The De liberis educandis communicates a confident educationalism. Through well-managed mental labor the child amasses a reserve of linguistic and cultural capital that demonstrates his legitimacy. Successful learning furnishes the requisite proof that his body has been kept from contagion and that his speech and ongoing self-culture will remain worthy of a free man. Quintilian shows remarkable similarities in his discussion of the proper education of the male heir, perhaps understandably since Plutarch and Quintilian taught at Rome at the same time. Quintilian was so popular that students pirated some of his work.1 In fact, the De liberis educandis and the Institutio oratoria provide unique insight into elite schooling at Rome at the turn of the first to second century A.D. In addition, the two treatises have an unrivaled importance for the legacy of educational thinking.2 New movements in pedagogy, in philology, and in art and literary criticism have charted their beginnings from these works.3 Whether as protreptics to an encyclopedic culture, or as digests of rhetoric, these texts have held their appeal, perhaps most fundamentally because (without gainsaying the special clarity of Quintilian’s language and range of his information) they make the attractive claim that the present text can direct the fashioning of a new man. All seems possible, even the reader’s return to proper culture (no matter what the divide of years or languages), if one will but follow the schoolboy’s course.
Quintilian is much richer than the author of the De liberis educandis in details of instruction. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 below consider the chief, separate stages of the recommended training in grammar and rhetoric. Now we must start again where all histories of Roman education have begun, with the grandest theoretical account of schooling in the Western tradition. It is difficult not to be swept away, for Quintilian writes with an elegance and precision that, though not attaining the grand heights of Cicero’s dialogues, are supported by a balanced judgment that judiciously weighs and sifts books, theories, and experts. Occasionally, like some motes of fine ore amid this heavy mining work, there gleam the jewels from the experience of a dedicated teacher. We are all students and teachers, and these asides draw us in as certainly as any novelistic experience of identifying with a character.
In the Institutio oratoria Quintilian has synthesized one of the most important technological systems invented by the ancients: rhetoric. He treats it not with the exotic vocabulary of a theorist but with the practical aims of a teacher of children. My modest enthusing is nothing compared to the salvos of celebration launched when Poggio “discovered” Quintilian’s text in 1416.4 The lost key to humanism, heralded as the code for reading, speaking, and writing, the full text of the Institutio oratoria received all the hyperbole the humanists could muster in their melodramatic sense of the ancient text’s importance and their own importance for society.5 Visit the cloister below the library of the Medicis, and amid the groups hushed and waiting patiently in a line stretching out from Michelangelo’s stairs, you will hear the same story being told, with proper rhetorical climax, to Italian schoolchildren. Poggio is the agent of culture, of Latin, symbol of discovery and communication, collector and celebrant for the Medicis and the new age. Probably the text of Quintilian was not so important. Poggio trumpeted his sudden discovery of a text already known. But if we must deflate the claims of the efficacy of this text or the high symbolism of this moment, undoubtedly Quintilian became a major weapon in the reorganization of the university’s curriculum and of the self-fashioning of the humanists.6 Perhaps we need to take a harder look at Quintilian’s appeal.
In writing an ideal script for the education of a boy, Quintilian has transmitted a synthesis and classical statement of Roman education.7 The several dedications announce the work as a guide for the education of Quintilian’s son and for the son of his dedicatee. It is also a showpiece on the education of the grandsons of the emperor Domitian’s sister, whose supervision brought Quintilian out of retirement and interrupted the writing of his great work. This new charge and the death of his own sons may have moved the author to a broader conception of his audience and his purposes in writing. Yet like Cato’s or Cicero’s before him, Quintilian’s inscription to his sons presents the author as an authoritative pater familias and would have been recognized as introducing an exemplary, not a private or familial, text.8
Quintilian shares with Plutarch the confidence that his text points the way to an education that is more than technical. He writes for the freeborn, whom his sons and the princes represent in ideal form. The very writing exhibits his own excellence—stylistic, pedagogic, and moral—and promises to produce the same results with the Roman boy. In the milieu of Plutarch’s school, paideia was recognized as the essential difference between the free and the slave. Although not at odds in points of detail (Quintilian too opposes corporal punishment for its deformative effect), Quintilian does not see the agents of education as the pernicious threat that, as we have seen, the author of the De liberis educandis made them out to be; nor does Quintilian depend upon any thematics of the free body to unify his work and impel his father-readers toward expensive out-of-home schooling. For Quintilian, education did not need such sustained apologetics. He does not summon the threat of malformation to strike home every recommendation. One is tempted to conclude that this model text from the capital city of the ancient world did not stoop to consider the margins—the education of slaves or lower-class freeborn, of provincials—or contemplate the prospect of middling teachers. Quintilian has the scholar’s arrogance: the present subject is best, perhaps only, presented in my book. Education is wholly contained here; it is not preliminary to philosophy or later life; it alone is responsible for the most important transformation, that of boy into man, in fact, the ideal man, the orator. The author of the De liberis educandis admitted there were three kinds of life (for the freeborn): the practical, the contemplative, and the pleasure-seeking (8A). Quintilian’s focus does not admit any variety: all should want to go to school to learn to be an orator. Of course, not every upper-class Roman, even among the most prominent families of the capital, was going to be an orator. Yet the ideal never wavers, at least in Quintilian’s pages. The straightforwardness of his assumption and the impression that we have in his text a distillation of his years of teaching have contributed to an understanding that the Institutio oratoria is the best evidence historians have for Roman educational practice in the first and second centuries A.D. In fact, Quintilian represents a new moment or new focus in the history of education.
Quintilian gives far more attention than his predecessors to the child as a learning agent.9 The presence, dispositions, and curricular progress of the child distinguish Quintilian’s work. He describes the training of the child in meticulous detail, all the while deeming the process of education essentially an encounter with texts. It is inaccurate to reduce Quintilian’s conception of education to those points of familiarity and similarity to later educations or even our own education. Certainly, in Quintilian’s program the child develops increasingly sophisticated interpretive and expressive abilities, but Quintilian seems to understand what one might term the child’s growing capacities or even the evolution of his subjectivity as a kind of textualization. The child’s development becomes assimilated to the texts he reads, recites, annotates, and composes. Classroom procedures are described not from any abstract motive of complete reporting of the institution or as an aid to the uninformed teacher or parent. They merit reporting to the reader insofar as they directly contribute to an exercise, a specific act of reading, writing, or reciting, or more narrowly in the cases where they might impede the continuous growth of the child’s abilities.
In addition to placing a new emphasis on the child’s progress in and through texts, Quintilian makes new claims for education. He vigorously redescribes the topic of education with a bold synthetic approach that assimilates Roman theory (especially Cicero) and Roman practice (his own schoolroom and especially the relatively recent and intense training in analysis and performance known as declamation) to the authoritative accounts of Greek theory. This eclectic synthesis lies somewhere between a virtuoso salvage act and a recombinative or even cannibalistic apologetics. As his education will make the boy whole, his book seeks synthesis and the elimination of controversy or contradiction. Quintilian’s great success is, then, that he presents grammatical and rhetorical curriculum as a moral routine, not the morally indifferent sequencing of skill-building tasks but the deliberate acquisition of the necessary expressive and interpretive faculties that underlie the well-ordered, capable self.10
The integration of routine, moralization, and textualization represents Quintilian’s greatest achievement. Education comes to be understood as something different from and better than Plutarch’s (and others’) superior labor, which was to be pursued and savored as a superior category, as an essentializing distinction of the free. Child training in advanced linguistic skills has become the ethically constitutive process of being fully human. Plutarch is one witness to the traditional thinking that insisted that education makes the young good and useful. Quintilian differs significantly by not postponing (or deferring) to philosophy the creation of an ethical disposition. As a champion of the power of the processes of schooling, Quintilian insists, against both a satirical, polemical tradition and actual experience, that this process is essentially moral.
Quintilian rightly grasps that textualization seeks to instill definite attitudes. Of course, descriptions of process make many assumptions about order, logic, effective and ineffective impulses to change, and the very nature of change. An idea of what and who a child is lies at the heart of any purportedly objective description of education. Quintilian has specific ideas that underlie his descriptions of process, especially about how the child learns. He worries about the efficiency of education, considers the effect of different practices upon the student, and justifies his curriculum on this basis. Throughout his discussion of the curriculum, Quintilian will keep the child before the reader’s eye. He will not let us forget that the interest of the child, not some Greek theory, directs his every move. The child’s goal remains fixed, varying neither with locale nor with ability: it is a steady, verifiable progress toward the perfected subjectivity of a mature, moral speaker.
