The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

We know about the Roman system largely from the writings of Quintilian, the “master teacher of Rome.” Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, born around the year AD 35, headed a school of rhetoric that enrolled students from the city’s most illustrious families, including the emperor Domitian’s two heirs. In his masterwork, the Institutio Oratoria (subtitle: Education of an Orator in Twelve Books), Quintilian unapologetically asserted the value of copying. From authors “worthy of our study,” he wrote, “we must draw our stock of words, the variety of our figures, and our methods of composition” so as to “form our minds on the model of every excellence.” The educator continued: “There can be no doubt that in art, no small portion of our task lies in imitation, since, although invention came first and is all-important, it is expedient to imitate whatever has been invented with success, and it is a universal rule of life that we should wish to copy what we approve in others.”