Quintilian: Rhetoric, Oratory, Pedagogy

hello good afternoon again my name is adam melwanger i am a professor of rhetoric at the university of houston downtown and this video is primarily for the students in my history of rhetoric class but if anybody who can find some use for it is welcome to do so so today we are talking about quintillion the roman teacher of rhetoric who is famous for having written institutes of oratory which is a humongous book if you see the whole version but today we're just working from the selection that is included in bezel in herzberg's textbook entitled the rhetorical tradition and the selection there deals mostly with how rhetoric was taught in the roman empire it's particularly interested in pedagogy and teaching of the skill and associated skills like writing um and grammar uh and oratory um so a little bit about quittillion first the book tells you that quintillion lived from about 35 of our era until uh 96 which puts him right in the heart of the imperial period of rome and many people who study rhetoric say that the imperial period of rome after the republic had fallen and the emperors had begun their succession many people say that this was a a bad time in the history of rhetoric primarily because they like to think that rhetoric has some special status in democracies where it's used in deliberative forms to figure out what a given society will do in response to its problems i differ a little bit i don't think that rhetoric is put to any less use in an imperial setting it's simply put two different uses and what we see in quintillion in part is a different approach to rhetoric and is teaching than we might have seen in cicero's rome or in uh in plato's greece uh and so uh quintillion was a i guess an academic rock star of his era the emperor vespasian appointed him the first imperial chair of rhetoric um which i assume was probably about as large of a a um scholarly position as you could hold in the roman empire and invest or i'm sorry quintillion also had some some rock star pupils we know that juvenile and suetonius were his students the book tells us that maybe tacitus was a student and pliny the younger was also a student and so what we know from that is that probably quintillion's pedagogy in terms of rhetoric was really the the best to be had uh in in the rome of his time um i think he was spanish if i remember right uh by by nativity right he was a spaniard who who found a home in rome anyways let's get into the text um so early on and this is about pages 364 365 in the bezel text quotillion makes a distinction between the teaching of grammar and the teaching of rhetoric so he makes a distinction between these two activities and as he notes uh the study of grammar is for the less advanced youth right the the younger children would study what gets called or study with what gets called the grammaticus that is the teacher of of grammar and skills at the grammaticus would include things like learning to read learning to write form letters right and and all the things that we associate today with grammatical instruction parts of speech um addiction syntax uh things like this and so uh the grammar teacher taught uh these things the the rhetorician the rhetoricus the person who taught rhetoric was a different teacher than the grammar teacher and what the rhetorician taught was how to apply the skills of the grammarian in effective ways ways that are effective politically and obviously rhetorically in other words how do you make persuasive uses of these skills in the forms of writing and oratory and so much of quintillion's text at least the parts we have here focus on how to do that it's of note that um in in the rest of the large work of ins institutes of oratory quintillion talks in some places about some pretty heavy rhetorical theory that that seems pretty far from pedagogical concerns but but here we'll talk about the pedagogy um one interesting point is that he notes that the dividing line between these two activities between grammar and rhetoric has become blurred and he's unhappy about that and on pages 364 365 he complains a little bit about how you know he says accordingly it's happened that what was first business of the one art has become the last of the other and that boys have been aged to be employed in the higher departments of study that is uh rhetoric remains sunk in the lower school and practice rhetoric under the grammarian so he's saying the grammarians are teaching boys that are too sophisticated and advanced for them and right that they're teaching skills that aren't properly theirs to teach an interesting point gets made in the same area of the text where he says this is on page 365 in the second column he says i think that the question hang on just a second i'm gonna go yell at my children i'll be back you guys all need to go outside right now i can't have yelling in the background of my video bye all right so how was that for rhetoric um okay so uh where were we ah yes in terms of when to move a student from the grammarian to the rhetoricus quintillion says i think that the question of when a boy ought to be sent to the teacher of rhetoric is best decided by the answer when he's qualified in other words when he's ready and i think it's worth noting that this is a very different approach to learning than we have in our society today where it's kind of assumed that everybody who enters the fifth grade will move on to the sixth grade right um and in some ways that ends up magnifying disparities because not all children are as prepared