Ciceronian Rhetoric Research Articles

Chronotopes of exile and loss in Philip O'Sullivan Beare's Zoilomastix (c. 1626)☆

AbstractThis essay explores the relationship between an early modern exile and his native environment, as depicted in Philip O'Sullivan Beare's unfinished natural history Zoilomastix. Writing by turns in Latin, Spanish and Gaelic from the safety of the Habsburg court, O'Sullivan Beare marshalled Ciceronian rhetoric and Plinian wonder to argue for the conservation of interwoven natural and cultural environments. One of the earliest examples of national historiographies written from exile by erudite Irish figures, Zoilomastix has most often been read in terms of its political theology. Though understandable, such readings obscure O'Sullivan Beare's idiosyncratic treatments of self, state and nature. Additionally, such readings only partially consider the author's attempts to engage with the debates on ethnicity, natural law and resource capture which directed the actions of the English state. Adopting the dialogic framework of Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotope, this essay therefore explores the extent to which the genre of natural history was utilized to inform and influence contested narratives. It argues that O'Sullivan Beare's autobiographical account, and its relevance to the forthcoming ‘loss’ of his Gaelic world, has much to tell us in a time of ecological crisis.

President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the Victoria Day parade in the light of some Ciceronian rhetorical principles

The purpose of this article is to examine the manner in which three of the principles of Ciceronian rhetoric and oratory are used in the speech of President V. Putin on the occasion of the Victory Day parade. The first of them, regarding the auditor’s information, is partially respected by the Russian president, in that he presents too little data intended to provide a somewhat concrete picture of how Western countries have reported, over time, to Russia’s defense requirements. Next, we bring enough examples to demonstrate the orator’s preference for the principle that consists in convincing the audience by appealing to arguments of an affective nature. The third, convincing the public through ethical arguments, strictly depends on the achievement of the previous ones. The degree of respect for each one emerges from the specific quotes in the content. The natural conclusion of the approach is that the Russian president prefers only one of them, failing, in our opinion, to effectively capitalize on the other two, a fact that has (or should have) repercussions on the persuasion of the audience.

Slavery and Oratory: Frederick Douglass in the History of Rhetoric

The antislavery and antiracist oratory of Frederick Douglass is a powerful case study of the appropriation and transformation of “the master’s tools.” Douglass’s formative exposure to the classical rhetorical tradition is well known—but just as important are the ways in which he subverted it. He did so by developing a categorically new, hybrid role: the orator-slave. Slavery played an important part in the conceptual apparatus of the Ciceronian rhetoric that Douglass absorbed: it conceived of oratory as a willing, temporary submission to the harms that were commonly associated with slavery. An explanation of the force of Douglass’s oratory should begin with his translation of the orator-slave identification from the metaphorical to the literal plane. Drawing on Douglass’s self-education in rhetorical discipline and artifice, an account of the symbolic uses of slavery in classical rhetoric, and Douglass’s own oratory, I reconstruct his claim to embody classical rhetoric in a uniquely vivid way.

Ethics and the Orator: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality

Ethics and the Orator: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality

The Presence of Rome in Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Texts, Artefacts and Beliefs. Andrew Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii+248.

<i>The Presence of Rome in Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Texts, Artefacts and Beliefs</i>. Andrew Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii+248.

Rhetoric, mimesis and Elizabethan acting: lessons from Hamlet

This paper provides an introduction to my monograph The Players’ Advice to Hamlet, the publication of which followed a few weeks after the 2020 SFS conference, and it illustrates the argument of my book by focusing on Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”. I propose that the debate about Elizabethan acting within the domain of “original practices” or “OP” needs to escape from its present cul-de-sac by focusing upon rhetoric as accessed through the Latin sources, for these give more serious attention to questions of performance than English recensions. Ciceronian rhetoric was an approach to reading and performance in which the whole body was invested. Modern practitioners have been reluctant to move beyond the literary concept of rhetoric as a tool for constructing figures of speech, and to think how it relates to questions of character and identity. I demonstrate how the soliloquy in the Second Quarto, derived from Shakespeare’s autograph, is strategically punctuated (probably building on indications in the manuscript) in order to divide up the text with an astonishing symmetry on the basis of the breath, the prevailing emotions and the argument. This symmetry and logic are entirely obscured by punctuation for syntax.

