Greek Rhetoric Research Articles

Comparing Rhetoric in Antiquity: The Greek and Indian Cases in Perspective

Abstract The understanding of rhetoric has been heavily influenced by the Western tradition, particularly the Greco-Latin tradition. Rhetoric was traditionally considered a creation of the Greeks and a unique feature of the West. However, theoretical perspectives such as Axial Age, Comparative History, Global History, and Comparative World Rhetoric offer new insights into the relationship between communication and persuasion. This paper aims to compare certain characteristics of Greek rhetoric and Indian rhetoric using the perspective of Comparative World Rhetoric. To do this, I analysed the Vedic texts, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and the Nyāya Sūtra. I concluded that the comparison was a fundamental aspect of the rhetorical exercise in antiquity, as it allowed the speaker to better connect with the audience.

I Know It When I Hear It

In the following article I consider a catalog of audio description porn videos available on the online adult entertainment platform Pornhub. Attending to the visual and aural elements of the original source video and their simultaneous narration in the audio descriptive tracks, I argue that this transcription offers us, the viewer/auditor, an ekphrastic encounter with the pornographic moving image mediated by the acousmatic gendered voice of the audio describer. While academic scholarship on pornography informs my discussion of the source videos, theories of ekphrasis ranging from its usage in Ancient Greek rhetoric, to its formulation in twentieth-century anglophone literary theory, and finally to its application in digital visual culture, will underpin my analysis of the audio description. Through ekphrasis I ultimately distinguish the audio description of pornography as a creative genre in its own right, as well as offer an extensive and interdisciplinary approach that extends beyond the recursive or self-reflexive lens of porn studies scholarship, and newly positions hardcore film pornography within a larger body of academic inquiry in conversation with epic poetry and art history.

CONCERNING THE PRE-SOCRATIC DOCTRINES IN RHETORIC

Background. Mastering the rhetorical art as a philological discipline must be based on scientific understanding of the subject of speech influence. The latter is only possible if one masters not only the knowledge of the current state of the discipline, but also the ability to analyze the theoretical achievements of the art of rhetoric in its formation and elaboration. That is what enables the scholar to assess the adequacy of the ratio of learning goals and objectives, as well as the correctness of moral, philological and pedagogical preferences underlying the mastery of the subject.
 Purpose. The article analyzes scholarly principles of one of the most important trends of early Greek rhetoric, represented in the main concepts of the ancient sophists.
 Materials and methods. The research material was the general philological and didactic postulates of most prominent rhetoricians of the period in question. To highlight the approaches, the method of critical analysis as well the structural-semantic and the philological historical methods are used.
 Results. The article demonstrates that the study of the origins of rhetoric gives the correct direction to its understanding. The reason of predominantly didactic nature of early rhetoric is its orientation towards practical goals. Nevertheless, the analyzed concepts enable us to assert that in them, as in the main approaches of the time, the theoretical philological basis is present in the form of rationalizing the essence and prospects of pathos and logos, the latter being considered with an emphasis on the comparison and justification of competing views, as well as on the actual linguistic techniques that ensure the effectiveness of verbal influence.
 Practical implications. The data obtained can be used in the analysis of the principles of construction and evaluation of argumentation in debates, as well as in university courses in stylistics for discussing the problem of the effectiveness of speech means.

Discours. Livres XXXIV, XXXV & XXXVI by Libanios, and: Libanius: Ten Mythological and Historical Declamations by Libanius