to enter the sixth grade for example as their peers and so in quintillion's world you know it doesn't matter what age you are what the age appropriate grade is you stay with the teacher learning the skills that are taught by that teacher until you've mastered them and if that means you stay there past the proper age then okay and i think that this is one of the the useful things in some ways about these pedagogical aspects of quintillion is that it it encourages us to think about what are some of the built-in assumptions of k-12 education and perhaps college education in our era that are unexamined right that we don't even notice because it just seems natural well yeah then the year ends and you move on to the next grade right not so in quintillion's world um one of the distinctive very distinctive parts of quotillion is his emphasis on the teacher's character that is the ethos of the teacher and so if we go to uh page 366 in the second column he says of these professors the morals must be first ascertained a point of which i proceed to treat in this part of my work not because i don't think that the same examination is to be made and with the utmost care in regard to almost all the teachers as indeed i've shown my last book but because the very age of the pupils makes attention to the matter more necessary and if you skip down about three inches quintillion continues let the teacher adopt then above all things the teacher or sorry the feelings of a parent towards his pupils and consider that he succeeds to the place of those by whom the children were entrusted to him let him neither have vices in himself nor tolerate vices and anybody else let his austerity not be stern nor his f ability too easy less dislike arise from the one or contempt from the other and and the passage continues and what quintillion seems to be saying is that the the moral virtue of the teacher is paramount right and he says the the good teacher can't tolerate the faults of his students right um if you have a teacher who's saying that's good enough right then then that's not a good teacher right a teacher needs to push somebody and at the same time quintelli quintillion says that the teacher shouldn't be too stern because then students won't like him or her of course in rome it would have been him and not to be too easy right you don't want to be buddy teacher or you know everybody's just trying to be liked okay um so hang on here while i check the battery on my computer oh we're in good shape we're in real good shape um okay so that ethos of the teacher is important and uh he says on the on the next page um sorry this is 367. the liberty of standing up and showing exaltation and giving applause as is done under most teachers is by no means to be allowed to boys for the approbation of even young men when they listen to others ought to be temperate hence it will result that the people will depend on the judgment of the master and will think that he has expressed properly whatever has been approved by him in other words quintillion is saying something bad about what we're really accustomed to when we're in class and somebody finishes their presentation we're all like quintillion says no right students don't clap the students shouldn't be allowed to show any signs of approval of their classmates work right because that puts the teacher in this situation where either he has to allow the applause in which case the student thinks oh i must have done well or he has to embarrass that student and say no no everybody stop applauding that was not good right um and in other words the in in sort of this radically democratized classroom where everybody gets applause you never really know what's good and what's not anymore and what has the teacher's approval and what doesn't he continues again on 367 he says the master ought not to speak to suit the taste of his pupils but the pupil should speak to suit the tastes of their master in other words what he's saying here is the teacher should not lower themselves to the the forms of speech and diction and tastes and appetites of their students right um the students should try to raise themselves to that of the teacher especially since the teacher is supposed to be in this parental role according to um quintillion where was i going with that i had something else i wanted to say it's interesting in some ways because we think in our era the taste is just sort of subjective right you like what you like in writing i like what i like in writing but uh quintillion kind of dismisses that out of hand he says no the teacher's taste is is superior right uh and it is his or her taste that should be elevated above the students and that the student should seek to to imitate right or at least to to appreciate um one thing that interestingly differs from some earlier texts is that on 367 uh quintillion says the mere boys or rather the idea that mere boys should sit mixed with young men i do not approve for those such a man as ought to preside over their studies in conduct may even may keep even the eldest of his pupils under control yet the more tender ought to be separate from the more mature and they should all be kept free not merely from the guilt of licentiousness but merely from the i'm sorry but even from the suspicion of licentiousness and what quintillion is doing here is really discouraging any kind of sexual contact both between older students and younger students and between teachers and students generally and as we talked about in our course some of the greek schools this was kind of common