Editing Rhetoric (section)

====Quintilian====
{{Main|Quintilian|Byzantine rhetoric}}

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Quintilian ({{CE|35–100}}) began his career as a pleader in the courts of law; his reputation grew so great that [[Vespasian]] created a chair of rhetoric for him in Rome. The culmination of his life's work was the ''[[Institutio Oratoria]]'' (''Institutes of Oratory,'' or alternatively, ''The Orator's Education''), a lengthy treatise on the training of the orator, in which he discusses the training of the "perfect" orator from birth to old age and, in the process, reviews the doctrines and opinions of many influential rhetoricians who preceded him.

In the ''Institutes'', Quintilian organizes rhetorical study through the stages of education that an aspiring orator would undergo, beginning with the selection of a nurse. Aspects of elementary education (training in reading and writing, grammar, and literary criticism) are followed by preliminary rhetorical exercises in composition (the {{transliteration|grc|[[progymnasmata]]}}) that include maxims and fables, narratives and comparisons, and finally full legal or political speeches. The delivery of speeches within the context of education or for entertainment purposes became widespread and popular under the term "declamation".

This work was available only in fragments in medieval times, but the discovery of a complete copy at the [[Abbey of St. Gall]] in 1416 led to its emergence as one of the most influential works on rhetoric during the Renaissance.

Quintilian's work describes not just the art of rhetoric, but the formation of the perfect orator as a politically active, virtuous, publicly minded citizen. His emphasis was on the ethical application of rhetorical training, in part in reaction against the tendency in Roman schools toward standardization of themes and techniques. At the same time that rhetoric was becoming divorced from political decision making, rhetoric rose as a culturally vibrant and important mode of entertainment and cultural criticism in a movement known as the "[[Second Sophistic]]", a development that gave rise to the charge (made by Quintilian and others) that teachers were emphasizing style over substance in rhetoric.