Reviewed by: Discours. Livres XXXIV, XXXV & XXXVI by Libanios, and: Libanius: Ten Mythological and Historical Declamations by Libanius Fabrizio Petorella (bio) Libanios, Discours. Livres XXXIV, XXXV & XXXVI, texte établi et traduit par Catherine Bry, Collection des universités de France Série grecque—Collection Budé 550. Paris, FR: Les Belles Lettres, 2020. 278 pp. EAN: 978-2-251-00637-6. Libanius, Libanius: Ten Mythological and Historical Declamations, ed., intro., trans. and notes, Robert J. Penella. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 420 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-48137-3. Our knowledge of Late Antique rhetorical school practice has been recently enriched by several studies focused on Libanius' works: in the last decades, the Antiochean rhetor has been the subject of key monographs and academic articles on upper-class education in the Later Empire and [End Page 104] many of his writings have been edited and translated into modern languages.1 The two volumes discussed here are part of this upsurge of interest in Libanius's teaching activity. Furthermore, they are meant to lay the foundations for future studies aimed at contributing to the debate on Late Antique paideia. Antiochean school life is at the core of the orations edited and translated by Catherine Bry. Her volume, which is the result of her doctoral research at the École Pratique des Hautes Études of Paris, opens with a brief introduction clarifying why the three Libanian speeches she takes up deserve to be analyzed together: composed in the second half of the 380s, they all stem from problems related to Libanius's role as a teacher. Thus, Orations 34, 35, and 36 provide a vivid testimony about the teaching of Greek rhetoric in the Eastern Empire and the issues that even a renowned sophist might face. These initial remarks are followed by an extremely accurate section devoted to philological aspects. Even though Bry acknowledges the importance of the last edition of the three speeches (published by Richard Foerster in 1906), she considers that work too distant from modern philological conventions.2 As a result of a rigorous re-examination of the whole manuscript tradition, she integrates the descriptions of the sources given by Foerster, Jean Martin, and Pierre-Louis Malosse with her personal observations, thus offering a detailed presentation of all witnesses and a stemma codicum for each of the three orations.3 In this well-ordered preliminary phase, Bry demonstrates a scrupulously honest approach, enabling the reader to access and—if (s)he wishes—to question her philological work. After a list of abbreviations and a bibliography (significantly divided into a section specifically devoted to the edition of the three speeches and a general bibliography), comes the core of the volume. Every oration is preceded by a brief and clear introduction, where the reader finds information on the date and circumstances in which Libanius originally delivered his speech and on the audience he intended to address, as well as a rhetorical analysis of the following text and a list of its previous editions and translations. [End Page 105] In contrast to Foerster, Bry opts for positive apparatuses and avoids mentioning orthographical variants, unless they have some morphological (and, consequently, semantic) value. This approach (which does not prevent her from quoting the conjectures of previous editors when necessary) has the merit of making her edition a very practical tool for the study of the three orations and their textual history. The translation heads in the same direction. It is clear and original and allows the reader to easily grasp the main aspects of Libanius' oratorical performances, accurately transposed into a modern language. In these respects, the volume shows clearly how scholarly accuracy and readability can be combined, thus producing an edition that can be appreciated on several levels. To complete this picture, Bry's commentary is agile, but exhaustive. Her explanatory notes reveal once more a strong interest in the context in which the orations were originally performed and in their rhetorical features. Libanius' words are analyzed in relation to Late Antique rhetorical theories and to their application at school (see, for example, the entry concerning the role of memorization in the learning process at pp. 43–44, n. 55). Particular attention is...

