Reviewed by: Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach by AlessandroVatri Vasiliki Zali-Schiel AlessandroVatri, Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 344 pp. ISBN: 978019879590 Vatri has produced a well-researched book that helpfully and skilfully marries the cultural-historical and the linguistic character of his work. The excellent use and review of scholarship enables Vatri to achieve the purpose of the book, which is to examine, with the help of modem psycholinguistics, whether there is any linguistic difference between classical Attic prose texts intended for public oral delivery and those intended for written circulation and private performance. The book starts with a thorough discussion of the complicated relationship between oral and written style (Chapter 1). The medium alone is not a decisive divisive factor because there is a great variety of communicative situations and priorities one needs to take into consideration even when the same medium is used. And this is indeed the case with Attic prose, where we cannot clearly distinguish between “literally” oral and written texts. However, the distinction between a written and a non-written conception can be traced very early in the development of ancient Greek stylistic theory (e.g., Alcidamas, Isocrates, Aristotle). For example, Isocrates in his Philip clearly marks the difference between speeches meant to be read and those meant to be delivered: those meant to be read may not be timely, hence their persuasive ability is compromised. Speeches for reading may also not manage to persuade the listeners because they may not be successfully delivered by the reader. This affects the reception of a text and changes the emphasis of the distinction between writtenness and non-writtenness from composition to performance. [End Page 96] Chapter 2 turns to contexts of reception. In classical Athens, close scrutiny of prose texts was possible in solitary and private group reading (“off-line” perusal) but not in situations whose norms of interaction excluded this possibility, such as public oratorical performances and semi-formal small- scale epideixeis. In such public competitive contexts, there was no room for anything but clarity (saphēneia) to convince an audience unable to revisit the text (“on-line” reception). Public texts could therefore not afford obscurity of expression by contrast to private texts (“where off-line perusal is possible, there is no need to take excessive pains to ensure the optimal on-line comprehension of a text,” 35). Hence, the different contexts of reception may be associated with linguistic difference. In Chapter 3, Vatri looks at the distinction between texts that were meant for off-line perusal/reception (scriptures) and those meant for on-line reception (scripts). The writing of Attic prose texts was quite a complex process, with several oral stages—and plausibly even oral composition— preceding written dissemination. But there were also revisions of publicly delivered texts (scripts), such as deliberative and forensic speeches, after their performance and often for the purpose of making a new version of the text public through written dissemination. After examining literacy and reading in classical Athens, Vatri determines the conception of written prose texts as scripts or scriptures proceeding on a genre-by-genre basis. Chapter 4 focuses on clarity (saphēneia), which was extremely important for texts meant for on-line reception (scripts) and especially so for public speeches in particular. The centrality of clarity of expression is already highlighted in ancient Greek rhetorical literature. For “Demetrius” (for example), clarity and familiarity are key to persuasiveness; persuasiveness and clarity can be achieved through plain style—an idea that can be traced back to the criticism of Aeschylus’ obscure language in Aristophanes’ Frogs. According to “Demetrius,” plain style is distinguished not only by its clarity but also by a vividness generated by precision (aknbeia). Both Aristotle and Isocrates consider precision an important feature of texts meant for reading, which may also generate saphēneia. Vatri then looks closely at a range of examples from ancient Greek rhetorical literature to examine what they say about the rhetorical devices employed to produce saphēneia. A recurrent issue in ancient discussions is ambiguity, which can be generated by vocabulary (e.g., ambiguous character of certain...

Reviewed by: L’art du sous-entendu: histoire, théorie, mode d’emploi by Laurent Pernot Mike Edwards Laurent Pernot, L’art du sous-entendu: histoire, théorie, mode d’emploi. Paris: Fayard, 2018. 334 pp. ISBN: 9782213706054 In July 2008, on behalf of Laurent Pemot, I represented the International Society for the History of Rhetoric at The First Biennial Conference of the Chinese Rhetoric Society of the World. Since this global event was scheduled to take place less than a month before the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, my first idea was to give a paper on ancient Olympic speeches. On second thoughts, I realized that talking about the content of Lysias 33, with its proposed attack on the despotic rulers of Persia and Syracuse, might be taken as a veiled reference to China’s socialist democracy—a sous-entendu. Twelve years later, with the Tokyo Olympics postponed because of a threat allegedly emanating from Japan’s old foe, I find myself reviewing a book written by Pemot that will become a standard work on the art of innuendo. Pemot covers an extensive range of material from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the present, to which this review cannot hope to do justice, with examples drawn from rhetorical works, other genres of literature, and elsewhere. Thus, in chapter 1 Pemot discusses types of sous-entendu (as often, the French word is best) in daily life, with politeness such as “you shouldn’t have” to mean “thank you” for a gift. There is an understandable French bias throughout, but Pemot’s versatility is indicated by analyses of authors such as George Orwell, Boualem Sansal, and Arthur Miller. Other topics include politics (the subtle war of words between Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand in 1974); fables and riddles (the Sphinx, naturally, but also Jean Paulhan with his translations of enigmatic Malagasy poetry); and conspiracy theory (such as Kennedy, Coluche, the Da Vinci Code). An excellent opening. Sous-entendu in the ancient world is the subject of chapter 2, where Pemot discusses the unsettled place of figured speech in rhetorical theory, and the frequently difficult relationships in declamation between fathers and sons that led to ambiguous remarks like “I married the woman who [End Page 94] pleased my father” (57). Pernot returns to antiquity in a very strong chapter 5 that examines how Greek authors represented Rome with figured speech. Here, on his specialist research terrain, he offers perceptive discussions of Dio Chrysostom’s On Kingship (cf. the much earlier treatment of the theme in Isocrates) and Aelius Aristides’ To Rome, highlighting the latter’s numerous significant omissions, not least of the word “Rome” itself (similarly, the story of Paul Valéry’s grudging eulogy of his illustrious predecessor in the Académie française, Anatole France, in which he managed to avoid using the name “Francé” in reference to his subject, is a little gem). Among the interesting topics of chapter 3 is connotation, as in publicity slogans like “Tendre est la nuit à bord du France” (69), which for Pernot might recall a line of Keats, a novel of Scott Fitzgerald, a film of Henry King or a song by Jackson Browne (yes: type “tender is the night” into Google). Analysis of literary critics (Barthes, Luc Fraisse, William Empson, Roger Callois) and Gide’s The Counterfeiters, with its expression mise en abyme, contributes to another excellent chapter. In chapter 4 Pernot turns to the risks attached to interpretation, especially when an unintended (often sexual) message is received. In the theatre this may be designed to cause laughter (Much Ado About Nothing), but there is nothing funny about De Clerambault’s Syndrome (erotomania). Pemot’s discussion references Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, but it made me think of Play Misty for Me. Arbeit macht frei? In chapter 6 Pernot turns to twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, focusing on the intellectual resistance to the Nazis of Louis Aragon in a poetic method he called “contrabande.” How could such works have escaped the censor (not all did)? One way was the use of historical parallels, as with Jules Isaac’s Les Oligarques and its analogy between ancient Athens under the Thirty and the German Occupation...

This article examines the influence exerted by the Aristotelian cognitive metarhetoric over the treatment of memory in Book 3 of the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Sections 3.16.28-29, 3.19.32 and 3.22.35-37 are read against the backdrop of the core principles of Aristotle’s psychological treatises on mind and memory, De Anima and De Memoria et Remmiscentia, together with the multifaceted concept of energeia, found in these treatises as well as in the Rhetoric and the Metaphysics. The results suggest that the psychology of memory of the Rhetorica ad Herennium and its rhetorical products are indebted to Aristotelian philosophy, with particular emphasis on the imagines agentes within the mnemonic system per locos et imagines.

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

Reviewed by: Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics by Michele Kennerly David L. Marshall Michele Kennerly, Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. 242 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 There exists a set of topoi still alive—undead—within ancient, medieval, and early modem historiographies of rhetoric that circles “the loss of politics” as the crucial fact when it comes to narrating the coming into being and passing away of rhetoric. Politics itself as an object of such attachment may take several forms, but it is the beginning and sine qua non of rhetorical [End Page 91] application. In her disciplined yet frequently humorous Editorial Bodies, Michele Kennerly boils the politics-as-lost-object topoi down to the bone: “oratory flourishes in democracies only, the Hellenistic age [for example] was undemocratic, ergo there were no speeches worth preserving” (56). Kennerly tilts at the politics-as-lost-object topoi (and contests this characterization of the Hellenic) from a refreshing and subtle angle—that of editing, revision, what she terms “ corpus-care” (15). For her, turning to the curation of texts with rhetorical attention is not the reluctant decision of a culture that has lost its opportunities to speak and decide together in public. As Kennerly puts it, “rather than being indicators of political decline or decadence, polished and published prose and verse point to contestation over what sort of words best sustain communal life,” and, in this way, “writing is no less democratic or republican than speaking: the two verbal forms live parallel lives” (209). Hers is also a re-reading of the early histories of both Greek and Roman rhetoric showing how concern for the written record was always at issue alongside concern for the oral performance. Kennerly’s approach yields instructive angles on a series of authors. We encounter what she calls “Horace’s meticulous file,” his editorial metaphor of choice for smoothing stylistic burrs. But Kennerly pushes against “a prevailing view on Horace’s strictures on the stilus-, that he ‘made a virtue out of a political necessity’”—“the ‘necessity’ being the need to watch one’s words as the imperial period gained force” (109). In her reading, Ovid is someone who “displays his editorial body” cultivating thereby “the image of a man trying to correct his mistakes” (134), and this leads to “the (cultivated) shabbiness of his corpora,” which for Kennerly “accords with their tristis situation” (139). Political exile means disheveled self-consuming textual performance. In reference to Quintilian, editing implies compilation and overview stemming from care, and “the enmbased lexical family is the progenitor of ‘curative’ and ‘curation,’ both of which apply to Quintilian’s labors: he sees what ails various oratorical corpora and means to cure them through his curation of rhetoric’s traditions and orations” (164). Editing, reworking, compiling, creating a summative edition—all these should be understood in terms of established rhetorical topoi. Just so, in Quintilian, compiling is also a form of ethopoetic exercise, and such processes become “habituation hexis (Greek, lit. ‘having’)” rendered sometimes, as we know, “in Latin as facilitas (ease)” (162). Always, Kennerly is attentive to the embodiments of writing and editing. In Latin, she relays, the “edowords”—at the root of “edit” and its variants—were themselves richly enmeshed in a slew of metaphors “from giving birth, to uttering words, to presenting something for inspection, to displaying it publicly, to publishing it” and did not denote “prepublic textual activities” (2). And the terms ancient Romans did use for textual revision drew on a range of artisan prototypes: “they dragged away, cut out, pressed, smoothed, polished, hammered, filed, and shaved” (2). On the Greek side, “gluing” was an important metaphor domain because it had pertinent literal applications too: “writers would glue papyrus patches atop errors to hide them or to insert emendations on top of them” (29). Again, [End Page 92] Kennerly is quick to note that “turning the stilus” was “idiomatic for rubbing out with the flat end of the stilus something written into a wax tablet with the pointed end” (79). It should thus come as no surprise that, although this work is ancient in...

