Quintilian, Progymnasmata, and Rhetorical Education Today

ABSTRACT

There has been a surge of scholarly interest lately in the progymnasmata, those ordered exercises in composition that played such an important role in rhetorical education from antiquity to the Renaissance. Comprising an integrated program in literary, civic, and moral effectiveness, they offer a compelling alternative to language arts pedagogy today, which seems too often driven by the goal of “college and career readiness.” But to be truly useful as a pedagogical model, the progymnasmata need to be embedded in something like the comprehensive educational philosophy of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.

Notes

^1. All references to the Institutio are to Russell’s 2001 English translation.

^2. My understanding of ancient Greek and Roman rhetorical education, and of the progymnasmata specifically, is indebted to Clark, Rhetoric; Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and New History; Lausberg; Marrou; Murphy; and Murphy and Wiese. Other sources are provided in the text itself.

^3. I have taught the progymnasmata most recently in an upper-level undergraduate English course titled Rhetoric, Writing, and Society; the online syllabus can be found at http://people.umass.edu/dfleming/english397R.html. I provide a modern version of the chreia exercise, using a quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr., in Fleming, “Rhetoric and Argumentation” 254. One difficulty in teaching the progymnasmata today is the lack of good, inexpensive English editions. For a useful list of the progymnasmata, with concise definitions and brief examples, see Gideon Burton’s “Forest of Rhetoric” website at http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm. For online versions of Malcolm Heath’s translation of Aphthonius, see http://www.rhetcomp.gsu.edu/~gpullman/2150/Aphthonius%20Progymnasmata.htm and http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~cla6mh/rhetoric/Aphthonius%20Progymnasmata.pdf. And for Lee Honeycutt’s online version of John Selby Watson’s 1856 English translation of the Instituio Oratoria, see http://rhetoric.eserver.org/quintilian/.

^4. But the argument that the progymnasmata were inherently conservative can be taken too far. “Indeed,” as George Kennedy argues, “a major feature of the exercises was stress on learning refutation or rebuttal” (Progymnasmata, x; see also Sloane). Ruth Webb shows how convention was often subverted in the exercises; see, e.g., Libanius’ defense of the Homeric villain Thersites (301). As she puts it, the materials students used were to be engaged, not memorialized. Webb also adduces evidence to show that the progymnasmata themselves adapted to historical change; from Theon to Nicolaus, for example, they become more epideictic, less forensic (314).