The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies by Brooke Rollins

Reviewed by: The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies by Brooke Rollins Mario Telò (bio) Brooke Rollins, The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies, Classical Memories/Modern Identities. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2020. 230 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1424-4. There aren't many bold books on ancient Greek rhetoric. When I say "rhetoric," I mean specifically the corpus of speeches of the orators of the fifth and fourth centuries bce, and by "bold" I mean scholarship that does not treat these texts simply as historical documents or stylistic paradigms but as complex literary constructions that invite theoretically engaged approaches. I can think, for example, of Victoria Wohl's Law's Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which focuses on how the very idea of the law—conceptualized as a self-styled notion of authority—affects the arguments of judicial oratory. We should be grateful to Brooke Rollins for having produced another big, bold book on a body of work that most often receives the empiricist and historicist treatment prevalent in the field of classical studies. This book has left me with the uplifting impression that, inspired by Rollins, more work in a similar vein will soon follow and that the world of fourth-century bce orators can finally gain the attention of those outside of classics. Rollins stages a compelling encounter between Gorgias, Lysias, Isocrates, and Plato, on the one hand, and Derrida on the other, engaging with the philosopher's late period, in the 1990s, when he produced a rich set of ethically and politically oriented writings. This orientation has always been central to the project of deconstruction. Rollins relays Derrida's formulation: "the thinking of the political has always been a thinking of différance and the thinking of différance always a thinking of the political" (9). Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Derrida we see here is more Levinasian than Heideggerian; it is a Derrida deeply attentive to the implications of alterity for hospitality, friendship, and democracy. [End Page 95] Rollins is interested precisely in how the interruptive force of alterity is thematized by oratory's constitutive reliance on the address—to judges in a courtroom, to an assembly, and to listeners gathered for a specific occasion or implied, abstract, "ghostly" readers. Her main goal is to show that "when the trace of the other interrupts identity, persuasive instrumentalism implodes" (5). This implosion is not simply the failure of the speech's argumentation, its surrender to the inevitable powers of indeterminacy. The emphasis is, rather, on the ethical affirmation that derives from the unsettling of identity brought about by the projection toward an other that is the address. As Rollins put it, "We encounter no controlling, autonomous speaking subjects here, but beings constituted (and so interrupted) in an encounter with difference" (6). The claim to authority, to a kind of indivisible, closed-off truth, is contradicted by the very opening to the outside (the speaking to) that is intrinsic to the conception of a speech. In this perspective, the speech becomes "a nontotalizable encounter, in which responsibility, negotiation and decision are owed to the other" (6). Persuasion, the alleged primary function of speech-writing, is thus complicated by an ex-cess, an ethical responsibility, emerging from "the unsettling moment of rapprochement with the unassimilable other" (37). In this way, persuasion can be regarded "not as a traditional communicative transaction, but as a possibility given only by way of our ongoing responsibility to and for the nonpresent other" (41). It becomes the staging of an aporetic moment, the opportunity for "a response in which both self and other are transformed" (45). In the chapter on Gorgias, Rollins focuses on the much-discussed Encomium of Helen, pushing against the apparent takeaway of the speech, an affirmation of logocentrism, of the affective power of logos. As Rollins observes, "Helen is marked, engraved, written by what is radically other to her" (61). The upshot is that "the subject is nothing but the effect of affirming the other's unwilled address" (63) and so is the all-encompassing, fetishized logos, another, albeit depersonalized, Über-subject, at...

The Kiss: Ekphrastic poetry, enargeia and the immersive installation

Imperial Greek rhetoricians defined ecphrasis as ‘descriptive speech which brings the subject shown before the eyes with visual vividness’ (Squire 2015: n.p.), since which time understandings of ekphrasis have evolved and narrowed. Recently, however, definitions of ekphrasis have been expanding to incorporate new media, digital images and augmented reality that engage with haptic and auditive experiences. The ancient concept of 'energeia'—‘the evocation of a visual scene in all its details and colours’ (Cave 1976: 6)—is relevant to these new understandings, including in the presentation of the kind of archival material housed in the Helen Shea collection at Emerson College. Digital ekphrasis, such as one finds in the 'Klimt: The Immersive Experience' installation, open up possibilities for fluid and wide-ranging representations of archival material, along with powerful considerations of this material’s relationships to complex social interactions. Such digital ekphrasis is able to evoke visual scenes in great detail and cast new and creative light on ekphrastic relationships.

Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire

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.

Anassagora retore

Anaxagoras is a missing author in the history of Greek rhetoric. His style has often seemed archaic and naive, unworthy of in-depth study. Nevertheless, the main so-called Gorgian figures are present in his fragments. They are not used with simply ornamental purposes but with a strongly expressive and even speculative intent. By examining in detail some texts (Lanza frr. B12; B6; B4), such systematicity and speculative depth of the use of the main rhetorical figures can be detected. Thus some conclusions about the contemporary Athenian culture can be inferred.