Reviewed by: The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend by T. J. Keeline Martin T. Dinter T. J. Keeline, The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 388 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 Cultural memory is a strange beast indeed. While there is no doubt that Cicero sculpted his own image during his lifetime, he could hardly have foreseen that as soon as the first century AD he would be defined by his style—i.e., that the style would become the man. The incorporation of Cicero into Roman cultural memory is thus highly selective. Without explicitly buying into the framework of cultural memory studies, Keeline, in the revised version of his 2014 Harvard dissertation, illuminates this process in seven chapters by focusing on Cicero’s early reception. The first four chapters on the reception of Cicero in Roman education are followed by three more specialized sections on Cicero in the works of Seneca the Younger, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger. Reception indeed serves as the overarching framework for this monograph, even though Keeline shies away from deconstructing its tenets. We cannot fathom whether or not Roman schoolboys “enjoyed” reading Cicero as much as today’s students, but Keeline employs Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, the commentaries of Asconius, and the Scholia Bobiensia to illustrate how young Romans would have encountered Cicero’s speech Pro Milone in the classroom. The rhetorically focused pedagogical approach—namely, the narrowing of Cicero’s persona and personality in a pedagogical context to a model of eloquence (which strips him of his historical and psychological complexity)—that emerges from this analysis usefully exemplifies the process Keeline expounds in the second chapter. The third chapter highlights the prominence of Cicero’s death in Roman declamation. It proposes that the narrative that Cicero was murdered by Popilius, a former client whom he had previously defended against the charge of parricide, is but an added color of the rhetorician schools. This nevertheless fits neatly with Octavian’s desire to downplay his own role in the proscriptions and shift the blame onto Mark Anthony. Cicero thus does not serve as advocate of Republican freedom but rather as advocate of freedom from Mark Anthony. In addition, the style and content of these declamations left behind traces in the accounts of Cicero’s death by Valerius Maximus and many of the historiographers such as Florus, Velleius Paterculus, and later authors such as Cassius Dio and Appian. In contrast, the chronologically fairly early accounts by Livy and Asinius Pollio still offer a morally more complicated image of both Cicero and the events surrounding his death. In the fourth chapter, Keeline ingeniously examines a group of pseudepigraphic texts that have distilled Cicero to the essence consumed in declamation schools: the Invective against Cicero (Ps.-Sallust) contrasts neatly with the Invective against Sallust (Ps.-Cicero), the Speech delivered the day before Cicero went into exile and the Letter to Octavian (Ps.-Cicero), and a pair of Ps.-Brutus’ letters to Cicero and Atticus (transmitted as Cic. Ad Brut. 1.16 and 1.17). Stylistically faithful, these texts concentrate on major life events such as Cicero’s consulship, his exile, and his speeches against Mark Anthony. [End Page 90] In addition, they provide an inventory of the tropes that formed around Cicero s life and character and subsequently found their way into the historiographical tradition. The book’s second part delves into the oeuvres, of Seneca the Younger (chapter 5), Tacitus (chapter 6), and Pliny the Younger (chapter 7) and analyses how each of them comes to terms with the über-father Cicero. Seneca the Younger adopts neither Cicero’s style nor his philosophy or educational theories. Even in his edifying letters to Lucilius, he only utilises Cicero’s correspondence with Atticus as a foil against which he constructs his own philosophical achievements. While Seneca the Elder engages frequently and substantially with Cicero, in his son’s works Cicero is conspicuous by absence. Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus is steeped in Cicero as Keeline demonstrates by analysing the speeches by Aper...

Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists (VS) is not usually understood as a text with much relevance for rhetorical theory. But this omission cedes theory to the handbooks and reinforces the dichotomy between theory and practice. I argue that Philostratus' theory of efficacious performance—implicit as it may be—has much to offer scholars of rhetoric and classical studies. I demonstrate that Philostratus prizes improvisation not only because it reveals the paideia of the orator, who becomes a cultural ideal, but also because it affords processes of mutual constitution between orator and audience. This occurs when the sophist becomes a physical manifestation of what the moment calls for, which compels recognition from the audience. In the second part of the paper, I focus on Polemo, the most improvisatory of sophists. In the scenes in which he features, Polemo repeatedly emerges as a man and, in recognizing him, spectators come to embody their own masculinity, in turn.

Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists (VS) is not usually understood as a text with much relevance for rhetorical theory. But this omission cedes theory to the handbooks and reinforces the dichotomy between theory and practice. I argue that Philostratus’ theory of efficacious performance—implicit as it may be—has much to offer scholars of rhetoric and classical studies. I demonstrate that Philostratus prizes improvisation not only because it reveals the paideia of the orator, who becomes a cultural ideal, but also because it affords processes of mutual constitution between orator and audience. This occurs when the sophist becomes a physical manifestation of what the moment calls for, which compels recognition from the audience. In the second part of the paper, I focus on Polemo, the most improvisatory of sophists. In the scenes in which he features, Polemo repeatedly emerges as a man and, in recognizing him, spectators come to embody their own masculinity, in turn.

Reviewed by: Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology by William C. Kirlinkus Logan Blizzard William C. Kirlinkus, Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 262 pp. ISBN: 9780822965527 William Kirlinkus’ Nostalgic Design poses a central question: “What are you nostalgic for, why, and to which ends?” (4, 21). Nostalgia has a bad reputation in contemporary discourse, central as it has been to recent conservative movements, like the propagandistic, restorative nostalgia of “Make America Great Again.” This conflation has allowed progressives and critics to dismiss nostalgia as purely regressive and/or nationalistic, which “simply relieves critics of the responsibility of understanding an ‘illogical’ group . . . [and] blinds [them] to their own nostalgic impulses” (29). But the truth is that we are all nostalgic for something, insofar as the futures we imagine are necessarily shaped by what we value from the past. What is needed, and what Kirlinkus offers throughout the book, is a means to negotiate multiple, conflicting nostalgias, and put their affective force to constructive, democratic, and inclusive ends. By reframing nostalgia, Kirlinkus articulates nostalgic design, “a perspective and method” for engaging with competing nostalgias and incorporating these into the design of technology. The inherent rhetoricity of design—defined broadly as “the methods by which expert makers create some technology to be operated by a specific user, in a specific context, in order to ‘change existing situations into preferred ones’”—has long been acknowledged by theorists like Richard Buchanan and Donald Norman, and often aligns with the future- orientation of the dominant technological paradigm (or “techno-logic”). Nostalgia, here defined as “pride and longing for lost or threatened personally or culturally experienced pasts” (6), would seem more closely aligned with another rhetorical process: memory. By recognizing that technology is far more historically-oriented than designers tend to admit (given that users tend to understand the new only through the old), nostalgic design posits nostalgia as powerful, largely-untapped resource for designers of all types, from graphic designers to medical professionals. As Kirlinkus argues, to overcome the tendency of tech design to neglect entire social groups, we must take seriously the memories, experiences, and concerns of a wide spectrum of users, and incorporate these into the very process of design. Much of the book is devoted to putting nostalgic design into practice, as a method. Kirlinkus frames the approach as a three-step process: identifying [End Page 464] exclusionary designs, mediating technological conflicts, and, ultimately, designing meaningful products (24). Perhaps due to the readily-apparent nature of exclusions in technology, the only real consideration of this first step comes in Chapter 2, which examines several cases of “critical nostos” (51), of amateurism functioning as resistance. Instead, the primary concern of Nostalgic Design is navigating the wildly divergent visions and values held by users and designers. In this way, the project runs into one of the defining questions for deliberative democracy: how to incorporate a plurality of opinions, needs, and values in a manner that is at once equitable and agonistic. The third chapter, one of the book’s strongest, engages with these concerns directly; setting four prominent theories of deliberative rhetoric—Aristotelian audience analysis, Burkean identification, Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening, and Mouffe’s agonism—alongside corresponding models of deliberative design. This juxtaposition highlights the shortcomings of previous, well-meaning attempts at inclusive design, such as the patronizing efforts of “user-centered design,” or the tendency of “empathic design” to sideline designer expertise. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to the final step in the process, explicating meaningful design. Returning to the pseudo-oral history method from the second chapter, Kirlinkus focuses squarely on design praxis, bringing in accounts of real designers who have developed productive relationships with user nostalgia. This approach is of particular use in Chapter 5, which poses the interactions between designers and clients as a potential conflict between the designer’s expert knowledge (techne) and the client’s experience (metis). The correlation between rhetorical communication and design professions truly shines in this discussion, as the process of adapting, adopting, or refusing feedback requires careful attention to knowledge boundaries and productive opposition—in short, the skills of the rhetorician. The project culminates with a...

Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash, edited by Richard Hidary Richard Hidary, Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781107177406 Brandon Katzir Brandon Katzir Oklahoma City University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (3): 340–342. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.340 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Brandon Katzir; Review: Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash, edited by Richard Hidary. Rhetorica 1 August 2021; 39 (3): 340–342. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.340 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2021The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In this article, I would like to provide a reappraisal of sophistic activities during the Hellenistic period. An analysis of passages in Philodemus, Posidonius, and several more fragmentary sources can show that there is a continuous and lively tradition of sophistic teaching and rhetoric from the Classical period until Imperial times. The texts give the impression that characteristic features of Hellenistic sophists point towards the generation of Gorgias and his colleagues as well as towards the star speakers of the Second Sophistic. The traditional but outworn negative image of the Hellenistic sophists and Hellenistic rhetoric in general can be explained as a result of the source situation, the decentralisation of schools and performance spaces, and a Classicistic bias of ancient and modern authors. In the end, the testimonies allow for more conclusions than generally thought. A selection of related sources is provided in an appendix.

Reviewed by: Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash by Richard Hidary Brandon Katzir Richard Hidary, Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781107177406 Recent scholarship on the Second Sophistic has demonstrated the extent to which that period, in the first centuries of the common era, had a profound influence on rhetoric as a cultural practice. In particular, as Timothy Whitmarsh has noted, “[Oratory] was one of the primary means that Greek culture of the period, constrained as it was by Roman rule, had to explore issues of identity, society, family and power” (5). The Second Sophistic lays the groundwork for the Byzantine tradition, which itself had an enormous influence on the European rhetorical tradition. Yet, the literary cultures inspired by Roman Hellenism were not limited to Greek speakers. Classical Jewish texts like the Mishna, the Talmud, and various midrashim were composed or redacted in the same literary culture that gave rise to Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists. Richard Hidary’s Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric argues that the Jewish culture which produced the Mishna was affected by the cultural and literary ferment of the Second Sophistic. Hidary observes that the Second Sophistic bears numerous similarities to its contemporary rabbinic movement. He notes, “the rabbis also pushed to uphold their own distinctive Jewish identity and pride in the face of Roman dominance and they too studied and taught inherited religious traditions from antiquity” (5). Like the Greek orators, the Talmudic sages “studied, codified, and lectured about their own past traditions and in a similar way used this as a strategy for upholding their culture and values” (6). The strength of Hidary’s approach lies in his nuanced examination of a range of rabbinical genres. Each of the chapters proceeds in a similar fashion: they begin by explaining the significance and structure of a particular genre of rabbinical writing followed by an explanation of how that genre intersects with rhetorical genres of the Second Sophistic. Hidary explores some rabbinical writing—such as aggadic midrashim, the Talmud Yerushalmi, the Talmud Bavli—as well as some lesser known genres, like the progymnasmata in rabbinical literature. He compares the role of lawyers in Roman and rabbinical courts, the heavenly court in rabbinical literature, and Plato’s heavenly court. Hidary offers a fresh perspective to each genre. Of particular interest is his analysis of Sabbath sermon, which, according to [End Page 340] Hidary, is the mainstay of rabbinical declamation and has its origins in the Second Temple period, which ended in 70 CE. Hidary argues that there is a formal connection between rabbinic homilies and the aggadic midrash. He observes that while some scholars have suggested that “works of midrash aggadah are transcripts of actual synagogue sermons,” most believe they are literary creations, even if they were perhaps sometimes read aloud. Each chapter of aggadic midrash begins with a proem which expounds upon a Biblical verse. Hidary notes that “the verse usually lacks an obvious connection to the Torah lectionary and thus raises the curiosity of the audience. The audience is kept in this state of suspense until the speaker finally manages to connect the opening verse with the first verse of the Torah lectionary, thus delivering his main point with a memorable punch line” (50). Hidary argues that the exordium is the model for the midrashic proem, pointing out that Aristotle “writes that the prooimion of epideictic speeches should begin with an unrelated subject and then transition into the main topic of the speech” (53). But Hidary emphasizes that while the rabbis’ rhetorical form may look Greek, their arguments are designed to demonstrate the superiority of the Jewish people and the Sinaitic revelation. Hidary draws a connection between the Hellenistic orators of the Second Sophistic who “turned to Attic oratory to revive Greek pride in the face of Western Roman political domination” and the rabbis who “[apply] the rhetorical technique of the Greeks to their teaching of Torah,” an application which was ultimately aimed at demonstrating “the perfection of Scripture” (77). The later chapters of Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric compare classical and rabbinic...

