Paura e formazione: Quintiliano tra pedagogia, retorica e tradizione degli adfectus

This paper examines the role of fear (metus) in Quintilian, showing how it is regarded at once as a pedagogical limitation and a rhetorical resource. On the educational level, the Institutio oratoria highlights the risks connected with a training based on coercion and corporal punishment, which produce shame, inhibition, and, in extreme cases, traumatic outcomes. Quintilian acknowledges the limited and temporary effectiveness of fear, preferring instead tools such as praise, ambition, and measured reproach, which are better suited to fostering deeper and more lasting learning. On the rhetorical side, by contrast, metus takes on a strategic function: the orator must be able to evoke and modulate this primary emotion in order to influence judges and audiences, making use of techniques of amplification and vivid representation (phantasia). Quintilian balances his disapproval of fear as a teaching method with its usefulness as an oratorical tactic: a skilled orator must know how to manage and even simulate emotions in order to achieve his goals, while still distinguishing productive anxiety from paralyzing fear.