The Horatian Tradition in Medieval Rhetoric: From the Twelfth-Century “Materia” Commentary to Landino 1482

Horace's Art of Poetry supplied the medieval schools with the only available classical doctrines on fiction and poetry before Aristotle's Poetics became widely studied in the fifteenth century. Horace exercized both practical and theoretical influence on literary exegesis, and shaped medieval and early Renaissance doctrines of composition by discussing the very nature of fiction, narrative techniques, authorial roles, description of character and tone, including performance and reading of a text. The anonymous commentators as well as the Dante commentator Francesco da Buti (1395) were deeply influenced by the twelfth-century “Materia” Commentary, but also by the Arabic notion of an independent art of poetics, and remained in lively dialogue with the teaching of Ciceronian rhetoric of invention, disposition, elocution, and delivery.

Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept by William Fitzgerald

374 BOOK REVIEWS MARGARETHA KRAMER-HAJOS Dartmouth College, Margaretha.T.Kramer.Hajos@dartmouth.edu * * * * * Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept. By WILLIAM FITZGERALD. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 240. Hardcover, $55.00. ISBN-13: 978-0226 -29949-5 Evoking the triple triumph held by Octavian after the battle of Actium, Vulcan’s shield in Aeneid 8 displays multiple ethnic groups in a wondrous and variegated array drawn from the far corners of empire. Such assortment highlights the Roman concept of variety as both an aesthetic and a political idea, an ancient precursor to our modern concept of diversity. Rich in such examples, William Fitzgerald’s book, Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept, offers a deeply engaging exploration of the classical roots and manifestations of varietas as an idea that circulates in multiple, overlapping discourses of antiquity— philosophical, imperial, aesthetic, linguistic—with a force-field that continues to shape contemporary thought. With a far-ranging discussion that begins with nuanced philological probing of the semantic fields of varius, including its Greek brethren (e.g. poikilos, daidalos), Fitzgerald unpacks the manifold ways that the ‘varietas complex’ radiates through different genres, authors, tropes, and historical periods. The reader encounters patchwork juxtapositions that exemplify varietas not only as the subject of Fitzgerald’s book but also as a principle organizing his selective analyses. Through five chapters, an introduction, and conclusion, Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept provides provocative readings of disparate texts that call attention to a neglected aesthetic vision inherited from antiquity. The introduction lays out the “why” of the book, challenging the normative critical pursuit of formal ‘unity’ in the works of classical authors, and advocating instead for a principle of “non-assimilation” or an aesthetics of variety that eschews balance and embraces the rhetorical abundance of copia. Chapter 1 excavates the rich veins of Greek and Latin meanings that run through words etymologically or semantically connected to the ‘varietas complex’ in passages of English poetry, including Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare, Pope, and Louis MacNeice. Classical authors—Cicero, Catullus, Ovid, Horace, Vergil and Plautus—serve to explicate and display such semantic range, with a focus on the visual and phenomenological meanings of varius and its kin. In the second chapter on “Variety’s Context,” Fitzgerald gives an erudite and hopscotch overview of scholarly, philosophical and artistic defenses and BOOK REVIEWS 375 formulations of variety, exploring particularly the conceptual nexus of varietas, nature, human artistry, and God. Displaying a masterful and varied range of his own, Fitzgerald juxtaposes the role of varietas in the theodicies of Christian texts with Vergil’s deployment of the concept in the first Georgic. Questions of aesthetic pleasure in relation to varietas dominate the rest of the chapter, with analysis of its temporal dimension as a corrective to boredom and satietas, and its visual aspect, often expressed in metaphors of jewels or mosaics, as ultimately an aesthetics of political diversity; thus, Flaubert’s Salammbo evokes ethnic variegation as a brilliant multiplicity symbolized by the heterogeneous sparkle of precious stones. Further examples drawn from contemporary art, whether the Haida sculpture of Bill Reid or the video installations of Nam June Paik, as analyzed by Fredric Jameson, demonstrate the relevance of varietas as a concept with a claim on our multicultural society. This chapter puts to rest any doubt that such classical concepts persist as hermeneutic lenses for self-reflection. Chapter 3 homes in on three specific Latin authors, Pliny the Younger, Lucretius, and Horace, to examine how they engage variety as an aesthetic principle that shapes the world-view of their texts. Here, Fitzgerald eschews the wide-ranging analysis and broad scope of the previous chapters and focuses in depth on varietas as a textual strategy. For Pliny, it serves to alleviate the anxiety of a single pursuit, reinforcing provisionality and intermittency as characteristics of the elite life (88). Lucretius, in turn, prizes variety as nature’s abundance, or copia (recalling, as Fitzgerald indicates, the connection with Ciceronian rhetoric). The Epicurean author’s analogies between the multiple permutations of language and the variously arranged atoms of the universe are provocatively set against the verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The discussion of Horace in this chapter...