Concern for the welfare of children marks the text both in its content and in its stated gestures of origin and intent. Quintilian represents children as the impulse to write his work. The claim that children’s needs and his students’ insistence have impelled him to publish comprises another (more complex) way in which the child constitutes an important category, and not simply an object of report, in Quintilian’s text. Those modern theories about the process of learning, which ultimately derive the idea of the solitary learner or the solitary user and maker of language from Cartesian ideas of the self, will not serve here. For Quintilian learning necessarily takes place within the context of a social community, in fact the same community of children, youths, and friends that he claims impelled him to publish in the first place. Certainly, Quintilian has adapted the presentation of a technical topic, rhetoric, under the stimulus of a moralizing pedagogics, and perhaps most specifically the influence of the Stoic thinking that only the sage can be a great orator. At the beginning of book 10 he reused Cato’s definition of the orator as a vir bonus dicendi peritus, a good man skilled in speaking, and in his preface (9) he had laid down that the orator was to be a vir bonus. The insistence that the orator be a good man has a social foundation.11 That vir bonus is doubly social—a member drawn from the elite, the Roman boni omnes, and an individual hailed as good by his public. While Quintilian never pauses to consider systematically the nature of the child, his text presents a unified thinking about and with the child. Quintilian describes an educational process in which children are agents, certainly susceptible to bad influences, but agents with capacities and dispositions distinct from adults though playing at and aiming at adult society.12
I take up below Quintilian’s conceptions of the child: the dedicatory comments that present the child as the impulse to write, the processes of eruditio and castigatio that redirect the child’s curbed passion toward manly use, and the competitive (yet social) process of learning itself. I conclude with his redefinition of rhetoric, certainly an act of intellectual poaching but also an index of his fundamental position that education is not child production but the construction of orators. In these reflections Quintilian far exceeds the predominantly negative anxiety about the malformation of the child that so possessed Pseudo-Plutarch’s text. Indeed, we have to wait for Rousseau or perhaps even Freud and his students for an equally important, systematic reflection upon the ideology and the practice of child training.
Quintilian invites his reader into the long process of reading his book and of educating a child with a letter to his bookseller followed by a preface. This double initiation, with plenty of authorial explanation, might be required simply by the length and detail of the treatment, which then rolls on for an epic twelve books. Quintilian, however, used the double beginning to present the impulse to write as the same as the impulse to educate. With his preface, Quintilian draws us into the passion of education. He also presents a characterization of the student and the teacher, and their relationship, that will be of fundamental importance for his work. The letter that precedes the preface advertises readers’ desire for his book and his own reluctance to part with it. The letter opens, after a customary salutation, with a rebuke: “You have hounded me with daily demands”—Efflagitasti cotidiano convicio. Quintilian repeats this colorful verb toward the close of the brief letter; now it is Quintilian’s books that are so insistently desired (efflagitantur).13
At the outset, however, Quintilian maintains that he is the circumspect, careful, and reluctant author. He has delayed publication and cites Horace in his defense. The latter’s Ars poetica, that careful, well-wrought classic, serves as more than a tag (Quintilian quotes from the work, which is read as the manual of Roman poetic aesthetics). The thematics of authorial worry regarding the premature departure of his text are also Horatian. Horace had treated his book of poetry as a young slave overeager to see himself bought at Rome’s stalls. Quintilian, like the poet, tries to check the ardency of his work; he says the books are not old enough yet (nondum . . . satis maturuisse) and should be given a cooling-off period before sallying forth into the public world (refrigerato inventionis amore is his striking phrase—with a Ciceronian flavor).14 This apology depends on the contrast between the author’s care and the haste and imperfection demanded by the world—the author’s act of publishing is not just tardy but grudging: iam emittere incipere. The first-person pronouncements are those of laborious, time-consuming effort: impendi and repetitos . . . perpenderem; and at the end, like his tentative beginning, Inciperem, the author is no direct agent but the well-wisher looking on from the shore as his beloved sails away (permittamus vela ventis et oram solventibus bene precemur). Finally, he puts his trust in his bookseller. Between author and reader comes this delegate, yet another mediator between author and the work in its final form, and between work and audience. All this rhetoric of reluctance, of work pried from the night light of the study, may seem conventional, but Quintilian develops both the imagery and certain ideas of the publication so as to shape the reading of his work and his readers’ ideas of studia, the passion for education, for literary study, for youth itself.
The author is consistently reluctant, as he will be reluctant to hurry along the child’s education, but most immediately, the proem continues to depict an author all but overwhelmed by the process of composition (diu sum equidem reluctatus—compare Quintilian’s contemporary, the poet Statius, who began the dedicatory letter of his lyric collection, the Silvae, with similar hesitation, diu multumque dubitavi . . .). A press of books in both languages impedes him. Still, in what is a topos for the postclassical author, he attempts nothing new, only a selection of the old. Verbs that suggest slow movement, burden, and imposition, indirect expressions such as the litotes non ignorabam, and the sense of a multitudinous and authoritative tradition that daunts the present writer (difficilis esset electio) spring from the carefully constructed statements of diffidence in Horace (and the other Augustan poets). The state Quintilian describes, this developed recusatio, leads him to ask his audience’s pardon. He calls it a deprecatio, the figure he discusses at 9.1.32—Cicero may again have inspired Quintilian, for in talking about the daunting Greek experts who have written on rhetoric, Cicero limits his own topic and asks his brother’s indulgence (veniam, De or. 1.22–23). Further, Cicero says that he will not treat the puerile exercises—thus leaving an opening for Quintilian. In this variation on the Augustan poets’ indirection about their literary ambitions and methods, the reluctant author is won over by the demands of his friends. So writing may evade a Horatian impasse (after Horace it would seem to take a Horace to write at all) by being cast as an act of patronage, a beneficium toward amici.15
The preface, which follows immediately upon this letter, especially exploits the contrast of Quintilian’s readerly, time-consuming diligence and his students’ oral, impetuous desire. Quintilian had said that he had cooled his own passion and then, like a reader, more carefully returned to favorite passages. In his letter to his bookseller he had moved from the loud and constant demands of the bookseller to the demands of his potential readers (efflagitasti is answered at the end with the modest si tantopere efflagitantur quam tu adfirmas). Now, in his preface, his students clamor, quidam familiariter postularent (and cf. exigebatur at 3). Marcellus Vitorius, Quintilian’s first dedicatee, both loves Quintilian and has an excessive passion for the literary life (cum amicissimum nobis tum eximio litterarum amore flagrantem); perhaps the reader is to understand that the youth, unlike the author, has not had a cooling-off period for his passion: youth is inclined to be aflame (flagrare), our author to play it cool (refrigerare).16 The mixing of personal and intellectual passion recurs in Marcellus Vitorius himself: Quintilian has written these books to be useful for Marcellus in the education of his son Geta (erudiendo tuo Getae). Passion and erudition are connected in the educational process. Quintilian conceived of elementary education as the channeling of this youthful passion—processes that he calls castigatio and eruditio.
The three dedications allow Quintilian to link a deflected, extreme passion to the process of education and of his own writing. In the first dedication, Quintilian imagines that his book will serve in place of himself as an aid in Marcellus’s teaching of his son. The book replaces teacher. And perhaps we can sense a parallel to Pseudo-Plutarch’s anxieties about delegated paternity and patriarchy, examined in the previous chapter: Quintilian’s book makes the father into the complete teacher. But in his rededications Quintilian reconsiders both the connection of passion to education and the role of his book as a replacement for personal instruction and even as a substitute or recompense for personal relations. At the beginning of the fourth book Quintilian again salutes Marcellus, announces that a major section is done, a fourth of the journey made, and declares his new topic (actual judicial cases and their component parts). At 4.proem.4 he defends the rededication first by invoking the poets’ practices (and we are to think of Homer above all others) of invoking the Muse a second time. In fact, circumstances had changed, and Quintilian did have the example of Cicero and no doubt others in rededicating a new portion or version of a major work.17
The emperor Domitian himself asked Quintilian to educate the grandsons of his sister. For all his subsequent nasty reputation, Domitian was a major literary force, and his mention adds luster to Quintilian’s project.18 The honor of his appointment was great. Declamatory education and performances gathered the city’s elite for rivalrous performances and evaluations. Seneca and others had taken pride in being Nero’s educators.19 Quintilian succinctly evaluates the effect of the honor: with his added responsibility, he no longer writes for domestic use but for princely training.20 The princes now eclipse his sons and young Geta. This proem augments the dedicatory fiction in which the author writes as if for the use of his own small circle, that is, for familia and amici.
The proem to the sixth book again starts with Marcellus and moves out to the new impulses affecting Quintilian’s writing: the students who harried him to write (as the first preface put it) reappear in more generic form. He classes them simply as well-born youth (iuvenes bonos). Next comes the subject of the second proem, here economically noted as his new officium. His son is mentioned: Quintilian wrote with the thought that should he die, his son would have in the book a proxy for his father (praeceptore tamen patre uteretur). A sustained, rhetorical, and moving lament recounts the shock of the loss of his wife and younger son and, later at the age of nine, his elder son, brilliant and compassionate, and brave through the course of a protracted illness.21 Bereft, Quintilian can only turn to his studies (6.pr.14: Sed vivimus et aliqua vivendi ratio quaerenda est, credendumque doctissimis hominibus, qui unicum adversorum solacium litteras putaverunt, “We live on and some principle of life must be resolved upon, and the most learned authorities must be followed who judged that literature was the sole solace in adversity”). Where youth’s passion and his love for his son and friends had prevailed upon him to write, letters themselves are now the only solace for his state of longing (in Latin terms amor has changed to desiderium). In his final words Quintilian imagines that the book that was to be his replacement for his son now goes to surrogates of that son: Nos miseri sicut facultates patrimonii nostri, ita hoc opus aliis preparabamus, aliis relinquemus (6.pr.16: “Just as in my misery with the wealth of my estate so I was preparing this work for some and will leave it to others”).22
In the first proem he had written that some students, misguided in their love of him, had used slave scribes to take down his lectures and that these unauthorized copies had been put into circulation under his name.23 Part of his reasons for writing had been to supplant these suppositious writings. At the end of the third proem his legitimate work is being passed on to substitute heirs. Certainly, an elegiac strain has replaced that familiar epistolary topic that entreats the author to part with his much-needed work. In the present case, a complex interplay among the errant passion of the less than scrupulous students, young Geta’s great passion for literature, and Quintilian’s reasoned and cooled passion has produced a work that is his only solace for his loss of family. Quintilian’s evocations of passion are all the more interesting in that they help evoke and direct readers’ attitudes toward his book, paternal attitudes toward the child to be educated, and finally scholarly and technical attitudes toward literary, rhetorical study itself. As the teacher, writer, and book are substitute fathers, the book and studies come to be a proxy for the child. The slippage between the categories of child and book is not simply a phenomenon of the proems or the accidental consequence of his actual loss. It constitutes a continuing strain in his thinking about education. The child comes to be associated with the book, and studies themselves come to be understood as a maturing child.