practice of romantic relationships between teachers and students or more advanced pupils and less advanced pupils and so quintillion is very clear in his in this moral emphasis that he places on the teacher that he expects that to be uh extended to the expectations for students right and this is why he advocates separating the the the young people by age in particular right so that the young the older students can't prey upon the younger students in terms of not lowering yourself to the diction of of the students or their tastes if you're um a student of rhetoric you may have read the fetus or the phaedrus by plato and this is precisely socrates concern in that dialogue is that uh that the the type of oratory um that um fidres is is falling in love with from lysius uh it also pulls him down right it pulls it pulls uh socrates down um from the elevated uh area of his taste and truth so that's a theme that runs through some of this ancient ancient thing or description of learning oratory and rhetoric um on 369 and chapter four uh quintillion starts talking about what he calls the first duties of the teacher of rhetoric um and some of these are very interesting now i think i'll write them up here one is narration right that the teacher of rhetoric at the beginning should teach narration should teach imitation should teach repetition should teach um what else do i have in my notes should teach uh memorization memorization should teach stylistics right so tastes taste as far as um uh writing is concerned and should learn dictation and then we look at this list and we think about g's how many like what's the the modern attitudes of these things well we like narration very much right in the sense of hey tell me a story from your life right that's a very popular writing assignment uh for for uh developing writers but that's not quite what quintillion has in mind here what quintillion means by narration is taking some event for example a battle right and tell us what happened narrate this series of events right um and he sees this as as particularly useful for forensic oratory or establishing the truth in a court of law right but imitation right this flies in the face of of expressivist pedagogy that composition studies still has this affinity for right imitation is a very bad connotation today no no you need to have an original voice don't imitate other people no quintillion says this is partly how you learn a style and learn invention is through imitation how about repetition that also has a negative connotation today right we tell students well don't repeat yourself right or don't write the same thing over and over again quintillion seems to think this has some usefulness in part what it will do is repeating the same arguments will turn them into topoi or into common places that are then easily deployed in a moment where they're needed and as we'll talk about in a minute quintillion is very interested in what he calls ex-tempore or what we would call extemporaneous speaking speaking off the cuff and without notes and as we'll see invention in invention skills uh and speaking extemporaneously uh are dependent upon topoi in in large part um and that comes in part from repetition memorization this has a negative connotation too everybody thinks oh we shouldn't make kids memorize besides what is there to learn we just need to teach them skills um no most classical education places a strong emphasis on memorization and you know even if it's just for the sake of memorization not even for the sake of gaining some knowledge but instead just for exercising the memory stylistic education well everybody likes style today but we also commonly view style as again subjective where it's just like hey it's whatever floats your boat no right quintillion recognizes that there are certain stylistic modes that if nothing else are more powerful in the register of rhetoric right there's there's more persuasive styles in less persuasive styles and since what we're teaching the students to do is make effective uses of rhetoric we want to equip them and uh inculcate a taste for the these best styles the most effective styles dictation we never have our students do that anymore almost never they should do it informally in notes right but it's interesting that what he sees as the first duties of the advanced teacher the teachers of rhetoric are almost all skills and activities that we pass over now as to elementary and then you think well are they getting done by our lower school teachers now now not really right uh so many of these old practices are kind of lost time um he also talks about how to respond to student work on 370 and 371 and i mean this is this is really useful for teachers of writing today so i'll read from it he says um see nor is it improper for me moreover to offer this admonition that the power of boys sometimes sink under too great severity in correction for they despond and grieve and at last they hate their work and what is most prejudicial while they fear everything they cease to attempt anything right so let's pause for for a second there right he says look it's a mistake to be to correct too much and i think that this is something we all need to stay away from as teachers of writing because when you have a student who really needs a lot of help with writing or was speaking if every single thing they do they're getting corrected for or told they're wrong then they get discouraged and don't do it anymore don't even attempt so quetillion says there's a similar conviction in the minds of people who