is Henry Dodwell’s 109-page-long Annales Quintilianei (1698), which offers a chronologically very detailed but fundamentally speculative account of Quintilian’s life. This chapter discusses, after a general outline of the biographical tradition from Poliziano (1481) to Clarke (1967) and Kennedy (1969, revised edition 2013), the suggestions which have been made throughout the centuries to fill out the gaps in our knowledge of Quintilian’s life, focusing on his birth (it is possible that he was born in Rome, not Calagurris), his early life and education, his career as teacher and orator, his retirement and death, and the chronology of the writing of the Institutio. It also explains the origin of the erroneous claim, still often repeated today, that Quintilian was the first teacher of rhetoric who had a public chair of rhetoric in Rome, and gives a summary of the long debate on whether Tacitus’ Dialogus de oratoribus is Quintilian’s lost treatise De causis corruptae eloquentiae, and on the authorship of the two collections of Declamationes.
Art · Literature · Augustinian Studies and Theology · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |