Abstract: Il presente contributo indaga il rapporto tra la teoria retorica e la pratica oratoria di Cicerone in riferimento al genere deliberativo e in particolare ai discorsi tenuti dinnanzi all’assemblea popolare ( contiones ). Sviluppando il caso di studio dell’orazione De imperio Cn. Pompei e prendendo le mosse da Part . 90–92, dove Cicerone propone una distinzione molto netta delle due categorie di uomini a cui un discorso deliberativo poteva essere rivolto, questo studio intende dimostrare come la complessa realtà politica della contio , ricostruita anche grazie a un excursus sui discorsi ciceroniani del periodo del post-esilio, richiedesse un’applicazione dei precetti meno rigida rispetto a quanto effettivamente prescritto a livello teorico.

Abstract: The present paper aims to bring light to the issue about the speech in Herodian’s work, analyzing the causes behind the anthology of battle exhortations of Herodian’s History preserved in Ambrosianus Graecus B 119 sup. To this end, I will study both the argumentation and the narrative setting of each of these five pre-battle speeches, focused on the exhortation to courage.

Abstract: The Epistles of Pliny the Younger confound his readers: some read like genuine correspondence, written to transmit information, others like careful literary pieces. Pliny’s description of his Tuscan villa, in Epistulae 5.6, seems to fall into the latter category. This letter, the longest of the corpus, has Pliny taking his addressee, Domitius Apollinaris, on a virtual walking tour, and describing what he sees. But Pliny’s villa, as described, seems mostly empty and lacks expected features if it were inhabited. The villa’s emptiness, however, provides nooks and crannies for practicing the rhetorical Memory Palace technique. By using this space for rhetorical exercise, Pliny, like his uncle, spent his otium wisely.

Abstract: I argue that in De inventione 1.1–5, Cicero reconciles technical rhetoric with Roman culture by crafting a justificatory narrative for rhetoric’s place at Rome. Cicero employs a calculated lexical strategy and redefines eloquentia in a way that shifts the meaning of the word to embrace ἡ τέχνη ῥητορική. Cicero further justifies rhetoric by emphasizing its utility for the Roman aristocracy and for the Republic. In the final analysis, Cicero argues for the value of technical rhetoric by demonstrating its compatibility with the values that underpinned Republican political culture.

Reviewed by: Cicéron et la Commune. Le rhéteur comme modèle civique (Italie, XIIIe–XIVe s.) by Carole Mabboux Laura Refe Carole Mabboux, Cicéron et la Commune. Le rhéteur comme modèle civique (Italie, XIIIe–XIVe s.), Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d'Athènes et de Rome 400, Roma, IT: École française de Rome, 2022. 525 pp. ISBN: 978-2-7283-1545-1. Il volume nasce dalla rielaborazione di una tesi di dottorato discussa nel 2016. Ad un'utile introduzione (1–16), nella quale sono illustrate le modalità di lettura di Cicerone in età comunale con un accenno allo stato degli studi in questo settore, alle difficoltà di ordine metodologico incontrate nella definizione dell'oggetto della ricerca, alle coordinate seguite nell'impostazione del lavoro, al corpus di fonti analizzate e alle piste battute, seguono cinque parties che sviluppano in profondità gli argomenti di indagine. Tali sezioni, aperte da pagine prefatorie con la funzione di 'bussola' nella fruizione dei contenuti, sono ulteriormente suddivise in capitoli, paragrafi e sottoparagrafi, e presentano snelle note al testo, funzionali più che altro a fornire essenziali rinvii bibliografici. Una conclusione (411–417) fornisce la chiave di lettura del corposo materiale illustrato e commentato; in appendice ("Annexes", 419–438) è pubblicata la trascrizione di tre documenti tratti da codici antichi: Bartolomeo del Regno, introduzione in latino al commento al De officiis; Luigi di Gianfigliazzi, Summa dictaminum rhetoricae in latino; un volgarizzamento anonimo della Rhetorica ad Herennium (inc.: «Nel sesto dì»). Chiude gli "Annexes" una tabella ricapitolativa dei prestiti dall'opera ciceroniana contratti da parte di uno degli autori presi in esame nel Cap. 16, Giovanni da Viterbo. Corredano il volume l'indice dei nomi e delle opere (439–444), l'indice dei manoscritti (445) e la lista dei titoli citati, distinti in fonti primarie e bibliografia secondaria (447–516), grafici, tabelle e illustrazioni a colori e in bianco e nero, inserite all'interno della trattazione e ricapitolate a p. 517. Mabboux ha applicato all'oggetto di studio—la ricezione dell'opera retorica e morale di Cicerone e l'interpretazione della sua biografia nel contesto sociopolitico dell'Italia dei Comuni—un approccio di tipo storico-culturale, affrontando quegli aspetti della fortuna dell'oratore in epoca medievale meno investigati. Il campo di indagine è definito dall'azione esercitata dall'ambiente comunale su formazione, vita, partecipazione politica degli autori presi in considerazione; il periodo cronologico di riferimento, lievemente più ampio di quello indicato nel titolo, va dall'ultimo decennio del XII secolo al primo decennio del XV secolo; il corpus esaminato, principalmente di tipo testuale anche se non mancano incursioni nell'iconografia (limitata, per i manoscritti, a tre fondi per i quali, vedi 186n97), comprende libri de regimine, trattati morali e manuali di eloquenza scritta o orale ed è relativo a tre tematiche: alle norme dell'esercizio politico, all'etica sociale e alla retorica. Considerate l'ampiezza del lavoro e la complessità della sua articolazione, si forniranno sintetiche informazioni per ciascuna sezione al fine di offrire una panoramica delle tematiche affrontate. La prima parte "Du Cicéron médiéval au Cicéron communale: un corpus à redéfinir" (17–83) è dedicata alla trasmissione e alla ricezione dell'opera dell'Arpinate in ambito comunal, il cui studio presenta non poche [End Page 102] difficoltà legate da un lato alla scarsità dei dati a disposizione su copisti, luoghi di produzione, possessori e concrete pratiche di lettura, dall'altro alla proliferazione delle testimonianze manoscritte (l'autrice, per le proprie rilevazioni, isola quasi un migliaio di codici). Sulla base dello studio del corpus ciceroniano medievale superstite, suddiviso in codici anteriori al XIII sec. e codici di XIII-XIV/XV sec., Mabboux traccia un quadro generale dei testi più copiati a seconda dell'epoca e dei loro ambienti di diffusione, e un profilo generale dei fruitori di tale materiale (anonimi e personalità note). Nella seconda parte "Modes de citation, modes d'appropriation: présences et mémoires des textes cicéroniens dans les cultures écrites communales" (85–160), strettamente connessa alla precedente in quanto funzionale a compensare la scarsità di dati desumibili dall'analisi della tradizione manoscritta, l'autrice si concentra sulle modalità di reimpiego di Cicerone...

Reviewed by: Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age by Michelle C. Smith Nancy Myers Michelle C. Smith, Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2021. 234 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8093-3835-1. In her 1863 self-researched and self-published The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman's Work, Virginia Penny points out that "the false opinion that exists in regard to the occupations suitable for women must be changed ere women have free access to all those in which they may engage."1 Penny's research may have expanded her readers' views on women's work in the nineteenth century; however, Michelle C. Smith's Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age illustrates for the contemporary reader the "social, economic, and cultural shifts" and contexts during the antebellum period that effect gendered labor issues today (11). Comprised of five chapters, Utopian Genderscapes presents three rhetorical case studies of intentional communities: Brook Farm (1841–1847) in West Roxbury, Massachusetts; the Harmony Society (1804–1905) settling near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1825; and the Oneida Community (1848–1881) in Oneida, New York (3). These examinations on gendered labor are framed at the beginning of the book with Smith's theoretical lens, historical [End Page 97] context, and rhetorical argument about gendered labor during the antebellum period and at the end of the text with the continuing utopian fallacy of gendered and class labor in our own time as expressed through tropes such as "tidying up," "leaning in," and "having it all" (148–153). Smith's overarching argument claims that "such rhetorics of gendered labor function to increase divides among women and preclude alliances on the basis of gender" (5). She grounds her argument through her clearly articulated and detailed theoretical approach of analyzing the intentional communities as "ecologies of gender" (6–11). This material-feminist rhetorical lens examines each community's practices in its resistance to the larger context of American industrialization and in its reflection of that industrialization as well as the societal and the cultural attitudes about gendered labor. The three case studies, as Smith explains, convey "the networks of bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses that comprised women's work within each community, intervened in larger rhetorics of women's work, and initiated patterns of gendered labor that persist today" (4). In "Domestic Rhetorics," which details the distribution of labor at the transcendentalist community Brook Farm, Smith focuses on women's work to argue that while women branched out into nondomestic labor, men did not venture into traditional housework, thus reinforcing its stigma as representing menial chores. To alleviate the burden of daily living and provide time for other endeavors, the community's middle and upper-class women employed working-class women for housework further associating those tasks with class divisions. "Professional Rhetorics" demonstrates how women, labor, and prestige are not allied. In fact, as is illustrated by Gertrude Rapp in the Harmony Society, the success of one woman's entrepreneurial and rhetorical endeavors becomes a synecdoche for all women working in the silk industry. Unfortunately, many women at that time in the silk industry were laborers working for low wages and in unsafe working conditions, so they were not aligned with Rapp's privilege and whiteness. Focused on the Oneida Community, "Reproductive Rhetorics" illustrates the complex dynamic between an intentional community's mission and its practices resulting both in reinscribing societal norms tied to motherhood, childcare, and housework and in creating new hierarchies of gendered and class labor and authority. In the final chapter, Smith appropriately positions herself as researcher and scholar, as she did in the book's opening, with her clearly articulated argument and analytical method. She expands on her aims in writing history "to restore a sense of possibility" and to make that history relevant for today as a means to imagine what "might yet be otherwise" (27). She validates her aims by drawing connections between each intentional community and current social, cultural, and economic practices and attitudes about housework, professional women supporting the advancement of other women, and the continued tension...

Reviewed by: That Tyrant, Persuasion: How Rhetoric Shaped the Roman World by J. E. Lendon Christopher S. van den Berg J. E. Lendon, That Tyrant, Persuasion: How Rhetoric Shaped the Roman World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. 302 pp. ISBN: 978-0-691-22100-7. John Lendon has written a provocative book about the interrelationship of formal rhetoric and the different worlds—physical no less than intellectual—that ancient Romans built for themselves. The arrows of provocation travel from Lendon's quiver in two different scholarly directions: first, at historians seeking to uncover sources, causes, or influences for some staple topics of Roman history; second, at scholars of rhetoric who have in recent decades so eagerly sought to excavate the underlying [End Page 99] socio-cultural backgrounds and impetuses of declamation—not just how rhetoric worked at the technical level but what kind of cultural purchase it had in making men (to use Maud Gleason's notable phrase), and in making them do things. Caesar's assassination, and especially its aftermath, is examined first, with an eye to what the declamatory halls (or their late-Republican precursors) will have misleadingly taught the likes of Brutus and Cassius to expect after the tyrant's death. "Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more" (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 3.2.1555–1556) might have been patriotic justification enough, certainly for anti-tyrannical Romans. So why didn't this justification prevail? In Shakespeare's famous dramatization it is Antony's superior strategy of "flooding the zone" (to use Steve Bannon's motto) that wins out. By making it hard for others to know anything you can probably get them to do anything. (Antony's "Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt!" could have just as well been the insurrectionist's chant at the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021.) Lendon, rather, lays the blame at the conspirators' own door. The assassins were so mentally fixed in the declaimers' halls that when reality came knocking they couldn't find their way to the exit: "They expected that a literary convention—the evil henchmen vanish and the city returns to normal without any further effort—would apply in the real world. And what really happened is that they got to the end of their script, tried to repeat the ending several times in hope of a better result (those speeches in the Forum), and finally fell off their script into the real world, which was inhabited by Antony and Lepidus and their soldiers" (55–56). Lendon teases out not merely what rhetorical education may have prompted its students to create, but especially which creations were the indirect result of that education. As such the study necessarily and avowedly remains in the realm of speculation, but hopefully fruitful speculation, of the kind that illuminates certain mysteries or perplexing scenarios. In this sense he has little time for recent debates over declamation's acculturative or subversive workings ("we bid farewell to the sociological interpretations of school declamation," 22). Lendon examines the rhetorical shaping of thought and action in three distinct spheres of Roman activity: elite politics (Caesar's assassination); the built world (monumental nymphaea and city walls); the juridical-pedagogical stage (Roman law and declamation). His style is a jaunty mix of the light-hearted, the stern, and the ironic, reminiscent sometimes of Gibbon or Dickens and sometimes of Ronald Syme. The limitations of our own knowledge are crucial to the book's working premises: "we may conjecture that students of rhetoric under the Empire knew what they knew with great force and intensity (more than we are used to, from our systems of education), but what they knew with such vigor is not what we know" (25). This claim makes it possible to explore untrodden paths: "what the members of that class were positively taught by rhetorical education will have stood first in their minds, and been likely in principle to have the greatest historical impact" (25). The book proceeds in several case studies by circling around from effect to cause and back to [End Page 100] effect: first consider an event or practice, then salvage from rhetoric...

Reviewed by: Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire by Dana Farah Fields Anna Peterson Dana Farah Fields, Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire, Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies, Abingdon, NY: Routledge, 2021. 236 pp. ISBN: 978-0-429-29217-0. In an ancient context, the term parrhēsia is most often associated with the Athenian democracy of the fifth century BCE, where free or frank speech became a key egalitarian and therefore democratic value. But it also featured prominently in Greek literature of the Roman period (1st-3rd centuries CE), a time when a single man ruled over the Mediterranean world and social hierarchies dominated life on a local level. Although parrhēsia has been a topic of recurrent interest over the past three decades (thanks in large part to the influence of Michel Foucault), later Greek literature has been largely sidelined in discussions of this virtue.1 Dana Fields's Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire begins to fill this gap by providing a thought-provoking exploration of how Greek sophists, philosophers, and satirists of the second century CE deployed free and frank speech. Most importantly, Fields's study challenges the prevailing assumption that, after Alexander the Great, the connotations of the term shifted radically from a political right to a personal, ethical virtue. Instead, Fields argues, parrhēsia retained political significance in the second century CE, both in terms of local institutions and, more importantly, in the interpersonal relationships that so often defined politics at this time. Fields's discussion proceeds in six chapters, the first of which lays out the book's approach and establishes Aristophanes, Socrates, Diogenes, and Demosthenes as "icons of frankness" for later practitioners of parrhēsia. Chapter 2 further sets the stage by considering parrhēsia in the classical [End Page 95] period, where it was associated not just with citizenship but with further restrictive statuses, such as categories of social class and gender. Of particular interest in this chapter is Fields's discussion of parrhēsia and slavery, which considers not just the well-worn example of Roman Saturnalia but also Aelian's On the Nature of Animals, an often overlooked work. Following these first two introductory chapters, the next three chapters focus on different addressees of frank speech, specifically kings, cities, and elites. Chapter 3 explores how a speaker might adopt an adversarial style when addressing a king or emperor, a posture that Fields argues benefits both speaker and addressee by showcasing the former's courage and wisdom and the latter's self-control. As is the case with all but the last chapter, Fields does not focus on an individual author but instead draws on a variety of authors and texts. Chapter 3 consequently juxtaposes Dio Chrysostom's Kingship Orations with Philostratus's Apollonius of Tyana and examples of frank speakers culled from Plutarch's Parallel Lives. Dio and Philostratus's Apollonius remain the focus in Chapter 4, where Fields provides first a survey of Dio's civic orations before turning to consider how Apollonius offers frank criticism to cities both orally and through his letters. As Fields argues, Dio and Apollonius "occupy a space somewhere between rhetoric and philosophy" and present themselves as itinerant wise men (131). Dio and his appropriation of previous models (e.g., Socrates, Diogenes, and Demosthenes) is really the star of this chapter, and it is worth noting here that Fields might have also considered Dio's relationship to the tradition of iambic speech, particularly in the First Tarsian and Alexandrian orations, both of which are covered in this chapter. Our surviving sources suggest that urban elites navigated local internal hierarchies through delicately and carefully contrived speech. If the cities of the Greek east were in essence being run by oligarchic governance and through patronage relationships, parrhēsia and the language of friendship reduced the visibility of these social differences. Chapter 5 offers a fascinating read of Plutarch's How to tell a flatterer from a friend alongside Artimedorus's Oneirocriticon, Aelian's On the Nature of Animals, and other texts. Here, Fields challenges the conventional reading that parrhēsia in Plutarch's treatise is apolitical. As she convincingly shows, the text...

Reviewed by: Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Small Histories during World War II, Letter Writing, and Family History Methodology by Suzanne Kesler Rumsey Pamela VanHaitsma Suzanne Kesler Rumsey, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Small Histories during World War II, Letter Writing, and Family History Methodology, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2021. 220 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2090-4. Blessed Are the Peacemakers began with literacy scholar Suzanne Kesler Rumsey's inheritance of her grandmother Miriam's papers, which included a surprising number of letters exchanged with her first husband, Benjamin Kesler, between 1941 and 1946. Rumsey "was shocked to discover what their lives were like … in the midst of World War II" (2). As "one might expect of war-era letters," they were "filled with love and longing, anguish at being apart, uncertainty and anxiety about the war and the country's future." But, in Miriam and Ben's case, the newlyweds were separated because Ben was a member of a historic peace church and conscientious objector. As an alternative to serving in the United States military, he was conscripted into unpaid labor in Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps, leaving Miriam to support the family while she too avoided better-paying jobs that contributed to the War. Working with their letters, Rumsey reconstructs the story, or small-h history, of her grandparents, weaving their narrative into the large-H History of conscientious objectors during WWII. Rumsey demonstrates the importance of small-h histories to the history of rhetoric, models how to develop them through family history methodology (FHM), and illuminates the role of love letters in both this historiographic work and the relationships they record. Rumsey's introduction sets out "three salient themes" that are woven throughout the book: "the value of small histories, the methodology of FHM, and the study of conduit and platform within letter writing" (7). Situating it within the tradition of ars dictaminis, Chapter 1 theorizes these two concepts—conduit and platform—as characterizing the nature of Miriam and Ben's letters. The letters were a conduit, "a vehicle or a means by which they could transmit the intangible," such as love (15). Through "the physical, tangible materiality of the letters," they also "functioned as a platform upon which they built their relationship" (15). The remaining chapters are organized chronologically and can be understood in two parts. The first part tells the story of the couple's early courtship and letter writing leading up to marriage (Chapter 2) and then during their separation only months later as Ben's first CPS placement [End Page 93] began at Sideling Hill in Pennsylvania (Chapters 3–8). Illustrating the FHM she developed, Rumsey moves from "extensive archival digging and secondary source reading" (33) on the broader context of historic peace churches and faith-based nonresistance (Chapter 3), to the specific story recorded in Miriam and Ben's letters. These letters document their "epistolary nesting" when first separated (Chapter 4), the details of Ben's labor at the CPS camp (Chapter 5), and Miriam's work as a young wife left responsible for supporting them (Chapter 6). Here Rumsey demonstrates the power of small-h histories, not only to show what the life of an individual conscientious objector was like, but also to uncover the lesser-known story of CPS women. Subsequent chapters nuance Miriam and Ben's story by identifying moments when the conduit and platform of their letter writing fell short: when dealing with family conflicts about time-sensitive financial matters (Chapter 7) and when coping with separation during their first Thanksgiving and Christmas as newlyweds (Chapter 8). Throughout this part of the book, Rumsey's analysis might be developed further in conversation with scholars who investigate the rhetoric of the specifically romantic subgenre.1 They offer approaches to exploring how norms of gender and sexuality get embedded in and challenged through epistolary rhetoric. Regardless, Rumsey's theory and analysis of conduit and platform will prove useful for any rhetoricians and/or historians working with love letters. The second part of Blessed Are the Peacemakers turns to Ben's next CPS placement at the Rhode Island State Hospital for Mental Diseases, where Miriam was able to join him...