Anassagora retore

:Anaxagoras is a missing author in the history of Greek rhetoric. His style has often seemed archaic and naive, unworthy of in-depth study. Nevertheless, the main so-called Gorgian figures are present in his fragments. They are not used with simply ornamental purposes but with a strongly expressive and even speculative intent. By examining in detail some texts (Lanza frr. B12; B6; B4), such systematicity and speculative depth of the use of the main rhetorical figures can be detected. Thus some conclusions about the contemporary Athenian culture can be inferred.

Greek Rhetoric of the 4th Century BC. The Elixir of Democracy and Individuality, written by Evangelos Alexiou

Greek Rhetoric of the 4th Century BC. The Elixir of Democracy and Individuality, written by Evangelos Alexiou

Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric, by Michelle Bolduc, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies

Michelle Bolduc’s Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric is, as a work of scholarship, quite formidable. Its 443 pages include 1,324 footnotes and 71 pages of bibliography. Its historical focus is brilliant and complex, with chapters on medieval translatio, Cicero’s translation and replanting of Greek rhetoric, Brunetto Latini’s translation of Cicero, Jean Paulhan’s reinvention of rhetoric following Latini, and the New Rhetoric Project’s own taking up of this tradition in the twentieth century.From one perspective, the book can be read somewhat straightforwardly as a carefully selected history of rhetoric, and anyone who reads the book from this perspective would gain some serious knowledge of the rhetorical tradition. A clear narrative guides the reader along even as the story is a story of retrieval, moving forward by reaching back. The subnarratives within this larger telling are full of lively episodes that are historically revealing and biographically rich. At times the book reads almost like a series of intellectual mini-novels—with standout characters.However, the overriding concern here is not the characters or the stories—as interesting as those may be—but the illuminating of the historical process of translation in a very large sense—in the sense of the medieval topos of translatio, a sense that is dynamic and propelling and history forming and in fact explains how traditions generate. The principal characters in this story are all engaged in the translation of rhetorical texts, the transfer of meaning from one language to another—as well as, often, a transfer from one culture to another of rhetoric as a pedagogy and a sociopolitical practice. Opening up these civilizational channels through translation is part of the dynamic of translatio, and the outcome is, in part, to generate civilizational practices that address contemporary challenges by placing them in the light of a translation of historical rhetorical texts. So, for example, when Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca write The New Rhetoric as a culmination of that postwar intellectual arc that included Perelman’s work with the UN, they are engaged in a translatio whose purpose is to defeat violence through the recovery of rhetoric as a form of effective reasoning in conditions of uncertainty.Bolduc is quite careful to avoid any notion of a continuous rational development of the translatio of rhetoric over time, but she insists that breaks and failures can themselves (later) be seen to have contributed to this translatio in serendipitous ways. Her serious and extensive treatment of Brunetto Latini and Jean Paulhan is instructive here. And yet this is not only a work of careful historical scholarship. One of the book’s first examples of translatio is Alan of Lille’s mind-boggling account of the incarnation as mystical translatio, the Word translated into flesh, and the book’s afterword virtually concludes with a discussion of The New Rhetoric’s modern notions of communion and freedom. This is also a work of vision—and of multilingual hope.

Review: Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire, by Susan Jarratt

Review: <i>Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire</i>, by Susan Jarratt

Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire by Susan Jarratt

Reviewed by: Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire by Susan Jarratt Anna Peterson Susan Jarratt, Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 200 pp. Coined by Philostratus in the early third century CE, the label “Second Sophistic” (c. 50-250 CE) is increasingly recognized as an imperfect periodic designation. Does it refer exclusively to the tradition of epideictic rhetoric as described by Philostratus? Or can it be expanded to include the full range of Greek literary production during the first three centuries CE? At its core the term reflects feelings of belatedness and nostalgia, such that the common narrative of the period has become one in which an elite Hellenic identity was defined above all by paideia (“education” or “culture”). While this rooting of an elite Greek identity in the classical past is well recognized as a response to Roman hegemony,1 recent scholarship has begun to expand on this conventional view, pointing to elements of continuity both with earlier Hellenistic literature and the literature of the fourth century CE.2 Jarratt’s monograph Chain of Gold consequently sets a tall task for itself in once again addressing the cultural politics of the Second Sophistic. It is an ambitious and thought-provoking work, even if in the end it does not completely succeed in what it sets out to do. At its core, it argues for a reappraisal of the “second sophistic habit of dwelling in the past” as something that was not “monologic and static” but “varied and dynamic” and that offered the writers and performers of the period “a politically protected way of ‘talking back’ to empire.” (17) For Jarratt, the obsession with the past that has come to define this period of Greek literature is not a simple matter of nostalgia but rather of critical memory, one that allowed the authors of this period to reimagine and keep alive a deliberative civic space. Jarratt’s aim in this book is not at its core an entirely new idea. That said, what makes her work so thought provoking is her desire to locate “a colonial counterdiscourse” in a broad range of works (38). Moreover, she is certainly correct that too often classicists have been overly hesitant about reading the literature of the period through the lens of postcolonial theory (3). In addition to an introductory chapter outlining the monograph’s methodology, Chain of Gold develops this argument across six case studies, covering respectively Dio Chyrsostom’s Euboean Discourse (Chapter 2), Aelius Aristides’ Roman Oration (Chapter 3), Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana [End Page 103] (Chapter 4) and Imagines (Chapter 5), Heliodorus’ Aithiopika (Chapter 6), and Libanius’ To Those Who Call Him Tiresome (Chapter 7). Generally speaking, this is a nice mixture of well-trod and often overlooked texts. Her strongest chapters are those which connect what she calls rhetorical vision to the post-colonial concerns outlined in the monograph’s first chapter. For example, her discussion in Chapter 3 of Aristides’ Roman Oration explores how “the ‘ sophist . . . draws on the resources of [Homeric] epic to enhance his powers of visualization,” providing his audience not only “a phantasm of [Rome’s] imperium but also a techne of viewing” (47). Likewise, Chapter 5 reads Philostratus’ Imagines—an intriguing collection of descriptions of works of art—as an exploration in rhetorical vision that pushes the limits of ekphrasis. Treating the text as a museum of sorts, Jarratt acts as curator, bringing out how the text handles reoccurring images of youth, women, and different ethnicities, among others. This is Jarratt’s most successful chapter, in part thanks to the inclusion of an appendix, which maps out the paintings in relation to one another. In a few instances, however, Jarratt does not make full use of the ancient evidence. The clearest example of this comes in her discussion of Dio Chrysostom’s Euboean Discourse (Or. 7). In this speech, Dio professes that he will narrate a personal experience, relating how, after being shipwrecked in Euboea, he was taken in by a huntsman, who recounted his own troubled participation in local politics. The huntsman’s tale then prompts Dio to expound on...

Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire

Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire

Epitaphios logos – hybrydyczny gatunek retoryki ateńskiej

Athenian funeral oration (epitaphios logos) belongs to the epideictic rhetoric. But according to Aristotle the topics used in epideictic oratory could be applied in the deliberative kind, after some modification in the matters of language. In this article I consider the means proposed in the narrative part of the composition, which can be used instead of argumentation in epideictic oratory, i.e. amplification, metaphors and actualization (putting things before the eyes, gr. energeia, lat. evidentia). My purpose is to answer the question who was/is the recipient of Athenian funeral oration. In my opinion there are three kinds of primary recipients: the dead soldiers in the battle, the listeners present at the celebration (Athenians and foreigners) and the Idea of Democracy itself. I also try to find the so-called secondary recipient of Athenian funeral oration. I treat Athenian funeral oration as a hybrid genre of Greek rhetoric.