Reviewed by: Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics by Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld William P. Weaver Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. 312 pp. ISBN: 9780823277926 The figures of speech are the subject of a reevaluation in literary scholarship of the Renaissance era. Their importance has never been entirely out of view—they are hard to ignore. Early printed editions of the classics sometimes note figures in the margins, and this was a practice emulated by one “E.K.,” the annotator of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender who noted, among other figures, “a pretty epanorthosis” here and “an excellent and lively description” there. Evidently the figures contributed to basic literacy in academic contexts, and it is hard to imagine that all that training was confined to the schools and universities. In recent interpretative scholarship on English poetry, a productive approach has been to place one figure of speech in focus, and compare its uses in order to discover its latent meanings. The effectiveness of this approach is amply illustrated, for example, by essays collected in a 2007 publication entitled The Renaissance Figures of Speech, covering twelve figures.1 Elsewhere, groupings of figures, subject as they were to classifying instincts of humanist writers and teachers, have proven meaningful instruments for literary interpretation. In a 2012 book, Jenny C. Mann considered various unruly figures under the heading of hyperbaton, in order to trace the difficulties of translating classical rhetoric and poetics into English vernacular practices.2 In Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld takes the latter approach, collecting and examining a group of figures under the heading of the “indecorous,” namely figures that flaunt their artistry, transgress modesty, and eschew generally the gold standard of Renaissance wit: sprezzatura, the dissembling or disguising of effort and study. Three figures—simile, antithesis, and periphrasis—were selected and compared to illustrate Rosenfeld’s thesis that ostentatious figures offered a distinctive means of thinking as well as of embellishing. It is a persuasive and coherent selection. Comparing, contrasting, and “talking about” or renaming something—these are logical as well as rhetorical operations. Together, they represent a promising start on Rosenfeld’s ambitious aim: “to understand how figures of speech established the imaginative domains of early modem poetry” (13). In three chapters of Part One, Rosenfeld describes an intellectual and pedagogical landscape that gave rise to “indecorous thinking,” that is, the practices and patterns of thought afforded by ostentatious figures of speech. It’s a contentious landscape drawn along lines of Ramus’ reforms in rhetoric [End Page 350] and dialectic, as these were filtered into English discourse by means of handbooks of the figures. Rosenfeld relies on the best-known and oft-rehearsed aspect of these reforms, filling out her account with some original scholarship on reading and composition practices. In a nutshell, Ramus’ attempt to simplify rhetoric instruction by reserving inventio and dispositio for dialectic (or logic) instruction resulted in a truncated presentation of rhetoric as consisting of just elocutio and actio, or style and performance. Although it could not have been Ramus’ or his followers’ intent to imply an autonomous field of discourse, some English vernacular handbooks of rhetorical poetics, such as Abraham Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), nonetheless give the impression that rhetoric might be studied independently of logic and reduced to the study of elocutio, which itself might be reduced to the study of schemes and tropes. It is in that imagined domain of an autonomous and mutilated rhetoric that Rosenfeld argues a counter-humanist movement in English poetics of the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-centuries. The argument for indecorum (the weaker argument) sometimes feels ponderous in Part One, but the pace picks up in Part Two. In three chapters, Rosenfeld convincingly shows the figures’ vitality and potential to structure and organize fictional thought, narrative, and speech. These are fine examples of rhetorical criticism and English literary scholarship. In Chapter 4, taking as a starting point Spenser’s portrayal of Braggadochio in The Faerie Queene, book 2, Rosenfeld compares some competing qualities of the figure simile and shows that it...

Reviewed by: Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions ed. by Christa Gray et al Christoph Pieper Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel, eds., Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 366 pp. ISBN: 9780198788201 Studying antiquity means studying fragments, given the highly fragmented nature of our knowledge of its politics, art, and literatvire. Within [End Page 346] this mosaic of bits and pieces, texts that have been transmitted as fragments are a specifically challenging field of research, one that has attracted lots of scholarly attention in recent decades. Fragments of oratory are a specific case within this field: as the editors of the volume stress in their introduction, every speech we read as text is, in a way, already a fragment, as it is the textualized reduction of a complex form of communication that includes words and arguments. Also, the vocal qualities of the speaker, his performance and auctoritas—all these aspects are lost to our immediate perception, even if the full text of a speech is transmitted. And yet, the relevance of fragments for understanding the persuasiveness and impact of oratory in the ancient world is huge. Studying the fragments of Roman Republican oratory therefore means more than simply reading and interpreting the fragments and testimonies in Malcovati’s Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta; in order to reconstruct their rhetorical potential, one needs a thorough understanding of their historical and cultural embeddedness, and a good grasp of the transmitting author’s own agenda. The volume under review, one of the preliminary proceedings that prepare the new edition of the Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators (FRRO) by Catherine Steel and her Glasgow team, has an outspoken interest in the fragments’ context that goes beyond textual representation: it includes reconstructions of performance and sensory surrounding. It reflects on the relevance of the speaker’s authority and on the changing cultural climate in the second and first centuries bce, when the interaction with Greek culture increased in Rome and when rhetoric challenged the traditional political hierarchy based on auctoritas (Alexandra Eckert). The authors of the volume approach the methodological challenges in an admirably undogmatic way that includes traditional philology, historical studies, and modern theoretical approaches. In this short review, I can merely offer some lines that run through the volume (by no means an exhaustive list). The volume is divided into two parts: transmission and reconstructions; but as happens with good conference volumes, important questions return throughout the book. A first important theme is the transmitting author, whose reasons for quoting or summarizing must be taken into account when studying (not only oratorical) fragments. S. J. Lawrence convincingly argues that Valerius Maximus’ collection of dicta should not be understood as neutral; instead Valerius wants to demonstrate the limits of oratory in Republican times (which influences his choice of exempla). Armando Raschieri, in a rather additive overview, analyses the contexts in which Quintilian quotes Republican orators. Generally, one of the aims of studying fragmentary Republican oratory has always been to get beyond Cicero for our knowledge about what speaking in the Republic meant and looked like. But as Cicero’s canonical status and his canon of orators in the Brutus were so powerful after his death, one has to be aware of the Ciceronian intertext that shapes later ancient readers’ perceptions. Alfredo Casamento tackles the problem of how to deal with Cicero’s legacy in his treatment of [End Page 347] Sulpicius Rufus and Cotta in the Brutus, whereas Ian Goh and Elena Torregaray Pagola look for genres not influenced by Cicero in which relevant information on Republican oratory can be found: Republican satire (Goh with a very dense, associative, and inspiring reading of Lucilius’ book 2), and comedy (Torregaray Pagola with a close reading of a section of Plautus’ Amphitruo). John Dugan contributes a methodologically far-reaching chapter for the case of Macrobius’ quotation of the second-century bce orator Gaius Titius. His working method has the potential to offer unexpected results for other fragments as well: based on New Historicism and Clifford Geertz’ concept of thick descriptions, Dugan concludes that “the only Titius we will read will be that which...

Reviewed by: Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom by Marjorie Curry Woods Jordan Loveridge Marjorie Curry Woods, Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. 200 pp. ISBN: 9780691170800 At the small liberal arts school where I teach, all students take a history course in which they read, among other common texts, Virgil’s Aeneid. A popular assignment for many of the professors teaching this course, myself included, is to assign students a speech where they compose in character what Aeneas might have said to Dido upon leaving Carthage, or, alternatively, the words Dido might have said to Aeneas. While each semester some students invariably choose to speak as Aeneas, my observation is that Dido is by far the more popular choice, regardless of students’ gender identity. Upon reading Marjorie Curry Woods’s Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom, I am struck by the parallels between my experience and the account of medieval pedagogy that Woods offers. Weeping for Dido explores the role that emotion, particularly women’s emotions, played within the classical texts that constituted the curriculum of the average medieval classroom. Since the medieval classroom was a space dominated by young male students, the focus of Weeping for Dido invites several [End Page 344] interesting questions about gender, identification, rhetorical delivery, and performance, all of which are taken up by Woods at various points within the text. Working with an impressive array of manuscript evidence, Woods demonstrates that “while women were overwhelming absent from [the] schoolboy classical world except in texts, their [women’s] emotions permeated and sometimes dominated the classroom experience” (10). This argument is advanced not through an analysis of the texts in medieval libraries, or through a comparison of rhetorical treatises by known figures associated with medieval education, but rather through close attention to and comparison among manuscript commentaries, glossing, notation, and other codicological elements. The results of this analysis are impressive and provide an illuminating view of medieval pedagogical practices. For instance, in the first chapter, which focuses on manuscripts of the Aencid, Woods shows how familiar elements of rhetorical terminology from sources such as Cicero De inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad herennium were used to help young students understand Virgil’s epic poem. One manuscript identifies Dido’s flattery of Aeneas upon his initial arrival in Carthage as a captatio benevolentiae, “the rhetorical term from letter-writing manuals for capturing the goodwill of the listener” (Woods 17); another identifies Dido’s speech to her sister Anna explaining her feelings for Aeneas as ”Oratio Insinuntiua,” “Insinuative discourse” (Woods 20). These techniques, traceable to traditions such as letter-writing manuals (ars dicta-minis) and Ciceronian commentary respectively, are placed within a classroom context, showing that such theories had pedagogical currency beyond their presumed function. While the Aeneid is central to Weeping for Dido, Woods also engages other “Troy Stories,” notably the Achilleid of Statius, which tells of Achilles’b mother stealing him away and hiding him in women’s clothes to keep him from dying in the Trojan war, and the Ilias latina, a Latin retelling of the Illiad. Both were used in elementary medieval education; “they are on almost every medieval list of what students should read, and they figure prominently in the consensus of what modern medievalists believe medieval students did read” (54). Perhaps unsurprisingly, these elementary texts exhibit completely different habits of glossing than copies of the Aeneid, revealing “what teachers thought would amuse or usefully instruct their pupils” (56). Woods shows that the elements brought to bear on the Achilleid were numerous and varied; many manuscripts, for instance, exhibit speeches that are clearly labeled with the Ciceronian partes orationis (Woods 66); others show how the unique valence of medieval Latin terms sometimes influenced the understanding of literary texts, such as in one manuscript where the Ciceronian Attributes of a Person are used to analyze a scene in which Achilles is disguised in women’s clothing. In this section, the term habitus is understood both in its original sense (as a taught manner of being, a physical disposition), but also as a manner of dress (Woods 67–8). Later...

In this article, I would like to provide a reappraisal of sophistic activities during the Hellenistic period. An analysis of passages in Philodemus, Posidonius, and several more fragmentary sources can show that there is a continuous and lively tradition of sophistic teaching and rhetoric from the Classical period until Imperial times. The texts give the impression that characteristic features of Hellenistic sophists point towards the generation of Gorgias and his colleagues as well as towards the star speakers of the Second Sophistic. The traditional but outworn negative image of the Hellenistic sophists and Hellenistic rhetoric in general can be explained as a result of the source situation, the decentralisation of schools and performance spaces, and a Classicistic bias of ancient and modern authors. In the end, the testimonies allow for more conclusions than generally thought. A selection of related sources is provided in an appendix.

This paper studies the persuasive strategies in Pro Lege Manilia in conversation with contemporary rhetorical theory, drawing especially on the perspective of constitutive discourse and the interaction between what is in the text and what is outside. Prior receptions of Pompey by internal audiences double as sites of panegyric image construction, which was itself then instrumentalized to influence external groups. The speech self-referentially thematizes this production of authority, disclosing its rhetorical mechanisms as both performed and performative text. Cicero himself, in the process of proclaiming Pompey, crucially participates in the manufacture and mediation of the image, and in constituting ideological cohesion.

Les études récentes sur Synesius de Cyrène rejettent de plus en plus la thèse traditionnelle qui le considérait comme un nouveau venu dans le christianisme, pour le considérer plutôt comme un chrétien flexible et antidogmatique. Cependant, tout en reflétant notre meilleure compréhension de l’expérience de la religion vécue à la fin de l’Antiquité, cette position néglige un aspect crucial de l’idenrité religieuse de Synesius: son auto-récit. À travers une étude des stratégies rhétoriques utilisées par Synesius pour communiquer son allégeance religieuse, cet article soutient que Synesius a plutôt cherché des moyens de se présenter comme un concurrent du christianisme et de ses représentants les plus éminents. Le « sophiste » Synesius (défini comme tel en dépit, ou mieux, en vertu de ses prétentions à ne pas en être un), caractérisé par la recherche d’une identite oppositionnelle construite a l’aide de la rhetorique traditionnelle, apparait ainsi comme incamant la tension entre innovation et continuite qui marque la Troisieme sophistique au IVe siecle.

This paper studies the persuasive strategies in Pro Lege Manilla in conversation with contemporary rhetorical theory, drawing especially on the perspective of constitutive discourse and the interaction between what is in the text and what is outside. Prior receptions of Pompey by internal audiences double as sites of panegyric image construction, which was itself then instrumentalized to influence external groups. The speech self-referentially thematizes this production of authority, disclosing its rhetorical mechanisms as both performed and performative text. Cicero himself, in the process of proclaiming Pompey, crucially participates in the manufacture and mediation of the image, and in constituting ideological cohesion.

