Between Real and Fictional Eloquence

In his critical edition of fragmentary Roman oratory of the Augustan and Tiberian periods, Andrea Balbo has dealt with many declaimers who were active both in the schools and the forum or during centumviral trials. We know about their activity in particular from Seneca the Elder: among those are L. Arruntius Pater, C. Albucius Silus, M. Porcius Latro, and T. Labienus, as well as Cassius Severus. This chapter examines some of the school speeches witnessed by Seneca with regard to their stylistic features and compares the characteristics of these fictional orations with fragments of real oratory, giving particular attention to rhetorical elements that can be ascribed to actio, and special emphasis on the declamatory contributions of Albucius Silus and Porcius Latro.

ekphrasis in Latin literature

The imperial-age Greek Progymnasmata in which the term ekphrasis first appears show that the rhetoricians of the Greco-Roman world identified “descriptive speech” as an important component of rhetorical narrative and other elements of an oration insofar as it created “vividness” (ἐνάργεια) and “clarity” (ͅσαφήνεια) so as to bring persons, places, events, objects, etc. “before the eyes” (ὑπ’ ὅψιν) of listeners. The Roman rhetoricians draw upon Greek concepts and terminology to express the value in oratory of vividness (evidentia, illustratio, repraesentatio) imparted through description (descriptio, sub oculos subiectio, etc.). Many examples of such techniques can be found in Roman oratory as well as the Roman historians, who, like most Roman authors, share with the orators a strong familiarity with rhetoric. But if, in general, neither oratory nor historiography exhibits a high degree of self-consciousness about differences between ekphraseis/descriptiones in Greek and Latin, one type of ekphrasis—that of art objects in Roman poetry and the Roman novel—does. This constitutes one reason why it merits separate attention, in spite of the fact that the Progymnasmata suggest that in Antiquity it was viewed as a subcategory of the larger phenomenon. Many of the ways the Latin authors use ekphrasis of art (real or imagined) are, again, drawn directly from Greek practice. For example, these ekphrases often represent in metaliterary fashion the larger text in which they appear (a technique known in modern discussions as mise en abyme) or, in a related gesture, allude through analepsis and prolepsis (flashback and “flash-forward”) to other parts of the main text. They often interrupt the course of the larger text’s narrative by encouraging its audience to concentrate on a visual narrative within the art object and yet demand to be integrated into the larger narrative, however problematically or imperfectly, by an interpreting audience. Whether implicitly or explicitly, moreover, they often affirm verbal art’s capability to express things that a silent art object cannot and thus seem to assert the primacy of the text over the image. All of these are inherited Greek techniques; but the Latin authors extend the self-referential quality of ekphrasis’ conventional functions to encompass focused scrutiny of the relationship between Greek and Roman culture. We can sometimes discern, moreover, ways in which allusions to Greek elements of actual painting, sculpture, architecture, etc. enhance this dimension of Roman ekphrasis. Latin authors’ uses of these interrelated techniques develop and change over time.

Tablets of Memory

This chapter focuses on one of the foundational images in Western epistemology: that memory is like a wax tablet. Charting the origins of the figure in the theories of mind of Plato and Aristotle through its development in the Roman practice of an oratorical ars memoriae (“art of memory”) as described by the Auctor ad Herennium, Cicero, and Quintilian, it recovers a variety of ways that writing and thinking were connected in the ancient imagination. Especially within theoretical handbooks of the discipline of Roman oratory, memory was understood fundamentally to be a practice dependent upon and at the service of written texts. From the tabula rasa to the “memory palace,” the tablet functioned as both tool and metaphor for Roman thought.

Reconstructing Republican Oratory in Cassius Dio’s Roman History

This chapter explores the way in which Cassius Dio—a third-century Greek historian of the Roman Republic—used published oratory of the late Republic as a basis for his own historiographical speeches. It argues that, far from belonging in a sophistic thought-world divorced from their depicted historical context, Cassius Dio’s historiographical speeches display a marked attention for preserving not only specific arguments, but also the rhetorical strategies and turns of phrase used to make those arguments in the oratory of the first century AD. While Cicero inevitably appears to predominate in Dio’s register of sources for Roman oratory, this chapter nevertheless demonstrates Dio’s awareness of non-Ciceronian oratory—such as the speeches of Catulus, Hortensius, and M. Antonius—preserved in quoted material and testimonies of these orators in Ciceronian texts, which the historian reproduced accordingly.

Fragments of Epideictic Oratory

Funeral eulogies are among the older examples of Roman oratory. The practice of honouring the dead with a laudatio funebris (funeral oration) was in the earliest stage reserved to males, but from the late Republic it became customary for women as well. This chapter examines the fragments and testimonia of female funeral eulogies. Although these remains are not abundant, they open some significant unusual perspectives on Roman oratory. First, they show how a speaker managed the task of eulogizing a woman in a society where the rules of rhetoric were laid out by men and intended for the encomium of men. Secondly, they raise other issues which go beyond the boundaries of ‘gender’ differences: laudationes funebres were performed in different venues and before different audiences, according to the social standing of the speaker and the deceased. These aspects strongly affected the aim of the speech, its content, and its style.

Gaius Titius, Orator and Poeta. (Cic. Brut. 167 and Macrob. Sat. 3.16.4–16)

Starting with an analysis of a section of Cicero’s history of Roman oratory,Brutus (167). the intention of this chapter is to throw new light on the biography and oratorical activity of C. Titius, who was active in the second century BC. First of all, the chapter aims to delineate the chronological contours of Titius’ life through the evidence gained from an examination of an extract from the Saturnalia by fifth-century AD writer Macrobius (3.16.15 s.), in which a broad fragment of Titius’ suasio legis Fanniae is presented. In the second place, the chapter offers some hypothesis on the activity of Titius as a dramatic poet.