At the outset of the grand work, we read that Quintilian had acted as a restraint upon youth (and his bookseller) in their agitation for his book. He has turned a studious and mature deaf ear to the demands of youth, just as he has shaped that youth from its early rude state. This deliberated curbing of youth’s passion is essential to Quintilian’s project and life—such is the force of his autobiographical notices in the prefaces. At i.pr.3 Quintilian presents himself as the author at ease or even the public man now privatus again, now returned to otium, like Cicero at ease in a villa outside the city: “After I had won a respite from the scientific and zealous training of youth, which had consumed me for two decades” (Post impetratam studiis meis quietem, quae per uiginti annos erudiendis iuvenibus inpenderam). Quintilian has won his discharge, yet the occasion of writing makes clear that he is not yet free from correcting youth, nor from studia, scholarly researches and interested care.24 He is of course also presenting his readers with his authority. In his artful indirection we learn ever so modestly of his preeminent experience.
The proem masterfully weaves an epistolary reluctance with the topoi of the Roman friend called to aid, the businesslike or even political Roman called to literary matters, and the Roman author, especially a poet, called to a grand topic with rich, even overwhelming traditions and precedents. For all the protest about well-earned otium being interrupted, we, like his friends, are to know that he has never paused from the education of youth—the conceit expressed in a phrase (erudiendis iuvenibus) that is grammatically a statement of purpose.25 This phrase, “youth” with the gerundive—“children to be educated”—draws Quintilian back. Indeed, in the next two books Quintilian will use the word “boy” or “youth” with a gerundive to remind his reader of his purpose and to mark out significant stages in the progress of his project, this institutio oratoria, construction of an orator, which must start with an institutio puerilis and move step-by-step to maturity. Protesting that resignation of the task is impossible, the author presents a persona defined by a relationship to youth and to studies. All of Quintilian’s care has been and will be, for the twelve weighty books that the slight preface introduces and for the eighteen years or so of a student’s life, devoted to the process of erudire, the purpose of helping young men mature, most literally, of removing what is rude in them.
Cicero especially loved to use the word erudire as a synonym for “teach, educate, fashion the young.”26 An ancient definition of the root reveals its semantic range: omnis fere materia non deformata, rudis appellatur (“Rude denotes all material that has not been shaped,” Cincius ap. Festus, p. 265 Müller). Rude is opposed to the well-shaped (the ancient definition does not exploit the second sense of de-formatum, that which has had its natural shape, forma, mishandled, although Quintilian seems to exploit both meanings). The rude awaits man’s shaping hand (so the word is used of the unformed medium that the artist takes up). The child is then like unworked marble, whereas the educated child can be commemorated as eruditus. A first-century B.C. funerary inscription commemorates a fourteen-year-old girl as schooled and learned (erodita) in all the arts.27 In Quintilian, rudis is a favorite term in discussions of the educational process. Indeed, eruditio is conceived as existing along a continuum, at one end of which stands the unworked boy, while at the other stand the erudite poets and scholars whose diction and inquiries further purify Latinitas. Foremost among the latter are some famous poets and the incomparable (and many-booked) Varro (1.8.11).
Quintilian is interested, however, in the diction of the learned, not their doctrine. Quintilian seeks a supply of words from the erudite. These words are a sort of blanket to cosset the child, for erudition means in Quintilian an environment and process rather than an abstract mental state or codifiable set of principles. Speech itself or the single word can be eruditus. A striking indication of this linguistic bias is that Quintilian says consuetudo, actual practice in language, has much erudition. He is cleaving to one side of an ancient debate about how to determine the proper form of a word, but it is important to note that eruditio is here used of a discovered trove of words. Mother and father, and slave pedagogues too, must have eruditio. Every bit of language the boy encounters should be eruditus. The Latin lexicon concerns Quintilian: so he discusses the form of a word and the avoidance of solecism. In this linguistic environment the boy will enter the road to eruditio. There are other courses—pleasures he calls ineruditae (1.18.10)—and he notes that faults of language are hard to remove.
Amid this nurturing speech environment Quintilian imagines the boy developing in carefully structured and scrutinized ways. To continue with his diction, we may ask: How is the boy to be pruned of his rudeness or molded to maturity? Perhaps too we should ask what metaphor to use, for Quintilian does not rely much on metaphors of pruning or cutting or sculpting. By way of contrast, Martianus Capella imagines a Dame Grammar who takes from her box a sharp instrument to rasp the tongue and cut out improper words—this violent and intrusive iconography is a feature of the late antique and medieval traditions, not of Quintilian, and is perhaps a reflection of the common use of parchment, a writing surface more durable and capable of erasure and rewriting than the medium of Quintilian’s day, papyrus.28 Quintilian imagines that the boy who comes to his care passes easily from home to school. This ideal boy arrives free from linguistic blemish—so far he has met no inerudite word.
Again and again in his description of the progress of the boy, Quintilian joins a gerundive to the word “boy”: the boy is to be trained (1.1.12 and in the final sentence of the book, 1.12.19), nourished, educated, advised; his inborn intellect is something to be sharpened.29 At the beginning of book 2 the boy has become a discipulus or a boy to be passed on to the rhetorician or a mature child or an adult child on his way to being an iuvenis. The repeated age terms mark the progress of education and the reader’s progress through Quintilian’s work, which begins: Igitur nato filio (“Therefore once a son is born . . .”); book 2 charts the boy’s development with new terminology: the pueri are now discipuli (2.1.1) or the puer who is to be sent to the rhetorician (2.1.3) or puer maturus (2.1.7) or adulti . . . pueri (2.3.1). Book 2 clearly represents a new stage, but the first stage demands more of our attention; for it is here that we can isolate the first of Quintilian’s most distinctive ideas about education: the boy is worthy of training and of theoretical comment. This we must immediately qualify: whereas Quintilian realizes different children have different degrees of talent and different aptitudes, he does not give directions corresponding to those varying abilities. At 1.3.6, where he does allow that children progress at different rates, the teacher is told simply to push only those who are ready. Quintilian’s theoretical account is satisfied with the boy, puer, as a simple category, whose growth may vary in speed but not in kind or direction.
The category puer comprises at once a stage of life, a stage of education, and a section of the book and the curriculum. While the first two books chart the progress from birth to puberty, Quintilian hardly employs biological terms.30 Rather, the reader is presented with the space of the puer. The proem announced that Quintilian would trace the boy’s studies ab infantia (pr. 1.6), and the book signals the movement with notices of the maturing boy. The boy is replaced by the “robust boy” in book 2, whose curriculum and ability now differ, since the boy has left behind the poetry he encountered with the grammaticus and now engages the more manly and truer subject of history (2.4.2: apud rhetorem initium sit historica, tanto robustior quanto verior).
Of course, these sections of Quintilian treat the subjects of grammatical instruction. If we were to provide him with summary paragraph headings, the topics would be spelling, music, geometry, and all the subjects that the grammarian and others would teach before the boy went on to the rhetorician. Certainly, Quintilian’s work has been described this way, but what is remarkable is that Quintilian has chosen to include the preliminary training at all and punctuates it with introductory notices that mention the boy. Indeed, Quintilian has a certain diffidence about his technical subject—he reports that he is not teaching grammar but advising those who will (1.4.7: non enim doceo, sed admoneo docturos). He keeps the boy and not the technical subdiscipline before his reader’s eye. After the initiatory Igitur nato filio come other notices of the child that also serve to introduce a new topic or stage: A sermone graeco puerum incipere malo (1.1.12: “My preference is that the boy begin with Greek”); Sed nobis iam paulatim adcrescere puer (1.2: “But the boy in our school already begins to grow”); a stronger echo and change of stage is announced with Tradito sibi puero docendi peritus (1.3: “Once the boy has been entrusted to him, the expert teacher . . .”). Quintilian joins this puer with the gerundive, as we have noted, or with a jussive subjunctive, Quare discat puer . . . (1.4.12: “Wherefore have the boy learn . . .”; cf. 1.4.22 and 1.5.11: Scire autem debet puer, “Moreover the boy ought to know . . .”). After a technical passage Quintilian reminds the reader of the topic at hand by setting the boy before his reader (again early in the sentence as a kind of programmatic recall): superest lectio: in qua puer ut sciat (“There is finally reading, in which that the boy know . . .”). Here Quintilian curbs the monotony of the technical material by setting down one guiding principle: amid all the instructions and exercises on how to read, the chief thing is that the boy is to understand (1.8.2: intellegat). At times Quintilian even omits puer in these sorts of notices. He uses a subjectless third-person verb when declaring a new stage: Cum vero iam ductus sequi coeperit . . . (1.1.27: “Once he has begun to trace the letter shapes . . .”). Context makes the subject clear, but it is also clear because the reader recognizes the sentence as one of those transitions where Quintilian focuses on the development of the puer. We see this child in the abstract progressing, with the occasional reminder of his goal (1.11 substitutes futurus orator for the common puer).
