Much influenced by Cicero, Quintilian taught rhetoric and oratory in Rome for twenty years, numbering among his pupils the younger Pliny. In retirement he wrote his masterpiece, Institutio Oratoria, a massive treatise covering everything needed in oratory: address, memory, style, material, ancient models, discernment and learning. His dictum, ‘do not write so that you can be understood, but so that you cannot be misunderstood’ may represent an impossible ideal (see reader response theory) but at the very least an appropriate aim for philosophers.