Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/206

188 Q U I--Q U I less fatigue than is necessary to master most parts of the rhetorical writings of Aristotle and Cicero. At all times the student feels that he is in the company of a high-toned gentleman who, so far as he could do so without ceasing to be a Roman, has taken up into his nature the best results of ancient culture in all its forms. His literary sympathies are extraordinarily wide. When obliged to condemn, as in the case of Seneca, he bestows generous and even extravagant praise on such merit as he can find. He can cordially admire even Sallust, the true fountain-head of the style which he combats, while he will not suffer Lucilius to lie under the aspersions of Horace. The passages in which Quintilian reviews the literature of Greece and Rome are justly celebrated. The judgments which he passes may be in many instances traditional, but, looking to all the circumstances of the time, it seems remarkable that there should then have lived at Rome a single man who could make them his own and give them expression. The form in which these judgments are rendered is admirable. The gentle justness of the senti- ments is accompanied by a curious felicity of phrase. Who can forget "the immortal swiftness of Sallust," or " the milky richness of Livy," or how " Horace soars now and then, and is full of sweetness and grace, and in his varied forms and phrases is most fortunately bold " ? Ancient literary criticism perhaps touched its highest point in the hands of Quintilian. To comprehensive sympathy and clear intellectual vision Quintilian added refined tenderness and freedom from self-assertion. Taking him all in all, we may say that his personality must have been the most attractive of his time more winning and at the same time more lofty than that of the younger Pliny, his pupil, into whom no small portion of the master's spirit, and even some tincture of the master's literary taste, was instilled. It does not surprise us to hear that Quintilian attributed any success he won as a pleader to his command of pathos, a quality in which his great guide Cicero excelled. In spite of some extravagances of phrase, Quintilian's lament (in his sixth book) for his girl-wife and his boy of great promise is the most pathetic of all the lamentations for bereavement in which Latin literature is so rich. In his precepts about early education Quintilian continually shows his shrinking from cruelty and oppression. The educational method of " Orbilius, abounding in blows," has never been more earnestly rebuked. Quintilian for the most part avoids passing opinions on the problems of philosophy, religion, and politics. The professed philosopher he disliked almost as much as did Isocrates. He deemed that ethics formed the only valuable part of philosophy and that ethical teaching ought to be in the hands of the rhetoricians. In the divine govern- ment of the universe he seems to have had a more than ornamental faith, though he doubted the immortality of the soul. As to politics Quintilian, like others of his time, felt free to eulogize the great anti-Caesarean leaders of the dying republic, but only because the assumption was universal that the system they had championed was gone for ever. But Quintilian did not trouble himself, as Statius did, to fling stones at the emperors Caligula and Nero, who had missed their deification. He makes no remark, laudatory or otherwise, on the government of any emperor before Domitian. No character figured more largely in the rhetorical controversies of the schools than the ideal despot, but no word ever betrayed a conscious- ness that the actual occupant of the Palatine might exemplify the themes. Quintilian has often been re- proached with his flattery of Domitian. No doubt it was fulsome. But it is confined to two or three passages, not thrust continually upon the reader, as by Statius and Martial. To refuse the charge of Domitian's expected successors would have been perilous, and equally perilous would it have been to omit from the Institutio Oratorio, all mention of the emperor. And there was at the time only one dialect in which a man of letters could speak who set any value on his personal safety. There was a choice between extinction and the writing of a few sentences in the loathsome court language, which might serve as an official test of loyalty. So Quintilian, man of honour though he was, swallowed the test as best he might, even as two generations ago in England unbelievers took the sacrament to avoid exclusion from municipal affairs. The Latin of 'Quintilian is not always free from the faults of style which he condemns in others. It also exhibits many of the usages and constructions which are characteristic of the silver Latin. But no writer of the decadence departs less widely from the best models of the late republican period. The language is on the whole clear mid simple, and varied without resort to rhetorical devices and poetical conceits. Besides the Institutio Oratorio,, there have come down to us under Quintilian's name 19 longer and 145 shorter Dcdamationes, or school exercitations on themes like those in the Controversies of Seneca. The longer pieces are certainly not Quintilian's. The shorter were probably published, if not by himself, at least from notes taken at his lessons. It is strange that they could ever have been supposed to belong to a later century ; the style proclaims them to be of Quintilian's school and time. The works of Quintilian have often been edited. Of the editions of the whole works the chief is that by Burmann (1720) ; of the Institutio Oratorio, that by Spalding, completed by Zumpt and Bonnell (1798-1834, the last volume containing a lexicon), and that by Halm (1868). The tenth book of the Insti- tutio Oratorio, has often been separately edited, as by Krueger, Bonnell, Mayor (unfinished), and others. There is a critical edition of the 145 Dcdamationes by C. Hitter (1885). (J. S. R.) QUINTUS SMYRN^EUS, a late epic poet of Greece, sometimes called Quintus Calaber because his poem was discovered at Otranto in Calabria. Next to nothing is known of him. He appears to have lived in the latter part of the 4th century, shortly before Nonnus. He speaks of himself as having tended sheep in his youth at Smyrna (bk. xii. 308 sq.). His epic in fourteen books, known as TO. ^ff "0/j.rjpov or the Posthomerica, takes up the tale of Troy at the point where Homer's Iliad breaks off, i.e., after the death of Hector, and carries it down to the capture of the city by the Greeks. It describes the doughty deeds and death's of Penthesilea the Amazon (bk. i.), Memnon, son of the Morning (bk. ii.), and Achilles (bk. iii.) ; the funeral games in honour of Achilles (bk. iv.); the contest for the arms of Achilles and the death of Ajax (bk. v.) ; the exploits of Neoptolemus and Deiphobus, the deaths of Paris and CEnone, the capture of Troy by means of the wooden horse, the sacrifice of Polyxena at the grave of Achilles, the departure of the Greeks, and their dispersal by the storm (bks. vi.-xiv.). The poet has no originality ; in conception and style his work is closely modelled on Homer. His materials are borrowed from the cyclic poems from which Virgil also drew, in particular the JEtliiopis of Arctinus and the Little Iliad of Lesches. The style is clear, but the poem is flat and tedious, in spite of the abundance of similes with which the poet seeks to relieve its dulness. The first edition of Quintus Smyrnteus was published by Aldus Manutius in 1504 or 1505 ; in this century there have been editions by Tychsen, 1807, Lehrs in the Didot edition of Hesiod, &c., 1841, and two editions by Kb'chley in 1850 (Weidmann) and 1853 (Teubner). Sainte-Beuve has an essay on him. QUITO, the capital of the republic of Ecuador, South America, an archbishopric, and the chief town of a depart- ment, lies 14' of latitude south of the equator, and in 79 45' W. long., at a height of 9520 feet above the sea. In ancient times it was connected with Cuzco by a paved highway, portions of which still exist; but under Spanish rule it was allowed to relapse almost into the natural isolation of its position. Since 1870, however,