Reviewed by: The War of Words by Kenneth Burke M. Elizabeth Weiser Burke, Kenneth. The War of Words. Ed. by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, Jack Selzer. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. viii + 285 pp. ISBN: 9780520298125 “For it is by the war of words that men are led into battle,” Kenneth Burke asserts in his new book, The War of Words (248). How a man dead these twenty-seven years has come to have a “new” book is not a better story than how prescient is the book, how pointedly this work—written and largely revised by 1950—speaks to our times. Burke’s overarching concern is the impetus to war that he saw all around him in the years immediately following World War II—all in some ways particular to his era. But the rhetoric by which geopolitical forces worked their magic to convince the American public to support their aims—these are universal. Or as Burke writes, “The particulars change from day to day, but the principle they embody recurs constantly, in other particulars” (45). In The War of Words, the editors have uncovered among Burke’s papers his Downward Way, the practical, applied counterpart to his Upward Way [End Page 242] of philosophizing about the universal nature of rhetoric in A Rhetoric of Motives (and its precursor, A Grammar of Motives). After a brief historical introduction from the editors—part context, part explanation of their editing process—the text is Burke’s alone, consisting of two largely completed sections and two sections for which he made substantial notes. As the editors put it, “‘The War of Words’ was designed from the start to be the analytic realization of Burke’s theory of the rhetorical motive. . . .Without The War of Words, [A Rhetoric of Motives] remains incomplete” (30). If Burke’s ultimate purpose in his motivorium trilogy was ad bellum purificandum, “toward the purification of war,” then his optimistic general theory of identification was to be counterbalanced with the shrewder practical analysis of rhetoric in everyday life, the war of words. For various reasons outlined by the editors, this Downward Way was never published, meaning that for some seventy years rhetoricians have been attempting to apply Burke’s theories to the analysis of scenes, acts, and agents in the world around us. It is a tremendously useful addition to the canon, therefore, to find Burke’s own original attempts to do the same. Thus, for instance, while in A Rhetoric of Motives Burke describes identification as identifying our interests with another’s, becoming consubstantial, in War of Words he describes the dangers of identification with a necessarily expansionist nationalism: “It is the deprived persons at home who, impoverished because so much of the national effort is turned to the resources of foreign aggression rather than to the improvement of domestic conditions, it is precisely these victims of nationalistic aggressiveness whose fervor is most readily enlisted through the imagery of sheerly vicarious participation in the power of our nationally subsidized corporations abroad” (251). That he was describing those fervent supporters of a Cold War buildup and not those fervent supporters of Donald Trump serves only to demonstrate the ways in which American exceptionalism relies on similar rhetorical devices in the scene-act ratio that keeps the world on edge. His first section, “The Devices,” then, shows Burke categorizing strategies much as he did with theories in RM, updating and expanding upon classical rhetorical strategies to show how they function in the modern world. The Bland Strategy, Shrewd Simplicity, Undo by Overdoing, Yielding Aggressively, Deflection (“so general an end that nearly all the Logomachy [the War of Words] could be included under it” [68]), Spokesman, Reversal, Say the Opposite, Spiritualization (the unifying achievements and paranoias of “us”), Making the Connection—these ten devices, a multitude of examples, and the theory behind them make up the first 125 pages of The War of Words. That multitude of examples, often confusing for readers of Burke’s longer texts, here in their somewhat condensed form work well. Don’t understand a description of a device? Read an example of it. Don’t understand that example? There are five or ten more, ranging...

L’expression “Troisième Sophistique” a commencé à être utilisée, à partir des annees 1990, pour designer les orateurs et rheteurs grecs du ive siècle apres J.-C, et elle a suscité des débats. Les principales questions qui se posent portent sur la définition et l’extension chronologique du concept auquel renvoie cette expression : s’applique-t-elle aux praticiens et aux théoriciens de la rhetorique au sens strict, ou doit-elle être élargie pour inclure d’autres catégories d’écrivains et d’intellectuels ? Est-elle limitée au ive siècle après J.-C. ou se prolonge-t-elle jusqu’aux siècles sui-vants ? S’agit-il seulement des païens, ou existe-t-il aussi une Troisieme Sophistique chrétienne ? Ces questions pouvant admet-tre des réponses diverses, les choix que Ton opère engagent la manière de concevoir le role de la rhetorique dans la societe et la periodisation de l’histoire de la rhétorique.

The Third Sophistic Laurent Pernot Foreword The Third Sophistic is a cultural and social phenomenon that began in the Greek half of the Roman Empire in the 4th century CE. It comprised personalities who were teachers of rhetoric, orators, and public figures. The numeral adjective “Third” is understood in reference to the First Sophistic, which includes Greek sophists of the 5th and 4th century BCE, and the Second Sophistic, which includes Greek sophists active in the Roman Empire from the 1st to the 3rd century CE. This is a relatively new subject in the field of history of rhetoric and it has been the topic of much recent research: the time to assess the work done and to open future prospects has come. The following essays aim to provide a definition of the Third Sophistic. They describe historical changes, explore geographical areas, unravel social and familial connections, and highlight exceptional individualities. It is hoped that this collection will provide insights into the richness of Greco-Roman rhetoric of Late Antiquity and demonstrate its relevance to literature, politics, and religion. A chronology and a bibliography are provided below for the convenience of readers. L. P. N.B. Of the three papers gathered here, the first two were presented at the ISHR Twenty-First Biennial Conference (London, 26–29 July 2017) as part of the Panel “The Third Sophistic and Its Spaces.” [End Page 174] Chronological Table This chronological table lists the principal authors that are mentioned in the papers. The dates are sometimes approximate or conjectural. The cited names do not only include sophists. 5th cent. BCE Gorgias (480–380) 4th Plato (427–347) Aeschines (390-after 330) 3rd 2nd 1st Potamon of Mytilene (75 BCE –15 CE) 1st cent. CE 2nd Aelius Aristides (117–180) Lucian (120–180) 3rd Philostratus (170–245) Callinicus of Petra (Second half of the 3rd cent.) Julian of Cappadocia (?) Menander Rhetor (Second half of the 3rd cent.) Panegyrici Latini 4th Eusebius of Caesarea (265–339) Prohaeresius (277–369) Lactantius (+325) Libanius (314–393) Themistius (317–390) Himerius (310–390) The Emperor Julian (331/2–363) Aphthonius (Second half of the 4th cent.) Gregory of Nazianzus (330–390) Gregory of Nyssa (330–395) Basil of Caesarea (329–379) John Chrysostom (345–407) Eunapius (349–415) Panegyrici Latini (Cont.) Marius Victorinus (290–365) Symmachus (340–402) Ambrose (335–397) Augustine (354–430) 5th Synesius (370–413) The School of Gaza Damascius (460–538) 6th The School of Gaza [End Page 175] Select Bibliography E. Amato, A. Roduit, M. Steinruck, ed., Approches de la Troisiéme Sophistique: Hommages à Jacques Schamp (Bruxelles: Latomus, 2006). Google Scholar Av. Cameron, “Culture Wars: Late Antiquity and Literature,” in C. Freu, S. Janniard, A. Ripoll, ed., ”Libera Curiositas.” Melanges d’histoire romaine et d’Antiquité tar-dive offerts à Jean-Michel Carrié (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 307–316. Google Scholar R. C. Fowler, ed., Plato in the Third Sophistic (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2014). Google Scholar D. Hernández de la Fuente, “Poetry and Philosophy at the Boundaries of Byzantium (5th-7th centuries),” in A. de Francisco Heredero, D. Hernández de la Fuente, S. Torres Prieto, ed., New Perspectives on Late Antiquity in the Eastern Roman Empire (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 81–100. Google Scholar P. Kimball, ed., “The Third Sophistic: New Approaches to Rhetoric in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Late Antiquity 3 (2010). Google Scholar M. Kraus, “Rhetorik und Macht: Theorie und Praxis der deliberativen Rede in der dritten Sophistik. Libanios und Aphthonios,” in M. Edwards, P. Ducrey, P. Derron, ed., La rhetorique du pouvoir: une exploration de Vart oratoire délibératif grec (Vandœuvres: Fondation Hardt, 2016), 299–341. Google Scholar P.-L. Malosse, B. Schouler, “Qu’est-ce que la Troisième Sophistique?” Lalies 29 (2009): 157–224. Google Scholar R. J. Penella, “Prologue,” in A. J. Quiroga Puertas, ed., The Purpose of Rhetoric in Late Antiquity: From Performance to Exegesis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 1–7. Google Scholar L. Pernot, La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain (Paris: Institut d’Etudes Augustiniennes, 1993). Google Scholar A. J. Quiroga Puertas, “From Sophistopolis to Episcopolis. The Case...

Reviewed by: Principal Writings on Rhetoric by Philipp Melanchthon Kees Meerhoff Philipp Melanchthon, Principal Writings on Rhetoric. Edited by William P. Weaver, Stefan Strohm, and Volkhard Wels. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. liv + 594 pp. ISBN 9783110561197 Publication of a brand new, state-of-the-art critical edition of Philip Melanchthon’s (1497–1560) major writings on rhetoric is excellent news for all scholars working in the field of Renaissance rhetoric. The volume under discussion here is the very first of a multi-volume edition of the opera philosophic, that is, of all major writings concerning the arts curriculum, taught according to the highest standards of humanism. Volume II-2 will be supplemented by a volume (II-l) in which the writings on dialectic will be published. This volume will also be of particular interest to students of rhetoric, since Melanchthon—following Valla’s and Agricola’s lead—placed dialectic at the heart of rhetoric. Melanchthon firmly believed in the classical [End Page 118] conception of the enkyklios paideia, so eloquently highlighted by Cicero in his oration Pro Archia, which was, not by accident, one of Melanchthon’s favourite speeches. True to the author’s conception, already expressed in his inaugural lecture (1518), the opera philosophies series will also republish his writings on grammar, classical literature, history, ethics, politics, physics, and mathematics. Moreover, since Melanchthon defended his philosophical conceptions on numerous occasions, either personally or by proxy, the final volume will contain his famous declamations concerning all areas of academic teaching. In short, this major enterprise, undertaken by the director of the Melanchthouhaus in Bretten, Günter Frank, and by church historian Walter Sparn, will supersede the previous editions of Melanchthon’s writings, notably the Bretschneider & Bindseil twenty-eight-volume edition published in the Corpus Rcformatontm over the course of the nineteenth century and the so-called MSA-edition of selected writings directed by R. Stupperich and published from 1951 onward. Volume II-2 contains the three textbooks on rhetoric published by Melanchthon in 1519, 1521, and 1531. These textbooks are supplemented by the republication of H. Zwicker’s earlier edition of the Dispositiones rhetoricae (1553), which first appeared in 1911 and was reprinted in 1968. These Dispositiones offer 160 outlines of speeches on all kind of matters and are thus working examples of declamations written according to the rules of composition proposed in the textbooks. Melanchthon’s writings on homiletics (De officiis conionatoris, etc.) are not included in the volume. But they are discussed through the annotations concerning the sections on preaching one finds in the textbooks from the very start. The volume is co-ordinated by William Weaver. Weaver is the editor of the 1521 Institutiones rhetoricae. Stefan Strohm, assisted by Hartmut Schmid, edited the 1519 De rhetorica libri tres. And Volkhard Wels was responsible for editing the 1531 Elementorum rehtorices libri duo. I shall refer to them as Editor B, A, and C, respectively. All texts are published in Latin, without translation; the introductions and annotations are either in English or in German. The quotations given in the notes are in Greek and in Latin. A modern translation with Greek key words added in brackets, especially for the longer quotations in Greek (of Aristotle, Plutarch, etc.), would have been defensible, if not preferable. Each editor enjoyed maximum scientific freedom in accomplishing his formidable task. And each individual edition offers not only a perfectly established text, but also a rich critical apparatus and a wealth of explanatory notes. The introductions and annotations demonstrate in a definitive way the importance of classical and humanist sources in Melanchthon’s writings. Among his humanist predecessors, Agricola and Erasmus are Melanchthon’s key authors; but, at a certain stage, George of Trebizond also played a remarkable part. Erasmus is the chief source, not only as the author of De copia and similar writings, but also as an interpreter of the Scriptures and as a collector of ancient wisdom in the Adagia. With Agricola, he is the great ancestor, who already conceived of rhetoric in close relationship to exegesis and homiletics and who advocated for an eloquence fuelled by [End Page 119] ancient literature. For Melanchthon as well, rhetoric became a tool for analysing...