Crimen Extrajudiciale: Ethics of Plagiarism and Erudite Sociability in J. Thomasius and J. C. Schwartz

This article deals with the ways of approaching plagiarism in the early modern Europe, mostly in the writings of two German intellectuals, J. Thomasius and J. C. Schwartz. The phenomenon of plagiarism is treated not only as an instrument of “symbolic violence” and “policing force of knowledge” in the Republic of letters, but primarily as a point of intersection of different discourses of the erudite culture: jurisprudence, moral medicine, Ciceronian rhetoric, hermeneutics and simultaneously – as a touchstone revealing the various dimensions of rival models of scientific knowledge (Protestant Aristotelianism, Barock eruditism, enlightened rationalism).

Medieval Rhetorical Education: Ethical praxis in Metalogicon

John of Salisbury (1115/20-1180) defended the liberal arts as his preferred educational system throughout Metalogicon. This article addresses the following question: what are the implications of John’s position about the relationship between rhetorical education and ethical praxis? First, Metalogicon is framed as John’s defense of rhetorical education. Second, John’s definition of rhetoric is interpreted as a synthesis of Ciceronian rhetoric and Aristotelian dialectics. Third, ethical praxis is framed by John as the telos of rhetorical education. The Cornificians served as the antithesis of John’s promotion of the traditional education system of Western Europe. Metalogicon serves as a religious teaching manual because John argued that educators should ground their actions in ethical frameworks articulated by the Catholic Church.

Gold and Apes. Des usages du scepticisme dans la philosophie de Robert Boyle

In 1661, when Robert Boyle published The Sceptical Chymist, he was trying to assess the consistency of the works of contemporary chemists, while criticizing the imperfections of their theories. Boyle suggested that another methodical approach was necessary, a method he described in later books as based on rich experimental data and wary of the obsolete Aristotelian or Paracelsian theories. The sceptical approach thus gave him the opportunity to underline the inadequacies of their positions, as Gassendi and Descartes did with the scholastics. But is the category of “constructive or mitigated scepticism” still necessary to define this critical kind of philosophy ? Richard Popkin elaborated it as one of the responses to the general sceptical crisis. But today it seems necessary to incorporate this rhetorical scepticism into the evolution of the Ciceronian rhetoric of the Renaissance as well as into the dynamic propagation of mechanist ideas in Europe. Instead of being specific to the thinkers of the Royal Society, the sceptical approach then becomes a common trend, equally spread on both sides of the Channel. That is why the significance of the use of this modern scepticism in each thinker ought to be specified, particularly in Boyle’s work.

Jesuit psychagogies: an approach to the relations of schooling and casuistry

The article explores the usefulness of the term “psychagogy” for analysing the net of instruments used by contemporary authors for guiding or helping – that is, for intentionally transforming – the souls of early modern Europeans. The article analyses Jesuit anthropology (free will) and its links with the most important vocations of the order of prists of souls, the penance–confession sacrament and schooling. It studies also some of the relations among the latter. In particular, the article advances that the moral doctrine maintained by the Jesuits as basis for their casuistry, probabilism, was related to the focus on schooling. Probabilism, which was the direct legal–moral expression of free will anthropology, was fostered by the practices of the disputatio and Ciceronian rhetoric in Jesuit schools. However, Jesuits faced a contradiction, as the leniency of probabilism undermined one of the most important disciplining instruments of the Catholic Church: penance–confession. The article concludes with the argument that the experience of schooling allowed the accepting of probabilism, as school discipline compensated for probabilism’s leniency.

