Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise by Laurent Pernot

Abstract

Reviewed by: Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise by Laurent Pernot John T. Kirby Laurent Pernot. Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise. (Ashley and Peter Larkin Series in Greek and Roman Culture.) Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. xiv + 166 pp. Cloth. $50. This book comes from one of the current world authorities on epideictic rhetoric and oratory and represents the summation of nearly a quarter-century of thinking on the topic. Beginning with the appearance of his massive Rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde gréco-romain (1993), which reached almost 900 pages in two volumes, Laurent Pernot has established himself as a presence in Classics generally, in Rhetoric specifically, and in the study of epideictic above all. The present work had its origin in a seminar hosted by the Rhetoric Society of America in 2012, under the larger auspices of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. αἱ δεύτεραί πως φροντίδες σοφώτεραι, and this volume, though not as expansive as Pernot's 1993 opus, takes advantage both of long reflection and of the proliferation of scholarship in the intervening years. Pernot sharpens his focus somewhat in this latest book, identifying two major areas of research that need at this point to be addressed. First, "… while epideictic is important, its role remains unclear. Unlike judicial and deliberative speeches, epideictic orations are not meant to elicit any vote or any decision on [End Page 184] the part of the listener. From a functional point of view, one is right to wonder what use they were" (viii). Second, the very polysemy of the term "epideictic" raises some interpretive difficulties (ibid.), which Pernot proposes to address. The body of the text is structured in four chapters. The first chapter, "The Unstoppable Rise of Epideictic," is intended "to establish rhetorical praise as a historical object, by defining it, by describing it in its context, and by retracing its evolution" (ix). The second chapter, "The Grammar of Praise," "analyzes the technique of praise, as stipulated by the theoreticians and used by the orators," and situates the phenomenon within what Pernot calls the histoire des mentalités (x). Chapter 3, "Why Epideictic Rhetoric?," examines "the role of the technique and the tensions that praise can carry," taking into account both the material of epideictic oratory itself and the critiques of the genus by the ancients, particularly in a philosophical context (ibid.). The fourth chapter, "New Approaches in Epideictic," offers several avenues of interpretation: "what the speeches leave unspoken … a psychopathology of encomium … and comparative epideictic" (ibid.). The whole is furnished with endnotes, a bibliography, and a brief index. The approach in Chapter 1 is essentially empirical, assessing the extant ancient sources, both for early examples of epideictic and for early analyses of the genus as such. The trajectory of epideictic is traced up through the Second Sophistic (and I say "up" because Pernot himself speaks of an "irresistible ascension": "Of secondary importance in Classical Greece and Republican Rome, and obscure in the Hellenistic era, epideictic came into its own amid the Greco-Roman world of the first centuries after Christ," 27). This is a development that he finds "both historically unexpected and intriguing [. …] Paradoxically, the Imperial period turns out to be creative" (28). Chapter 2 tours the "body of rules and usage through which the speakers expressed themselves and conveyed their messages" (29); these include the topoi, the classification of the objects of praise, the structure of the encomia of persons, and guidelines for how to praise cities, a god, or animals and inanimate objects. Particularly useful is the typology of epideictic speeches (50–55). Much more could be said, in general, about tropes and figures, but the apposite section here (57–62) is in proportion to the overall work. Living, as we do, in an era in which unbridled vituperation in the public arena is now almost commonplace, the reader may be surprised to find only three pages here on the rhetoric of blame (63–65); but this half of the epideictic formula does seem to have remained somewhat underdeveloped in the ancient theorists, as well as (apart from school exercises) in the making of self-contained speeches of blame...