Reviewed by: Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion by Ann George Kyle Jensen Ann George. Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion. Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 2018. xvi + 279 pp. ISBN 9781611179316 It is difficult to appreciate the full achievement of Ann George’s Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion unless one has firsthand experience with Kenneth Burke’s extant papers. All archival research is challenging, of course. But Burke’s papers are especially difficult to manage because of the volume and fecundity of his drafting materials. These materials encourage a persistent feeling of insecurity, that hard-won moments of clarity will be run off by new and unexpected variables. I am not surprised that it took George twenty years to track “P&C’s development, theoretical arguments, critical methodologies, and civic pedagogy” (24). Her erudite analysis indicates the time was well spent. George navigates the complicated arguments of Permanence and Change with characteristic precision and grace. In Part I, she addresses the core concepts of Burke’s argument such as piety, perspective by incongruity, metabiology, and the art of living. In Part II, she presents an extended archival account of the book’s production and reception history that complicates prevailing assumptions about Burke’s work as a critic. The two parts are connected by George’s claim that Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change is the originating work of the New Rhetoric. [End Page 116] To make payment on this claim, George emphasizes the value of reading Burke in context. In each chapter, she presents Burke as a writer responding to the problems posed by his historical moment and needing to revise his perspectives as the scene evolved. Because Burke’s interpretation of key events and their resolutions underwent constant revision, critics hoping to understand his arguments must engage with not only his published works but also his extant drafting materials. In between the drafts, we discover a groundbreaking civic pedagogy that will compel new and expert Burke scholars alike. George identifies metabiology as the “ethical grounding for [Burke’s] proposed cultural reorientation.” In doing so, she claims that his insights remain relevant for the contemporary moment (56). George makes this case convincingly, arguing that Burke’s account of human motives “creates the scene and the means that allow Americans to fulfill their deepest human needs, and as they participate in collaborative civic conversations, they instantiate and reaffirm, for themselves and each other, their commitment to democratic values” (224). Forum constraints prevent me from listing the full array of praiseworthy features in George’s book. So, I will focus on what seem to me her most profound contributions. First, George presents perspective by incongruity as a multi-layered concept. There is a reasonable temptation to limit the scope of perspective by incongruity by noting its capacity to denaturalize well established cultural “truths.” But within Burke’s civic pedagogy, perspective by incongruity has “different levels . . . for different situations”: “a freewheeling, outrageous cultural critique by an ‘analyst’/artist/rhetor or an individual who is already alienated from the dominant culture versus the more conciliatory rhetorical means by which piously reluctant audiences can be led to new ways of seeing” (50). Second, when discussing metabiology as purification of war, George presents five different scenes that elucidate the nuances of Burke’s thinking and thus add considerable depth to our understanding of his civic pedagogy. According to George, the purification of war demands that we address simultaneously the interconnections between our biological, cultural, pragmatic, economic, and militaristic assumptions. George’s claim is particularly suggestive because it implies that later works such as A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives evolve from Permanence & Change. Having spent nearly a decade working on the archival histories of A Rhetoric of Motives and The War of Words, I concur with this assertion. Much of what appears in A Rhetoric of Motives is an extension and/or revision of Burke’s earlier arguments. Finally, George claims that Burke’s civic pedagogy is both m extension and revision of epideictic rhetoric. It extends by examining how particular orientations “train people to accept certain ways of knowing and judging...

Reviewed by: Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes by Timothy Raylor Torrey Shanks Timothy Raylor, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xvii + 334 pp. ISBN 9780198829690 In a meticulous and learned account of Thomas Hobbes’s lifelong relationship to rhetoric and humanism, Timothy Raylor takes up the peculiar but important challenge of proving that something did not happen. That something is Hobbes’s famed double turn, his rejection of humanist rhetoric followed later by a modified return to rhetoric, as defended in Quentin Skinner’s influential study, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996). Raylor presents a [End Page 121] Hobbes steadfast in his relationship to both rhetoric and humanism, in contrast to his sharper and unrepentant philosophical turn. The book is provocative in its scrutinizing and overturning of Skinner’s thesis, where it largely sets its sights. It also provokes questions beyond that horizon for the theory and practice of rhetoric in putatively rationalist philosophy. One of several important contributions of Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes is its laser-like focus on the specific rhetorical and humanist traditions from which Hobbes drew insight over the long span of his life. Attending closely to his early pedagogical pursuits with the Cavendish family, the book discerns Hobbes’s commitments among a broad range of humanist and rhetorical approaches available to him. It speaks of Raylor’s attunement to the rhetorical tradition that he weighs pedagogical activities and topics so significantly. The examination of Hobbes’s work as a young tutor and nascent poet take up his incontrovertibly rhetorical humanist phase, during which, Raylor emphasizes, he harbored the pragmatic and skeptical tendencies of a Tacitean more than a Ciceronian civic republican. While Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides distances him from Cicero, the The Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique reveals his enduring commitment to Aristotelian notions of rhetoric. Though he was no ethical Aristotelian, Hobbes found in the Rhetoric a guiding structure of thought that was further inflected through Francis Bacon. Drawing Bacon into the humanist fold, Raylor rightly challenges anachronistic habits of opposing aesthetics and reason, poetry and science, in seventeenth-century philosophy. One benefit is in his richly layered reading of an early poem, De mirabilibus pecci. The poem incorporates catalogue of wonders, travel writing, and epideictic rhetoric, intertwining aesthetic pleasure, knowledge of natural history, and currying favour. Hobbes’s humanism takes new shape here as a contribution to the concerns and methods of an emerging natural scientific inquiry. This is a less familiar Hobbes and a path not taken for a thinker who later championed materialism at the expense of experiential knowledge. Hobbes abandoned natural history, but other Aristotelian tenets endured: a division of knowledge into scientia and opinio and a rhetoric attuned to the passions and pragmatically aimed at persuasion over loftier ethical goals. Crucial evidence for this is found in Hobbes’s choice to teach Aristotle’s Rhetoric and to prepare a Latin Digest and English Briefe. The documents, Raylor argues, do not reject rhetorical humanist (read Ciceronian) culture, but rather offer “a reasonable interpretation and apt condensation of Aristotle” (169). Aristotelian rhetoric is instead the structure through which Hobbes would effect a momentous change a decade later. Reorienting Hobbes’s rhetorical humanist phase around a Baconian Aristotelianism leads to the conclusion that “[i]t is not rhetoric that Hobbes, at the end of the 1630s, rejects, but philosophy—philosophy as it has traditionally been practiced” (176). Philosophy becomes the problem and object of transformation, not rhetoric. Moreover, rhetorical study becomes the driving factor in this reconceptualization of ratiocination. [End Page 122] The Rhetoric helped Hobbes to see that too much of what passed for philosophy was not certain or universal but drawn upon arguments meant to persuade, yielding, at best, probable truths. The natural histories that once interested him are based merely on “experience of fact,” producing only appearances of knowledge (201). With the demotion of natural philosophy, Hobbes elevates and transforms the study of politics into a science grounded in logical demonstration of causes from clearly defined terms, like geometry. Civil philosophy, in other words, is torn from its rhetorical roots in dialectical reasoning, experiential or prudential knowledge, and persuasion...

Cicero's Pro Archia has historically been taken as a bona fide expression of humanism. In this article, I demonstrate how this reading of the Pro Archia has allowed the political and cultural tensions in the speech to remain hidden. Cicero's vision of Archias as an idealized amalgam sanitizes both the poetic and the cultural identity of his Syrian client in favour of a projection which combined generic “Greekness” with a politicized invocation of the Roman poet, Q. Ennius. Contextualizing the Pro Archia within its contemporary political moment reveals that Cicero is consciously constructing a narrative of Archias as a “good immigrant.”

The first book of medieval Latin beast epic, Ysengrimus, relates imaginary trials. In the episodes of the stolen ham and the fishing, the characters, Ysengrin and Renart, imagine that they would convene an ecclesiastic assembly, a synod, and that they would plead their case. Their plead reverses right and wrong (translatio criminis), invents speeches to denigrate each other (sermocinatio), and seems to take the form of large digressions. These speeches, which have been considered as “interminable” and “wordy” by J. Mann and É. Charbonnier, can be reassessed through classical rhetoric. This paper aims to demonstrate that, in spite of the extent of these speeches' apparent rambling, we can extricate some rhetorical structures (constitutiones) from the judicial oratory. This is the first point of a speech that also uses prolixity as an “art of being right.”

Cicero’s Pro Archia has historically been taken as a bona fide expression of humanism. In this article, I demonstrate how this reading of the Pro Archia has allowed the political and cultural tensions in the speech to remain hidden. Cicero’s vision of Archias as an idealized amalgam sanitizes both the poetic and the cultural identity of his Syrian client in favour of a projection which combined generic “Greekness” with a politicized invocation of the Roman poet, Q. Ennius. Contextualizing the Pro Archia within its contemporary political moment reveals that Cicero is consciously constructing a narrative of Archias as a “good immigrant.”

Book Reviews 437 brush to reveal how these women's collective voices defined women's citi­ zenship in an era that suppressed it. Maddux aims to account for women's diverse practices of citizenship and civic roles at the time of the fair. This book is ultimately successful in deepening our understanding of what constitutes citizenship by accounting for multiple practices of women's citizenship. Maddux recognizes that her work can only account for a small fraction of the robust event, but her accounting is fruitful and informative. Her work certainly adds to public address and citizenship scholarship, and offers many points of departure for future study. For example, she includes a brief discussion of the interna­ tional nature of the women's congresses in the conclusion chapter, leaving the door open for others to take up her call to pay more attention to the fair from a transnational perspective. In Practical Citizenship, Maddux achieves her goal of recovering new forms of women's citizenship at the fair, which should encourage future scholarship and therefore an even greater under­ standing of women's contributions to this rich rhetorical event. Anna Dudney Deeb Brenau University Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Beatrice da Vela, eds., The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, (Mnemosyne Supplements 403), Leiden: Brill, 2017. 355 pp. ISBN: 9789004334649 This collected volume is an exciting and timely contribution to the study of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric. The introduction lays out the work's premise: oratory, like theater, is always a performance involving a triangular dialogue between performer, opponent or co-actor, and audience. Influenced by the field of Performance Studies, the editors regard rhetorical texts as events rather than objects. As such, the texts can be used to recapture ele­ ments of the original performance and to reveal aspects of performance beyond oral delivery. The chapters represent a wide range of approaches to analyzing performative aspects of oratory. The majority of the chapters are on Attic oratory, with one chapter on Thucydides and five excellent chapters on Roman oratory. The following brief sketches of the contents will demon­ strate the breadth of approaches contained in this volume. The book's first section, "Speakers—Audience," contains five chapters. Ian Worthington suggests that speakers appearing before the Assembly required more skill in acting than those who spoke in the courts because deliberative speakers could be more versatile in responding to the audience and other politicians. Andreas Serafim examines Demosthenes s use of direct address, arguing that Demosthenes uses the address ta VApsc AOfjwioi in order to create a "rhetoric of community," establishing himself and the jurors 438 RHETORIC A as an in-group while excluding his opponent (31). In contrast, the address & devSpec; dixacFToci would remind the jurors that they were themselves being judged by the watching populace. Brenda Griffith-Williams claims that theat­ rical elements in Isaios 6 (the scheming hetaira, the bumbling old man) served to distract from the case's relatively flimsy evidence by building a sense of familiarity among the jurors in their capacity as theatergoers. Guy Westwood considers the dearth of examples of eidolapoeia, the impersonation of a dead person, in Classical Athenian oratory. He suggests that this practice might have been considered undemocratic, if a speaker was thought of as personally appropriating an ancestor who should belong to all. Catherine Steel demonstrates that Cicero's published speeches are misleading: in live performance, informal elements would have interrupted the speakers, requiring them to reveal their ability to successfully interact with the people and to gauge the attitude of the judges and spectators. In fact, oratory is unlike theater in that its performance is never fully scripted. The second section, "Ethopoiia," has two chapters. Christos Kremmydas demonstrates that Thucydides reveals the character and intentions of indivi­ duals and cities through dialogue—especially their style of argumentation and use of gnomic statements—as much as through narrative. Henriette van der Blom shows how Metellus Numidicus reinvented himself after being recal­ led from Africa in 107 bce. An examination of the fragments of his speeches reveals that Metellus used the "rhetoric of inclusion" to bring the people to his side while simultaneously...

