This is a book about how a lesson once learned can be used again.
It is also a book about future writing and speaking, about preparing for discourse that is yet to be.
It takes advantage of the longest-lasting teaching process in Western civilization, which was devised by Roman schoolmasters more than a century before the birth of Christ. Over the next two thousand years, this teaching process influenced figures as diverse as Cicero, Saint Jerome, Erasmus, Martin Luther, John Milton, John Stuart Mill, Winston Churchill, and John F. Kennedy. The Roman schools prepared a carefully crafted learning sequence based on a close relationship between the four factors of listening, reading, speaking, and writing.
Toward the end of the first Christian century, the best features of this system were distilled into a comprehensive work titled Institutio oratoria (The Education of the Orator). The author was Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (circa A.D. 35–98), one of Rome’s most famous teachers, who had flourished under three emperors and then devoted two years of his retirement to describing and explaining his educational program.
This volume offers translations from the three key sections of the Institutio oratoria in which Quintilian provides the rationale for an education that looks to future writing and speaking.
Modern readers, it is hoped, will find his ideas as useful today as they have been in many countries for nearly two thousand years.