The Orator's Education: Cicero and Quintilian on Forming a Speaker

A fine speech looks like a gift. Cicero and Quintilian treat it as the product of long training, most of it done before anyone stands up. Cicero's dialogue De oratore sets out the ideal speaker. Quintilian's Institutio oratoria, in twelve books, turns that ideal into a schooling. Translations of Cicero here are loose; Quintilian is quoted in H. E. Butler's translation.

Know a great deal first

De oratore sets the bar high. No one, it says, can be an orator complete in every merit without a knowledge of all the great subjects and arts (I.20). Without that knowledge, speech has "an empty and almost childish" style (inanem quandam ... et paene puerilem, I.20).

Quintilian makes the case for two arts that later belonged to the quadrivium. Music matters because it "has two modes of expression in the voice and in the body" (I.10.22), and so does a speaker. Geometry matters because "logical development is one of the necessities of geometry. And is it not equally a necessity for oratory?" (I.10.37). Geometry, he says, "arrives at its conclusions from definite premises"; an argument should too. The Order of the Seven Liberal Arts: Substance, Quantity and the Mind gives his definitions of grammar and rhetoric.

Five parts of the art

De oratore passes on the school division of the orator's power into five parts:

1. Invention: find what to say (reperire primum quid diceret).
2. Arrangement: put what you found in order, and weigh it with judgment (dispensare atque componere).
3. Style: clothe and adorn it in words (vestire atque ornare oratione).
4. Memory: fence it in with memory (memoria saepire).
5. Delivery: deliver it with dignity and grace (agere cum dignitate ac venustate).

The English labels are the usual loose glosses (I.142). Each part is trained by exercise, not by reading about it.

The pen as teacher

De oratore calls the pen (stilus) the best and most excellent maker and master of speaking, and urges writing as much as possible (quam plurimum scribere, I.150). Quintilian adds a rule about pace: "write quickly and you will never write well, write well and you will soon write quickly" (X.3.10). Writing slows thought enough to inspect it. That last sentence is this page's reading of why the rule works, not a tested finding. Technical Writing as Reasoning makes the same case for an incident report: if the sentence will not come, the reasoning is not finished.

Imitate, then go past the model

For Quintilian, "in art no small portion of our task lies in imitation" (X.2.1). Yet "imitation alone is not sufficient" (X.2.4). He calls it "a positive disgrace to be content to owe all our achievement to imitation" (X.2.7). A model is where you start, not where you stop. English Expression Mastery: Words, Sentences, Paragraphs and Speech gives a modern drill: name one move in a passage, then use it on a subject of your own.

Revise as a stranger

Quintilian calls the correction of our work "by far the most useful portion of our study" (X.4.1). His method is to put the draft aside for a time. Then, on return, "it will have the air of novelty and of being another's handiwork" (X.4.2). Distance turns the writer into a reader. Loosely, this is the cycle of attempt, feedback and correction in Deliberate Practice for Learning and Mastery.

Memory and delivery

Quintilian reports that "the first person to discover an art of memory is said to have been Simonides", after a banqueting hall "fell in upon the heads of the guests" (XI.2.11, 13). The method needs "places, real or imaginary, and images or symbols" (XI.2.21). He doubts it for a speech: "how can such a method grasp a whole series of connected words?" (XI.2.24). He advises learning a long speech "piecemeal" (XI.2.27). Asked for the one supreme method of memory, he answers: "practice and industry" (XI.2.40).

Delivery "is concerned with two different things, namely, voice and gesture" (XI.3.14). Quintilian reports that Demosthenes "gave the palm to delivery and assigned it second and third place as well" (XI.3.6). A mediocre speech with all the power of delivery, he judges, will impress more than the best speech without it (XI.3.5). That power cuts both ways. It can make a weak case sound strong.

A good man skilled in speaking

So the orators ask who is speaking. Quintilian takes his aim from Marcus Cato: the orator is "a good man, skilled in speaking" (XII.1.1). He goes further: "no man can be an orator unless he is a good man" (XII.1.3). He raises the obvious objection himself: "Was not Demosthenes an orator? And yet we are told that he was a bad man" (XII.1.14). His reply doubts the charges, defends Cicero's aims, and grants that neither man reached perfect virtue (XII.1.15-18, paraphrased).

De oratore makes the point from the other side. It deplores a split, as it were, of the tongue and the heart (quasi linguae atque cordis), in which some teachers taught us to think wisely and others to speak. It calls the split absurd, useless and blameworthy (III.61). Augustine on Signs, Interpretation and Eloquence follows the argument into Augustine, who put wisdom first. Duties, Friendship and Philosophy as a Way of Life follows Cicero from speech into conduct.

The orators and the five acts

The Levels path asks for five acts. They are the site's own synthesis, not a Roman scheme. Loosely, the orators train the first three hardest: broad study for understanding exactly, invention and arrangement for examining reasons, and writing, imitation and revision for expressing truly. Quintilian's Book V does treat proofs, among them documents and witnesses (V.1.2), but as material to argue from in court rather than as tests of whether a claim is true. That contrast is this page's reading. The site teaches that beside them, as in Hypotheses, Predictions and Tests.

Where this could be wrong

The strongest objection. Skill in speaking and goodness come apart. Persuasive liars exist, and Quintilian's own example concedes the problem: of Demosthenes, "we are told that he was a bad man". Defining such people as "not orators" wins the argument by definition, not by evidence.

The best reply. Read Quintilian's claim as the aim of an education, not as a finding about persuasion. A school that trains the skill without the character trains the dangerous version. Cicero's complaint about separate teachers of wisdom and of speech makes the same point.

What would settle it. Evidence on whether audiences, over repeated meetings, learn to discount speakers they find dishonest. This page cites none. So the claim that goodness makes the better speaker stays Aporetic, and the value of the exercises is Provisional: long-standing practice, not tested here.

Try this

1. Pick a short speech or essay you admire. Copy one paragraph by hand, name one move it makes, then use that move on a subject of your own.
2. Write 300 words on something you know well. Put it away for two days. Revise it as if a stranger wrote it, and keep both versions.
3. Reduce the revised piece to one cue word per paragraph. Deliver it aloud from the cues, record it, and note one fault of voice or gesture to fix next time.

Further reading

• Cicero, De oratore, Book I, Latin text ed. A. S. Wilkins (Perseus Digital Library).
• Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, Book X, chapters 2 to 4 (imitation, writing, correction), and Book XI, chapters 2 and 3 (memory, delivery), trans. H. E. Butler (LacusCurtius).
• Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, Book XII, chapter 1, on the good speaker.