M. Fabius, a celebrated Roman rhetorician, chiefly eminent for his treatise on oratory. The main facts of his life, as far as they are known to us, are derived from his own allusions in this celebrated work. His father seems to have been a man of some note (ix. 3, § 73), and from a passage in Seneca, it has been inferred that he was a declaimer. If so, Seneca speaks of him very slightingly (Constr. v., pref., p. 318), as a man whose oratorical reputation had not survived him. Others suppose that the Quintilian noticed by Seneca was the grandfather of M. Fabius; but the name was so common that any assumption about it is highly precarious.

Quintilian is said to have been born at Calagurris in Spain (Auson. Profess. i. 7; Euseb. Chron. ad. Ol. cexi.), and we hear of other Quintilians in that country at a much later period (Prudent. Hymn. vii. 152). Doubt has been thrown on this fact from the silence of Martial, who being himself a Spaniard, would naturally have been glad to have included a man whom he so profoundly admired (Ep. ii. 90) in the list of his distinguished fellow-countrymen. Some weight must undoubtedly be attached to this argument, and his birthplace be regarded as uncertain. He was certainly educated at Rome, and repeatedly alludes to the instruction he received from Domitius Afer, whose waning powers were the more conspicuous from his unwillingness to abandon an arena in which he had excelled all his contemporaries, although they were men of such high reputation as Julianus Africanus and Servilius Nonianus (v. 7, 7; x. 1, 24, 118, &c.) Quintilian was then a mere youth (adolescentulus) during the old age of this distinguished orator; and he must therefore have been born A.D. 40-42, for Domitius Afer died in the reign of Nero, A.D. 60. When his education was completed, and after the death of his friend and instructor, he went to Spain with Galba, and stayed with him during his eight years' administration of Hispania Tarraconensis. At the end of this period he returned to Rome with his patron, and began to practise at the bar with such distinction that his name became with his contemporaries a proverbial term for a consummate orator. (Juv. vii. 280.) He won still greater distinction in the office of a teacher (moderator summe iurisdictio, Mart. ii. 90), and had the fortune to number Pliny among his pupils. (Plin. Ep. ii. 14, § 9; vi. 6, §§ 3, 32.) We cannot wonder at his brilliant success, if his practice in any way came up to the noble requirements of his theory. His general remarks on education, distinguished as they are by the calmest good sense, may still be read with advantage; and the arguments by which he maintains the superiority of a public to a private education, give an irresistible answer to the objections which eighteen centuries have not sufficed to clear away. Probably few men came nearer to his marvellous ideal of a tutor than he did himself, as we may conjecture from the affectionate respect which he received from his pupils, and from the use of his name by Juvenal as a general expression for a pure and honourable man. (Sat. vi. 75.) When we add to this the certainty that he fully gained during his lifetime the reputation which he had justly earned, his biography presents a picture of rare good fortune. Two emperors singled him out for their most conspicuous marks of approbation. Domitian entrusted to him the education of his sister's grandsons (Inst. Orat. iv. prelum); and Clemens, the father of these youths, obtained for him, in gratitude for his instruction, the honours and empty title of consul (Anson, Grat. Act. ante med.) Although this office had long been shorn of all its political power, it may well have seemed a guerdon sufficiently splendid to excite the envy of contemporaries as a freak of fortune. (Juv. vii. 194.) From Vespasian he received the still more substantial recognition of a regular salary of 100,000 sesterces (between L.800 and L.900) a year out of the privy purse, with the additional honour of being the first recipient of a bounty which was afterwards continued in imitation of this excellent precedent. (Suet. Vesp. 18.) These distinctions were showered upon him at the close of his public duties, when, after twenty years of professional labour, he was employing his retirement in the composition of his great work, the Institutiones Oratoriae.

But in spite of his brilliant success, the life of Quintilian was embittered by the severest domestic misfortunes. He had married, probably late in life, a very young girl, who, after bearing him two sons, died before her twentieth year. He speaks of her with almost parental tenderness, and says that his sons were his only consolation. Of these, the younger, a child of the utmost promise, died a few months after his mother, while the father was diverting his thoughts with the composition of his treatise De Caussis Corruptae Eloquentiae. All his hopes were then centred in the young Quintilianus, whose unusual abilities formed a strong stimulus to his father's diligence, and heightened his desire to complete, before his own death, his larger and more celebrated work. But these hopes were destined to be blighted; the boy died, after eight months' illness, in the tenth year of his age, and Quintilian bitterly complains that the fruit of his labours was destined to be reaped by any one rather than those for whose sake he had so fondly written. Besides showing him in a very amiable domestic character, the autobiographical digression, in which he informs us about these circumstances, is valuable, as illustrating Quintilian's high position; for the son whose loss he so pathetically laments had been adopted by a man of consular dignity, and already betrothed to the daughter of a praetor. (Inst. Or. vi. Proem.)

