ABSTRACT
Quintilian covers the whole range of the rhetorical curriculum, reflecting the traditional teaching of Roman schools, theoretical sources and his own extensive experience of forensic pleading. He was clearly familiar with Greek rhetorical theory and many details of his teaching can be directly compared with Greek examples. In Book 4 of the Institutio oratoria, Quintilian includes some remarks on quality of vividness in his treatment of the statement of facts. This placement suggests that, rather like the authors of the lost Greek Progymnasmata mentioned by ps.-Hermogenes, he considered enargeia as a quality to be added to various types of discourse. Ultimately, whether in poetry, rhetoric or historiography, whether it represents credible or incredible things, verbally produced enargeia is always a matter of illusion. Enargeia is therefore far more than a figure of speech, or a purely linguistic phenomenon.
