obliged to condemn, as in the case of Seneca, he bestows generous and even extravagant praise on such merit as he can find. He can cordially admire even Sallust, the true fountain-head of the style which he combats, while he will not suffer Lucilius to lie under the aspersions of Horace. The passages in which Quintilian reviews the literature of Greece and Rome are justly celebrated. The judgments which he passes may be in many instances traditional, but, looking to all the circumstances of the time, it seems remarkable that there should then have lived at Rome a single man who could make them his own and give them expression. The form in which these judgments are rendered is admirable. The gentle justness of the sentiments is accompanied by a curious felicity of phrase. Who can forget “the immortal swiftness of Sallust,” or “the milky richness of Livy,” or how “Horace soars now and then, and is full of sweetness and grace, and in his varied forms and phrases is most fortunately bold”? Ancient literary criticism perhaps touched its highest point in the hands of Quintilian. To comprehensive sympathy and clear intellectual vision Quintilian added refined tenderness and freedom from self assertion. Taking him all in all, we may say that his personality must have been the most attractive of his time—more winning and at the same time more lofty than that of the younger Pliny, his pupil, into whom no small portion of the master's spirit, and even some tincture of the master's literary taste, was instilled. It does not surprise us to hear that Quintilian attributed any success he won as a pleader to his command of pathos, a quality in which his great guide Cicero excelled. In spite of some extravagances of phrase, Quintilian's lament (in his sixth book) for his girl-wife and his boy of great promise is the most pathetic of all the lamentations for bereavement in which Latin literature is so rich. In his precepts about early education Quintilian continually shows his shrinking from cruelty and oppression.
Quintilian for the most part avoids passing opinions on the problems of philosophy, religion and politics. The professed philosopher he disliked almost as much as did Isocrates. He deemed that ethics formed the only valuable part of philosophy and that ethical teaching ought to be in the hands of the rhetoricians. In the divine government of the universe he seems to have had a more than ornamental faith, though he doubted the immortality of the soul. As to politics Quintilian, like others of his time, felt free to eulogize the great anti-Caesarean leaders of the dying republic, but only because the assumption was universal that the system they had championed was gone for ever. But Quintilian did not trouble himself. as Statius did, to fling stones at the emperors Caligula and Nero, who had missed their deification. He makes no remark, laudatory or otherwise, on the government of any emperor before Domitian. No character figured more largely in the rhetorical controversies of the schools than the ideal despot, but no word ever betrayed a consciousness that the actual occupant of the Palatine might. exemplify the theme. Quintilian has often been reproached with his Hattery of Domitian. No doubt it was fulsome. But it is confined to two or three passages, not thrust continually upon the reader, as by Statius and Martial. To refuse the charge of Domitian’s expected successors would have been perilous, and equally perilous would it have been to omit from the Institutio Oratoria all mention of the emperor. And there was at the time only one dialect in which a man of letters could speak who set any value on his personal safety. There was a choice between extinction and the writing of a few sentences in the loathsome court language, which might serve as an official test of loyalty.
The Latin of Quintilian is not always free from the faults of style which he condemns in others. It also exhibits many of the usages and constructions which are characteristic of the silver Latin. But no writer of the decadence departs less widely from the best models of the late republican period. The language is on the whole clear and simple, and varied without resort to rhetorical devices and poetical conceits. Besides the Institutio Oratoria, there have come down to us under Quintilian’s name 19 longer (ed. Lehnert, 1905) and 145 shorter (ed. Ritter, 1884> Declamationes, or school exercitations on themes like those in the Controversiae of Seneca the elder. The longer pieces are certainly not Quintilian's. The shorter were probably published, if not by himself, at least from notes taken at his lessons. It is strange that they could ever have been supposed to belong to a later century; the style proclaims them to be of Quintilian's school and time. The works of Quintllian have often been edited. Of the editions of the whole works the chief is that by Burmann (1720); of the Institutio Oratoria that by Spalding, completed by Zumpt and Bonnell (1798-1834, 5th ed., Meister, 1882, the last Volume containing a lexicon), and that by Halm (1868), and another by Meister (1886); Eng. trans., J. S. Watson (1856). The tenth book of the Institutio Oratoria as often been separately edited, as by Krueger (ed. 3, 1888), Peterson (1891), Bonnell, Mayor and others. (J. S. R.)