Book Reviews 439 collection. Edward Harris argues that, unlike tragedy, Athenian oratory avoided the excessive expression of emotions and other histrionics because it would distract from the legal issues. Drawing on Aristotle's distinction between poetry and oratory, Harris claims that the numerous examples of emoting in the court were exceptions, rather than examples, of typical court­ room behavior. Jon Hall uses evidence from Cicero's letters and other sour­ ces to argue that judicial proceedings in the Late Republic were far more interactive and even chaotic than their modern British and American coun­ terparts. Because judges were selected publicly and were frequently wellknown politicians, they could use their service on the court to advance their own political interests. The final section, "Language and Style," also contains three chapters. Chris Carey argues that Aeschines uses a series of antitheses to cast Timarchus as feminized, depraved, and anti-democratic. He conflates Timarchus's appearance with his actions, a full-body assault that moves beyond narrative and becomes a reality seen and enacted. In contrast, Aeschines characterizes himself as metrios and a model of sophrosyne, like Solon. Konstantinos Kapparis analyzes the corpus of Apollodoros for perfor­ mance elements, arguing that Apollodoros uses vivid narrative as well as direct and indirect speech to create psychologically complex personae and to bring the action before the mind's eyes of the jurors. Finally, Alessandro Vatri uses syntax analysis to distinguish between Antiphon's forensic speeches, written for delivery, and his Tetralogies, written for publication. While the Tetralogies tend to have the more complex structures expected of a logographic text, the performed texts feature semantic ambiguities that gestures and other paralinguistic features would have clarified. Due to the broad range of topics covered in this book, more questions and ambiguities are raised than answers given. Interestingly, several chap­ ters use similar pieces of evidence to come up with opposite conclusions (Harris and Kremmydas) or to cast light on two sides of the same perfor­ mance context (Clark and Hall). While no doubt many readers will only read selections based on their research interests, the collection as a whole provides a thought-provoking roadmap of the current state of the question and indicates several intriguing avenues of future research. Hilary J. C. Lehmann Knox College Fabio Roscalla, Dalla tribuna al pulpito. Retorica del verosimile. Pavia: Pavia University Press, 2017, 130 pp. ISBN: 9788869520457 Nel corso degli ultimi anni la categoria deWeikos e stata oggetto di un crescente, giustificato, interesse. Il recente libro di Fabio Roscalla (d ora in poi R.), che viene ad arricchire ulteriormente il dibattito relativo alYeikos, si segnala per due tratti peculiari: 1) la serrata analisi testuale dei contesti 440 RHETORICA d'occorrenza del termine; 2) il zcorto circuited che viene proposto tra due ambiti apparentemente molto distanti tra loro, e non solo per ragioni cronologiche : il tribunale attico del V e IV secolo a.C. e l'oratoria cristiana dei primi secoli della nostra era. Per anticipare le conclusioni, si pud senza dubbio affermare che le analisi proposte dall'autore permettono al lettore di farsi un'idea particolarmente approfondita dell'intricato complesso di ques­ tion! sollevato dalla nozione di eikos. Da questo punto di vista, quindi, pur rifuggendo volontariamente dall'intenzione di fornire «una nuova riconsiderazione generate delYeikos» (p. 1), esse vi contribuiscono, sia pure indirettamente , mostrando come questa nozione generate si vada articolando nella dimensione concreta e variegata dei suoi usi. Non essendo naturalmente possibile ripercorrere la minuziosa disamina testuale svolta da R., mi limitero ad evidenziare, per ciascuno dei due capitoli in cui e diviso il libro, uno tra i possibili fili conduttori in grado di rendere conto della ricchezza degli spunti che esso offre. Il primo capitolo e dedicato all'oratoria ateniese e, dopo alcune considerazioni introduttive, prende le mosse da una delle piu note orazioni lisiane, la Contro Eratostene, che ha come oggetto «un evento centrale della recente storia ateniese, su cui il dibattito doveva essere ancora aperto e acceso», cosicche «Eeikos diventa [. . .] in mancanza di testimoni diretti, lo strumento di persuasione privilegiato in possesso dell'oratore» (p. 7). E' quindi particolarmente interessante osservare che in questo contesto la nozione di eikos serve non solo ad indicare una categoria...

Book Review| August 01 2020 Review: Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus, by Tushar Irani and The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, by James L. Kastely Tushar Irani, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, xiv + 217 pp. ISBN 9781316855621James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015, xvii + 260 pp. ISBN 9780226278629 Robin Reames Robin Reames University of Illinois at Chicago Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (3): 328–332. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.328 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robin Reames; Review: Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus, by Tushar Irani and The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, by James L. Kastely. Rhetorica 1 August 2020; 38 (3): 328–332. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.3.328 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Zottoli argued that the enthymeme theory was a very useful tool to understand Chinese texts. To show this, he analyzed and examined the Baguwen (八股文). The enthymematic features of it are compable to enthymemes of signs or enthymemes of wide-ranging opinions. They are considered to be makers of contexts that are accepted and approved largely by the audience according to common sense. They are also very similar to loci communes of Cicero.

Zottoli argued that the enthymeme theory was a very useful tool to understand Chinese texts. To show this, he analyzed and examined the Baguwen (八股文). The enthymematic features of it are compable to enthymemes of signs or enthymemes of wide-ranging opinions. They are considered to be makers of contexts that are accepted and approved largely by the audience according to common sense. They are also very similar to loci communes of Cicero.

328 RHETORICA de cinq siecles qui separe le pseudo-Platon et Maxime). L'ouvrage hesite, puisqu'il mentionne incidemment ces auteurs platoniciens, tout comme il hesite, pour les besoins de son objet, entre un traitement exclusivement philosophique et une approche plus rhetorique de la priere. On forme evidemment ces regrets parce que Ton y est conduit par l'aptitude d'AT a produire des syntheses eclairantes. Sans doute Porphyre et ses predecesseurs platoniciens n'avaient-ils pas lu Lacan, mais ils n'en tenaient pas moins lame pour structuree, consciemment et inconsciemment, comme un langage. Qu'elle ne soit pas exprimee en paroles, phonetiquement, ne change rien au fait qu'elle est foncierement logike (meme si elle se fait sans le truchement du logos, y compris du logos interieur, empreint de passion ; p. 158), qu'elle est de l'ordre du discours et que la pensee est toujours, depuis Platon, un discours, sinon un dialogue. AT nous invite a distinguer de maniere tranchee la priere silencieuse et phi­ losophique de la priere prononcee. Mais sans doute doit-on temperer cette opposition. La priere silencieuse en quoi consiste l'exercice theoretique de l'intellection, est une forme de communication, de partage et d'entente avec la divinite. C'est ce qui explique, pour n'en retenir qu'un exemple, que les demons soient designes par Porphyre comme des divinites intermediaries, des « transporters » de messages, qui font circuler prieres humaines ou pre­ scriptions divines en les transmettant d'un destinataire a l'autre. Comme le dit le debut de la longue sequence demonologique du De Abstinentia, en II 36 (§3), c'est la mission proprement angelique des demons que de transmettre des messages et des conseils. Parmi lesquels figurent les prieres. Le silence n'est aucunement suspension de l'expression et de la communication entre les hommes et les dieux. L'ouvrage d'AT connaitra la meme fortune que sa precedente synthese« demonologique », en devenant l'etude de reference sur son objet. Jean-Francois Pradeau Universite Lyon III - Jean Moulin Tushar Irani, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, xiv + 217 pp. ISBN 9781316855621 James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015, xvii + 260 pp. ISBN 9780226278629 Scholarship on rhetoric in Plato habitually suffers from certain limita­ tions. While recent decades have seen profound revolutions in how Plato's dialogues are read and interpreted (inspiring profound changes in Plato Book Reviews 329 scholarship generally), these changes have had too little impact on how Plato's treatment of sophistry and rhetoric is conceived. Among the most important of these changes is the development of literary-dramatic readings of the dialogues, which consider the works' philosophical content by relation to their literary form as dialogues. According to this view, reading Plato entails an awareness of dialogue's distinctive capacity for masking authorial intention and voice. Such a reading resists the hasty assumption that the works put forth Plato's dogmatic or doctrinal positions for which Socrates was the presumed mouthpiece. Rather, as literary-dramatic representations, the dialogues give voice to indirect positions and hidden views. In spite of this enhanced sensitivity to Plato's authorial choices, there has been on the whole no significant alteration to the view that Plato held rhetoric in contempt or extreme distrust, believing it to be a sham art, a threat to true philosophy, and an inferior method to dialectic. Hence rhetoric is mere rhetoric—the lesser counterpart of philosophy, useful only for speaking to ignorant masses, for whom more rational methods are ineffectual. He may have offered marginal and grudging allowance for rhetoric in the Phaedrus dialogue, but only as an unrealizable ideal that sacrifices practical effectiveness. This leads to the second limitation. Studies of rhetoric in Plato often orbit around the two dialogues where rhetoric is treated most explicitly— the Gorgias and the Phaedrus—and neglect the relevance of many of Plato's other dialogues for understanding his conception of rhetoric, despite the fact that language, rhetoric, and sophistry are abiding (albeit implicit) concerns across the corpus of dialogues. Where these...

Book Reviews 227 compelling theoretically, the case study did not fully examine the implications of the project's reliance on homonormativity. Bessette concludes with two provocations for the future of queer retroactivism. First, she argues that a near-future task may be to challenge the centrality of corporations in digital media production. And second, she follows Carla Freccero in noting that the hauntological past must be heard, on its own terms. Bessette's work with a variety of grassroots lesbian archives is an engaging read and offers a useful approach to historical scholarship. But I felt that she did not spend enough time parsing out the affordances and limitations of grassroots archives in relation to their institutional counterparts. Fittingly, Bessette's most important insight is her notion of retroactivism, a concept that can hopefully open up more space for reconsidering archival identification, queer or otherwise, into the future. Morgan DiCesare University of Iowa Peter A. O'Connell, The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, 282 pp. ISBN 9781477311684 The close connections between rhetorical and theatrical performance as two of the major types of civic spectacle in Classical Athens are well esta­ blished, but we are hampered by the fact that our knowledge of courtroom practice is largely dependent on the surviving texts of the speeches. Unlike their Roman counterparts, the surviving fourth-century Greek treatises have little to say about delivery or about the type of spectacular effects alluded to in Attic comedy and in the speeches themselves, which creates a challenge to the modem researcher. Peter O'Connell's book, based on his PhD disser­ tation, is one of several recent studies to take up that challenge1 and is dis­ tinguished by its focus on sight and visual effects in Athenian trials. O'Connell's book stands out for its focus on the role of vision, both physical and mental, and metaphors of sight in forensic oratory (with a brief foray into the funeral oration). It makes an important contribution to the study of vivid language and visual effects as an integral part of the process of persuasion and underlines the continuing importance of these tools through modem comparisons. The author's solution to the lack of theoretical discussions contemporary with the speeches is to draw principally on an impressively wide range of ancient speeches, giving close readings of ^ee, for example, N. Villaceque, Spectateurs de Paroles: Deliberation democratique et theatre a Athenes a Vepoque classique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013) and A. Serafim, Attic Oratory and Performance (London : Routledge, 2017). 228 RHETORICA selected passages (summaries of all the speeches discussed are given in an invaluable appendix). The astute close readings of these passages are supple­ mented by appeals - made with all due caution — to the critical and theoreti­ cal discussions of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The result sheds a new light on the functioning of judicial oratory as a multi-sensory persuasive per­ formance, though the nature of the material inevitably raises some questions. All the major passages are quoted in the Greek and in the author's own English versions. The choice of a very literal translation style serves to clarify the sense of the words discussed but at the occasional cost of fluidity. The first of the book's three parts asks what was visible to the jury within the courtroom, analysing passages that comment on the impact of the presence and physical appearance of the various parties to the case in the courtroom and of material evidence. Against the background of the close association of vision and knowledge in the Greek language, the second section analyses the importance of vision and of metaphors of vision in Athenian law, forensic oratory, and, beyond the courts, in classical Greek philosophical and medical texts. It is here that O'Connell, through citations from Sophists such as Protagoras, Antiphon, and Gorgias, raises the vital epis­ temological question of how juries could decide upon events they had not themselves witnessed. This is backed up by an illuminating analysis of the lan­ guage of visibility in Antiphon and in Gorgias' Defense of Palamedes, which explores the challenge of proving the non-existence...