Abstract: This paper highlights the importance of an audience-centric approach in the study of Athenian forensic rhetoric and leverages insights from Social Identity Theory and Burke's concept of 'identification' to examine courtroom speeches. Litigants, perceiving the Athenian dikastai as a distinct group marked by a salient social identity, rhetorically employed the group's prototypes, norms, and interests to establish their identification—and underscore the opponent's division—with the audience. This prominent role of social identity and the potential for jury bias affecting the large audiences of dikastai prompt a reconsideration of the nature of Athenian trials and suggest that, in addition to upholding the law, Athenian courts functioned as platforms for the imposition of social and legal conformity.

Abstract: Despite the impressive influence that Martin Heidegger has over 20th-century thought, there has been little scholarship on how Sein und Zeit has influenced Latin American philosophy. I correct for this critical oversight by investigating how Rodolfo Kusch, Álvaro Vieira Pinto, and Paulo Freire, respectively, use the words ser and estar to critique and creatively reappropriate Heidegger's Sein lexicon in Sein und Zeit .

Abstract: Ennodius' panegyric for Theoderic the Great shows the employment of Roman rhetorical tradition and republican-era virtues to legitimise the new Germanic ruler of Italy. After Ennodius' general strategies to depict Theoderic as a Roman are discussed, this paper analyses two specific samples from the speech which show the use of traditional symbols, exempla , and even Ciceronian conceptions of tyranny alongside contemporary views of Romans and barbarians. These strategies were used to shape a version of Theoderic that removed the ruler from his Germanic background and reinterpreted him as a Roman ruler.

Reviewed by: Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric by Michelle Bolduc Denise Stodola Michelle Bolduc, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric, Studies and Texts 217. Toronto, CA: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2020. 443 pp. ISBN: 978-0-88844-217-8. Many scholars have worked to uncover the transmission of rhetorical texts over time, which is important but nothing new; however, this book takes a novel and illuminating approach in examining a specific case of the transmission of Cicero diachronically by delineating its transmission from Cicero to Brunetto Latini's translation of Cicero and then to Jean Paulhan's translation of Latini's translation of Cicero, and finally, to Perelman's and Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric Project. Significantly, the book posits a close relationship between rhetoric and translation, and does so by exploring the different meanings of the medieval term of translatio and using the notion of translatio as the organizing metaphor overall. Indeed, the work argues that the New Rhetoric Project grew out of this line of transmission and did so through both the literal and metaphorical meanings of the notion of translatio. In order to support these assertions, Bolduc presents us with very thorough and meticulously documented research. She provides an extensive bibliography of seventy-one pages, which is subdivided into two major categories: "Pre-Modern Works (before 1800)" and "Modern Works (after 1800)." Her bibliography includes works in many different languages, and she herself, as indicated in "A Note on Translation," has performed all of the translations unless indicated otherwise in the text. Moreover, each chapter includes numerous notes, each of which is painstakingly thorough. Just as an example, the first chapter contains one hundred twenty-one notes, while the second contains two hundred and sixty-five. In addition to using such high-quality scholarship methods, Bolduc does a good job of organizing her chapters: before launching into the chronology of the transmission in the third chapter, her second chapter conveys the different facets of the word translatio and exactly what that term brings to the discussion of the roots of the New Rhetoric Project. As Bolduc points out, translatio means not only the act of literally putting a text written in one language into a different language, but it also takes on additional types of meanings as generated in the Middle Ages. In fact, in the Middle Ages, translatio also included the metaphorical meaning of the [End Page 446] term. In other words, the term takes on the meaning of transcultural transmission of ideas and a sort of recontextualization of those ideas. Moreover, the act of translating a text includes this kind of transcultural transmission and recontextualization. In showing the chronological movement of the argument she is making, chapters two through five are in chronological order. In the first of these chronological chapters, entitled "Cicero: Rhetoric and Translation for the Roman Republic," Bolduc focuses on Cicero's translation of Greek sources and the manner in which he was integral in the "transfer of knowledge from Greece to Rome" (58). Cicero's translation and translation function to show that Latin, as a language, could transmit knowledge as readily as Greek, that the Romans were legitimate heirs of Greek knowledge, and could ultimately move even beyond what they inherited from the Greeks. Ultimately, however, Cicero's political aims despite, and perhaps because of, his renowned eloquence, led to his execution after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Cicero thus became synonymous with the demise of the Republic itself. This focus on the connection between rhetoric and civic concerns persists throughout the rest of Bolduc's chapters. The focus on the metaphorical meaning of translatio and its application to this line of transmission becomes clearer as the chapters progress. Chapter three is entitled "Bringing Ciceronian Rhetoric to the Florentine comune: Brunetto Latini's Translation of Cicero," and in it Bolduc posits that Latini's translation of Cicero is done as a response to his exile, which occurred for political reasons: he was a leading figure of the Guelph party, which suffered a defeat at Montaperti. As such, La Rettorica was shaped metaphorically by Latini's political context. As Bolduc asserts, "Latini transfers the Roman story of the conspiracy of...

Reviewed by: Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History by Jason Barrett-Fox Lisa Mastrangelo Jason Barrett-Fox, Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022. 202 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-5828-6. Jason Barrett-Fox's Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History offers feminist scholars and in particular feminist historians a dense but useful theoretical method for reading and recovering feminist artifacts. In particular, Barrett-Fox is focused on media such as film and book publication. He uses his new method for reading to examine work by the film star and medium Mae West, the silent film scenarist, novella writer, and autobiographer Anita Loos, and Marcet Haldeman-Julius, the writer, editor, and co-owner of socialist publishing company Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company (source of the famous Little Blue Books series). On the surface these seem odd choices since all three have already been "recovered" and there is extensive scholarship about them. However, part of Barrett-Fox's critique of earlier recovery projects is the tendency to recover the women that we recognize most easily from our own vantage points, particularly academic women. His project therefore diverges in order to read West, Loos, and Haldeman-Julius through new rhetorical lenses. [End Page 450] Barrett-Fox explicitly builds on early feminist historiography scholars such as Barbara Biesecker, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, and Carol Mattingly. Noting the strengths and weaknesses of extant models, Barrett-Fox jumps off from these previous models of feminist historiography by using a concept he calls "Medio-Materialist Historiography" or MMH. This concept provides new methods for reading texts from the past, particularly complicated ones, and requires several things from the objects in consideration. Chief among them is the original creator's use of some form of "inscriptional technology" and their "facility with a particular medium" (48). Next, "another facet of a likely candidate would be the quality with which she manipulated her chosen media and how those manipulations coincided with particular messages, critiques, or other, less overt demonstrations of (distributed) rhetorical force" (48). Importantly (and in a deviation from much current rhetorical recovery work), the material creator, in Barrett-Fox's imagining of MMH, need not be intentionally creating feminist material and may instead be responding to the private circumstances (social, historical, economic) of their own lives (31). MMH would allow for researchers to trace not just the materializations of the subject but also the distributions that result. Barrett-Fox begins with a discussion of how works may move between the ontic and the ontological in what he calls "radical inscription: materialized inscription that punctures the membrane separating the ontic from the ontological and, often, the past from the present" (4, emphasis original). With this in place, Barrett-Fox sets up the discussion of MMH and the ways in which it can be used to move beyond previous readings and even previous qualifications for whose work is recoverable. Chapter 1 of the text introduces us briefly to each of the three women under discussion (West, Loos, and Haldeman-Julius) as well as some background of the ways in which these women have been remembered. Barrett-Fox also lays out some further background for the concept of MMH through the discussion of Charles Sanders Peirce, whose 1887 experimentation with telepathy pushed the threshold between existence and knowability, and Georges Méliès's concept of the "cinematic stop trick," which used distortion to create images that were not "real" (much as current cinema does with CGI). Perhaps the most important concept introduced in this first chapter is the idea of cold kairos: the idea that a text or artifact may have been dormant for many years but can now be mediated. This notion is particularly helpful for those of us who routinely encounter historical artifacts and think that they are interesting but need a larger or better framework for thinking about how and why they should be recovered. Through Chapters 2, 3, and 4 (Loos, West, and Haldeman-Julius, respectively), Barrett-Fox introduces new concepts to help bolster an MMH reading of each of his subjects. In Chapter 2, for example, Barrett-Fox introduces the idea of using MMH...