His use of the term “child” is in fact rather like the use of the word “it” in recipes. In narrating a recipe, we repeatedly say “it” to refer to the developing object. So we could say add salt to it, then knead it for ten minutes, let it rise for an hour, press it down, etc., until we finally have it. The “it” is not the same throughout, but for reasons of economy, and because we tend to conflate the process with the end result, we use a single pronoun. No doubt pronouns function more widely in such a fashion. For Quintilian, puer functions as a virtual pronoun. The repeated use generalizes process and subsumes individuality or aberration under universality or normativity. “It” rather than Marcus or Quintus progresses nicely, neatly, in clearly defined ways. “It” is not unruly but accepts rather strictly limited epithets and predicates (the gerundives and the verbs of learning that suggest its agency is severely limited, its capacities rigorously restricted and capable of restriction) before the puer emerges as one trained (instituendus, 1.12.19) in these first studies, and soon to be the puer maturus or adultus or even iuvenis in the books devoted to rhetoric. Thus grammar and the child become perfectly correspondent: the child seems to be like a well-regulated word, admitting no change in its form, appearing in regular places within the text so as to guide our reading, and restricted to one field—or, in Quintilian’s terms, one office. In ancient manuals, the term “child” often functions like the modern educational statistic: it is the well-governed reduction that becomes ever so easily an item of argument, preeminently a word for the ancients, a number for us.
In his first book Quintilian presents the child and grammatical studies as perfectly congruent. The child is that stage of man disposed to grammar, and grammar is the subject and disposition fit for and productive of the free boy. In Quintilian’s view the grammatical curriculum cannot summarily be dismissed as comprising those studies preliminary to the important fare of rhetoric (an attitude communicated by their name, which Quintilian does not use, progymnasmata in Greek, praeexercitationes or praeexercitamenta in Latin). Quintilian thinks that grammar is necessary for the growth of the child. Through grammar the child grows to studium, which is both zeal for literary study and zeal to excel one’s peers. Without grammar the child’s maturation seems unthinkable (for without education the child would be the unadorned puer, the slave). Here the customary rationalization for the institution of schooling is expanded to advocate a new point: Quintilian counsels that the child should not be schooled at home. He does not voice the fears of Pseudo-Plutarch about the influence of women, slaves, and freedmen.31 Rather, homeschooling would be a species of parental neglect that would stunt the child. Quintilian can see the child’s potentialities in the rough, and in sustained arguments in the first book describes how they must be fostered in the social community of the school. The idea that the child is a social animal whose capacities for further learning and adult success depend on his educational environment is remarkable. Quintilian must articulate the nature of the child mind in order to explain and establish his program.
First, in encouraging fathers to train their children toward oratory, Quintilian maintains that mankind has as its distinguishing characteristic mental activity (1.1.1; this position is taken up and refined at the outset of book 2, where he more narrowly and rhetorically defines this quality as vox, which signifies not merely language, but rather something like human communicative society).32 Children are born with an ingenium, which comprises both a native intelligence and specific gifts toward oratory and literary study. Indeed, Quintilian does not seem to consider that there could be cognitive abilities independent of language. A child’s intelligence, or literary disposition, is the promise of the future man. In Quintilian’s repeated metaphor, light portends greatness. Young Geta has it: cuius prima aetas manifestum iam ingenii lumen ostendit (“whose early childhood already revealed the clear light of his talent”).33 The first thing the teacher is to do is perceive, perspiciet, the boy’s ingenium and nature (1.3.1; the same verb is used at 1.2.16). A child’s native disposition seems to be visible; its lack Quintilian also describes as visible. Those without talent are like monsters; Quintilian uses a technical term from religion that means the physically deformed, the newborn animal whose body is a composite of two species (1.1.2: “The slow and learning impaired are as contrary to human nature as are hybrid or monstrous bodies, but these are rarities,” Hebetes uero et indociles non magis secundum naturam hominis eduntur quam prodigiosa corpora et monstris insignia, sed hi admodum pauci). Among animals deformity is corporeal, among men deformity is the failure to learn (rhetoric). Reassuringly, almost everybody seems to have a modicum of the light of talent, which can be developed by an expert teacher, studium, and practice (1.1.27).34 Indeed, Quintilian encourages fathers to have the highest expectation of rhetorical success from the very birth of their sons (1.1.1).
This linguistic disposition is written on the young boy. Whereas the talentless are like beastly bodies with signs of their monstrosity, monstris insignia, the freeborn boy has sure signs of his talent. He has natural signs for those who can see: Ingenii signum in paruis praecipuum memoria est: eius duplex uirtus, facile percipere et fideliter continere. Proximum imitatio . . . (1.3.1: “The chief sign of talent in the very young is memory, which has two strengths, swift acquisition and accurate retention. The second is imitation . . .”).35 True, he does not have judgment, the iudicium that characterizes robustiores, stronger, older youth. Choice and judgment are still beyond him, but Quintilian does not dwell on the negative characterization. The contrast with the more robust youth of rhetorical age does not denigrate the child: his capacity to imitate will ensure that he realizes the hopes of his elders.36 The imitative quality is inherent and essential, but it is also social.37 Thus Quintilian is quite insistent that boys go to school and not be tutored one-on-one at home.
In arguing against home tutoring Quintilian insists that the speaker needs an audience (see the discussion of 1.2.27–31 below), and at 1.2.17 has already forestalled the objection that the boy at school will be lost in the crowd, with two arguments: first, fathers should treat the teacher as an amicus; second, the teacher will naturally favor the student who possesses ingenium and studium. That is to say, Quintilian understands school as a Roman social community, where patronage dictates the good treatment of the student. The teacher is the father’s amicus, dependent friend, and the student is the dependent friend of the teacher, displaying the interest and talent that every patron looks for and rewards in his clients.38 Imitation is not simply the individual’s urge to mimic, but part of a hierarchical, social nexus that ties together the (male) agents of education. School imitates society in reproducing idealized male social relations, amicitia. The great sign of a child’s talent is of course the faithful imitatio that is memory. Faithful version of his father, of his teacher, and of the lessons given him, the child performs a most important, ideological virtue. Quintilian of course does not diagnose the child’s imitative bent in this way. Nonetheless, his analysis reveals the potent overlay of sentiment, morality, social structure, and the institution of the Roman school.
Quintilian’s instructions for the handling of the child’s imitative faculties reveal the importance of this first stage. Imitation may be innate; but the child mimics for effect, and he mimics those older than he. Imitation can go wrong: Quintilian counsels that the boy can be sent to the expert reciter of comedy (1.11.1–2) but only to improve his delivery—the boy must not let any of the registers (or fun) of comedy affect his speech. Quintilian details the voices not to be imitated: woman, old man, drunkard, slave, lover, miser, and coward. Further, memory and imitation are allied. Curiously, Quintilian has defined the qualities of child memory he thinks important as ready perception and faithful retention. That is, whereas he does occasionally stress that the child is to understand what he is reading, Quintilian does not consider what a child’s cognition might be like. It is sufficient to him that the child is incapable of that quality of distinction that marks the adolescent and, more positively, that he is capable of swift imitation: his lessons he quickly takes up (in imitation of the master) and then retains (long-term imitation).
While Quintilian does not despise this process as simple rote learning, he does not analyze how it works or indeed if it differs from simple rote work (he does not seem to see the connection between the processes of memory and imitation). He considers learning more effective if the child understands (and here he writes of reading, not the first step in the curriculum). The child has other innate aids to learning: he is patient of labor, and his ingenium is softer and more docile than that of older boys.39 Quintilian illustrates these statements with the proof of experience: a young boy takes only two years to achieve proper enunciation, older boys take many years. He then cites the Greek term “child-learner,” which was used for someone who was a “natural” at a new task. Childhood is thus the natural time to learn language. He uses a metaphor to explain the capacity for labor: as the infant can suffer a fall and not be hurt or crawl all day without knee pain, so the child’s ingenium is equally pliable and resilient. Quintilian’s metaphoric term for education at this period, acuere ingenium (“sharpening native disposition”), also suggests the softness of the child.