Book Reviews 229 O'Connell is very effective when analysing the use of vivid language to make the audience imagine scenes they have not witnessed themselves, dis­ cussing Aeschines' passage on the sack of Thebes, Demosthenes on Phokis, and Lycurgus on the scene at Athens after the catastrophic military defeat at Chaeronea. His analyses make use of both ancient criticism and modem lit­ erary tools. Taken together, they make a strong case for accepting the ancient commentators' evaluation of these passages as able to make the audience "see" the scene in imagination. The most stimulating part of this final section however is the final chapter on "shared spectatorship" with its examples of the interaction between the mental images of past actions or absent persons created by the orators' language and the actual sights of the courtroom. O'Connell shows how the orators encourage a type of mental superimposition (my term) of the idea of the sight evoked - and created - by the orator onto the accused present in the courtroom. This is particularly satisfying as an example of actual and virtual sights being used as a sustained strategy throughout a speech and underlines the multiple possibilities for manipulation. One area that could have been addressed in more detail is the sugges­ tion on p. 32 that appearance—real or imagined—might spark a process of enthymematic reasoning (the accused has the commonly accepted characte­ ristics of a murderer/adulterer therefore it is likely that he is guilty as char­ ged). But this rich and stimulating study has a great deal to offer specialists in ancient and modem rhetoric and in ancient Greek literature and culture. Ruth Webb Universite de Lille Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch, eds., Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus, (Beitrage zur Altertumskunde 368), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. 202 pp. ISBN 9783110573978 Plato's Menexenus is a rhetorical masterpiece. That, at any rate, seems to have been the judgment of generations of Athenians, who, Cicero tells us, had someone recite Socrates' funeral oration annually (Orator 151). The speech can be stirring, especially when Socrates speaks in the voice of the dead soldiers and urges their sons to lives of virtue. But is it sincere? Before he delivers the speech, Socrates claims that it is easy to give funeral orations, since all you have to do is praise Athenians to Athenians. The speech misrepresents historical events and doesn't even reflect Socrates own sentiments, since he attributes it to Pericles mistress Aspasia. To make matters worse, Socrates seems to be delivering the speech years after he, and probably Aspasia as well, had died. The puzzles of the Menexenus have no easy answer. Unable to resolve its contradictions in a satisfactory t47av, scholars have tended to focus on its relationship with other surviving 230 RHETORICA Athenian funeral orations and with the rest of Plato's works. This thoughtprovoking volume is no exception. The contributors approach the text from the perspectives of philosophy and political thought, but their argu­ ments will also be inspiring to readers interested in rhetoric in Plato and in Classical Athens. After a brief introduction, Speechesfor the Dead reprints Charles H. Kahn's 1963 article, "Plato's Funeral Oration: The Motive of the Menexenus" Kahn argues that the Menexenus is a political pamphlet, expressing Plato's dislike of the policies of Pericles and his successors, especially the capitulation to Persia in the King's Peace of 386. The eight new essays in Speeches for the Dead are influenced not so much by Kahn's specific arguments as by his approach, which poses five questions about the Menexenus: Why Aspasia? Why the anachronisms? Why the historical distortions? Why did Plato write a funeral oration? Why did that oration continue to be delivered years after it was written? Only some of the authors invoke these questions directly, but a fundamental "why" lies behind each of the essays. They all seek to explain why the Menexenus is the way it is by treating it as a work of serious Platonic philosophy. In "Reading the Menexenus Intertextually," Mark Zelcer takes seriously Socrates' claim that Aspasia composed the speech he delivers by gluing together pieces she had left...

Book Review| February 01 2020 Review: The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siècle's Conversation and The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, by David Randall David Randall, The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siècle's Conversation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, vi + 266 pp. ISBN 9781474430104David Randall, The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, vii + 288 pp. ISBN 9781474448666 James Donathan Garner James Donathan Garner James Donathan Garner Department of Rhetoric and Writing University of Texas at Austin 204 W 21ST ST Austin, TX 78712 j.garner@utexas.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (1): 122–126. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.122 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation James Donathan Garner; Review: The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siècle's Conversation and The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, by David Randall. Rhetorica 1 February 2020; 38 (1): 122–126. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.122 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The presence of a singular rhetorical figure, the dialogismos, in Charisius' Ars grammatica, in Iulius Ruphinianus' De figuris and in some exegetical notes by Donatus to Terence, yields the opportunity to reflect on the mutual influences between rhetoric and grammar in the textbooks of the Late Empire. A mediating role seems to be played by the Progymnasmata.

The presence of a singular rhetorical figure, the dialogismos, in Charisius’ Ars grammatica, in Iulius Ruphinianus’ De figuris and in some exegetical notes by Donatus to Terence, yields the opportunity to reflect on the mutual influences between rhetoric and grammar in the textbooks of the Late Empire. A mediating role seems to be played by the Progymnasmata.

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

Reviews 129 to rebrand old ideologies and invent new rhetorical repertoires with direct appeal to twenty-first-century audiences both at home and abroad. Reading The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong is a true delight, a delight that is made possible by Xing Lu s dispassionate and deeply engaging study of political rhetoric in modern China in general and Mao's transformative rhet­ oric in particular. As China continues to make its presence importantly felt on the world stage, understanding and developing a productive dialogue with its rhetoric is imperative. The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong should serve as an efficacious guide toward this urgent task confronting today's rhetori­ cians and politicians of all persuasions. Luming Mao University of Utah Marie Lund, An Argument on Rhetorical Style. Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2017, 220 pp. $25 (paper). ISBN 9788771844344 In An Argument on Rhetorical Style, Marie Lund builds on the work of Maurice Charland on constitutive rhetoric to advance constitutive style as an original contribution to rhetorical theory. To what extent is Lund's claim to have made an original contribution to centuries-long thought about style borne out by her argument? The first part of An Argument on Rhetorical Style is conceptual, distin­ guishing "constitutive style" from other ways of theorizing style. Lund draws on Wolfgang G. Muller's analysis to organize a taxonomy. In Topik des Stilbegriffs (1981), Muller identifies two tropes as dominating concep­ tions of style in the West: "style as dress" and "style as the man." Both have complicated histories. Style as dress would seem to see style as divorced from underlying ideas and, therefore, as decorative. But in the Renaissance, where the style as dress trope flourishes, Lund notes that ornatus was often thought of more as armament than decoration (58): for example, in John Hoskins' Directions for Speech and Style. Still, in so far as the live canons are thought of as a sequence, traditional rhetoric has fostered the idea that stylistic concerns are belated. With regard to "style is the man," this too is a complicated trope. When Comte de Buffon wrote in "Discourse on Style" that Le style c'est Thomme meme, he meant something quite different from both Quintilian who claimed that speech is commonly an index of character (Institutes, 11.1.30) and from the Romantics with their emphasis on the uniqueness of a personality as reflected in speech. Regardless of these diffe­ rences, Lund's claim that we have often theorized style as the formal embodiment of the speaker or writer's personality" (208) is true enough. Muller's two tropes of style serve as the ground on which Lund mounts her claim for a third topos: style as constitutive: "Wolfgang Muller is responsible for the first two topoi, while the last [constitutive] is my own invention," Lund writes (208). She reviews previous work on the figures 130 RHETORICA and on style generally to place her work in context and to shore up her claim of originality. Among scholars working on the rhetorical figures, Jeanne Fahnestock receives the most attention. Although Fahnestock does consider the figures as constitutive in her Rhetorical Figures in Science (p.22), she does not oppose constitutive to decorative, as Lund does. Instead, she distinguishes figures as functional or not—as advancing an argument or distracting from it. Fahnestock shows that even in scientific argument, figures are present and often serve a functional purpose by for­ mally epitomizing the structure of a scientific argument. For example, in the argument Darwin advances in the Origin that gradual change in response to natural selection turns variations from incipient species to new species, Fahnestock shows that the formal qualities of this argument are captured in the figure gradatio that characterizes Darwin's style (Fahnes­ tock 113-14). But it would be wrong to say that the gradatio is constitutive of the argument because gradatio, like all figures, is in itself skeletal, lacking evi­ dence and is not, therefore, probative. Lund also discusses Lakoff and John­ son on cognitive metaphor. But their point is that metaphor is a generative cognitive process—and therefore relates to invention. If a metaphor goes unnoticed, can we say it contributes to style? Lund's...

122 RHETORIC A rejected some time ago,1 goes beyond redescribing Aristotelian virtues as vices in decoupling Aristotle's twin arts of politics and ethics according to the Aristotelian distinction between making and doing. Whereas the outcome of the former is a product, that of the latter is an action. And products differ from actions in that as made things products must be judged in and of them­ selves, according to how well they work and how long they last. Actions, in contrast, can only be qualified in terms of the moral character and intentions of the agents. As a made thing or product, then, the state, which, as we have seen, must be preserved at all costs, does not derive its quality of being good or bad from the moral dispositions of its rulers. Compared rather to the doc­ tor and the painter, Machiavelli's prince practices an art rooted ultimately in techrie rather than arete understood as excellence in any moral sense. Kathy Eden Columbia University David Randall, The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siecle's Conversation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, vi + 266 pp. ISBN 9781474430104 David Randall, The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni­ versity Press, 2019, vii + 288 pp. ISBN 9781474448666 In The Concept of Conversation and The Conversational Enlightenment, David Randall proposes that conversation as a social, cultural, and histor­ ical force has not received its due, especially in the history of rhetoric. True, books on conversation appear every so often within and outside the academy, whether historian Peter Burke's modest essay collection The Art of Conversation, literary scholar Jane Donawerth's recovery of con­ versation as a model for women's rhetorical theory in Conversational Rhet­ oric, or American essayist Stephen Miller's quasi-apocalyptic jeremiad, Conversation: A Historij of a Declining Art. But Randall's ambitions are gran­ der. Beginning with these two volumes and promising an as-vet-untitled sequel, he unfolds the concept of conversation's development from ancient Rome through the Enlightenment, as well as its struggle to displace oratory as the dominant rhetorical mode. With these ends in mind, Randall Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Renaissance (Cambridge, 1978), 131-38, esp. 135: "Thus the difference between Machiavelli and his contemporaries cannot adequately be characterized as a difference between a moral view of politics and a view of politics as divorced from morality. The essential contrast is rather between two different moralities—two rival and incompatible accounts of what ought ultimately to be done." Reviews 123 promises two interventions common to both books: first, to reveal conver­ sation s place in rhetoric s history, and second, to realize a larger narrative reorganization along the lines of Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transfor­ mation of the Public Sphere and Theory and Practice (Concept 2-3, 8-10). Beginning with Cicero's Rome and concluding with the Republic of Letters, The Concept of Conversation challenges conversation's exclusion from the history of rhetoric by following the parallel advances of sermo (or con­ versation) and conversatio (which Randall glosses variously in both books as "behavior" and "mutual conduct") until their convergence into a wider ranging phenomenon of sociability motivated by economic self-interest (Concept 1, 5, 183; Conversational 5). After the introduction establishes the many conceptual and theoretical terms Randall juggles, chapters 1, 2, and 3 track how conversation transcended its origins as interpersonal discus­ sion. Per Chapter 1, ancient sermo was familiar, leisured conversation that sought philosophical truth conducted among the educated, male, Roman elite. It was represented in print in dialogue form and generally thought to expiate oratory's transgressions, even as its own vices—flattery, for instance—threatened its irenic aims. Chapter 2 details how Medieval Chris­ tianity universalized the concept of friendship, while the increasing public­ ness of letters pushed the ars dictaminis toward oratorical rather than conversational ends. The third chapter traces how Renaissance humanism loosened conversation's connection to Ciceronian sermo further, making conversation "the synecdoche for all conversational modes of inquiry." In this way, conversation became a metaphor that extended far beyond in-person discussion (Concept 83). These opening...

Christoph Georg Leidl In memoriam January 10, 1960 - August 17, 2019. t came as a terrible shock for all of us when just a few weeks after the Biennial Con­ ference in New Orleans this past July, where we had been together with him and shared hilarious chats, drinks, and music, the news spread that our friend, colleague and fellow ISEiR member Christoph Leidl had passed away from this world at the age of only 59 years. Born in Burghausen, Upper Bavaria in 1960, from 1979 to 1986 Christoph studied Greek, Latin, and History at the Uni­ versity of Munich, Germany, and (during the academic year 1982-1983) at St. John's College, Oxford, UK. It was from the University of Munich that he earned his M.A. in 1987 and his PhD in Ancient History, Greek and Latin in 1991, with an edition and commentary on Appian's history of the Second Punic War in Spain, printed 1996. During the years 1987 to 1999 he was Assistant Professor at the Department of Classics in Munich, again interrupted by a stay in Oxford from 1995 to 1997 on a research grant from the German Research Fund (DFG). From 1999 to 2001 he was Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Mannheim, until he received a tenured post as Akademischer Rat Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 1, pp. 1-13. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. nrnress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.1 2 RHETORICA at the University of Heidelberg in 2002 (promoted to Akademischer Oberrat in 2006), where he has been working and teaching ever since. Besides a steadily growing emphasis on the theory and history of rhetoric, in which he particularly focused on the theory of metaphor and tropes, the orator's ethos, rhetorical pedagogy, and humour in oratory, Christoph also did research and published on poetics and literary criticism, on ancient historiography and on the reception of ancient drama in music. Christoph had been an ISHR member since 1995, and missed almost none of our conferences, with the sad exception precisely of the one in Tubingen in 2015, when he fell ill. He also held various offi­ ces in ISHR. He was a Council member from 2011 to 2015, and in 2013 also took on the chair of the membership committee, a duty he fulfilled with enormous dedication and accuracy until his last days. Everyone will remember his meticulous membership reports delivered at each Council or General Business meeting. Christoph was perfectly versed not only in ancient literature, but also in modern and contemporary literatures. He knew his Shakespeare, Moliere and Goethe just as well as his Homer, Virgil, or Horace, and he was acquainted with contemporary approaches to rhetoric just as much as with Aristotle, Cicero or Quintilian. His private library filled an entire house and might have been the envy of many a department library. One wondered when, alongside his exorbitant duties in teaching and administration, he ever found the time for reading all those books. In addition, he was also a great lover of music. He had stupendous knowledge in all things music and was able to talk in minute details about concert pianists, conduc­ tors or particular recordings, and he was himself an excellent piano player. He was also a passionate mountain hiker. Besides all this, he had a wonderful and subtle sense of humour, and an extremely amiable character; his big inviting smile remains unforgettable. On the other hand, Christoph was an indefatigable worker with an outstanding sense of duty. Not only was he more than thorough in his research, but he was also always available for his students whenever they needed help. He seemed to be permanently active; it appeared as if he never rested, and indeed he may well too often have burnt the candle at both ends. Only lately he talked about a change in his way of life. But it...

