In the rhetorically circumscribed world that Cicero feared and that Caesar did so much to bring about, Quintilian operated a successful school of rhetoric, tutored the sons of the emperor Domitian, and composed the twelve-volume Institutio oratoria. The Institutio, published circa 95 ce, not only compiled and transmitted much of the Greek and Roman rhetorical tradition; it also raised troubling questions about that tradition’s viability – questions of the kind that will motivate the second part of this book. We might call these problems of decorum on the largest scale: issues not of fit between specific words and a particular rhetorical situation, but between broad norms of speech and large-scale political, institutional, and cultural conditions.