cultivate trees who think that the knife should not be applied to tender shoots as they appear to shrink from steel and to be unable yet to bear an incision beautiful metaphor right the young student who doesn't have many skills yet can't stand the cut of a harsh criticism a teacher ought therefore to be as agreeable as possible that remedies which are rough in their nature may be rendered soothing by the gentleness of hand he ought to praise some parts of his pupils performances to tolerate some and to alter others right and so in other words his quintillions say no no you shouldn't lay the blade to him he says no you have to cut out what's wrong right the the student has to be told what they're doing wrong and what they're doing right but the trick is to deliver the cut in a way that to put it um perhaps differently is is to put it in a friendly way right try to make the criticism constructive and not a overall judgment of the students capacities so quintillion continues he says different ages however should be corrected in different ways and work is to be required and amended according to the degree of the people's abilities i used to say to boys when they attempted anything extravagant or verbose that i was satisfied with it for the present but that a time would come when i should not allow them to produce compositions of such a character thus they were satisfied with their abilities and yet not led to form a wrong judgment all right interesting so again what he says is you know basically you set up little successes for the student but you don't indulge them right and i think you know in some ways composition historically has been this red ink no no no no no profession i think in some ways now composition studies has swung to the other pendulum where it seems to me that for some teachers the teaching of writing is kind of a non-stop giving of applause to the student because we're so tuned into affect and emotion that we think like oh if just they can believe they could do it then they can do it and so then teaching becomes an exercise in affirmation right but i think that what quintillion is pointing us back to is that in some ways taken to an extreme affirmation does students no favors okay um let's see he talks about this is where he gets into the importance of invention and topoi and these are some of the more sophisticated skills for him um let's read a passage on 372. he says when they say that he's talking about orders um when they say the same things in various pleadings they're cold meat as it were served up over and over again must either create loathing in the speakers themselves or their unhappy household furniture which as among the ambitious poor is worn out by being used for several different purposes must when detected so often by the memory of their hearers cause a feeling of shame in them especially as there is scarcely any commonplace so common which can incorporate well without any pleading okay and so what he's saying here is the importance of invention he's like topoi are good enough right like in part right and to a limited extent but if all you've got is the same six arguments that you always rehearse uh in other words if you're looking for retweets on twitter don't just be the 37th person to observe x right that you need to be able to invent kind of unique take and if your take is always the same he says that's like cold meat you know nobody wants to eat leftovers all week and and you have to be careful as a speaker and as a writer not to serve up leftovers over and over the other metaphor he gives is like poor people who can't afford new furniture and so what they do is instead of throwing out the old furniture and getting some new stuff right what they do is they just keep moving the worn out furniture they have around the room and rearranging it so that somebody comes in and says hey what's different around here do you have new furniture and you're like no it's the same stuff i just moved it that people say ah yeah i remember it um and so what he's saying is that a good oratory needs to have some bombast and some inventiveness um if only to keep audiences interested and indeed keep the speaker interested okay um i'm trying to move quickly here uh just because i don't want the video to be too too long but we need to well i'll pause for a second here um and link this idea of invention to ex-temporary speech which we talked about a minute ago extemporaneous speaking um so this is on 404 quintillion says without this precaution the very faculty of speaking ex temporary will but furnish us with empty loquacity or loquaciousness so it's just just empty speech and words just born on the lips in writing are the roots in writing are the foundations of eloquence by writing resources are stored up as it were in a sacred repository where they may be drawn forth for sudden emergencies or as circumstances required and so he says look extemporaneous speech is great but if you haven't done the preparation to be able to do it then it's just going to be empty stuff that you're saying right he says that writing is the key to developing an ability to speak extemporaneously in part because that is where the inventive work happens in writing that then is stored in memory and then can be deployed when the moment needs it verbally okay um and he says also if you're curious on page 371 he talks about topoi i guess we'll look at it quick um he says this is 371 second column he calls them common places or i guess in the latin they'd be loci right uh common places i speak of those in which