The art of puppetry. What made Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory so successful

Marcus Quintilianus was a very conscientious and cautious man. He saw nothing wrong with the idea that man should be the measure for everything. Man is partly animal, it is true. What is left is social. To the extent that he may be manipulated by language control. Quintilian's instruction on how to achieve this was a gift to all manipulators of history seeking present authority. His work should have been given the title How to fool a man into acting as a perfect social puppet. He carried out coordinated research for the perfection of humankind. And this was two thousand years before the publication of Heinrich Kleist's essay On the Marionette Theatre in which puppets are described as being more graceful than humans.