Reviewed by: The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic by Stephen Howard Browne Tom F. Wright Stephen Howard Browne, The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. 229 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08727-6. Nostalgia about early American history typically comes in a few familiar forms. At the more popular end of work on the Revolutionary Period, there is no shortage of longing glances towards the struggles and causes of that era rooted in attraction to seemingly clear-cut ideological certainties. In a different way, intellectual historians might often seem to envy a period in which men of ideas of the quality of Adams and Jefferson led the nation. In a more tragic key, chroniclers of the continent's indigenous histories are rightly elegiac for the moment before entire worlds were destroyed. Stephen Howard Browne's The First Inauguration occupies another distinct category. It is a category that for obvious reasons is flourishing in our particular political moment and is of particular relevance to a Rhetorica audience. We might call this mode that of "public sphere melancholy." His book claims to speak on behalf of "readership concerned with the tenor of political discourse in our own time … [lamenting] the passing of an age when citizens deliberated as citizens, with speeches, not tweets" (4). To that audience he offers an engaging and readable study of the circumstances and significance of George Washington's passage through the USA to delivery of his first speech as president. But this is not an escapist backward glance. For while it expresses a great deal of wistfulness for the world of the Founders, it is an optimistic book, bringing to life the rhetorical world of the early republic in order to offer readers what Browne calls "vital resources for the reanimation of civic life" (2). In a familiar procedure, his book reads an entire era through the lens of a single speech. In this case, the opening address of Washington's presidency, delivered on 30 April 1789. But what is more striking and ultimately more successful about this book is how it casts its gaze more widely, [End Page 448] devoting as much time to the ritual procession of Washington from his home in Virginia through to Manhattan. This tour is a narrative device that allows for a vivid panorama of a slice of the early republic. Browne brings a novelistic verve to this capsule history, evoking the streets, buildings and rooms and the other landscapes through which Washington moved. Memorable instances here include the political microclimates of Philadelphia and Trenton and the free Black community of New York. With clear relish, he also recreates the parades and banquets and toasts that the almost-president was forced to endure and the many speeches he reluctantly delivered. These chapters are aimed at a broad audience, involving plentiful vignettes and asides that will be of use to general readers, even if unnecessary for the book's scholarly readers. Rather than incidental, however, the context makes the case that rhetorical analysis must always be grounded in granular thick description. If only all contexts were as well-sketched as this. By the time the book turns to the rhetorical analysis of the speech itself, a lot of the key concepts have been well-established. Browne has used his account of the journey to set up the live contexts that animated the key term that he will go on to address. The argument turns on Washington's attempt to "invent" the modern republican state through his framing of its stakes and its values. As in Browne's previous works on Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson, he is a thoughtful and insightful theoretically informed textual analyst, drawing out the complex themes and salient ideas from what has often been dismissed as a rather forgettable speech. He also offers an interesting survey of the speech's afterlives, examining in turn the anniversary years of 1839, 1889, 1939, 1989. In all of this, the nostalgia for an eloquent and dignified form of statecraft is often justified. However, nostalgia can be as wearisome as any banquet. As the analysis...

Reviewed by: Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities by Stephen M. Monroe Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Stephen M. Monroe, Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021. 256 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2093-5. How much do we know about our own university and its past? Stephen M. Monroe asks this question of his university—University of Mississippi—as well as a few other peer southeastern U. S. schools. Monroe examines how these universities "have struggled with their linguistic and [End Page 452] symbolic inheritance" (1). The controversies covered in the book are shown to have deep roots in the Lost Cause ideology that developed almost immediately after the Confederacy surrendered to the Union in the Civil War. Monroe explores how the Lost Cause formed, and continues to inform, notions of race and identity in universities of the American South and beyond. Monroe builds a conceptual frame called "confederate rhetoric." Put simply, confederate rhetoric "is historical, gathering any and all symbolic behavior that is rooted in or that recalls the Old South" (2). The concept extends beyond just Lost Cause discourse in its attention to a larger variety of texts, objects, and sources. As Monroe explains, "confederate rhetoric encompasses many modes of communication, including words, sounds, colors, statues, flags, photos, architecture, and more" (2). The widening of the communicative aperture allows Monroe to study less traditional forms of discourse, like ephemera, collegiate fight songs, and nicknames, as well as more traditional forms such as public arguments and deliberations. Heritage and Hate is composed of seven chapters, along with a preface, introduction, epilogue, and postscript. Most books do not have all of these sections preceding and proceeding the numbered chapters of a book. The various entry and exit points of the book express the recurring relationship amongst racism, identity, and tradition. Chapter one and two analyze vernacular discourses from the University of Mississippi. Chapter one traces the contested meaning of the nickname of the University, "Ole Miss." Originally the name given to the first University of Mississippi yearbook in 1897, Monroe explains that the quick uptake of the term as a nickname for the school owes to the racialized hierarchy of the late nineteenth century. The person responsible for suggesting the name noted that they often heard Black people working on southern plantations "address the lady in the 'Big House' as 'Ole Miss'" (25). Monroe builds upon this origin story to show how "'Ole Miss' has been invoked to glorify and defend the Old South and its outmoded way of life, used to punish and exclude Black people, … and served as code, container, and protector of nostalgic feelings for the Lost Cause" (20). Monroe tracks the various public debates about whether to keep the nickname, showing how appeals to unity and tradition betray a sympathy to the past rather than an effort at inclusion. Chapter two also takes up a vernacular discourse at the University of Mississippi, specifically the school cheer known as "Hotty Toddy." The central question posed in this chapter is, "how should southern university communities (and other intuitions) handle expressions or symbols less glaring than Confederate statuary but perhaps just as troubling?" Monroe makes the case for why "Hotty Toddy" rises to the same level of scrutiny by examining six moments in which the chant was "weaponized as a racial taunt" (63). Chapter three and four focus on controversies that feature an inciting event and significant discursive responses. In chapter three, Monroe analyzes a 2015 incident in which Black students at Missouri staged a peaceful protest and white spectators used the traditional M-I-Z-Z-O-U chant "to [End Page 453] drown [the protestors] out and to communicate anger and disapproval" (91). Monroe draws from newspaper articles, social media posts, and institutional responses to capture the intense emotion of the discourse from various individuals and groups. Chapter four moves back to University of Mississippi to address a controversy based on the response of students to the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012. On November 7, when the election was called in favor of Obama, many students took to public spaces and yelled racial...

Abstract: Gorgias's Encomium of Helen stands out as more than a display speech: it is a sophisticated statement on fifth century Greek life. Within a mythic framework, it presents Gorgias's post-Eleatic understanding of the world, including new ways of conceiving the logos within the finite boundaries of human life. I show how Gorgias's thoughts build out of Empedocles's cosmology and stylistics, leading Gorgias to consider more deeply how language and world go together. I demonstrate that the order of Gorgias's four causes is cyclical, which allows Gorgias to make gradated distinctions about responsibility. Gorgias's exploration of responsibility enables him to portray the world as something that continually marks and molds human being, and this includes the logos . Gorgias also addresses temporality, which not only imposes existential limits on human capacity but also contours language itself. Ultimately, the Helen conducts third-order (self-reflexive) thinking by marshalling a battery of rhetorical resources designed to attune an audience to how their own participation in the logos generates and sustains its powers. In effect, what the Helen is about is the work that the Helen does. Through a mixture of new insights into persuasion, language, temporality, and psychology, combined with self-reflexive rhetorical work, the Helen inspires further thought about key aspects of Greek existence.

Abstract: The renaissance witnessed both a large expansion of teaching and composition of rhetoric manuals and a flowering of literature in the sixteenth century. This essay asks what rhetorical theory contributed to renaissance literature. Where some earlier accounts, for example by Cave, Eden and Vickers, focus on the impact of one or two rhetorical doctrines, this essay argues that renaissance writers drew on, adapted and combined a wide range of rhetorical doctrines in thinking about how to persuade and move their audiences. In order to make this argument it sets out sixteen skills taught by renaissance rhetoric which writers could use: thinking about the audience; self-presentation; reusing reading in writing; style and amplification; emotion; pleasing; narrative; character; argument; examples; comparison; contraries; proverbs and axioms; disposition; beginning; and ending. It analyses texts by Erasmus, Tasso, Sidney, Montaigne and Shakespeare to show how the greatest renaissance writers adapted and combined ideas from rhetoric.

Abstract: "Are we not condemned to live in our exposure to one another, sometimes in the same space? Owing to this structural proximity, there is no longer any 'outside' that might be opposed to an 'inside,' no 'elsewhere' that might be opposed to a 'here,' no 'closeness' that might be opposed to a 'remoteness.'" Taking inspiration from Achille Mbembe's (2019), 40, "necropolitical" analysis of slavery in colonial contexts as a "structural proximity," this article explores Cicero's use of the image of a slave (idealized as "ideal" as well as vilified as violent) in the Catilinarians .

Abstract: Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (192–260/808–873) is mainly known as a translator of Greek works into Arabic, but he was also a prolific author. This article focuses on one of his least known treatises, On Vines ( Kitāb al-Karma ), which still remains unedited. On Vines is an eclectic and unclassifiable work that combines different genres. It has been traditionally considered a dietetic treatise on the properties of vine products inserted in the Galenic tradition. But On Vines is also a disputation on the excellence of trees written in the form of questions and answers and, ultimately, a polemical encomium of wine that relies for its effect on the opinions of ancient Greek authorities such as Homer, Diogenes, Aristotle, Socrates or Theophrastus. In this article I analyse the structure of the treatise, identifiying its generic affiliations and the rhetorical strategies deployed by Ḥunayn. I discuss specially the long sections on wine and Ḥunayn's defence of the virtues of this drink against its critics, arguing that the structure of the treatise is also determined by the religious implications of praising wine in an Islamic environment.

