Beschreibung:

Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, in Latin with a word in Greek, two leaves from a manuscript on parchment [Italy, fifteenth century] Two leaves, with parts of book 1, chs. 1 & 4-5 (citing the Roman poet Horace), complete single columns of 37 lines in a fine and skilled humanist hand with a swooping ‘ct’-ligature and a capital ‘Q’ with a long curling fish-hook-like tail that lifts it high above the written line (written space 277 by 155mm.), Greek word in slightly lighter ink and perhaps supplied by another contemporary hand, part of a running title “LIBER” at head of one leaf, wide lower margins preserved, numerous blocks of marginalia (that on one leaf filling all of the lower margin and two-thirds of the vertical margin), small initial once opening book 1, ch. 5 now cut away, this and other holes now professionally filled with modern paper, recovered from bookbinding with discolouration through dirt from reuse there and areas of purple mould (also treated by modern conservator), versos rubbed and mostly illegible, but substantial parts of rectos easily readable and in fair condition, 356 by 280 mm. and 390 by 280mm. From a British private collection. Quintilian (or Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) was a rhetorician from Roman Hispania who lived from c. 35-c.100 AD., and survived one of the most politically turbulent periods of Roman history. After an education in Rome in the following of the orator Domitius Afar (d. 59), he entered the retinue of Emperor Galba, but was not close to that emperor - a fact which probably saved his life after Galba’s assassination in 69. During the Year of the Four Emperors which followed, Quintilian established a school of rhetoric, taking Pliny the Younger as a pupil, and probably also Juvenal and Tacitus. Vespasian made him a consul, and Domitian appointed him tutor to his heirs and nephews.The present text is his only surviving work, which he finished in retirement in 95 AD. Its influence was felt by St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Jerome in the fourth and fifth centuries, but waned quickly after that and was all but forgotten until a complete manuscript of this work was discovered in 1416 by the celebrated humanist text hunter, Poggio Braccolini, in the library of St. Gallen, “buried in rubbish and dust”. As Leonardo Aretino expounded in a letter to Poggio on learning of the discovery, “Oh! what a valuable acquisition! What an unexpected pleasure! Shall I then behold Quintilian whole and entire, who, even in his imperfect state, was so rich a source of delight? … But Quintilian is so consummate a master of rhetoric and oratory, that when, after having delivered him from his long imprisonment in the dungeons of the barbarians, you transmit him to this country, all the nations of Italy ought to assemble to bid him welcome ... Quintilian, an author whose works I will not hesitate to affirm, are more an object of desire to the learned than any others, excepting only Cicero’s dissertation De Republica”. These leaves may have been copied directly from that rediscovered codex, or with only Poggio’s copy between them. Quintilian is, perhaps, the rarest of all significant Roman authors on the market. The Schoenberg database records no codex as having been sold since that from the Sir Thomas Phillipps collection, his MS. 4534, sold by Sotheby’s on 21-25 March 1895, lot 925, last appearing in the sale of the library of H.B. Weaver at Christie’s, 29 March 1828, lot 489.