Revisiting the idea of the ideal orator and education

"Vir bonus dicendi peritus", in Latin, means "a good man skilled in speaking". For Roman educator and rhetorician Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, better known as Quintilian (35-100), the phrase captured his ideal orator: someone whose mastery of language was inseparable from moral character. In that ideal, learning, character, language, and public responsibility converged. To educate someone in eloquence was to ultimately educate the person behind the voice, not merely to win an argument, but to speak with judgement and serve the common good.

In 1969, George A. Kennedy (1928-2022), an American classicist and leading scholar of ancient rhetoric, published his book-length study of Quintilian. His engagement with the Roman rhetorician began in his doctoral years, when he studied Book 8 of Quintilian's monumental 12-book treatise, Institutio Oratoria, typically translated as The Oratorical Education or The Education of the Orator.

Earlier this year, Huang Hanlin, a lecturer and lover of classics at South China University of Technology, published a Chinese translation of Kennedy's book, seeking to introduce Chinese readers to a figure who, despite being relatively little-known in China, has exerted an enormous influence on Western education since the Renaissance. More importantly, Huang sees in Quintilian an opportunity to compare traditions that reflected on virtue, persuasion and public life.

"For Quintilian, oration was a foundation of civilization: knowledge by itself can accomplish little. By giving knowledge and judgement a public voice, the orator helped turn individual understanding into collective action, strengthening a society's capacity to govern itself through reason rather than force — and ultimately to sustain civilization itself," said Huang.

Quintilian's vision belonged to an older civic tradition. In the Greek city-states, especially democratic Athens, citizens debated laws, war and public policy in the Assembly. At the same time, individual litigants argued disputes in courts, sometimes with the help of speech-writers. The Romans inherited this close connection between eloquence and public life. Still, they placed it within a broader ideal of the public man — a cultivated citizen whose knowledge, judgement and moral character served the res publica (the Roman Republic). Quintilian, though living under the Empire when political power was far more concentrated, preserved the civic purpose of Republican oration while adapting it to a changed political order.

This was also a time when Rome was still expanding and consolidating its territories, while relying increasingly on an educated Roman and provincial elite to govern them. Rather than reducing the orator to a servant of imperial power, Quintilian sought to equip him with the knowledge and judgment to administer public affairs and exercise responsibility within the imperial order. Around AD 74, Emperor Vespasian appointed him to Rome's first publicly funded chair of Latin rhetoric.

Aristotle, whose rhetorical theories Quintilian repeatedly discussed in Institutio Oratoria, had earlier written in his Politics that "the human being is by nature a political animal" and that "among all animals the human being alone possesses logos" — the capacity for articulated thought, reasoned discourse and deliberation.

Huang sees a related understanding of language and education in the Confucian tradition. Confucius is quoted in the Analects as saying, in James Legge's translation, "If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success." For Confucius, the precision of language was inseparable from political order: when words lost their correspondence with reality, action itself could falter, affecting ritual, law and society.

This concern with the force of language continued in later Chinese thought. In the late Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24), Liu Xiang's Shuoyuan.Shanshuo, or The Art of Persuasion, treated speech as political action and explored how words could move rulers and shape state affairs. About five centuries later, Liu Xie's Wenxin Diaolong, a foundational work of Chinese literary theory deeply informed by Confucian thought, extended the discussion to literary writing, examining how language could give form to thought while carrying moral and social purpose.

Yet Confucian thought also warned against eloquence divorced from virtue. Confucius warned, "Clever words and an ingratiating manner seldom accompany benevolence," and observed, "The virtuous will have something to say, but those who have something to say are not necessarily virtuous." He added that "the gentleman wishes to be slow in speech but quick in action".

This wariness was hardly foreign to Quintilian. The Sophists, a distinctly Greek phenomenon of fifthcentury BC, made a profession of teaching rhetoric, argument and civic skills, but became objects of suspicion among philosophers, most notably Plato. Quintilian's answer was not to reject eloquence, but to redefine the orator: a bad orator was almost a contradiction in terms, since true eloquence required virtue, truth and sound judgement. Yet the ideal sat uneasily with the realities of public life, where men of compromised character could wield eloquence.

The closest Confucian counterpart to Quintilian's morally formed man may be the junzi, yet its ideal rests above all on moral and personal cultivation rather than political standing. As Confucius observed in the Analects, "When the state is well governed, he serves; when it is not, he withdraws." The contrast is telling: Confucianism did not require the junzi to be eloquent, whereas Quintilian made the formation of the perfect orator the culmination of education, seeing eloquence, grounded in virtue and knowledge, as essential to the fullest realization of the individual.

Political structures also shaped the two rhetorical traditions differently. In Athens, persuasion was fundamentally public, directed toward assemblies and collective bodies. During China's Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BC), by contrast, itinerant thinkers and advisers traveled from state to state, seeking rulers willing to heed their counsel. Confucius was among them.

Political persuasion was thus more often directed upward, toward individual sovereigns; later, arguments were also conveyed through memorials, remonstrances and other forms of official writing. China consequently developed a rhetorical tradition in which persuasive writing assumed an especially prominent place alongside oral persuasion.

"China's rhetorical landscape changed dramatically during the first half of the 20th century. Amid social upheaval, political speech increasingly reached a mass audience through rallies and other forms of public mobilization. As revolutionary movements sought to reach largely non-literate workers and peasants, language had to be vivid, accessible, and attuned to its audience," said Huang. "Chairman Mao Zedong, who insisted that political language draw on the living speech of the masses, was among its most influential practitioners."

In 1416, the complete Institutio Oratoria was rediscovered at the abbey of Saint Gall by Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini, helping restore Quintilian's educational vision to Renaissance intellectual life, when humanists were once again asking what education might make of a human being. Centuries and cultures apart, Greek, Roman and Chinese thinkers asked a similar question in different ways: how should learning shape the person, and what should that person do with what they have learned?

The answers were never identical, yet they shared a conviction that learning was never an end in itself, but a way of becoming fully human.