Naturally imitative, impressionable, and diligent, the child of Quintilian’s pages is docile, and social. Despite presenting the boy as a soft body, one not too far from mother’s milk and thus fit for the acquisition of language, by docile Quintilian does not mean passive. The desired student, Quintilian’s normative puer, has definite animi—a word of considerable range: courage, emotion, and intellect. Again, there are intimations that the boy is a passionate subject and not the passive object of a curriculum. Animi are to be developed in a group setting. Quintilian founds his theoretical argument against homeschooling on a connection between eloquence, animi, and the community. These three factors are interdependent: there is no eloquence in conversation among individuals; no good education will arise from tutor and student alone. Rhetorical training and oratorical performance demand an audience; otherwise the animi (emotions) are fake; indeed, they are not stimulated. These points Quintilian makes in a sustained argument that begins by instructing the instructors not to overload young minds:
Quod adeo uerum est ut ipsius etiam magistri, si tamen ambitiosis utilia praeferet, hoc opus sit, cum adhuc rudia tractabit ingenia, non statim onerare infirmitatem discentium, sed temperare uires suas et ad intellectum audientis descendere. Nam ut uascula oris angusti superfusam umoris copiam respuunt, sensim autem influentibus uel etiam instillatis complentur, sic animi puerorum quantum excipere possint uidendum est: nam maiora intellectu uelut parum apertos ad percipiendum animos non subibunt. Utile igitur habere quos imitari primum, mox uincere uelis: ita paulatim et superiorum spes erit. His adicio praeceptores ipsos non idem mentis ac spiritus in dicendo posse concipere singulis tantum praesentibus quod illa celebritate audientium instinctos. Maxima enim pars eloquentiae constat animo: hunc adfici, hunc concipere imagines rerum et transformari quodam modo ad naturam eorum de quibus loquitur necesse est. Is porro quo generosior celsiorque est, hoc maioribus uelut organis commouetur, ideoque et laude crescit et impetu augetur et aliquid magnum agere gaudet. Est quaedam tacita dedignatio uim dicendi tantis comparatam laboribus ad unum auditorem demittere: pudet supra modum sermonis attolli. Et sane concipiat quis mente uel declamantis habitum uel orantis uocem incessum pronuntiationem, illum denique animi et corporis motum, sudorem, ut alia praeteream, et fatigationem audiente uno: nonne quiddam pati furori simile uideatur? Non esset in rebus humanis eloquentia si tantum cum singulis loqueremur. (1.2.27–31)
The consequence of this is that the teacher who prefers practical steps to showmanship has the duty, when he draws out minds still unformed, not to overload at the start the weakness of the learners but to moderate his own powers and to come down to the understanding of the student. For just as narrow-necked jars spit back a large stream of liquid poured over them but are filled when the flow is graduated or put in drop by drop, similarly one must consider the capacities of young minds: for the conceptually difficult will not enter minds ill disposed to understanding. It is advantageous first to have models for simple imitation, second those to be rivaled and bested. To these points I add that tutors cannot conceive the same thought and emotion in speaking as those teachers fired by a large audience. For the greater part of eloquence rests in emotional power: this must be experienced, this must invent representations of the facts and must be accommodated somehow to the subjects under discussion. The more noble and lofty this emotional intelligence, the more it is moved by greater organs as it were, and so it swells when praised and is increased in the rush of contest and takes pleasure in attempting something grand. There is a certain internal inhibition in slackening, for an audience of one, the force of speaking prepared by such great toil: one feels shame to rise up above the norm of conversational speech. And should anyone really adopt before a single hearer the stance of a declaimer or the pleader’s voice, the pacing, the delivery, and finally that movement of thought and of body, the sweat, I pass over in decent silence the rest, and the exhaustion, would he not seem to be suffering something close to madness? Eloquence would not exist in human affairs if we spoke only with individuals.
Quintilian’s first metaphor of learning, overfilling vases, suggests the rude ingenium is passive (but with the slight agency of the infant, the vase spits up when overfed). Quintilian quickly builds from this. He has warned the teacher not to overfill the young student, then describes how praise, growth, impulse, increase, activity, and desire will follow (ideoque et laude crescit et impetu augetur et aliquid magnum agere gaudet). Thus does the child develop animus, which as he says is the chief thing in eloquence. In fact, Quintilian is protecting the child from being swamped, advising that he be given examples of animus that he can imitate, and then be led to a state that Quintilian himself likens to suffering (pati) high passion, where the body moves, sweat pours—Quintilian passes over with a praeteritio the other bodily effusions—and finally fatigue comes. All of this would be unseemly if discharged before a single tutee. Quintilian is directing the teacher on how to bring himself and the child to oratorical climax.
There is something of a mélange of imagery here, which grows worse as Quintilian turns in the next section (1.3.5) to images from agriculture, perhaps a safer and more customary way to talk of semina and their growth in the child.40 When Quintilian writes here that greater organs are needed for the development of the nobler and loftier child, organa no doubt attempts a change in metaphorical field: organum is a wind instrument and not as in Aristotle the membrum virile. But Quintilian’s prescriptions for the proper training of the child return to an anxiety about the confusion of pedagogy and pederasty: the next sentences begin with the dedignatio, indignity and debasement, and pudet, the shame felt, of the uplifted (attolli) one-on-one performance. The child is to imitate greater organs, namely, the great speakers of the past, before an audience. Quintilian is not here voicing direct worry about the sexual corruption of wards; he is worried about the development of virility, and speech is the mark of virility (lofty birth and commanding, masculine, heterosexual affect). A proper masculinity in the child is measured by his linguistic habits and achievements. The boy is to move from imitation to mastery (vincere velis), rather than, like a vessel of tight aperture, be flooded. In Quintilian’s metaphors, rather than being female container, he will be more solid, with animus, vis, and semina that have grown to full fruit.41 Thus in Quintilian’s biological and physicalist model does the puer advance beyond grammar and on to speaking.
To define this child, Quintilian relies mostly on positive description of the apt curriculum. A cursus of studies prepares for rhetorical training, the stage of life and letters that demands judgment and that distinguishes the robustiores from the pueri. In the passage discussed above that exhorted fathers to send their sons to school, the child is theorized positively as a growth that achieves proper maturity through grammar. Quintilian also uses the prospect of the boy gone wrong as a rhetorical argument: no father wants his son to suffer shame and degradation, those consequences of homeschooling and of corporal punishment. Still Quintilian does not promise that every boy will be a star. He recognizes a variety of talent in children but entertains no idea that alternate training is required. Rather, all can improve; and while some may be more fit for one or another aspect of studies, no one escapes the whole training.42
The few notices of less successful students reveal a consistent and recurrent aspect of educational thought: the less successful is the less gifted. Such a child seems to be more like the neck-impaired vase and less like the sharp-tooled promising puer. Conversely, Quintilian does not want the boy to be too quick-witted—his description of the child begins to sound like a recipe from an experienced if inarticulate cook: do not overcook and do not undercook is seldom helpful advice, except perhaps that we are reminded of the expertise, experience, and fine judgment of the advice-monger. However, if the puer seems intermediate between infans and robustior, between imbecillis and catus, this is because Quintilian exploits the polar categories to reassure parents and to rationalize an elitist, difficult training. For Quintilian education must not be a simple reflection of innate talent (ingenium), since then training would be unnecessary. And he feared another possibility: if rhetorical education were seen as a morally neutral skill, perhaps only those with ingenium might succeed at it. Instead, the reader will be led to understand education as a graduated growth. This is one part of the master’s grand claims for rhetoric as a moral science (the connection of maturation and the moral science of education I defer until we have finished examining the nature of the animus puerilis).
In his ideal central position, between excesses of tardiness and precociousness, between the home and the rhetorical school, the boy’s mind requires special treatment. In its prejudgmental phase, that mind is presented with imitanda. These are to be retained and understood. Both the tendency to imitate and the tendency to excel are attributes of studium, zeal and study. The boy is not simply drawn to imitate; he wishes to impress. Thus Quintilian can imagine a bad sort of imitation where the child tries to draw attention, as we would say, by being funny, perhaps even derisible.43
Rivalry, both with the model texts that have been memorized and imitated and with other practitioners of oratory or literature, is one end of Quintilian’s training; it was also a daily feature of the school. Quintilian has his students speak in the order of their ability. It seems that the students even contributed to the determination of this pecking order (1.2.23). Elsewhere (2.2.14) he advises that boys are not to be seated with adolescents (he fears the appearance of homosexual relations). But he also wants to develop within the lead boy (dux) or leading boys a mentality of excelling. This is part of the reason that no boy is to be beaten. Quintilian does not want him to take on the shame, the mentality of the slave. We have here sufficient hints of a teacher who wishes to develop the feeling of a class with its leaders. So he remarks that he disapproves of letting boys leap to their feet to applaud (2.2.9). Under such circumstances the interactive classroom has gone too far: boys now run forward ad omnem clausulam (2.2.12, denoting the rhythmic syllable patterns that signal the end of a sentence or clause).
With these descriptions of the school we have advanced beyond the boy’s first exercises and on to declamation or at least recitation. For young boys, the order of speaking, the approval and interaction of peers, and the praise or blame of the master were not sufficient incentives. Quintilian strongly advocated the virtues of play in a passage that, along with that inveighing against corporal punishment, has been saluted as testimony to his humanism. The directive to educate through play constitutes an essential role in Quintilian’s thinking about the imitative, agonistic, and diligent tendency of the child. It is also, however, a reflection of his, and more generally Roman, thinking about the exclusive, free body (and mind) of that child. Quintilian states that the child, the type of diligence, must be given a break: respite must be granted to all both to relieve the drudgery and restore energy and because “devotion to learning depends on the free will of the student, which cannot be compelled” (1.3.8: studium discendi voluntate, quae cogi non potest, constat). Quintilian is again cultivating not so much a specifically childlike learning style but the latent or unself-conscious will to learn in the (prejudgmental) child. It is not the case that play liberates the mind or develops certain cognitive qualities: play spells the hard work of learning and (mis)leads the child to do what at an older age he will have the self-will to do. Play is like the honey upon the lip of the cup of bitter medicine that is studium—such is Quintilian’s reuse of Lucretius’s famous image of smearing the lip of the bitter cup of medicine with honey, when he confesses the dryness of his rhetorical material and apologizes for the lack of honey (3.1.4 [quoting Lucr. 4.11–13]: Ac veluti pueris absinthia taetra medentes . . .). At 1.1.20 he counsels that children are to be offered prizes, and their lessons made into games so that they will not come to hate the studies they cannot understand. Quintilian here uses the word “bitterness” of these early studies, perhaps a gesture to the Lucretian passage.44 Quintilian’s real interest lies in the later life of the student, in the age of rhetoric, when the student can understand, judge, and love his studies. For the present, the child must be offered the honey of delusion so as to prevent the development of an abiding hostility to study (just as he must not be beaten so as to avoid instilling fear and shame in him). So games substitute for judgment, self-will, and the self-conscious love of learning.