QUINTUS SMYRNAEUS, Greek epic poet, probably flourished in the latter part of the 4th century A.D. He is sometimes
called Quintus Calaber, because the only MS. of his poem was
discovered at Otranto in Calabria by Cardinal Bessarion in
1450. According to his own account (xii. 310), he tried his
hand at poetry in his early youth, while tending sheep at
Smyrna. His epic in fourteen books, known as Τὰ μεθ’ Ὄμηρον
or Posthomerica, takes up the tale of Troy at the point where
Homer's Iliad breaks off (the death of Hector), and carries it
down to the capture of the city by the Greeks. The first five
books, which cover the same ground as the Aetlziopis of Arctinus
of Miletus, describe the doughty deeds and deaths of Penthesileia
the Amazon, of Memnon, son of the Morning, and of Achilles; the
funeral games in honour of Achilles, the contest for the arms of
Achilles and the death of Ajax. The remaining books relate
the exploits of Neoptolemus, Eurypylus and Deiphobus, the
deaths of Paris and Oenone, the capture of Troy by means of
the wooden horse, the sacrifice of Polyxena at the grave of
Achilles, the departure of the Greeks, and their dispersal by
the storm. The poet has no originality; in conception and style
his work is closely modelled on Homer. His materials are
borrowed from the cyclic poems from which Virgil (with whose
works he was probably acquainted) also drew, in particular
the Aethiopis of Arctinus and the Little Iliad of Lesches.
Editio princeps by Aldus Manutius (1504); Köchly (ed. major with elaborate prolegomena, 1850; ed. minor, 1853); Z. Zimmermann (author of other valuable articles on the poet), (1891); see also Kehmptzov, De Quinti Smyrnaei Fontibus ac Mythopoiia (1889); C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Etude sur . . . Quinta de Smyrnee (1857); F. A. Paley, Quintus Smyrnaeus and the “Homer” of the tragic Poets (1879); G. W. Paschal, A Study of Quintus Smyrnaeus (Chicago, 1904).
QUIPUS (Khipus, Qippos), the ancient Peruvian name for a method of recording which was in use at the time of the arrival
of the Spaniards. It consisted of a cord two feet in length to
which were attached a series of knotted-strings (Peruv. quipu,
a knot) hanging like a fringe. These strings were coloured,
and the knots, their number and size, their distance apart, the
colours, the order in which the coloured threads hung, all had
a signification, e.g. white was silver, yellow gold; white meant
peace, red war, &c. In this manner' a rough register of important
events, of births, deaths and marriages, and other
statistics was kept, the quipus even constituting a rude history
of the' people. They were also much used for conveying orders
to military chiefs in the provinces.
The idea of knotted strings to aid memory is so simple that it is common to many peoples. A Pelew islander, visiting England, knotted strings as a diary of all that struck him during his travels. In the Hawaiian Islands native carriers have knotted-string records of their rounds. The Peruvian quipus is simply the perfecting of a system of mnemonics common to the Red Indians. See also Wampum.
QUIRE (in earlier forms quaer, quair and quere, from the O. Fr. quaier, modern cahier, a copy-book, manuscript book; Lat. quaterni, set of four, from quattuor), originally the term for four sheets of paper or parchment folded so as to make eight leaves, the ordinary unit in manuscripts and early printed books; the term is now chiefly applied to a twentieth part of a ream of writing paper, twenty-four sheets. In bookbinding and publishing the expression “in quires” is used of the sheets of a book when not folded or bound. “Quire” was formerly
