Quintilian on Memory and Delivery

This chapter discusses Quintilian’s account of delivery and memory, especially (though not solely) with regard to his extended treatment of them in Book 11. With delivery, it surveys such issues as his discussion of the appropriate gesture and voice to be adopted by the orator, and the pragmatics of delivering a speech before a Roman audience. It discusses Quintilian’s heavily gendered and class-based account of appropriate delivery, where the orator has to adopt manners appropriate for a high-status male and eschew the contrary; it also considers the uneasy relationship between high-status oratory and low-status acting. It focuses above all on the highly textualized account of performance in Quintilian, where delivery is closely linked to an assumed written text, and argues that this is the consequence of Quintilian’s classicism, where oratory is associated with an established literary canon on a par with other literary genres. With memory, it briefly discusses his mnemotechnics, but argues that Quintilian is pulled between two incompatible desires: the classicism which leads him to want to associate memorization with fidelity to a written text, but also the pragmatism which requires a large measure of spontaneity and improvisation, which may be hindered if the orator has prepared a memorized text in advance.