this time, Quintilian attempted to interject some of the idealism of an earlier time. "Political oratory was dead, and everyone in Rome knew it was dead; but Quintilian deliberately chooses the oratory of a past generation as his educational ideal" (Gwynn, 188).

For hundreds of years during the Middle Ages, European scholars only knew about the Institutio from quotations in other works and little fragments that they recovered. However, a complete copy was found in 1416 in the Monastery of St. Gall (St. Gallen), Switzerland:

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