Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire

Abstract

At a time of renewed interest in Greek rhetoric during the Roman Empire, Chain of Gold establishes itself as an essential text that fills a gap in criticism of this period known as the Second Sophistic. Jarratt observes that the political mode has often been strangely ignored in readings of Second Sophistic texts, especially given their unique postcolonial context, the complex power relations of Greek sophists to their audiences, and the backdrop of potential imperial violence to those who would risk critique. Chain of Gold begins to address this omission, with rigor and creativity, through a sustained inquiry into the politics of rhetorical form.Jarratt’s great insight is that the complicated political role of these sophists required a careful balancing of limited free speaking (parrhēsía) with safer and more effective modes of “figured discourse” as conceptualized by Frederick Ahl (1984) utilizing persuasive strategies that relied on obliqueness, strategic silences, and especially references to classical Greek literature and myth that would have different meanings for their Greek and Roman audiences. Reading these cloaked arguments with attunement to the political, Jarratt finds manifold visions of good government–“projections of possible futures” (21)–as well as coded critiques of empire.Jarratt’s approach results in truly innovative readings of prominent Second Sophistic texts. For example, the chapter analyzing Philostratus’s Imagines, an extensive collection of ekphrases describing over sixty imaginary paintings, eschews the approach most critics have taken, which is to read the descriptions as a demonstration of Philostratus’s own aesthetic theories and commitments. Instead, Jarratt highlights the political dimensions of the Imagines’ colonial, pedagogical framing device–a Greek sophist lecturing a group of upper-class student-age Roman boys about the paintings–and the narrative content of the descriptions themselves.In her reading, Jarratt ambitiously clusters each ekphrasis into various topoi of ethnicity, geography, and gender. She then analyzes how each subject, such as foreign rulers or women, is treated across the entire set of descriptions. This allows her to argue persuasively, for example, that the treatment of women across the Imagines emphasizes sympathy, respect, and admiration. (This is the first scholarly analysis in at least eighty years that considers every one of Philostratus’s descriptions.) Her conclusion–that Philostratus uses ekphrasis in order to enable his Roman audience to imagine the “responsibilities of acting in a power-laden multicultural, imperial context” and to “treat their colonial subjects with care” (100)–breaks new ground for a rhetorical genre usually seen as essentially poetic.Other chapters read figured discourse in more immediately recognizable political contexts, such as Aristides’s Roman Oration. Jarratt shows that, though Aristides ostensibly seems to praise Rome (both city and empire), the text actually offers deep and pervasive “undercurrents of critique” (46) thanks to specific topics Aristides is silent about and Homeric allusions that emphasize absence and hollowness, creating an antisublime aesthetic suggesting the political failures of Rome.Chain of Gold assumes no previous knowledge of the Second Sophistic, and the range of texts in each accessible chapter provides a thorough introduction to the subject, spanning the first four centuries of the common era, a wide range of rhetorical genres, and a set of authors whose relationship to the empire and ability to speak freely varied greatly. The case studies themselves present compelling and exciting models of reading coded political positioning relevant not just to rhetoric scholars and students but to those working in postcolonial studies, comparative literature, and classics. For historians of rhetoric familiar with this literature, Jarratt’s readings are creative and often genuinely surprising, inspiring, one hopes, a new generation of rhetoric scholars to grapple with these complex and until recently underestimated texts.