without specifying per persons it is usual to declaim against vices themselves as against those of the adulterer the gamester the licentious person though these are of the very nature of speeches on trials and if you add the name of an accused party they're real accusations so here he talks about different types of people that you should have in mind almost as personality types topoi related to to people so that when you're sort of arguing with a person you've got it ready disposal all the different labels you could affix to that person right as what type of person they are to convey that to an audience we would be remiss though if we didn't talk about what everybody remembers from quintillion um and that is uh his definition of rhetoric and um frankly of the order so let's go to 385 which is really sort of uh some of the central points of the text um i'm going to switch to my other book so i have some different points highlighted in that all right so 385 he says um this is the first column rhetoric then for we shall henceforth use this term without dread of sarcastic objections he's thinking about for example uh cicero who kind of avoids the word rhetoric in his writing uh because maybe of its sophistical associations or the platonic critique of rhetoric and quaternion says yeah we're going to use the word rhetoric from now on think of that what you will but i'm going to call it that he says rhetoric then will be best divided in my opinion in such a manner that we may speak first of the art next of the artist and then of the work in other words rhetoric can mean three things rhetoric is the art of rhetoric or the ability to use rhetoric that set of knowledge that forms the discipline of what we call rhetoric there is also the artist right the person who does rhetoric this activity that they do using rhetoric and then there is the thing rhetoric a particular example of discourse that is a a piece of rhetoric that we could say see look this is persuasive discourse all right he says the art will be that which ought to be attained by study and is the knowledge of how to speak well the artificer is he who has acquired the art that is the order whose business it is to speak well the work is what is achieved by the artificer that is good speaking and so if you jump over the next column he says first of all then we have to consider what rhetoric is indeed we define various ways but its definition gives rise chiefly to two considerations for the dispute is in general either concerning the quality of the thing itself or concerning the comprehension of terms in which it is defined the first and chief difference of opinion on the subject of rhetoric is that some think it's possible even for bad men to have the name of orders while others to whose opinion i attach myself maintain that the name of rhetoric and order and the art of which we are speaking that is the art of speaking itself can be conceited only to good men all right that's the central idea that quintillion is famous for is the idea that the order or the rhetorician is the good man speaking well and so that is a certain ethos in terms of credibility and virtue bound with a certain excellence in terms of style um knowledge and and truth right and for him both need to be there so for him to to be a master of rhetoric but to only deal in untruths like say somebody like polis from the dialogue gorgeous that these people are not worthy of the name to quintillion um and and he reiterates this on page 390 um well three let me look at my other book all right here you go here's here's probably the famous passage 390 second column he says but if eloquence is the art of speaking well the definition that i adopt he says so that a true order must above all be a good man it must assuredly be acknowledged that rhetoric then is a useful art and he continues and on the next page on 391 in the second column he concedes that rhetoric is in fact an art um that he views it as such and of course we've seen this semester that over the history of rhetoric there have been people who say no it's not an art and he mentions the good man speaking well if you're interested in finding other passages on uh 4 12 4 13 he says at the very bottom of 4 12 let the orator then whom i propose to form with my teaching be such a one as is characterized by the definition of marcus cato a good man skilled in speaking there you go and he continues with that passage right so this is uh this this emphasis on ethics both in teaching and in practice and in learning right uh is is kind of unique to quintillion and forms the the uh the major part of of his pedagogy if you look at the the end of rhetoric at various points he talks about the telos of rhetoric or its end its purpose um and he's interesting this is on 393. he's interesting because he says that persuasion is not the goal for him the goal of rhetoric is not to persuade an audience rather he says that good speaking is in itself the end of rhetoric right so the end of rhetoric is not just to convince people and win the argument right the the point the purpose of argument its end is to produce good speech and of course there's many many other things that we could talk about in relation to quintillion and of course for my students we will very shortly when we meet here in a little bit but uh for the rest of you i hope you learned something take it easy

Channel: Doctor Ellwanger

Views: 694

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: iXMaUxi2caI

Length: 35min 30sec (2130 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020