Led by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus Simulacrum
About this course
The last module of the school, and the last of the trivium.
Everything has been separated: invention from arrangement, arrangement from composition, composition from style, style from memory, memory from delivery. That separation was necessary — five things cannot be learned at once — and it is false to how a speech is actually made, where every canon constrains every other. An argument requiring four qualifications may be sound and undeliverable. A structure with no clear divisions cannot be held as matters and must be held as words, which costs everything. A periodic sentence must be spoken as a period, and a speaker who cannot sustain it should not have written it.
The declamation was the capstone of Roman rhetorical education: a full speech on a set case, in two kinds — the controversia, a forensic case built on stated laws and facts, and the suasoria, deliberative advice at a moment of decision.
Quintilian complains about what declamation had become in his own time: drifted from preparation for public life into a performance genre with its own conventions, remote from any court that ever sat. His remedy is that it should be as close to real cases as possible, and this module follows him.
The central exercise is the one modern training mostly omits: arguing the same case on both sides. You cannot know where your case is weak until you have built the opposing one, and cannot anticipate what will be said against you unless you have said it. And the guard that keeps it from being sophistry: afterwards you say which case is actually better, and why. Omitting that step turns the exercise into a demonstration that anything can be argued — which is Plato's charge from Module 1, and which is what bad declamation actually became.
Led by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus Simulacrum
The question
Seven sittings. You begin by finding three places in your own material
Outcome
The student can compose and deliver a complete speech, integrating all
Sub-units
Practice scenarios
You are asked to prepare a speech for a cause you believe to be wrong. The person asking is a friend, the fee is significant, and — this is the difficulty — the case is not indefensible. There are real arguments on that side; you have already, involuntarily, thought of three, and one is rather good. You are also fairly sure that if you decline, someone less scrupulous will take it and make worse arguments.
Your goals