Abstract: This paper explores the relationships between style and complexion, temperament and disposition, climate and place in seventeenth-century thought. Facility and variation in style not only depend on reason, judgement, and responsiveness, but on the material substrata of the imagination and memory, in turn conditioned by air and temperament, climate and the uneven geographical distribution of environmental and internal, vital heat. This ensemble ofconcernes spurred wide-ranging enquiry in early modern anthropology, ethnography, and rhetoric, which I examine her in order to substantiate the mathematician and rhetorician Bernard Lamy's 1675 claim that "Every Clymat hath its style."

Abstract: La réflexion développée ici est le prélude à une édition critique de la Dialectique en François pour les barbiers et les chirurgiens , texte d'Adrien L'Alemant (1527–1559) publié en 1553, à Reims, chez Thomas Richard. L'ouvrage paraît dans le contexte épistémologique très spécifique de la seconde moitié de la Renaissance, dans ce moment où se met en place un discours « scientifique » en langue vernaculaire, à partir de l'héritage que constituent les textes logiques et/ou médicaux de l'Antiquité et du Moyen Âge.

Abstract: Cette étude met en lumière une figure négligée de l'humanisme français et aquitain (Périgord) dans le contexte de la littérature médicale. Il s'agit d'un ouvrage peu connu, la « traduction » du traité des Simples de Galien en français par le médecin Ervé Fayard (1548). L'analyse du texte comme des paratextes montre une démarche auctoriale singulière dans le contexte dynamique de la production de livres médicaux en langue française au milieu du seizième siècle. Fayard se distingue également dans le débat autour de l'orthographe du français, avec une préface sur ce sujet que l'on peut qualifier d'originale et de précoce. La rhétorique des paratextes (textes liminaires, portrait de l'auteur) conspire avec les choix d'auteur et de traducteur de Fayard pour faire apparaître un écrivain original et lettré. La comparaison avec les efforts contemporains mieux documentés de Jean Canappe à Lyon, auteur d'une autre traduction (partielle) du même ouvrage de Galien, montre de vifs contrastes. Fayard propose donc une voie et une voix propres, toutes en simplicité calculée, à l'opposé de Galien lui-même.

Abstract: This introduction offers a brief overview of the scholarly landscape on rhetoric and medicine from antiquity to early modern times. It argues that the relationships between rhetoric and medicine offer a field of study quite distinct from the rhetoric of science, and that they can be understood and approached from multiple angles. It then describes the contents of the papers in relation with the argument.

Abstract: This paper investigates the role of rhetoric within ancient medicine by setting medical writings in dialogue with contemporary forensic texts. Reading across these two genres allows us to capture the shared ways in which early medical and forensic discourse mobilise rhetoric in response to the epistemological limits of medical and forensic practice. Both medical and forensic discourse frame factual and practical knowledge as the remedy to the slippages of words, but at the same time they need words to formulate and validate their tentative knowledge of those very facts. Select readings from the Epidemics illustrate the importance of a rhetorically structured narrative in response to uncertain scenarios. Much like the narrative of forensic texts, I argue, the case-histories of the Epidemics try to shape elusive realities through a rhetorical gesture that confers a precise meaning upon them. Rhetoric, the paper concludes, is not merely an embellishment nor a skill. It is, instead, a medium for the communication of knowledge and the negotiation of its limits, even in texts that at first glance seem, or claim, to be devoid of any rhetorical features.

Largely disparaged by readers since the eighteenth century but revered before then as a guide to living and dying well, the Tusculan Disputations has throughout its long reception been acknowledged as the most rhetorical of Cicero's dialogues. This essay takes as its point of departure not only this acknowledgment but the principal interlocutor's key comparison between finding the appropriate status or "issue" in a legal case and selecting a circumstantially sensitive strategy when offering consolation for the loss of a loved one. It argues, with the help of Cicero's rhetorical works, that he deploys rhetorical status, with its three questions (conjectural, definitive, and qualitative), to structure the conversation, thereby redressing the perceived failure of Plato's Phaedo to provide adequate guidance for navigating life's vexations, including pain, depression, anxiety, and death.

Reviewed by: Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Purity, Covenant, and Strategy at Qumran by Bruce McComiskey Robert M Royalty Jr. Bruce McComiskey, Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Purity, Covenant, and Strategy at Qumran. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. 231 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-09015-3. This book is a detailed rhetorical analysis of six of the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumran. Each chapter, focusing on one or two of [End Page 204] the texts, employs a different rhetorical strategy for analysis based on what McComiskey has identified as the "rhetorical ecology" of the text, incorporating the changing material, discursive, and historical elements of the Qumran community rather than only the more static rhetorical situation of each text. The chapters proceed in a roughly historical order. The book achieves its aims of introducing rhetorical scholars to the sectarian scrolls and, with its "case study" approach, religious scholars to new strategies of rhetorical analysis. Key points are the emphasis on rhetorical ecology as an interpretive lens and the argument for hermeneutics/rhetoric in chapter 6. While McComiskey places the diachronic rhetorical development of these texts in the social and political history of the Qumran community, this is a rhetorical, not historical, study. The Introduction argues for the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls not only for Second Temple Jewish history but also for analysis by rhetoricians, given the relative paucity of rhetorical studies of the texts and their evolving rhetorical ecologies. Chapter 1 analyzes the early epistle from the future leader of the Essene Qumran community to the high priests of the Jerusalem Temple called Miqṣat Ma'aśeh ha-Torah, "Some Precepts of the Torah" (4QMMT, following Dead Sea Scroll convention for identifying texts by cave number and site, here Qumran). 4QMMT uses the rhetorics of identification, distinction and persuasion to distinguish the two parties' positions and to try to convince the Temple priests of the validity and urgency of Essene views on the impurity of the Temple. The rhetorical ecology of the text is as important as the rhetorical situation: "only the understanding of texts as situational and ecological will further our understanding of ancient texts such as 4QMMT" (46, McComiskey's italics). The rhetorical ecology of the community shifts dramatically in the next 50 years as the letter does not achieve its persuasive goals. The Essene community, under the leadership of the "Teacher of Righteousness," the putative author of 4QMMT, dissociates from the Jerusalem hierarchy and indeed all non-Essene Jews, founding a desert community outside of Jerusalem by the Dead Sea. Drawing on the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, chapter 2 then analyzes the foundational Rule of the Community (1QS), a performative text using infelicitous speech acts to condemn the Jerusalem authorities and felicitous speech acts to form the Yahad, or congregation, as the Essene community referred to itself. The document ends with a serious of curses, which McComiskey labels as preventing infelicitous speech acts within the initiated community, although he parses the curses, treating the ones for material actions in chapter 4, weakening his analysis. Chapter 3 then analyzes the dissociative rhetoric of the Damascus Document, a text discovered in the Cairo Genizah almost 40 years before copies were found at Qumran, hence called CD. Although the origins and purposes of CD remain less clear than 1QS, the text addresses members of the community who live in "camps" or communities among non-Essene Jews away from Qumran. Using Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric on "the dissociation of concepts," McComiskey shows how CD addresses the incoherence of Essenes living among Jews who [End Page 205] are not "real" Jews.1 He shows how CD divides central concepts of Jewish identity, such as humanity, Israelite, remnant, and Essene, into "real" and "apparent." This rhetorical strategy resolves incoherence for "real" Essenes living among "apparent" Israelites. Chapter 4 turns to the central theme of ritual purity at Qumran. McComiskey chooses two texts focusing on purity, the Purification Rules (4QTohorot A, B) and the Temple Scroll (11QT), which he analyzes using material rhetoric, an alternative to representational approaches to models for words. The symbolic material actions of inspiriting...

Tra Seicento e Settecento, Ennodio ha goduto di una particolare attenzione presso i Gesuiti, come dimostrano le edizioni di Schott e Sirmond (1611), la sua inclusione tra le letture consigliate da Possevino (1603-1606) e la discussione sul suo stile in Caussin (1619). Inoltre, il caso del predicatore gesuita Vanalesti (1678-1741) mostra due modi diversi nella ripresa di Ennodio. Da un lato, i suoi estratti furono riutilizzati senza tener conto del contesto originario e in questa forma circolarono tra i diversi autori. Dall'altro lato, la probabile lettura diretta della <i>Dictio</i> 20 di Ennodio diede a Vanalesti lo spunto per innovare uno schema argomentativo consolidato come quello della predica sulla virtù.