Quintilian does imagine one other use for play. The point of presenting studies as a game is to “let the child never feel pleasure at not doing his lessons; should the child ever prove unwilling, teach another child, one whom he envies, and let the first child compete and think that he is winning again and again: let the boy be drawn along by rewards also, which that age likes” (1.1.20: numquam non fecisse se gaudeat, aliquando ipso nolente doceatur alius cui invideat, contendat interim et saepius vincere se putet: praemiis etiam, quae capit illa aetas, evocetur). Games here also forestall a wrong passion: they prevent fear of studies and love of idleness. Quintilian somewhat begrudgingly (with a litotes “not un-useful”) concedes that some games do sharpen the boy’s intellect; but again he does not argue that there is something inherently useful in games. Rather, they are efficacious to the extent that they forestall the child’s sense of tedium, as we have seen, and to the extent that they arouse rivalry: “Some games are not un-useful for sharpening the boys’ wits, as when they strive with one another to answer trifles of every kind posed them one after another” (1.3.11: Sunt etiam nonulli acuendis puerorum ingeniis non inutiles lusus, cum positis invicem cuiusque generis quaestiunculis aemulantur).45 He continues to make the point that games are useful for the detection of the child’s mores. At this young age the child can be more easily corrected and shaped thanks to his lack of deceit (an age infirma . . . tum vel maxime formanda cum simulandi nescia est et praecipientibus facillime cedit, 1.3.12). A behavioral—but not an intellectual—reason directs that a child’s studies be presented as a game. Games serve the apotropaic purpose of forestalling resentment and resistance, and channel rivalry. Quintilian does believe in the joy of learning, but he does not treat games or riddles as a species of problem solving or social learning. He records that as boys he and his peers used to play at false geometric drawings (i.e., diagrams that must be shown to be impossible). This is play, and play at an early stage (geometry being taught concurrently with grammar), but receives no comment as play from Quintilian. Rather, it is one means of distinguishing the false from the true—again a habit for life that this elementary game rehearses (1.10.39: Falsa quoque ueris similia geometria ratione deprendit. Fit hoc et in numeris per quasdam quas pseudographias uocant, quibus pueri ludere solebamus). Quintilian values success at games as a sign of a swift intellect, signum alacritatis (in keeping with his general view that the child is a signum of the man). Like other signs of the child’s talent, his performance in games constitutes a diagnostic and disciplinary tool for the teacher but not a significant medium of training.
Does the child do anything that is good in itself or productive of a mental faculty? We have considered Quintilian’s repeated phrasing that ingenia can and must be sharpened, and his admonitions on the careful handling of imitation.46 Dancing and games serve their elementary purpose and will be abandoned when the child passes to rhetoric.47 Quintilian does describe, still in rather general terms, what should characterize puerile education. He recommends which authors to imitate; he confides how he encourages the youngest students (and at the same time ensures that they know that in the future they will have to speak differently, with greater restraint). In his most sustained treatment of child learning, Quintilian presents the linguistic stylization of the child as the essential, indispensable good of early education. Aside from some specific recommendations on whom to read, his directions are more metaphorical than practical. Quintilian showers upon the reader a wealth of metaphor and simile about forming the child and his still plastic body. These represent the speech of the young as a plump, tender infant, still close to mother and breast-feeding. A florid, rich, milky-full style is to be encouraged. Later this will be trimmed. Quintilian has child speech match the child body both because he sees the development of eloquence as a natural, biological growth and because he understands speech and its development in terms of imitation.48 Bodies and speech must suit each other. As so often, one suspects that issues of authenticity and legitimacy subtend the rhetorician’s account of system and practice. Like the author of the De liberis educandis, Quintilian seeks to produce a speaking subjectivity for a governing elite. The ability to speak is presented as a natural phenomenon correspondent to biological growth while dependent on careful nurture. It may then seem unexpected that Quintilian stresses the infantile or even feminine affinities of first training, but he sees the development of manhood and manly style as a growth away from infancy. Quintilian defends his program for boys by reminding his reader that childhood is a premature stage and cannot be judged by the stylistic criteria fit for the finished speech and the finished man:
Vitium utrumque, peius tamen illud quod ex inopia quam quod ex copia uenit. Nam in pueris oratio perfecta nec exigi nec sperari potest: melior autem indoles laeta generosique conatus et uel plura iusto concipiens interim spiritus. Nec umquam me in his discentis annis offendat si quid superfuerit. Quin ipsis doctoribus hoc esse curae uelim, ut teneras adhuc mentes more nutricum mollius alant, et satiari uelut quodam iucundioris disciplinae lacte patiantur. Erit illud plenius interim corpus, quod mox adulta aetas adstringat. Hinc spes roboris: maciem namque et infirmitatem in posterum minari solet protinus omnibus membris expressus infans. Audeat haec aetas plura et inueniat et inuentis gaudeat, sint licet illa non satis sicca interim ac seuera. Facile remedium est ubertatis, sterilia nullo labore uincuntur. Illa mihi in pueris natura minimum spei dederit in qua ingenium iudicio praesumitur. Materiam esse primum uolo uel abundantiorem atque ultra quam oporteat fusam. Multum inde decoquent anni, multum ratio limabit, aliquid uelut usu ipso deteretur, sit modo unde excidi possit et quod exculpi; erit autem, si non ab initio tenuem nimium laminam duxerimus et quam caelatura altior rumpat. Quod me de his aetatibus sentire minus mirabitur qui apud Ciceronem legerit: “uolo enim se efferat in adulescente fecunditas.”
Quapropter in primis euitandus, et in pueris praecipue, magister aridus, non minus quam teneris adhuc plantis siccum et sine umore ullo solum. Inde fiunt humiles statim et uelut terram spectantes, qui nihil supra cotidianum sermonem attollere audeant. Macies illis pro sanitate et iudicii loco infirmitas est, et, dum satis putant uitio carere, in id ipsum incidunt uitium, quod uirtutibus carent. Quare mihi ne maturitas quidem ipsa festinet nec musta in lacu statim austera sint: sic et annos ferent et uetustate proficient. Ne illud quidem quod admoneamus indignum est, ingenia puerorum nimia interim emendationis seueritate deficere; nam et desperant et dolent et nouissime oderunt et, quod maxime nocet, dum omnia timent nihil conantur. Quod etiam rusticis notum est, qui frondibus teneris non putant adhibendam esse falcem, quia reformidare ferrum uidentur et nondum cicatricem pati posse. (2.4.4–10)49
These are both faults, although that which comes from want is worse than that from surfeit. For among small boys, perfect speech cannot be expected nor exacted: moreover, it is better to have enthusiastic talent and noble effort and a heart which for the time being essays more than what is called for. And in these years of the learner, may no superabundance ever distress me. On the contrary, I wish teachers would take this as a rule, nourish minds still tender more softly, like a nurse maid, and allow them to be sated by the milk, as it were, of a kinder teaching. For the meantime, their body will be a little plumper, which soon adulthood will draw taut. This abundant style is the hope for future strength; the infant perfectly proportioned at the outset usually presages later emaciation and debility. Let this young age dare much and discover much and take pleasure in its discoveries; do not let that age for the meantime be too dry and hard. The cure for abundance is easy; no toil repairs the jejune. In my opinion the disposition among boys least promising is that where judgment precedes talent. First off I want the supply to be fuller and more fulsome than is right. Time will decoct much, reason will file off much, some will be worn away by practice provided only that there be something that can be cut and shaped away. There will be sufficient if we have not stretched the plate too thin at the start, which the engraver, cutting deeply, will puncture. My judgment on this age will not surprise the reader who remembers Cicero’s “For I want fertility to puff itself up in adolescence.”
Therefore among the most important things to avoid, most especially for young boys, is a dry teacher, just as you would a dry and parched soil for crops still tender. This will render the boys humble and downcast, the sort who never dare rise above conversational style. For such boys skin and bones serve for a healthy body, weakness for judgment; and while they are satisfied with the lack of any fault, they have fallen into the fault of lacking any virtues. Therefore do not hurry along aging and do not let the vintage new in the barrel have a harsh taste: so they will age well and in their maturity be potent. Our advice is not unseemly, the talents of boys subjected to an overly severe correction during youth come to naught, for they grow despondent and aggrieved and finally hateful and, what does the most harm, they essay nothing while they dread everything. Even peasants know this: they advise tender shoots not be pruned with the knife because they seem to fear the iron and cannot yet abide the scar.
Most strikingly, Quintilian does not want the child prodigy (omnibus membris expressus infans). Too much man and too much virtuosity too early might suggest that teacher and teaching are unnecessary, but it is in keeping with an outlook shaped by rhetoric and the graduated curriculum of ancient education to seek stages (just as styles) in which speech and bodies correspond. Imitation is not simply a species of educational exercise or method but an underlying conceptual category. Throughout the discussions in these first two books infirmitas characterizes the child, and rightly so Quintilian thinks. If the child is the complete speaker and indeed shows judgment, Quintilian predicts disaster (Illa mihi in pueris natura minimum spei dederit in qua ingenium iudicio praesumitur, “In my experience that nature among boys offers the least hope in which native talent is consumed before [the coming of] judgment”).50 The premature stage has baby fat, mass, softness. Further, education in parallel with physical maturation follows a course of thinning, hardening, and weaning. The soft body patient of labor, the imperfect speaker with the fulsome style is completely consistent with his gendering of the child. The child is imagined as still close to the maternal body, but he must not be kept at home. The child’s body is soft, patient, and impressionable, but it must not be beaten or eroticized by the older male teacher. Play will not help this body or mind mature; at best, it habituates without instilling judgment.
