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.

A history of humanity through the higly coloured lens of hyperbaton (conflicts between logical and rhetorical precedence)

Much of the effectiveness of Greek prose depends upon a non-logical development of the thought. A bare logical development would kill the effect (“striking colours, placed side by side, kill each other” – Denniston). This is quite obvious in a reading of any Greek text. Hyperbaton is what strikes most. Whenever a word refuses to wait it will either press to the fore taking its turn in the logical development or be placed late by dislocation of natural order. 

Ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῦτο ἐὰν ὁμολογῶμεν (Plat., Prot., 360a)
(but that too if we admit)
 

instead of

 Ἀλλὰ ἐὰν ὁμολογῶμεν καὶ τοῦτο
 (but if we admit that too).

Τρέφεται δέ, ὦ Σώκρατες, ψυχὴ τίνι; (Prot., 313c)

(nourished, Socrates, is a soul with what?)

 instead of 

ψυχὴ δὲ, τίνι τρέφεται, ὦ Σώκρατες;

(with what, Socrates, is a soul nourished?)