Reviews Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, xiii + 432 pp. ISBN 9781107128859 Students of the rhetorical tradition will learn a great deal from Skinner's From Humanism to Hobbes; for like Elobbes, Skinner has mastered the rhetorical curriculum that informs the humanist education of sixteenthand seventeenth-century writers like Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Milton, and, of course, Hobbes himself. Even more to the point, Skinner's mastery of this tradition has made him attentive to the fundamentally adversarial nature of their writings, allowing him to uncover the argumentative structures and stylistic figures that underwrite their persuasive effects. It has also, I expect, helped him to hone his own enviable argumentative skills, whether he is making the case for the origins of political representation in the art of the actor, the role of rhetorical redescription in Machiavelli's Prince and Shakespeare's Coriolanus, or the iconographic identity of the colossus in the frontispiece of Leviathan. Without by any means exhausting the impor­ tant and wide-ranging issues addressed in this book, these three cases will surely interest the readers of this journal because they set in high relief how deeply embedded such rhetorical strategies as personation or prosopo­ poeia, paradiastole, and enargeia are in the thinking and writing of earlv modernity. Two of the twelve essays in this collection (chapters 3 and 5) turn—or, for Skinner's devoted readers, return—to the figure of paradiastole, also cal­ led rhetorical redescription by Skinner because it refers to the orator's effort to "spin" the narrative of events, including the moral characters of the agents involved, by reframing vices as virtues and vice versa, impugning caution as cowardice, for instance, or packaging recklessness as braverv. Although arguably not among the most high-profile rhetorical figures, paradiastole, as Skinner demonstrates, propels the core mission of the rhetorician to leverage the affective power of language to alter what an audience believes, to manipulate its responses by using word-choice to elevate or denigrate its targets. In keeping with this mission, Skinner also demonstrates, rhetorical theorists from Aristotle to Quintilian to Susenbrotus to Thomas Wilson take the paradiastolic move into account, whether thev feature the technical term Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 1, pp. 118-132. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http: wwv. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ rh.2020.38.1.118 Reviews 119 in its polysyllabic Greek form, translate it into Latin or the vernacular, or leave it nameless. Following his signature method, Skinner arms his readers with an understanding of this key term before using it to unlock the complex texts he considers in the context of the controversies they engage. In the Prince, for instance, Machiavelli counters the long-standing tradition of classical ethics exemplified by Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero's De officiis by redescribing the qualities they endorse as political liabilities destined to destroy the state, rather than maintain it. With this single-minded end of mantenere lo stato in view, Skinner argues, Machiavelli "redefines the con­ cept of virtu" (56), exposing previously held virtues such as liberality and kindness as vices when practiced in the political arena (60). Shakespeare's use of paradiastole, on the other hand, reflects a reversal in rhetorical theory that Skinner attributes to Quintilian and finds wide­ spread among Tudor rhetoricians. Whereas the figure originally serves to expose or unmask the verbal manipulation of one's adversary, it is eventually deployed to excuse one's own shortcomings and mitigate culpability by redescribing one's vices as virtues. After flagging this strat­ egy in a number of Shakespeare's plays, Skinner concludes that "It is in the assessment of Coriolanus's character, however, that Shakespeare makes his most extended use of paradiastole" (111). For the in utramque partem structure this late Shakespearean tragedy shares with all drama encoura­ ges the representation of controversy or debate, which, in this case, invol­ ves "coloring...

Book Review| November 01 2019 Review: Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400–1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE, by John O. Ward John O. Ward, Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400–1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019. xviii + 706 pp. Rita Copeland Rita Copeland Rita Copeland Department of Classical Studies University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 rcopelan@sas.upenn.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (4): 429–432. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.429 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Rita Copeland; Review: Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400–1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE, by John O. Ward. Rhetorica 1 November 2019; 37 (4): 429–432. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.429 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews 427 Davida H. Charney, Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms. Hebrew Bible Monographs 73; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2017. xii + 156 pp. ISBN: 9781909697805. The tension within rhetorical criticism of the Bible, whether the Hebrew Bible or New Testament in Greek, is how to think of and hence to utilize the Greek and Latin rhetorical traditions. That is, do they consti­ tute the metalanguage for rhetorical criticism or are they exemplified instan­ ces of how the ancients approached rhetoric? In this volume, Charney for the most part attempts to find a middle ground, what she calls "compara­ tive rhetoric" (p. 12). By this she means that, even though she draws heavily upon ancient rhetoric, she does not believe that the ancient Hebrews knew or drew upon Greco-Roman rhetoric. Nevertheless, many of the categories of ancient rhetoric—such as the genres and some of the stylistic techniques, such as stasis theory—are central to the argument that she makes, while she also draws on some of the techniques of the New Rhetoric, such as "amplitude" (Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca) or "amplification" (Burke) and "association" or "identification." She utilizes these helpful categories, pla­ ced in the service of a close reading of selected first-person psalms, to offer rhetorical explications of their persuasive power. Charney is not concerned with the many historical factors that tend to mire much psalm scholarship, but she posits a rhetorical situation appropriate to each psalm and is atten­ tive to each text's rhetorical features. The contents of this relatively short volume include, first, an introduc­ tion that lays out Chamey's view of the psalms as argumentative discourse within Israelite public life, her definition of rhetoric in relationship to literary analysis, and, most importantly, her definition of rhetoric that draws upon both ancient and contemporary theory—all in service of her reading of the psalms as instances of ancient rhetoric, attempts by the first-person speaker to persuade God through various authorial stances. The rest of the chapters comprise various examples of how rhetoric is exemplified by individual psalms. Chapter 1 concerns praise of God as a form of currency used to per­ suade God, what she labels a form of epideictic discourse. She here treats Psalms 71,16, 26, and 131. Chapter 2 focuses upon the few psalms addressed to the speaker's opponents, drawing upon notions of amplitude and amplifi­ cation to establish the focus of each psalm. The psalms here are 4, 62, and 82. Chapter 3 treats psalmic lament as a form of deliberative rhetoric, with an established psalmic form that functions as a "policy argument (pp. 56-58). Charney discusses the lament Psalms 54 and 13 in relation to their lack of amplification, proposing that the speaker was confident in his innocence before God. She usefully draws upon the conversational implicatures of Paul Grice especially regarding the maxim of quantity. In contrast to chapter 3, chapter 4 focuses on psalms in which the speaker argues, sometimes at length (amplitude), for his innocence and attempts to persuade God to act on his behalf, as in Psalms 4, 22, and 17. Chapter 5 concentrates upon psalms in which the speaker draws strong opposition between himself and his oppo­ nents as he seeks vindication from them based upon the fairness of God. 428 RHETORICA The psalms treated here are 7, 35, and 109. Chapter 6 encompasses the few psalms in which the speaker admits to his guilt, with treatment of Psalms 130, 38, and 51. Finally, chapter 7 discusses psalms in which the speaker is involved in persuading himself rather than simply expressing his opinion regarding God or his opponents. Treated here are Psalms 77 and 73. The vol­ ume concludes with a bibliography and helpful indexes, including one on rhetorical terms. There are a few problems with this volume that cannot be overlooked. These include Charney's sometimes appearing to rely too heavily upon the categories of the Greeks and the Romans. These might restrict her categories in some instances where modern interpretation has expanded the resources regarding language function. The categorization of lament as deliberative seems to be forced by her attempt to equate the ancient categories with the biblical...

Reviews 429 Society version. A final positive feature is that Chamey is explicit in her expo­ sition. She breaks down her topic of persuasive first-person psalms into a number of complexifying categories that open up the various types of psalms. Her insights into lament—even if it may not best be described as public policy persuasion—are still very helpful, as she finds a useful, typical argumentative pattern in these psalms. For each psalm, Chamey provides not only a translation (Alter's) but also often both a structural and a diagram­ matic outline of the psalm, so that the reader sees the relative "weight" of the various sections, a feature of Chamey's argument. Charney makes much of the difference between the complaint of the psalmist and the proposal made to God, and these can be more readily assessed through these means of presentation. I commend Chamey for this volume, as it makes a serious and persua­ sive attempt to draw upon the categories of ancient and modem rhetoric, without ever becoming simply an exercise in labeling parts so often found in such biblical studies. She provides some interesting insights into the psalms and their rhetoric. Stanley E. Porter McMaster Divinity College John O. Ward, Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400-1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019. xviii + 706 pp. There is a small circle of scholars of rhetoric who, at some point during the 1970's or 1980's, enclosed themselves in cramped and dark microfilm rooms, reading and taking copious notes on the 1200 pages of John O. Ward's 1972 Toronto Ph.D. thesis in two volumes, "Artificiosa Eloquentia in the Middle Ages: the study of Cicero's De inventione, the Ad Herennium and Quintilian's De institutione oratoria from the early Middle Ages to the thir­ teenth century, with special reference to the schools of northern France." For those scholars and for others who were able to read the thesis under perhaps more comfortable conditions, encountering this book, which puts the thesis into print for the first time, will be like revisiting a monument they knew in their youth. They will be amazed once again by its magnificent ambition, and (as is the case with monuments revisited) they will discern features that they did not notice or understand before. They will also admire the care and thought with which that monument has been curated, with timely and important additions to the original structure. Those readers will have worked through the original dissertation in order to educate themselves about an aspect of the history of medieval rhetoric that had not yet been narrated and will have followed Ward's career and absorbed some if not all of the approximately thirty substantial articles and chapters on rhetoric that he 430 RHETORICA has written, as well as his 1995 volume for the Typologie series. In this contin­ uous flow of scholarship, he has expounded his increasing knowledge of the medieval and renaissance rhetorical traditions. Now more mature in their understanding, readers acquainted with his thesis will appreciate its richness. But some readers will come to it fresh, without previous knowledge of Ward's bibliography. For those new students of rhetoric, Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages will be a stunning awakening to the profundity of medieval thought about communication. Over the years, Ward has refined or enlarged the insights rendered in his thesis. But even though readers can consult his later narratives of Ciceronian reception in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, there are good reasons for publishing the thesis now. First, it is a treasure house that had never been published integer, even though it has served as a resource for constant reevaluation of evidence: the transmission of texts; glosses and commentaries on the Ciceronian legacy; applications of doctrine; and possible answers to the question "why did the Middle Ages, especially from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, value classical rhetoric so highly?" Second, it is the complete narration of the medieval reception of classical rhetoric to which Ward has devoted his remarkable energies, and it remains the narrative that he was able to...

Historians of rhetoric continue to debate the relative degree of transmission and implementation of the progymnasmata during the Middle Ages. This essay intervenes in this debate by analyzing Matthew of Vendôme's Ars versificatoria (Art of the Versemaker), showing that the treatise emphasizes the construction of probable assertions within a system of rhetorically-informed poetic composition. While past scholarship has shown Matthew's indebtedness to Ciceronian and Horatian rhetoric and poetics, this essay argues that progymnasmata exercises focused on probability and verisimilitude may have also influenced Matthew, suggesting the continued influence of the exercises within rhetorical and grammatical education during the 12th century.

Book Review| August 01 2019 Review: Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks, edited by Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister, eds., Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks, Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2018. 328 pp. ISBN: 9780817359041 Elizabeth Losh Elizabeth Losh American Studies and English William & Mary College Apartments, 318 114 North Boundary St. Williamsburg, VA 23185 lizlosh@wm.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (3): 325–327. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.3.325 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Elizabeth Losh; Review: Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks, edited by Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister. Rhetorica 1 August 2019; 37 (3): 325–327. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.3.325 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| August 01 2019 Review: Aristotle and Confucius on Rhetoric and Truth: The Form and the Way, by Haixia W. Lan Haixia W. Lan. Aristotle and Confucius on Rhetoric and Truth: The Form and the Way. Routledge, 2017. 228 pp. ISBN 9781472487360 LuMing Mao, PhD LuMing Mao, PhD Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies Languages & Communication Building 255 S. Central Campus Dr., Rm. 3700 Salt Lake City, UT 84112 LuMing.Mao@utah.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (3): 328–330. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.3.328 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation LuMing Mao; Review: Aristotle and Confucius on Rhetoric and Truth: The Form and the Way, by Haixia W. Lan. Rhetorica 1 August 2019; 37 (3): 328–330. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.3.328 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.