Reviewed by: Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts by Allison Glazebrook Katherine Backler Allison Glazebrook, Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2021. 240pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-2441-7. This book offers a short, focused, thoughtful analysis of how prostitution functions rhetorically in Athenian legal speeches. In each of the five chapters, Glazebrook takes us through a forensic speech in which what she [End Page 209] calls "sexual labor" is at issue and analyses its rhetorical strategies to draw out ways in which Athenians used the figures of "sexual laborers" to articulate and negotiate social values. Each chapter's argument develops the last. The first chapter discusses Lysias 4, a dispute between two men over a prostituted woman they allegedly agreed to "share" but whom one is using exclusively. Glazebrook shows how the speaker repositions the unnamed woman from sex-object to subject, a manipulative influence on his opponent and the trial. The second shows how Isaios 6's portrait of a prostituted woman named Alke suggests the ramifications of her alleged influence by moving her from brothel to tenement-house to household, Peiraieus to Kerameikos to astu, playing on Athenian anxiety about "concepts of oikos and polis and … the roles of enslaved persons, non-Athenians, and even women in these places" (49-50). The third examines the more dramatic (almost panhellenic) mobility of Neaira in Against Neaira, and her more serious supposed threat to the Athenian family, citizen body, and religion. The fourth, on Lysias 3, changes focus to prostituted boys and men, considering how the speaker uses Plataian teenager Theodotos to mark out acceptable and unacceptable expressions of male homosexual desire and behaviour. The fifth, on Aischines's Against Timarchos, uses male prostitution to work through what it means to be a decent, democratic, Athenian citizen—or not. Sexual Labor is refreshingly clearly written. Glazebrook briefly but helpfully explains relevant technical points (for example, on legal processes) and key concepts (like the important but fuzzy ideological distinction between pederasty and prostitution), avoiding over-simplification and acknowledging problems and contradictions. She will offer a variety of scholars' opinions and either pick out the one closest to hers or identify the "bottom line," for example, on what it means to "commit hubris against one's own body" in Aischines 1 (140). The description of Athenian courts (9-13) offers a dynamic, basic introduction to Athenian law but also considers the law-courts as a performance context. The book is useful on terminology, demonstrating that orators use words like pornē, hetaira, and pallakē not so much to denote categories as to evoke a set of connotations to make a point. For example (37), "At two key points [in Lysias 4] … when the speaker accuses the opponent of feigning his injuries and when he asks for the jurors' pity, he refers to [the woman] as pornē (4.9, 19)" which is "both degrading and inaccurate": seemingly she "has been living with the opponent as his personal hetaira or even pallakē (long-term partner)." Further, she argues that the avoidance of the labels pornē and hetaira for Alke in Isaios 6 unmoors her from fixed place-associations (brothel for pornai; oikos for wives and pallakai; symposion for hetairai), allowing her to move within the cityscape, transgressing and disrupting the social order. Glazebrook makes her argument particularly effectively on p. 150 where, through and informing her analysis of Against Timarchus, she shows that as Aeschines "uses kinaidos as a lifestyle and identity for Demosthenes, [he] employs pornos to indicate a lifestyle and personality for Timarchos. His concern is not to show that Timarchos has practiced a profession—no concrete proofs … are offered—but to show that he embodies an identity." [End Page 210] There are some problems. On p. 40, Glazebrook writes that "many of the jurors … may have been familiar with the pornē in the brothel and on the streets, [but] the sex laborer who mixed with citizens at elite symposia … was beyond their immediate circle." This sits awkwardly with her statement on p. 70 that "many Athenians would have experienced [symposia] or at the very least would have been familiar with [their] entertainments and the women...

Reviewed by: The Orator Demades: Classical Greece Reimagined through Rhetoric by Sviatoslav Dmitriev Gunther Martin Sviatoslav Dmitriev, The Orator Demades: Classical Greece Reimagined through Rhetoric. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021. 354 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-751782-6. The sub-title reveals that this book is not a biography of the orator Demades; it does not describe the work, life, and character of a leading politician in the waning days of Athenian independence. One may instead call it an anti-biography in that it undertakes the deconstruction of nearly all existing evidence about Demades's life and rhetoric. Far from being purely negative, it offers a thorough study of the way in which the rhetorical culture from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine Era constructed and moulded its own "Demades," subjecting this phantasmagoria to its own ideas about [End Page 212] the social, moral, and rhetorical qualities of good and bad orators and to its own purposes in propagating these ideas and the concomitant values. Literary sources paint a picture of Demades as a major force in "pro-Macedonian" politics in Athens after the battle of Chaeroneia in 338, i.e., a proponent of a non-confrontational relationship with Philip II and Alexander the Great. The many witticisms ascribed to him show a teller of truth, fearless in the face of monarchs and the democratic mob, making him immensely quotable. While previous biographies of Demades have struggled to distinguish trustworthy information from fanciful anecdotes and to assign the former their historical setting, Dmitriev proposes to cut the Gordian knot by discarding all evidence that is not from Demades's lifetime as fabrication of the later rhetorical educational system, in which progymnasmata and declamations drew on classical (pseudo-)quotes and (often historically impossible) scenarios. His argument is based on an impressive array of material that exposes many of the quotes as stock material ascribed to different characters by different ancient authors, the anecdotes as tropes, for example about corruption, dealing with the masses or flattery. What is left is a small number of references in the Attic orators and epigraphic evidence. One inscription (IG II2 1623, B 166-167), which appears to show Demades's commitment in an operation directed against Macedon in 341/340, is viewed as proof that Demades was by no means a supporter of appeasement or even pro-Macedonian. Dmitriev's scepticism deprives us of many cherished sources, such as Plutarch's Lives of Demades's contemporaries. But if Plutarch was indeed so steeped in the culture of his days that he fell for the inventions of the rhetorical school, so be it: we should be grateful for the purge of misleading material. However, despite the impressive cumulative power of Dmitriev's parallels and his construction of a largely coherent picture of the transformation through rhetorical culture of "Demades," the pendulum swings too far to the side of scepticism (not of the Pyrrhonian kind) when all the later testimonies are discarded as products of a later age. The evidence may be rejected as unreliable, but Dmitriev insists that it is definitely fabrication. Sometimes, however, tropes and clichés may not be pulled out of thin air, and he rarely asks where information may have come from and for which reasons one may have invented biographical snippets (other than the needs of the school room and the self-affirmation of the educated class). Plutarch often drew on contemporary (now lost) sources, not only historians such as Theopompus but also compilations of personal attacks from comedy. The trope of Demades having been a sailor would be in line with Aristophanes's mocking description of Cleon as a tanner. Moreover, in his dismissal of the literary sources, Dmitriev even doubts the authenticity of Hyperides's Against Diondas and both his and Dinarchus's Against Demosthenes. Methodologically problematic is the dismissal of tropes as late because of their "rhetorical tone": that seems to presuppose that the polemicists of the fourth century—i.e., the orators, the "rhetorical" historians, and the comedians—did not adopt a rhetorical tone. (Dmitriev himself, by the way, slams those who accept alleged quotes by Demades on the basis that they sound authentic.) [End Page...

Reviewed by: Los "Principios de Retórica" de Aftonio con anotaciones de Juan de Mal Lara by María Dolores García de Paso Carrasco et al. Raquel Martínez Ballestrín Los "Principios de Retórica" de Aftonio con anotaciones de Juan de Mal Lara. Introducción, edición, traducción y notas, María Dolores García de Paso Carrasco, Trinidad Arcos Pereira, María Elisa Cuyás de Torres, Gregorio Rodríguez Herrera. Madrid, ES: Ediciones Clásicas, 2021. 363 pp. ISBN 978-84-7882-876-0. Los Principios de Retórica de Aftonio constituyen uno de los numerosos manuales en los que quedaron rescatados y expuestos los principios de la retórica clásica para su enseñanza en los ambientes intelectuales y religiosos. En este contexto, la obra de Aftonio fue ampliamente editada, [End Page 202] con constantes traducciones y anotaciones, entre las que destacan las de Lorich, Agrícola y Francisco de Escobar. Se suscribe Juan de Mal Lara a esta tradición, que recoge con especial atención de su maestro Francisco de Escobar, llevando a cabo la edición y anotación de la obra de Aftonio, en la que incluye comentarios a los diferentes ejercicios. Así, en esta obra nos presentan sus editores un cuidado proceso de edición, traducción y estudio de la obra del humanista, con una completa introducción en la que se recoge desde la ubicación biográfica e intelectual del autor hasta la estructuración de los contenidos. En este sentido, es importante referenciar el estudio preliminar que introduce la edición y traducción, en tanto que ofrece al lector un panorama completo de las cuestiones nucleares para la comprensión de la obra: introducen los editores al humanista, presentan su obra, respecto a la que refieren su estructura, objetivos, referencias, desarrollo editorial de las traducciones y comentarios de Aftonio, e, incluso, revisan las máximas educativas sobre las que se asienta el proyecto del intelectual. Este estudio introduce una edición fonética de la obra de Juan de Mal Lara, que los editores toman del ejemplar ubicado en la Biblioteca Nacional de México, aunque lo ofrecen cotejado con los ejemplares encontrados en la Biblioteca Nacional, la Diocesana de Zamora y la de Castilla-La Mancha. Ofrecen en estas páginas la edición de la obra, su traducción y un nutrido corpus de notas en las que se desarrollan tanto explicaciones del contenido como alusiones intertextuales de los diferentes intelectuales que el humanista toma en consideración en la elaboración de sus comentarios. En cuanto a la biografía de Juan de Mal Lara, de esta destaca el contenido autobiográfico que presenta, extraído en su mayor parte de las obras del autor, además de la existencia de biografías elaboradas por coetáneos del humanista. En este sentido, se ofrece en el estudio preliminar una transcripción de la que Pedro Pacheco elabora tan solo veinte años después de su muerte. De este contenido biográfico se destaca su formación intelectual, en la que nombres como el de Francisco de Escobar cuentan con gran presencia e importancia, así como sus producciones, orientadas a las preocupaciones que el autor muestra en torno al estudio de la lengua vernácula y el latín, junto a contenido literario, filosófico y religioso-moral. En el contexto de la producción de Juan de Mal Lara, la elección de la edición de la obra retórica de Aftonio adquiere especial importancia. El Renacimiento constituye un momento de recuperación del pasado grecolatino en el que el estudio de los procesos retóricos para la enseñanza, especialmente vinculada al ámbito escolástico, se revela fundamental. En estos términos, la recuperación de los ejercicios preliminares para el proceso de estudio del discurso pasó por la continua reedición de tratados como los de Aftonio, cuya difusión en el ámbito hispánico estuvo marcada por las ediciones de Agrícola y de Francisco de Escobar. Es en esta tradición, por lo tanto, en la que se enmarca la obra del intelectual...