Pliny wrote one of his extant letters to a Quintilian, whom he addresses in affectionate terms, and to whom he sends a present of 50,000 sesterces (between L.400 and L.500), as a present for his daughter on her marriage to Nonius Celer, a Roman knight. He apologises for so trifling a present (minucissimum) by saying that he would not have succeeded in persuading him to accept a larger sum, and adds that his friend's means were disproportionate to the wealth of his intellect. (Ep. vi. 32.) If the Quintilian here addressed be the author of the Institutiones (as appears most probable), he must have married the daughter of Titullus when he was at least fifty, and have lived to a considerable age. We see no improbability in this, since the death of his children, and the very short duration of his previous married life, would naturally induce him to a second marriage. The date of his death is entirely uncertain. Doubt has been thrown on the identity of the great Quintilian with the one mentioned by Pliny, because in this epistle he is said to have been "medicini facultatibus," whereas we have seen that he enjoyed a handsome pension; and Juvenal quotes him as an instance of a literary man who possessed the ampest means. We may add to this that he himself alludes to his circumstances ("facultates patrimonii nostrii") in terms which show that he had a considerable competence. There is, however, no real difficulty here. The general tone of Pliny's letter shows that he was addressing a rich man, though one poorer than himself; and there is an obviously sarcastic exaggeration in the jealous language of Juvenal, who, although he felt for Quintilian a sincere respect, probably disliked him as a court favourite under a detestable tyrant. It has been well remarked that Quintilian was "a rich man among the poor, and a poor man among the rich."

He lived in times which were perilous to the honesty of prominent and able men. Comparatively few of his contemporaries escaped without a stain from the all but universal corruption of that dark period, when, as Niebuhr expresses it, "the world was effete with the drunkenness of crime." Many of the eminent men with whom Quintilian lived on terms of intimacy, and among them Domitius Afer, were "prosperiore eloquentiae quam morum fana." (Tacit. Ann. iv. 5.) It is even strange that in close proximity to men so distinguished for genius, yet so degraded by moral weakness, Quintilian should still have maintained his celebrated theory, that a splendid eloquence is incompatible with an immoral life. (Inst. Or. i. 2.) And yet there is not a single reproach against Quintilian's own character, unless it be the adulation with which he addresses the Emperor Domitian on being requested to undertake the education of his grand-nephews. Considering the high compliment which was involved in his selection for this office, and the general prevalence of flattery far grosser and more extravagant (Vell. Paterc. ii. 94, 104; Stat. Synt. i. 1, 62; Mart. v. 81), we cannot but consider this a venial offence. Quintilian was no politician, and even if he had been, such insane compliment is too preposterous to do any harm. We might call it a vice rather than the period than of the individual, did we not know historically how seductive are the blandishments of royalty. Even Lord Chatham, a far greater man than Quintilian, burst into tears on receiving from George III. a few words of ordinary civility.

Quintilian's chief claim to the respect of posterity rests on his famous work, Institutiones Oratoriae, written mainly with a view to the education of his own son and the son of the courtly orator Marcellus Victorius, to whom he dedicated it. The publication of it was hastened by the generally expressed wish, that he would embody in writing the results of his long experience, and by the fact, that no less than two unauthorized editions of his rhetorical notes, full of imperfections, had already been brought before the world by the ill-judged zeal and admiration of his youthful auditors. He tells us that he composed the present work in rather more than two years, amid the interruption of numerous other engagements; but it gives the result of many years' study of the subject, and contains all that he considered most valuable in numerous earlier treatises, both Greek and Latin. It forms a complete compendium of every topic likely to be technically useful in the education of a young aspirant to the honours of eloquence. It is the clearest and most practical of rhetorical manuals; and though inferior to Cicero's De Oratore in a literary point of view, is much more adapted to be practically useful. Quintilian's style is graceful, lucid, and flowing; and although he was not so pedantic as to avoid every expression which wanted the classic stamp of the Augustan period, yet he may be regarded as the restorer of good taste, and "can in no way be classed among the writers of the Argentea atar."

The first MS. of Quintilian was discovered by the Florentine Poggio in the tower of the monastery of St. Gall, when he was attending the council of Constance. The first printed edition was that of Campanus at Rome in 1470. The best commentary is that of Spalding (completed by Zumpt and Bonelli), who gives in his Preface an imperfect and desultory sketch of Quintilian's life.

It is now generally agreed that the work De Causis Corruptae Eloquentiae is lost. It was long identified with the Dialogus de Oratoribus, which is more rightly assigned to Tacitus, and usually printed by modern editors among his works. The arguments about the authorship are well and briefly given by Spalding in his note on Institutiones Oratoriae, vi. praec., and need not be recapitulated here. The one hundred and sixty-four declamations which long passed under the name of Quintilian, are universally acknowledged not to be his. They are the feeble and tasteless productions of those rhetorical schools which, by encouraging empty rant on subjects which had the least possible affinity with real human interests, tended radically to vitiate the taste of young orators. Tacitus and Petronius Arbiter alike condemn the futile and fantastic manner of these discussions, which degraded eloquence into affectation, and made it the orator's sole object to surprise by unexpected and unusual expressions, and emasculate his sentences by a nauseous superstition of quips and flourishes. The ridiculous and intolerable style of the later Roman writers, with the archaisms and emphisms with which they elaborately endeavour to conceal their barrenness of thought, was the natural development of so mistaken a practice.