Faire voir: Études sur l'enargeia de l'Antiquité à l'époque moderne ed. by Florence Klein and Ruth Webb

Reviewed by: Faire voir: Études sur l'enargeia de l'Antiquité à l'époque moderne ed. by Florence Klein and Ruth Webb Flora Iff-Noël Faire voir: Études sur l'enargeia de l'Antiquité à l'époque moderne. Edited by Florence Klein and Ruth Webb. Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion. 2021. Pp. 293, ills. This collective volume, which presents the proceedings of a two-day conference at Tourcoing in 2014, analyzes the theory and practice of enargeia and its relationship to visual art through various case studies from archaic Greece to imperial Rome. It contributes to the constantly growing scholarship on text and image studies since the [End Page 375] 1990s, and more precisely on the connections between the Hellenistic concept of enargeia and ancient art and text.1 Indeed, enargeia, defined as the capacity of words to create the impression that absent things are present to the senses, and in particular to the sense of sight (9; see Quint. IO 6.2.29–32), has already been the object of monographs about Hellenistic poetry, imperial rhetoric, and historiography.2 The present volume aims to fill three gaps in the scholarship by considering the following issues (10–11): 1. How can we study enargeia in archaic and classical Greek texts when there are no contemporary theoretical texts on the matter? Can we identify practices specifically associated with particular literary genres? 2. Even after enargeia's theorization and practice in Hellenistic and Roman times, what is the status of word-created images? Are they effective substitutes to the perception of real objects or deceitful illusions? 3. Especially since the 1950s, scholarship interested in descriptions of artworks has isolated such texts and labeled them ekphraseis, changing the meaning of this word, which was originally used in imperial Greek rhetoric to designate texts full of enargeia, i.e., texts that could "place their object as if under the eyes of their reader or audience" (Aelius Theon, Progymnasmata 118). This volume aims to reconsider such texts within the context of enargeia and to explore the role of enargeia within the reception of real artworks and the production of discourse about them. The book focuses especially on Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Zeuxis, Posidippus of Pella, Moschus, Sallust, Pliny, Ovid, Quintilian, and Pseudo-Longinus. Thus, it is of interest to all classicists, as it tackles rhetoric, poetry, historiography, drama, and art history, both in Greece and in Rome. As all quotes are translated, the volume will also be valuable to scholars of modern literature interested in questions of intertextuality, hypotyposis, text and image studies, as well as for historians, art historians, and university students. The Introduction provides a helpful definition of enargeia and a summary of the various chapters. Chapter One by Pierre Judet de La Combe analyzes the description of fountains in the Iliad (22.145–161). How can we explain the presence of a lengthy description of fountains at the precise moment of Hector's defeat, which is the turning point of the war? Judet de La Combe considers it to have a metapoetic meaning, reflecting on the nature of epic. Chapter Two by Deborah Steiner explores the various interactions between objects and texts inscribed on them by comparing the spectator's real vision of the object to the reader's mental vision of the images evoked by the inscribed texts. She focuses on three archaic inscriptions (IG2 I 919 on the oenochoe of Dipylon, Athens, Archeological Museum 192; a funerary epigram on the cenotaph of Ambracia, SEG 41.450; IG I3 833 [End Page 376] bis on an Athenian marble tripod dedicated by a victorious choral poet). Steiner argues that seeing these inscriptions is an anticipation of the images evoked by the inscription's content. For instance, the letters' disposition sometimes seems to represent the shapes of the dance moves evoked in the inscriptions, as when the letters create effects of symmetry that represent the dancers' symmetrical movements, or when the inscription as a whole is placed below representations of dancers and constitutes a wavy line which mimics the dancers' chorus line. The way these inscriptions are written is meaningful for enargeia and...

Evangelos Alexiou, Greek Rhetoric of the 4th Century BC. The Elixir of Democracy and Individuality. Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter 2020

Article Evangelos Alexiou, Greek Rhetoric of the 4th Century BC. The Elixir of Democracy and Individuality. Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter 2020 was published on April 1, 2021 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 312, issue 2).

