[A fine succinct description of his Cambridge PhD dissertation on the warring trivium:]
From the beginning, the trivium was beset by rivalry between the brain hemispheres, later known in Swift's time as the wars of the Ancients and the Moderns, with grammar and rhetoric usually holding control of the trivium against the rival claims of the dialecticians. Cicero, following the rhetorician Isocrates (a contemporary of Plato) and Quintilian, established the basic pattern for civilized education in the West, whether of prince or poet (reaffirmed by St. Augustine four centuries later), as the alignment of encyclopedic wisdom and eloquence.