Quintilian on Effective Language

Books 8 and 9 of the Institutio take up the third major division of rhetoric, elocutio or effective rhetorical style. Here Quintilian offers an encyclopaedic review of choices and devices at the word, sentence, and passage level, providing examples of their functions and potential abuses. Book 8 covers three of the four virtues of style: correctness, clarity, and ornatus or force. Quintilian favours everyday usage in word choice and warns against the faults of monotony, excess, and offensiveness. He praises visualizing language (enargeia), demurs on sententiae or pithy expressions, and reviews amplifying tactics, such as placing an item in, at the top, or even beyond a rising series, leading to speechlessness. The final section reviews twelve tropes, with special attention to how metaphors are invented. Book 9 opens with a definition of figures of speech as departures from normal usage, and discusses how the form of an expression contributes to its function. It then covers the ‘figures of thought’ such as prosopopoeia and irony, and the syntactic figures or schemes including figures of repetition. The last part treats compositio, involving word order, sound, and rhythm. Using the metrical vocabulary of poetry, Quintilian analyses prosody in terms of the proportion of long to short syllables, creating the pace of a passage, and then discusses prose rhythm in terms of the comma, colon, and period. Overall, Quintilian’s rich and complex treatment of rhetorical style should fuel continuing investigations.