Quintilian’s thinking about the maturation of the child rests largely on two central impulses. Mother must be replaced by teacher, and the child’s closeness with the feminine must be replaced or redirected to an intimacy with the mother tongue. Biological maturation is thus recoded as mastering Latin. This is the rhetorical process of castigation (which the discussion of rhetorical habitus, corporal punishment, and the adolescent body in chapters 7 and 8 below describe more fully). In the preadolescent phase of grammar instruction, the lactating, natural mother loses her role to Dame Grammar or Dame Rhetoric. The personification is not explicit in Quintilian as it would later be, for instance, in Martianus Capella.51 In Quintilian’s words, the child is properly abundant, superfluous, and copious (see above: e.g., the teachers more nutricum mollius alant; and to characterize the boys: lacte, ubertatis, abundantiorem; finally, the Ciceronian tag that caps the paragraph with fecunditas). In this male appropriation of maternal nurture and women’s social roles, the antitype to the child is not the girl—she is all but invisible—rather, the feminine is necessary but becomes displaced as a linguistic feature, a prelude in stylization. Thus the child prodigy essentially lacks this feminine rotundity: he starts too slim and will pine down to macies when he should grow robust. Too male too early, he will in the final event prove dry, arid, hard, and thin. Sterility is the inevitable outcome of a precocious self-sufficiency. The ideal child is thus not too quick, for he is the emblem of Dame Grammar herself, especially of all her resources, her overpowering, generative force that the maturing male will prune as his own animus and body harden from the promiscuous fullness of grammar and childhood.
Quintilian has presented himself as the permissive teacher of tender boys; like the students, he is not exercising judgment (or punishment) yet: “Each age has its own discipline, and work must be exacted and corrected in proportion to capacities. I used to tell boys who dared something a little bold or exuberant, ‘For the time being that wins my praise, but the time will come when I shall not allow the like’; thus the boys took pleasure in their native ability and were not misled in judgment.” (2.4.14: Aliter autem alia aetas emendanda est, et pro modo uirium et exigendum et corrigendum opus. Solebam ego dicere pueris aliquid ausis licentius aut laetius laudare illud me adhuc, uenturum tempus quo idem non permitterem: ita et ingenio gaudebant et iudicio non fallebantur.) The teacher’s role here is to praise; the boys act with license, licentius, or as the second adverb, laetius, has it, fruitfully and abundantly (laetus is a word used to characterize style and also the act of natural, botanical growth).52
Quintilian returns to imagery of growth, even floral imagery, when speaking of the child’s curriculum. In his second book, when discussing which authors to set boys who (though beginners in rhetoric) are ready for prose (2.5.1: prima rhetorices rudimenta tractamus; 2.5.2: robusti fere iuvenes), Quintilian imagines teachers taking one of two courses: “For some advocate the lesser authors, since they seem easier to understand; others advocate the more flowery prose styles on the grounds that they are better suited to nourishing the talents of the young scholars” (2.5.18: Nam quidam illos minores, quia facilior eorum intellectus uidebatur, probauerunt, alii floridius genus, ut ad alenda primarum aetatium ingenia magis accommodatum). Both choices, the lesser authors and the more florid prose, then, represent the first stage of a graduated curriculum.
The second choice (Quintilian approves of neither—he recommends Cicero and Livy somewhat jingoistically, the best first and always) corresponds not to the boys’ understanding but to their ingenia, which we may understand here as their imitative faculties. Quintilian does not explicitly state his reasons for rejecting these approaches, but they seem to prolong childhood and the grammatical curriculum too long. A florid style is what the boys learned from the poets. Now while they have not achieved the state of judgment (Sallust, he says, is too hard to understand yet), they are ready for the style of Livy, Cicero, and other authors to the degree that they approximate Cicero (Quintilian writes more generally candidissimum quemque et maxime expositum).
Imitation of the florid and the fulsome style must give way to exposition and the shining clarity of the prose classics. Quintilian sounds a familiar warning: the boys must be kept from excess (2.5.21–26). Neither let them imitate the old prose authors (Cato and the Gracchi) nor the new style (he seems to be describing Seneca, although the characterization equally fits many of the declaimers preserved in the elder Seneca’s collection). The potential consequences are predictable: on the one hand, reading the old authors will render the boys hypermasculine—the diction centers again on the erect, hard-muscled, emaciated: horridi, durescere, ieiuni; on the other hand, the moderns will send the young rhetoricians back to childhood, making them effeminate, oversoft, and overpassionate. The passage at 2.5.22 gives this warning while parodying the florid style of the moderns: “A second genre [of reading also to be avoided] quite unlike the first is the following: do not let them, ensnared as they are by the florets of this modern wantonness, be enervated by this sinful pleasure with the result that they are smitten by that oversweet genre so loved by boys for reason of its similarity to them” (Alterum, quod huic diversum est, ne recentis huius lasciviae flosculis capti voluptate prava deleniantur, ut praedulce illudgenus etpuerilibus ingeniis hocgratius quoproprius est adament).53 Quintilian even recommends that the reading of the moderns be put off; he fears the students will not keep the styles discrete (2.5.24: curandum erit ne iis quibus permixta sunt inquinentur—diction that suggests a bastard production; they will be stained by association with the wrong sort), and again warns that students have not yet reached the time of judgment (2.5.26: ne imitatio iudicium antecederet, “lest imitation anticipate judgment”). Children are naturally drawn to the florid and, even though they are in the hands of the rhetorician, have not graduated from ingenium to iudicium, from the generative to the manly.54
Quintilian has treated the child and his learning with a directness unparalleled in antiquity. Grammar is not presented as a technical subject, nor is it dismissed as a preliminary to rhetoric not worthy of the author’s or a reader’s regard. His justification, at a literary level, may be that Cicero had left him the topic of the early training of the student (Cicero had passed over it in the introductory remarks of his dialogue on the training of the ideal orator, De or. 1.23). The orator’s dialogues had described the training and expertise of the perfectus orator, and Quintilian could now give a full account not of what that orator should be (Cicero at Orat. 18–19, for instance, depicts the orator as the perfect man, the man who lacks nothing) but of how he could come into being. His chief interest might then simply be as a witness to the long-standing, but little-regarded traditions of educating elite children. In fact, the child is acknowledged as a learning subject and agent whose proper development will determine an adult sense of power and authority.
Quintilian depreciates grammar as he appreciates the boy. The category of Roman childhood thus comes to trump the slighted subject of grammar (disparaged as technical and perhaps Greek). Quintilian does not name the early period of training progymnasmata or praexercitamenta, the standard term (attested later) for the prerhetorical curriculum. He does grant grammar teachers their role (they take first place, 1.4.1) and on occasion uses the Greek term for the art of grammar (2.1.4), but he seems to prefer periphrases, for example, “For Book One will treat those subjects that come before the duty of the rhetor” (1 pr. 21: Nam liber primus ea quae sunt ante officium rhetoris continebit), or in a similar avoidance of Greek, technical vocabulary, “the rudiments of speaking, which train the young not yet capable of rhetoric” (1.9.1: dicendi primordia, quibus aetates nondum rhetorem capientes instituant).55 He refers to the topic most often by delineating the stage, not the age of the student, “the first age” (1.11.2, i.pr.6) or, in a reference to the curriculum, “the first rudiments” (1.8.15). Quintilian thus marks grammar as preliminary without giving it a technical name or a definite age range. He also foreshortens the period of instructions—so as to introduce the boy to rhetorical training earlier and to have him overlap grammatical and rhetorical studies.
Again, his focus is on the success of the boy, not the demands or conventions of grammar. As soon as the boy can, he is to move on. The boy may pass from grammar when he is ready to read Livy and Cicero and to begin to curb the fulsome copia imitated, memorized, and internalized in the grammatical training. His studies are daunting, even encyclopedic, for Quintilian believes that the boy is capable of much and that the only fit training is toward that ideal orator, the man versed in all areas of knowledge.56 Quintilian is interested in what grammar can do to move the boy along, but he also believes a natural correspondence links grammar with the child. The grammatical stage is important in that it marks the child, almost indelibly; the style of body and tongue learned here is all-important, and for Quintilian, goodness itself inheres in this style. It is not the case that grammar instruction furnishes neutral linguistic skills. Rather, the capacity for moral and manly speech takes root in the first age.