On the Term “Dunamis” in Aristotle's Definition of Rhetoric

The term dunamis, by which Aristotle defines rhetoric in the first chapter of The Art of Rhetoric, is a “power” term, as its various meanings in Aristotle’s corpus—from vernacular ones like “political influence” to strictly philosophical ones like “potentiality”—attest.1 In the Rhetoric, however, dunamis is usually translated as “ability” or “faculty,” a designation that, compared to other terms that describe persuasion in ancient Greek poetics and rhetoric (such as “bia” [“force”] or “eros” [“seduction”]), marks rhetoric as a neutral human capacity rather than the use of language entangled in the vagaries of violence and desire.2 John Kirby calls Aristotle’s definition “one of the boldest moves in the history of the philosophy of language: to redefine rhetoric, not as the use of peitho but as the study of peitho” (1990, 227). The presumption of rhetoric’s ethical neutrality implied by dunamis has indeed become commonplace in interpretations of Aristotle’s treatise itself and of rhetoric as a social phenomenon. As George Kennedy puts it in his authoritative translation of the Rhetoric, “Aristotle was the first person to recognize clearly that rhetoric as an art of communication was morally neutral, that it could be used either for good or ill” (1991, ix). In this article, I would like to probe another, perhaps not so reassuring, implication of dunamis as a term for rhetoric—that as “an ability to see all available means of persuasion,” it does not need to become (or emulate) practical oratory. In what follows, I suggest that Aristotle’s terminology, however neutral it may appear, constitutes an intellectually and politically motivated act of naming that severs rhetorical knowledge from historically specific rhetorical practices and thereby erects a protective barrier between practical rationality and discourses of democracy.

Administrative Slavery in the Ancient Roman Republic: The Value of Marcus Tullius Tiro in Ciceronian Rhetoric

Urban slave life in ancient Rome was unlike the absolute bondage and physical labor historically associated with the term slavery. Cicero's administrative slave Tiro was a literary collaborator, a debt collector, a superintendent of sorts, a secretary, a financial overseer, a political strategist, a recipient and content-generator of Cicero's famed practice of letter-writing, and a connected component of Cicero's social scheming. Cicero's correspondence with Tiro praises him for his value and loyalty, but it also shows previously unrevealed rhetorical aspects of the ancient orator and his relationship with his slave, colleague, and friend.

RHETORIC AND THE FEMININE CHARACTER: CICERO’S PORTRAYAL OF SASSIA , CLODIA AND FULVIA

The role of women in the ancient world has been extensively debated and a significant amount of work has been done in this area. Included in the texts that have received attention are Cicero’s speeches which refer to women. All the women who feature in Cicero’s speeches were those who have been acknowledged to have made their presence felt in the Roman public domain. Although Roman society regulated its socio-political activities around masculine values, it is nevertheless difficult to explain why so few women appear in such a voluminous corpus like Cicero’s.1 What is certain is that Ciceronian rhetoric is characterised by the use of invective and vituperation.2 In this article, I shall argue that the women who were negatively portrayed in Cicero’s speeches were victims of an already standardised form of communication within the hegemonic male order that dominated the Roman public domain in first century BC.

“For Want of the Usual Manure”: Rural Civic Ethos in Ciceronian Rhetoric

This essay examines the role of rural citizens in the social fabric of ancient Italy and the redefinition of the rural by the mightiest orator of that time: Marcus Tullius Cicero. This redefinition created a novel form of ethos, a rural civic ethos, apparent in the valuing of Arpinum in The Laws and in the rural character of Sextus Roscius in Pro Sextus Roscius. Rural civic ethos is further developed through an analysis of Cicero's dual identity as rustic and urbane, trained according to the oratorical style of the city yet maintaining an allegiance to the landscapes and peoples of Arpinum.