Reviewed by: The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland by Brian James Stone Conor O'Brien Brian James Stone, The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland, Knowledge Communities. Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. 275 pp. ISBN 978-94-6298-445-5. This is a volume in the history of rhetoric, rather than the history of Ireland. The author's aim, apparent from the first page, is to introduce the [End Page 214] intellectual riches of early medieval Ireland to fellow scholars of the rhetorical arts and to make the case that Irish writings deserve serious attention from historians of rhetoric interested in the development of the discipline in the post-Roman West. The assumed audience of the book knows little about early medieval Ireland or its intellectual history, and indeed may have been seriously misled by the portrayal of Ireland in previous work on early Irish rhetoric which relied on out-dated ideas of the island as some untouched bastion of Celtic culture, removed from the rest of Latin Europe. Stone is well aware that the past decades have seen these Celtic mists blown away from the study of early Irish intellectual history and he sets out to do the same for early Irish rhetoric in this book. Consequently, the first two chapters of the book essentially summarize much of our existing knowledge about Ireland in its late antique and early medieval context and provide an overview of the evidence for education, learning, and scholarly activity in Ireland between the fifth and the ninth centuries. Little here will be new to historians of the early Middle Ages, but clearly such information is a necessary prelude to Stone's rhetorical analysis of particular primary sources that forms the bulk of the text. Nonetheless, I wonder if the historian of rhetoric, coming to this material for the first time, might not have benefitted from an earlier introduction to the social significance of rhetoric and oral communication in early Ireland. Stone actually provides a very clear and useful discussion of precisely this topic in chapter six: his discussion there of the links between native and ecclesiastical learning, of the social functions of the filid (the poet class which provided Ireland's equivalent to the rhetor), of the real impact of the public performance of praise and satire, all that is both lively and insightful. Providing readers with this discussion earlier in the volume would I think have been useful for putting the enumeration of texts read and written in early medieval Ireland (of which much of chapter two consists) into a richer context. Chapters three through six provide a detailed rhetorical analysis of three primary sources: St Patrick's Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, the Hisperica famina, and the Old Irish "Cauldron of Poetry and Learning." Stone identifies rhetorical tropes utilized, suggests sources or analogues in late antique rhetorical writings, and generally provides detailed case studies of how early medieval Irish authors used language to persuade people or reflected on the nature of a rhetorical education. Stone is less successful in contextualising these texts and explaining what rhetorical analysis can tell us about them as historic works. The problems are most obvious in the section on Patrick, whose Letter receives the most attention despite being the least Irish of the texts surveyed (Patrick was neither born nor educated in Ireland and wrote primarily, if not exclusively, for a non-Irish audience). Stone provides a lot of background discussion drawing on the vast literature on Patrick in a manner which manages to be exhausting, but not exhaustive. We have much summary of mid-twentieth-century debates about Patrick's dating, but nothing on Roy Flechner's recent controversial suggestions for Patrick's purposes in going to Ireland. The analysis of the Letter [End Page 215] itself is overall solid and convincing, but its most original claim (namely that Patrick's rhetoric serves an implicit aim of late Roman "frontier management") remains under-developed. Stone has drawn on some recent important developments in the scholarship of late antique Ireland, especially the work of Elva Johnston, but more time reflecting on the implications of his ideas and explaining...

This article investigates whether Attic orators use prosodic and phonological effects to convey meaning (iconicity). Four hypotheses are explored: 1) heavy syllables tend to occur more often at period boundaries than within the sentence; 2) heavy syllables convey solemnity of tone and, in narrative, low dynamicity; 3) clustering of unvoiced consonants correlates with unpleasantness of tone or content; 4) alliteration is used when the author wishes to draw particular attention to the argument. Quantitative analyses for these hypotheses yield few positive results, so that we should be sceptical concerning the importance of iconicity in Attic rhetoric.

In memoriamMarc Van Der Poel (1957–2022) Mike Edwards It is with a heavy heart that I write this personal tribute to my dear friend Marc van der Poel, who passed away on 18 December 2022. I do not need to remind readers of Rhetorica of the tremendous service Marc gave to the International Society for the History of Rhetoric over three decades, with repeated stints on Council, his long and distinguished editorship of the journal (2011–2018), and his Vice-Presidency and subsequent Presidency of the Society, which was equally distinguished and also long, being uniquely extended for a year due to the Covid crisis and forced postponement of the 2021 Biennial Conference. He bore the pressures that situation brought with his usual calmness, professionalism, and good humour. Away from ISHR, Marc was a distinguished Professor of Latin. Born on 4 February 1957 in the Dutch town of Geldrop, just east of Eindhoven, Marc read Classics at the Catholic University of Nijmegen (now Radboud University). After graduating in 1979 he studied for a Diplôme d'Études Approfondies at the University of Tours before taking his Masters cum laude at Nijmegen in 1983, with a dissertation on Seneca the Elder. He was already deeply interested in Neo-Latin and went on to study for his doctorate under the supervision of Jan Brouwers and his friend and mentor Pierre Tuynman. Marc was awarded his PhD in 1987, with a thesis (in Dutch) entitled The 'declamatio' among the humanists. Contribution to the study of the functions of rhetoric in the Renaissance. This was the beginning of a long and highly productive career dedicated to the study of the humanists and humanist rhetoric, in particular Rudolf Agricola, which took him immediately to the USA on a Fulbright award and a two-year post at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. Further research posts followed at Nijmegen and at the Constantijn Huygens Institute in The Hague, accompanied by books in French and English on Agricola, until his appointment as Professor at Nijmegen in 1999. While continuing to research and publish extensively, Marc [End Page 111] was also dedicated to the teaching of Latin language and culture, and on numerous occasions we discussed his heavy teaching load, which he was always determined to carry out to the very best of his not inconsiderable ability. He supervised seven PhD students, while performing the other duties of a Professor, including being Head of Department and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts. On one of his annual summer visits to Oxford when already in his early nineties, Jerry Murphy asked me if I would help to ensure that his project on Quintilian would come to fruition, should anything happen to him. I was of course deeply honoured and very happy to agree, especially because it afforded me the opportunity to collaborate closely not only with Jerry but also with Marc. He and I spent many happy hours together editing the submissions to the Oxford Handbook of Quintilian, in his home and in mine, and online when the coronavirus struck, with Jerry always eager to contribute by email. While working closely with him, I came to realise at first hand what a tremendous scholar Marc was, as well as his ability to make tough decisions. He saw this major project through to completion in time for Jerry to hold a copy of the volume, and it was a proud moment for both of us on 21 December 2021 when we were able to launch the Handbook at Radboud University, online because of the virus but the two of us together in spite of it. It is a serious loss to scholarship that Marc did not live to finish his edition, with commentary and translation, of Agricola's important work De inventione dialectica. He also recognised, throughout his career, the high importance of accurate bibliographies and was working on one of Agricola for the Oxford Bibliographies Online series. Totally at ease with all six languages of the Society, as well as Greek, Marc was fluent in French and English, which I used to tease him he spoke with an American accent and vocabulary. But he was so much more...

Madeleine de Scudéry's Les Femmes illustres (1642) comprises fictional speeches by famous women of antiquity and includes coin portraits reproduced from Guillaume Rouillé's Promptuaire des medalles (1553). The portrait illustrations invoke connections between Scudéry's text and the genre of Rouillé's text—the coin image anthology. Comprised of coin portraits accompanied by biographies, anthologies of coin images draw from ancient visual traditions and grant prestige to women's images. As backgrounds for Les femmes illustres, these texts enhance the ethos of Scudéry's heroines because the coin portraits encourage readers to see the women as people worthy of public commemoration. Scudéry's prefatory epistle echoes the visual arguments and guides readers into ways of seeing women speakers as competent rhetors deserving of respect.

Reviewed by: La confrontation des points de vue dans la dynamique figurale des discours. Énonciation et interprétation by Alain Rabatel Pierre Chiron Alain Rabatel, La confrontation des points de vue dans la dynamique figurale des discours. Énonciation et interprétation. Limoges, FR: Éditions Lambert-Lucas, 2021. 655 pp. ISBN 978-2-359-35305-1. Les découpages disciplinaires pèsent sur les objets de la recherche ainsi que sur les méthodes de ladite recherche. Ces découpages sont invétérés par les parcours universitaires et se répercutent sur l'habitus des chercheurs. Dans le cas de l'Antiquité, le problème est d'autant plus gênant que l'existence même d'une discipline suppose un enseignement institutionnalisé et que des champs entiers du savoir comme la sociologie, la linguistique ou la littérature, sont de création récente. L'un des grands apports de l'anthropologie structurale a été de battre en brèche certaines frontières inconsciemment ou consciemment admises et de faire accepter que la philosophie, l'histoire, le droit, la sociologie, ou encore la littérature, etc. pouvaient conjuguer leurs efforts sur les mêmes objets, des textes par exemple, ou des événements ou des traits de civilisation, dans un processus en quelque sorte scialytique. C'est à cette condition que les différences d'approche—le fait par exemple que l'étude de la langue grecque se soit tardivement séparée de sa matrice, la philosophie, et se soit ou bien intégrée à la rhétorique ou bien dissociée en grammaire descriptive et grammaire scolaire—cessent d'être des obstacles et deviennent des richesses. Une fois reliées au projet qui les sous-tend, les notions échappent non seulement au finalisme d'un "progrès" mais aux jugements condescendants coupés de la dynamique propre des doctrines. Parmi ces frontières, celle qui crée un abîme entre la rhétorique et la linguistique est une des plus persistantes. Les fondateurs de l'ISHR en 1977 ont fait deux choix décisifs en la matière : ils ont adopté une démarche historique et privilégié le versant prescriptif et pratique de l'approche du langage—d'où l'emploi du mot rhétorique—sur sa description ou sa théorie. Les cadres théoriques sont volontiers ceux des époques étudiées et l'étude des usages divers de la parole au cours du temps prévaut sur une description fine et scientifiquement actualisée de l'énoncé/texte obtenu. Les historiens ne cherchent pas tant à donner leur nom à une nouvelle théorie qu'à décrire l'attestation de telle ou telle technique oratoire et d'en mesurer l'effet sur tel ou tel public. Les linguistes, de leur côté, ont longtemps travaillé sur des textes inertes ou le système de la langue comme structure abstraite, plus facile à "scientificiser." [End Page 200] L'opposition entre les deux n'est évidemment pas irréductible. Des rapprochements, de part et d'autre, ont été opérés. C'est ainsi que le projet de donner un classement structural aux figures à l'aide des quatre opérations addition-soustraction-mutation-métathèse est commun à la rhétorique tardive (Phoebammon, vie siècle ap. J.-C.) et aux linguistes du Groupe μ de Liège (1970). Les listes de figures illustrant la "rage taxinomique," selon la formule de Roland Barthes, ont été concurrencées à l'époque impériale romaine par des figures conçues non plus comme des énoncés ponctuels remarquables dans l'absolu mais—dans la théorie hermogénienne des ideai—dotées d'une fonction dans la stratégie expressive ou argumentative d'un texte. Réciproquement, la pragmatique puis l'analyse du discours se sont appliquées à élargir l'analyse linguistique aux autres paramètres, voire aux stratégies, de la communication, mais le clivage reste profond. Dans son livre passionnant, AR fait plus que tendre des ponts entre les deux approches. Il fait de l'interprétation, dans sa dynamique, un des moyens du fonctionnement figural, et ses descriptions sont utiles aussi bien au lecteur qu'au producteur d...