Greek Literature

I begin with a warm welcome for Evangelos Alexiou's Greek Rhetoric of the 4th Century bc, a ‘revised and slightly abbreviated’ version of the modern Greek edition published in 2016 (ix). Though the volume's title points to a primary focus on the fourth century, sufficient attention is given to the late fifth and early third centuries to provide context. As ‘rhetoric’ in the title indicates, the book's scope is not limited to oratory: Chapter 1 outlines the development of a rhetorical culture; Chapter 2 introduces theoretical debates about rhetoric (Plato, Isocrates, Alcidamas); and Chapter 3 deals with rhetorical handbooks (Anaximenes, Aristotle, and the theoretical precepts embedded in Isocrates). Oratory comes to the fore in Chapter 4, which introduces the ‘canon’ of ten Attic orators: in keeping with the fourth-century focus, Antiphon, Andocides, and Lysias receive no more than sporadic attention; conversely, extra-canonical fourth-century orators (Apollodorus, the author of Against Neaera, Hegesippus, and Demades) receive limited coverage. The remaining chapters deal with the seven major canonical orators: Isocrates, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hyperides, and Dinarchus. Each chapter follows the same basic pattern: life, work, speeches, style, transmission of text and reception. Isocrates and Demosthenes have additional sections on research trends and on, respectively, Isocratean ideology and issues of authenticity in the Demosthenic corpus. In the case of Isaeus, there is a brief discussion of contract oratory; Lycurgus is introduced as ‘the relentless prosecutor’. Generous extracts from primary sources are provided, in Greek and in English translation; small-type sections signal a level of detail that some readers may wish to pass over. The footnotes provide extensive references to older as well as more recent scholarship. The thirty-page bibliography is organized by chapter (a helpful arrangement in a book of this kind, despite the resulting repetition); the footnotes supply some additional references. Bibliographical supplements to the original edition have been supplied ‘only in isolated cases’ (ix). In short, this volume is a thorough, well-conceived, and organized synthesis that will be recognized, without doubt, as a landmark contribution. There are, inevitably, potential points of contention. The volume's subtitle, ‘the elixir of democracy and individuality’, ties rhetoric more closely to democracy and to Athens than is warranted: the precarious balancing act which acknowledges that rhetoric ‘has never been divorced from human activity’ while insisting that ‘its vital political space was the democracy of city-states’ (ix–x) seems to me untenable. Alexiou acknowledges that ‘the gift of speaking well, natural eloquence, was considered a virtue already by Homer's era’ (ix), and that ‘the natural gift of speaking well was considered a virtue’ (1). But the repeated insistence on natural eloquence is perplexing. Phoenix, in the embassy scene in Iliad 9, makes it clear that his remit included the teaching of eloquence (Il. 9.442, διδασκέμεναι): Alexiou only quotes the following line, which he mistakenly assigns to Book 10. (The only other typo that I noticed was ‘Aritsotle’ [97]. I, too, have a tendency to mistype the Stagirite's name, though my own automatic transposition is, alas, embarrassingly scatological.) Alexiou provides examples of later Greek assessments of fourth-century orators, including (for example) Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Hermogenes, and the author of On Sublimity (the reluctance to commit to the ‘pseudo’ prefix is my, not Alexiou's, reservation). He observes cryptically that ‘we are aware of Didymus’ commentary’ (245); but the extensive late ancient scholia, which contain material from Menander's Demosthenic commentaries, disappointingly evoke no sign of awareness.