Grammar for its own sake seems a deviation and distraction. Thus Quintilian responds to the imagined objections of those who found grammar unnecessary for children or perhaps beneath the interest of the rhetorically minded: “The thought returns that some will object that what we have discussed is beneath notice and even a hindrance to students attempting something grander; and I myself do not believe one should descend to minute worryings and foolish hairsplitting, and I believe such things injure and diminish the boys’ talents. But grammar will do no harm except where it is extraneous:’ (1.7.33–34: Redit autem illa cogitatio, quosdam fore qui haec quae diximus parua nimium et impedimenta quoque maius aliquid agentibus putent: nec ipse ad extremam usque anxietatem et ineptas cauillationes descendendum atque his ingenia concidi et comminui credo. Sed nihil exgrammatice nocuerit nisi quodsuperuacuum est.) Here grammar fails to nurture the child’s talent. The child is not drawn to eruditio. Quintilian does not write of any natural attraction to linguistic and grammatical precision of speech or that assiduous investigation of poetic texts that marked, for instance, the learned poets Ennius and Lucilius. Quintilian’s fears for the child return here (concidi et comminui): the ill-educated child is the broken child or the attenuated child. Too much grammar, like a beating or the overzealous imitation of the elder Cato, produces a hesitant, fearful, or thin child and style. These are moral consequences as well, since the child will not wish to study or to speak.57
The boy is an apprentice adult or adult-in-training whose psychology and even educational activities, but decidedly not his body and not yet his style of speaking, mimic the adult.58 Quintilian describes carefully the qualities of this mimicry, since the boy does not have the mental capacities of the adult. The boy’s motivation, his desire to outstrip his rivals, is the same as the adult orator’s. Thus Quintilian, in describing the sort of student he would like, employs the vocabulary of Roman politics to enumerate the behavior of the ideal student: “Let that boy be handed over to me whom praise stirs, whom glory pleases, who when bested weeps. This is the boy who will be nourished by ambition, this the one whom harsh criticism will bite, this the one whom distinctions will stir, in this boy I shall never fear idleness.” (1.3.7: mihi ille detur puer, quem laus excitet, quem gloria iuvet, qui victus fleat. hic erit alendus ambitu, hunc mordebit obiurgatio, hunc honor excitabit, in hoc desidiam numquam verebor.) The schoolboy is a little Cicero, not victimized by the verbal slander of Roman politics but stirred to action and revenge. Quintilian’s expression here is rhetorical in its anaphora and asyndeton and in the pileup, the climax, of its abstract nouns. He has cast the Roman political landscape in miniature—little wonder then that the master does not waste words on grammar. He has described grammar’s exercises for the child and thinks of grammar as a stage, but one whose importance consists in preparation of certain verbal arts and which must be used to foster an abundant speaking and writing style and a competitiveness that is at once fierce and yet emotional, responsive to failure, to criticism, and to an audience.
The life of a child is a series of engagements with texts (and audiences). A child speaks fables, reads Virgil, does not declaim. The advanced child is at work reading Cicero and Livy. The biologism of the prepubescent child and pubescent adolescent, and the social and ritual delineation of child and youth, visible at school itself through dress, are subordinated to a textually graduated, audible, and legible growth. In the process of maturation Quintilian does not draw attention to ritual, social, physical, or legal changes in the child. Admittedly, these are not his subject, but in the text of his manual they are eliminated, as the category of the child is redefined in essentially linguistic terms. Maturation is thus not an inevitable, natural process nor quite a socially prescribed rite of passage. Maturation is the teacher-led formation of speech and, through speech, of character. The able teacher can see through the rude body of the child the shape of true ingenia. The teacher has the tools to make these ingenia more and more visible until with the completed man, the orator, all the community shall acknowledge his virtues. Further, volition and judgment mark the advanced student and so divide the grammatical from the rhetorical age.
Quintilian’s greatest innovation may be the articulation of the child’s propensity to be educated, a disposition to docility that is both natural and social, a combination of the inborn qualities of ingenium and imitatio. What has attracted so many readers to Quintilian is his promise of eruditio, the process that will sharpen ingenia into the orator’s weapons. Eruditio—that careful discerning of talents and shaping of them from the rough—is what the master teacher has been doing for twenty years, what he does in resisting the cries to publish quickly, and what his book will do for the coming generations.
There is a certain, stark appeal to the plan for education. Quintilian, however, never writes, as we might be tempted, following Locke’s insistence on the primacy of sensation, that the child strives to differentiate and understand the stimuli coming in, tries to understand and discover his world. There is no pull to speech or to naming as there would be for Augustine. The infant is not presented in that gripping fashion that has resounded with so many readers: the child longing for speech is like Augustine and his reader longing for knowledge, for insight, ultimately for the logos that is God. Quintilian’s child is likened to raw matter, not vicious or defective, but unformed. He is that which must be shaped. Like all human beings, his vox distinguishes him from the animals. He does have ingenia. These need sharpening. He does have desire. This needs direction (just as Quintilian’s readers have desires that must be mediated by the master). And he is an imitative creature, ready to repeat—a quality that the teacher must exploit. Unshaped, passionate, memorious, and imitative, the boy awaits the master’s direction. Quintilian knows what to do when in order to make this unqualified puer into a vir bonus dicendi peritus. Quintilian writes to satisfy his readers’ and the student’s desire. By treating schooling as a life, a natural sequence of maturation, Quintilian excludes the other possibility, the unschooled life, as unlivable (or at least not worthy of consideration). Fundamentally, that life could not create a moral speaking subject.
We have followed the student from home to school. The strong claim of Quintilian’s text has rhetoric assert as its special function the shaping of the child into the ideal man. At the same time, it excludes forces, institutions, and agents that any modern, and indeed many ancients, would find significant. It is a bookish claim, of course, to insist that books shape minds (as to imply that bodies follow minds). It is also a masculine claim to insist that the teacher’s gaze can see and direct the soft child toward manhood. Both these claims are fundamental to Quintilian’s new rhetoric.
I have argued that a particular valuation of the child is an essential aspect of Quintilian’s conception of education. He did not put it this way. Rather, by means of definition, a rhetorical mode in itself, rhetoric is construed in a way that he meant to be both theoretically original and a return to a native Roman tradition.59 Thus in book 2 Quintilian surveys definitions of rhetoric so as to arrive at Cato’s dictum of “a good man skilled in speaking.”60 Cato is the final member in a rhetorical climax of definers and definitions of rhetoric. At the same time as Cato’s definition subsumes the others, Quintilian insists on a moral dimension to the orator. Thus he can imagine a totalizing rhetoric that embraces all subjects and does not cede to philosophy or to tradition, to Greece or to Roma antiqua, the capacity to form the mind and character properly. The composite account of the child-learner defines the preadult human being essentially as puer imitans; like man, vox distinguished him from the beasts, but his vox lacks iudicium, choice, volition, and restraint. At every stage of his education, judgment is employed, but the puerile age requires a father’s surrogate to supply judgment, to select what is to be imitated, all the while turning and returning the child to the labor of learning. Quintilian develops a comprehensive apologetics for rhetoric and rhetorical training through notices about the proper development of the child and the insistence that only the good man can be an orator. Quintilian equips Roman schooling with a finished argument for its efficacy and indeed its very existence.
The “moral” dimension allegedly so vital to the orator is in part a fantasy of this apologetics. Fathers and a patriarchal elite are assured that education marks the good as good, the boni who are at once a social class, a moral group, and an ideal readership. But moral qualities—ethical habits, categories of people and behavior, words and styles appropriate to different characters and different genres, the practices of moralization—are most certainly part of rhetorical training. Rhetoric is a moral art not because Aristotle said lies were not rhetoric but because, in Quintilian’s thinking, rhetoric needs a community, and in the actual exercises rhetoric imagines community, human relations, and the power of speech to mediate these. Where one might speak of education as civilized and civilizing speech, Quintilian is not much drawn to theorize about the social role of rhetoric: he for the most part is stuck on the idea that rhetoric forms the individual toward a norm of speaking. Nonetheless, Quintilian’s apologetics circumscribes the sphere of his institution’s authority. Rhetoric defines the complete man, and so rhetorical theory thinks about virility and power as much as about appropriate or persuasive words.
Chapter 7 will address rhetorical habitus, the transformation and internalization of “judgment” as Quintilian would have it. Before we leave the manual, the prescriptive medium of child rearing and child thinking, however, I should state that I believe Quintilian was right in seeing the continuity of the rhetorical process. A convenient term to describe the rhetorician’s inculcation of work habits and social attitudes may be textualization.61 The next chapter addresses directly this process of textualization, the movement through the series of exercises of the Roman curriculum and the internalization of the modes of representation effected in the very composition and reperformance of the exercises.
To gauge what a student takes from his course of grammatical and rhetorical training is in fact far more difficult than Quintilian imagined. The student does not simply “sharpen his wits,” nor does each student succeed in transforming himself into an orator. Not only the individual result but also the social good achieved by education can be far different from what the native participant or observer opines. Yet the claim to produce orators cannot be so easily set aside. Certainly, it represents an ideal and so is of interest as a compelling cultural fantasy, but it has also embodied and tried to instill day by day, through exercise and exhortation, definite values, habits, and routines. At least in the Roman world, before the coming of a codex culture, elite training aimed to produce speaking subjects and not primarily the more exclusively readerly and writerly subjectivity of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Much of what was taught and how it was taught may not have succeeded in producing a fertile copia, that love for traditional forms of writing, talking, and understanding. Yet insofar as fathers and sons pursued Quintilian’s methods or assumed that his goals were worthy, they joined a culture. Such participants in an elite education are also practicing what they take as the defining difference of the free. The next chapters explore the subjectivity of the ancient student, both the ideal subjectivity that teacher and father and perhaps student believed the student was assuming and the practical subjectivity, the nexus of attitude and habit, that the exercise demanded.
Quintilian has certainly offered the greatest guide to this education, but he has also provided a compelling emotional and intellectual rationale for rhetorical education. The child drives him to write as that same child impels the father to educate him. Quintilian has contributed more than a synthetic pedagogics. The idea of the animus puerilis is new and of great consequence. The child is measured by his school activity: he or she reads, now he or she reads Cicero, at last he declaims moot court cases. In providing his field of expertise with a theoretical explanation, Quintilian has used the child as an undergirding conceptualization. He writes the child into maturity and, in a way reminiscent of Plutarch, in so doing gathers the faculties of father and mother, nurse, slaves, and pedagogue under the function of the master teacher. The child becomes a virtual imperative, demanding resources and a rigorous program and requiring and displaying the father’s diligent—if delegated—supervision.