Painted for the ear: Ambrogio Lorenzetti's “Fraud” and political oratory

Painted for the ear: Ambrogio Lorenzetti's “Fraud” and political oratory

DE SENECTUTE STUDIORUM: ON OLD AGE AND ANTIQUITY

THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL 106.2 (2010-2011) 229-236 PRESIDENTIALADDRESS DE SENECTUTE STUDIORUM: ON OLD AGEAND ANTIQUITY1 hree score and eleven years ago, my great predecessor Hubert McNeil Poteat, of what was then Wake Forest College, addressed this meeting in Iowa City as CAMWS president for 1938.2 Times were tough—res adversae, indeed; the Great Depression was still weighing down everyone’s dreams, Hitler’s Germany was a threat to Europe and a second World War was imminent. My parents in northern Indiana had just graduated from high school and were headed for a nearby business college, after which they started married life in the shadow of the European war thatwould bring an end to the Depression at a terrible cost of lives and destruction of the cities and cultural monuments of the Old World. Poteat (whom I never knew) was a great orator—he had taught Cicero for many years and had used Ciceronian rhetoric to good advantage both in and out of the classroom;3 and Cicero was in part the subject of his address to that meeting of CAMWS in 1938. But I shall not, in this company, emulate Poteat’s rhetoric for 2009 and another Depression, lest Tacitus’ sententia about Domitius Afer be applied to me: aetas extrema multum etiam eloquentiae dempsit, dum fessa mente retinet silentii impatientiam (“extreme old age deprived him of much of his eloquence as well, as in spite of his weary mind he held on to an impatience of silence,” Ann. 4.52). 1 These remarks were given in a slightly different form as the presidential address at the annual meeting of CAMWS in Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 3, 2009. 2 “Some Reflections onRoman Philosophy,” Classical Journal 33.9 (1938) 514-522. 3 A sample from that presidential address: “Rome was once a little frightened community of shepherds squatting precariously by the Tiber-side and surrounded by dozens of more or less similar communities. Who knows or cares anything about Veii and Fidenae and Ardea now? Rome grew slowly and steadily and invincibly, and one after another of her neighbors fell before the might of her armies and the indomitable, dogged persistence of her will to victory. Hamilcar, Hannibal, Antiochus, Vercingetorix were swept aside as she moved grandly down her appointed road— checked here and there by a Pyrrhus, an Arminius; halting and stumbling now and again, as civil strife hurled brothers against brothers; but eventually mistress of the world and builder of a civilization which has inspired the just wonder and admiration of all the ages. Why? I am profoundly convinced that it was because the prisca virtus Romana and the mores maiorum were substantially what Augustus believed they were” (above, n. 2, pp. 521-522). T 230 ROBERTW.ULERY, JR. I do not begin, as Cicero said, in the voice of a Tithonus (omnem sermonem tribuimus non Tithono),4 that Tithonus cited by Sappho in the newly discovered fragment of her poetry.5 These are not to be the maundering reflections of a teacher growing old amid a crowd of ever-young students and young colleagues, as M. L. West remarked about the conclusion of Sappho’s fragment: “Tithonus lived on, growing ever more grey and frail, while his consort remained young and beautiful—just as Sappho grows old before a cohort of protégées who, like undergraduates ,are always young.”6 That image brought to mind the following lines, from W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928): An aged man isbuta paltrything, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap itshandsand sing. Or in Latin: Senex est quoddam mendicum, sagum pannosum in baculo, nisi Anima complodans cantet.7 To begin with the obvious: Classics is at the outset the parent of the scholar, an authority with a demanding standard for the young scholar to meet, and years pass with that sense of striving to satisfy the demands of that parent (whether embodied in one’s senior professors or not), until late in life one realizes that the tables have been turned, that the parent has become the child, weak and in need of care, and the child has become the parent, feeding and protecting and assisting...

Truth, plausibility, and the virtues of narrative at the millennium

While it is widely understood that medieval historiographers employed the techniques of rhetorical invention in their work, less attention has been paid to the way in which the standard of plausibility, upon which rhetorical invention was premised, could be reconciled with the historian's traditional obligation to tell the truth. This paper examines the ways in which the rhetorical doctrine of narratio probabilis was understood and put into practice by three authors active around the turn of the millennium: Richer of Saint-Rémi, Dudo of Saint-Quentin, and Adalbero of Laon. All three had been trained in the schools of northern Francia in the late tenth century and all reveal a sophisticated understanding of the doctrines of Ciceronian rhetoric, according to which plausible inventions were not seen to be incompatible with historical truth.

Rhetoric of Myth, Magic, and Conversion: A Prolegomena to Ancient Irish Rhetoric

Ancient Ireland presents an interesting case for rhetorical study. While the island is usually considered a part of geographic Europe, it long resisted the influence of cultural Europe. Unlike Britain, for example, Ireland was never conquered by Rome, and its pre-literate culture flourished beyond the fall of the Empire. Consequently, the Irish maintained a mythopoetic rhetoric based in narrative. Their stories recounted not only the deeds of their heroes, but also their words. And, like ancient Greece, ancient Ireland also had a class of sophistic rhetors, the Druids. When Patrick arrived around the end of the fourth century, he eschewed the Ciceronian rhetoric of Augustine and instead adapted Christian theology to fit Irish rhetoric.