QUINTILIAN, SENECA, IMITATIO: RE-READING

Rhetoric is about elitism. A man’s ability to speak in a particular fash-ion signals that he belongs among the elite. And yet for as long as there has been rhetoric, there have also been teachers of rhetoric: those whose instruction promises the student admittance into this coterie through the mastery of a set of skills.1 In the study of the teaching of rhetoric, however, we have been hesitant to attribute much in the way of rhetorical style to the “textbooks ” of the rhetoricians. I would like to show that Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria not only teaches the skills that allow students to be classed among the elite, but that its very rhetoric also stratifi es the author and various readers of the text. Quintilian’s treatment of Seneca at the end of his reading list for students of rhetoric in Book 10 will serve as a case study for the use of rhetoric in the Institutio Oratoria. The passage has generally been read as a negative assessment of Seneca. While much scholarship has attempted to defi ne precisely Quintilian’s opinion of Seneca, this paper will not b