Hearing Revelation 1–3: Listening with Greek Rhetoric and Culture by Jerome H. Neyrey, S.J

Reviewed by: Hearing Revelation 1–3: Listening with Greek Rhetoric and Culture by Jerome H. Neyrey, S.J Andrew R. Guffey jerome h. neyrey, s.j., Hearing Revelation 1–3: Listening with Greek Rhetoric and Culture (CBQMS 56; Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2019). Pp. 210. Paper $39.95. In this latest essay Jerome Neyrey trains his well-honed sociorhetorical eye on the first three chapters of the Book of Revelation. The agenda of the book is to reorient scholarly approaches to Revelation, dislodging the obsession with literary excavations typically found in the technical commentaries and commending instead an approach that reflects the rhetorical experience of an ancient audience, most specifically the way it establishes Jesus’s ethos for the communities it addresses, with careful attention to matters of honor and shame. Part 1 opens with an introductory chapter outlining the twenty-one theses N. is keen to advance, followed by a chapter that urges a change in perspective, from reading Revelation as a text, to hearing Revelation as an oration or rhetorical communication. Part 2 expands on these observations, arguing in chaps. 3 and 4 that, although Revelation 1 displays epistolary elements, it is better treated as an exordium, the beginning of a rhetorical work intended to outline the ethos of the sender of the communication. Neyrey argues vigorously that, while conventional scholarship focuses on John as the sender, a rhetorical analysis rather highlights the importance of Jesus as the Proximate Sender (the Ultimate Sender being God). Part 3 (chaps. 5 and 6) makes the case that Revelation 1 presents Jesus as a trustworthy rhetorical agent (by Aristotle’s canons; Rhet. 2.1.5), who knows what he is talking about (phronēsis), is virtuous (aretē), and exhibits goodwill toward the audience (eunoia). Jesus’s trustworthiness is accomplished both directly in 1:1–11 with the presentation of Jesus as the recipient of the revelation and the notice of his honorable deeds, and indirectly in 1:12–20 with an ekphrasis, a vivid description, of the Sender himself. The ekphrasis, N. contends, utilizes aspects of Daniel 7 and 10 but also resonates with Greco-Roman anatomical descriptions meant to establish honorability. Elements of this description are picked up in the letters to the seven churches, binding the honorable ethos of Jesus to the content of the letters. If to this point N. has sought to expand the capacity of biblical scholars actually to hear Revelation, in part 4 he attunes the hearing of Revelation more narrowly to matters of honor and shame. In chap. 7, he briefly sketches the honorific agonistics of ancient Greek and Roman society: even in rhetoric there was a constant struggle for reputation, for honor. N. uses Libanius and a couple of ancient examples in chap. 8 to flesh out the oft-invoked epistolary categories, letters of praise and blame. Part 5, then, comprises a set of analyses (chaps. 9–15) of the dynamics of honor, of praise and blame, in each of the letters of Revelation 2–3. In the conclusion, N. reviews the elements of the argument and offers a few modest remarks on what this sort of analysis of Revelation 1–3 might say about studying the rest of the book—principally, that it ought to engage with similar insights from Hellenistic rhetoric. The claims of the book ought to be taken seriously by any scholar working with Revelation. N. is undoubtedly correct that hearing Revelation with an ear for ancient rhetoric is a fruitful procedure. Still, my description of this book as an essay was deliberate: the elements of the argument are often schematic and lightly grounded. Moreover, N. is not conversant with current scholarship that would have aided his argument. This is especially [End Page 344] true, as an example, in the case of ekphrasis. N. shows the right instinct in labeling Rev 1:12–20 as an ekphrasis, but his discussion is vague (pp. 67–69). He appears to be unaware of the considerable body of work on ancient ekphrasis that would have given this recognition some real heft (see Robyn J. Whitaker, Ekphrasis, Vision, and Persuasion in the Book of Revelation [WUNT 2/410; Tübingen...

The Nature and Perception of Attic Prose Rhythm

This article investigates the ancient theoretical discussions and critical analyses of rhythm in Attic prose in order to reconstruct its native perception as a psychoacoustic and cognitive phenomenon. In particular, the article examines the inventories of rhythmic feet identified by the ancient Greek rhetoricians and concludes that the earliest reconstructible one is most likely to include the minimal durational patterns perceivable as rhythmical units by ancient native speakers. Much in the perception of such rhythms depended on vocalization and delivery, and purely metrical approaches to prose rhythm in Attic prose are inadequate to capturing this phenomenon to the full.