Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry by Irene Peirano Garrison

Abstract

Reviewed by: Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry by Irene Peirano Garrison Michele Kennerly Irene Peirano Garrison. Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 295 pp. ISBN 978-1-316-21935-5 In our free-verse universe, poetry only seems unbound; every so often, it is invoked precisely because it cannot shake common knowledge of its traditional formal and affective structures. For instance, in the 1980s, New York governor Mario Cuomo distinguished courtship from leadership with his quip “you campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton used the line against Barack Obama, attempting to call into question his ability to pivot from charming to commanding. In 2020, then California senator Kamala Harris, interviewed while seeking her party’s nomination for the presidency, explained that policy proposals have “to be relevant,” not “a beautiful sonnet,” suggesting form can come at the expense of function. These examples show how orators operating in a tricky rhetorical culture use poetry and prose to differentiate modes of influence. They are part of a lengthy lineage. In Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry, classicist Irene Peirano Garrison makes what is not the first case but what may be the fullest that distinctions posited between ancient poetry and oratory, verse and talk, poetics and rhetoric, are not fixed and absolute but strategic and contested. What is at stake in the making of those distinctions? That is an important question to ask of any time period, but Peirano Garrison s focus on Rome’s early imperial period sets her up to oppose what for a long time was prevailing scholarly opinion: that, during that period, the purity of poetry was adulterated by rhetoric, with Ovid being the first faulty filter. Peirano Garrison challenges the logic (and imagery) of that opinion, arguing that the very assumption that poetry and rhetoric were ever self-evidently [End Page 211] discrete and separate is not supported by the ancient evidence. To make her case, Peirano Garrison partitions that evidence into three sections: 1) Poetry in Rhetoric; 2) Oratory in Epic; 3) “Rhetoricizing” Poetry. A short introduction offers operative definitions of a few key terms. The first part begins with the chapter “Poetry and Rhetoric and Poetry in Rhetoric,” in which Peirano Garrison stretches from Gorgias to Derrida to take the long view of purported disassociations, connections, and interrelations between the two verbal arts. Pinpointing imperial Rome, she identifies eloquentia and facundia as terms for capacities of powerful and fluent speech that accommodate both orators and poets. It is precisely because they share in those capacities that orators and poets pursue and argue about who does what better under their respective constraints. The remainder of the chapter spotlights pleasure (voluptas), showiness (ostentatio), and enhancement (ornatus), since debates about the closeness of poetry and oratory tend to bunch around those concepts. The second chapter, “Poetry and the Poetic in Seneca the Elder’s Controuersiae and Suasoriaeseeks to understand and then correct the misguided view—in Seneca’s time and now, to the degree that anyone still clings to it—that the popularity of declamation in the early imperial period indexes its broken (that is, poeticized) rhetorical culture. Garrison focuses on how Seneca, himself from Spain, vaunts a Spanish orator (Porcius Latro) over an ostensibly eastern orator (Arellius Fuscus), because Latro instructs in what an uncorrupt, properly Roman oratorical style should sound like. Whereas Fuscus’s concoctions are bad imitations of good poets, Latro’s controlled persuasions render him so exemplary a speaker that Ovid and Vergil emulate him in their verse (74). “The Orator and the Poet in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria,” the final chapter in this section, ranges across the Institutio but dwells on book-rolls 8, 9, 10, and 12, since it is there that Quintilian most explicitly erects boundaries between poetry and oratory, even while he quotes and borrows extensively from Vergil to specify an orator’s unique training and trajectory. In this first part of the book, readers may notice Peirano Garrison’s unflagged (and frequent) use of the word “prose” in her discussions and translations. It seems important, even helpful, to her...