Reviewed by: Rhetoric and Scripture in Augustine's Homiletic Strategy. Tracing the Narrative of Christian Maturation by Michael Glowasky Rafał Toczko Michael Glowasky, Rhetoric and Scripture in Augustine's Homiletic Strategy. Tracing the Narrative of Christian Maturation, Supplements to Vigilae Christianae: Texts and Studies of Early Christian Life and Language 166. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2021. 195 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-44668-7. Augustine's rhetoric is experiencing a new wave of scholarly interest. Michael Glowasky's PhD monographic thesis is among the growing number of explorations of Augustine's rhetorical practice, unique in focusing solely on Augustine the preacher. The introduction (1-29) first presents the reasons for selecting this subject and reflects on the problems of studying Augustine's sermons as a coherent corpus. Next, he proposes classifying them into three categories based on the audience's "stages of spiritual maturation" (15): catechumens, neophytes and the faithful. This is novel, as scholars usually discern between catechumens and others, because the rules of participation in liturgy differed between them. Glowasky corroborates his decision with passages from two sermons (353 and 392) in which Augustine makes a parallel between the age of innocence of the newly baptised and infants. Glowasky's division of audiences into three categories is crucial for the whole study, constituting the basis for the selection of material and the method of communicating findings. The grouping is simple and elegant. Closing the introduction, Glowasky outlines his method for approaching Augustine's use of rhetoric and scripture in these three groups. First, he redefines the classical concept of narratio, to apply it more broadly as a way of communication that may replace logical argument to "communicate deeper meaning with more persuasive and emotive force" (23). Glowasky assumes that Augustine drew here on a long Latin rhetorical tradition and made use of narratio in two senses. Firstly, narratio is the story God tells the faithful through creation, history and Scripture. Secondly, the Scripture was understood as the narratio of the sermons. Furthermore, he assumes Augustine used a different type of narratio addressing different groups, applying a forensic narratio addressing neophytes, a deliberative type addressing catechumens, and, preaching to the faithful, "draws out more fully the dialectical quality of narratio." Chapter 2 (30-56) explores the notion of narratio more deeply, building on John O'Banion's controversial claim that, for Quintilian, narratio was [End Page 207] "the orator's fundamental art" (341) and was understood as a thought process and way of communicating rather than a part of speech.1 Glowasky believes that Augustine shared this tradition and hence saw narratio as "a ready-made tool to be used to refer to the strategic ordering of temporal events in order to convey an author's particular meaning" (36). Narratio could substitute logical argument and be more persuasive if ordered properly. Glowasky again turns to O'Banion and Kenneth Burke to explain that Augustine treated "narratio primarily as a tool for interpreting Scripture" (41) but, contrary to these two scholars, links this thinking with the prior rhetorical tradition. This tradition seemingly emphasised that narratio proved to be the best tool for conveying meaning. Augustine presented Scripture as a coherent and reliable narratio in De doctrina Christiana and employed it as the narratio of his sermons. Glowasky bases his thesis on O'Banion article on Quintilian. However, Quintilian says various things about narratio throughout his vast work—some contradictory. But the main difficulty is that nothing suggests that Augustine knew the Institutiones well. They were not used as manuals of rhetoric at that time, when teaching was dominated by De inventione and Rhetorica ad Herennium and many books drawing on them, authored by Marius Victorinus, Grillius and other rhetores latini minores. Chapter 3 (57-88) is dedicated to proving the thesis that Augustine's sermons for catechumens seek to persuade them to enter the Catholic Church as the only place where salvation is attainable (57). Glowasky observes how Augustine's technical advice concerning preaching to the catechumens from De catechizandis rudibus shares much with Cicero's view of narratio in judicial oratory. Augustine's two sample speeches from the same book focus on describing the character of the Church through narratio...

In early Greek theoretical descriptions of rhetoric peithō and logos both emerge as crucial elements. However, historical scholarship on rhetoric has generally focused on logos at the cost of any sufficient understanding of peithō. This essay examines peithō within a text that predates the descriptions of rhetoric formulated by Gorgias, Plato, and Aristotle—Aeschylus's Oresteia. I argue that, throughout the speeches of Athena at Eumenides 778-891, Aeschylus displays highly sophisticated argumentative techniques (forms of logos) that anticipate principles outlined in Aristotle's Rhetoric. At the same time, Aeschylus highlights peithō as an essential characteristic of Athena's rhetorical effectiveness. In so doing, Aeschylus prepares the way (in practice) for what Greek sophists and philosophers will later articulate (in theory): that logos and peithō are inseparable and equally important components of effective rhetoric.

Reviewed by: Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self by Adam Ellwanger Ryan McDermott (bio) Adam Ellwanger, Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2020. 202 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08593-7. This book moves metanoia and related concepts of transformation and conversion to the center of our theoretical understanding of ethos. Whereas for Aristotle ethos had depended on the audience—did they consider the speaker trustworthy?—now the speaking subject determines how ethos ought to be recognized, and the audience must defer to the subject's self-understanding. As a rhetorical device, Ellwanger shows, metanoia is one of the most important means by which subjects can establish ethos in either of these models. This book's consistent concern is to analyze how, precisely, metanoia is employed in the service of ethos in various contexts and rhetorical and ethical models. At its best, Ellwanger's study adopts a comparative method—what he calls "paratactical rhetorical analysis"—that allows different understandings of metanoia to clarify each other by contrast. Ellwanger also approaches his topic diachronically, telling a story of development or transformation in the practices of metanoia. This narrative gives the book its structure, moving from classical and ancient Jewish sources to early Christianity, then the Protestant Reformation, post-Enlightenment modernity, and what Ellwanger characterizes as the postmodernity of today. Each chapter's narrative section culminates with a theoretical elaboration, which is then worked out in a section of comparative examples. This reviewer found the heuristic, second section of each chapter the more effective. For example, Chapter One compares five different Christian conversion stories (all post-1850), including the Sioux Indian Ohiyesa's memoirs of his transition From the Deep Woods to Civilization, two accounts of conversions in China, and two testimonies from members of the rock band Korn. Ellwanger is able to compare these diverse experiences with impressive conceptual clarity. The major conceptual contrast that runs throughout the book is that between metanoia and epistrophe. When speaking of the contrast, Ellwanger characterizes epistrophe as a 360-degree conversion, a return home. He reserves metanoia for 180-degree conversions, which renounce the past self and result in a rebirth, a replacement of the original subject by a "completely" new subject. In Ellwanger's account, all Christian metanoia "is a substitutive transplanting of identity," and it "locates the substitution at the core of one's being" (95). Modern, secular conversions can also involve renunciation of a previous self, but they lean more heavily on epistrophic unveiling of and return to the original, authentic self. Epistrophic conversion never renounces the real self, but rather the former illusion of self. Theoretically, this contrast harbors considerable explanatory power. It helps make sense of why ethos can reside alternately in audience or speaker. When a speaker seeks to establish ethos by claiming that her previous self is dead and she is now a new (and better) self, she might appeal to the audience to authenticate whether she is indeed new and better. But when a speaker [End Page 93] claims to have discovered and returned to her original, authentic self, she expects the audience to acknowledge her authority to authenticate herself. The contrast between ethoi established by metanoic or epistrophic conversion narratives plays out in fascinating ways in the contrast between Bruce Jenner's coming out as gender-transitioned Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezol's racial transition from identifying as a White woman to identifying as a Black woman. In public responses to each narrative (which unfolded roughly contemporaneously), Ellwanger identifies both metanoic and epistrophic discourses. Each kind was employed by both critics and defenders of the respective claims to identity. The conflict between metanoic and epistrophic understandings of identity transition help account for the intense scrutiny and controversy each story attracted. The weakest part of the book is its narrative of secularization, which frames Christian and modern models of conversion as mutually exclusive. Ellwanger asserts that "in Judeo-Christian thinking metanoia and epistrophe were two fundamentally opposed models of conversion" (100). By contrast, "the definitive feature of modern transformation is a reconciliation of" the two models (p. 143). Likewise, "Christianity is especially...

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...