Abstract: Cicero's preface to De inventione 1 shows that his early understanding of the interdependence of philosophy and oratory, with particular emphasis on the importance of philosophy, was more advanced than it is usually thought. The thesis or the general question that opens the treatise showcases Cicero's ability to present Greek technical knowledge about rhetoric as a part of a broader—we may say philosophical—problem, foreshadowing the "thetic method" showcased in his later works. Both the preface to De inventione 1 and Cicero's criticism of Hermagoras's views on thesis at De inventione 1.8 reflect the influence of Philo of Larissa, suggesting that the treatise was not finished before 88 BCE.

Abstract: Teaching of Aristotle's Rhetoric at secondary level in Britain has, until recently, been largely confined to elite fee-paying schools, attended by only seven per cent of young people. But since 2020, several projects have challenged the status quo by creating freely accessible resources based on Aristotle's Rhetoric for all schools to use. This article provides an overview of the recent educational audiences for Aristotle's Rhetoric , including an experimental modern Aristotelian "triad" of ethos, pathos, and logos in a deprived school in Surrey, grassroots initiatives inspired by a 2022 Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) Research Review for English, the activities of the Network for Oratory and Politics , debating competitions, and the introduction of the teaching of Aristotelian rhetoric in prisons. The article concludes by pointing to future possibilities for further widening of access to this text in British classrooms.

Abstract: The article focuses on blame, the less fortunate pole of the pair on which the epideictic genre has traditionally been built. Picking up on Pernot’s idea that, despite its apparent symmetry, the relationship between praise and blame is in fact strongly unbalanced in favor of praise, a reflection is proposed on the role that the aggressive word, if relocated within the horizon of the epideictic genre, can still play in the public sphere.

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by: The Ideology of Democratic Athens: Institutions, Orators and the Mythical Past by Matteo Barbato Christine Plastow (bio) Matteo Barbato, The Ideology of Democratic Athens: Institutions, Orators and the Mythical Past. Edinburgh, GB: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 252 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4744-6642-4. Barbato's book offers a new analysis of Athenian ideology through the application of a New Institutionalist approach to the city's democratic institutions as demonstrated by their use of stories from the mythical past. He argues for a middle ground between Marxist and culturalist understandings, characterising Athenian ideology as value-neutral, flexible, normative, constructive, and bidirectional. This is illustrated through an analysis of the varied presentations of four myths across several institutional contexts: particularly the epitaphioi logoi, but also tragedy, Assembly and forensic speeches, and private genres. An introduction lays out the structure of the book and summarises previous approaches to Athenian ideology; there is a particular focus on the Marxist approach of Nicole Loraux and others, and the culturalist approach illustrated by the work of Josiah Ober. The second chapter explores Athenian knowledge of mythology, identifying the theatre as its main source but also noting the importance of religious festivals such as the Panathenaia, public institutional contexts, and private learning. The third chapter establishes Barbato's theoretical approach, drawing on New Institutionalism to argue that the different democratic institutions of Athens had their own discursive frameworks and that discourse within them was necessarily structured by these: the need to create an imagined community in the funeral speeches; the requirement to argue in favour of justice in the law courts; the principle of advantage for the Athenians in the Assembly, and both justice and advantage in the Council; and the ability to play with the ideological frameworks of other institutions and the need to appeal to a diverse audience at the dramatic festivals. The subsequent four chapters examine the use of four stories from the Athenian mythic past in these institutional contexts and in private genres: the concept of Athenian autochthony, the sheltering of the Heraclidae, the Amazonomachy, and the assistance provided to Adrastus against Thebes. A short conclusion summarises the book's arguments and contextualises its contributions to the study of Athenian ideology, democracy more broadly, and interactions between Classics and political science. [End Page 88] There is much to commend Barbato's book. His analysis of Athenian ideology highlights two important points that are not prominent in the work on the subject to date. First, he emphasises that Athenian ideology was not fixed but fluid and dynamic, and that the presentation of ideological material necessarily differed based on the context in which it was delivered. This is an important point to grasp to understand the Athenians' apparent tendency to contradict themselves from source to source. Barbato successfully illustrates the appropriateness of different perspectives in different institutional contexts. For example, his nuanced analysis of the various versions of the myth of Adrastus presented in Lysias' funeral oration, Euripides' Suppliant Women, and Assembly speeches convincingly shows how the emphasis on or exclusion of certain narrative features—such as the hybris of the Thebans—can be manipulated to evoke aspects of the democratic ideology suitable to the setting. Second, he is right to draw attention to the fact that ideological material not only describes the audience's viewpoint but also moulds it by demonstrating a norm to which they are expected to conform, touching implicitly on an important point regarding the cognitive effects of rhetoric. Indeed, this methodology in combination with a cognitive approach could produce a particularly strong reading: for instance, how was the ideological result affected by the movement of audience members between the institutions and their memory of the different versions they had heard in other arenas? Barbato is working within a particular school of thought in the study of Athenian oratory that proposes that strict expectations of acceptability were in place in the various contexts of public speaking. Indeed, in his conclusion he summarises that the institutionalist reading of fixed discursive parameters in the institutions "corroborates the view that Aristotle's subdivision of the discipline into three genres was based on the observation of actual oratorical practice" (219). While the...

Reviewed by: Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World by Stuart M. McManus Don Paul Abbott (bio) Stuart M. McManus, Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 300 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-83016-4. The title of Stuart McManus's book might lead readers to expect a history of rhetoric in the Americas. That expectation would be perhaps misleading, for the "empire of eloquence" extends far beyond the New World and encompasses all the territories that were under the direct control or indirect influence of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies. It was a realm that included portions of Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. It was, like a later empire, a vast domain upon which the sun never set. It was also a polity of remarkable duration, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing well into the nineteenth. Most importantly for readers of Rhetorica this empire was also a place where "neo-Roman public speaking was the archetypal ordering mode in Iberian urban settings, and a powerful tool for spreading ideas, building political consensus, bolstering religion and articulating standards of public behavior that could take place in Latin, European vernaculars and indigenous languages" (5). [End Page 97] The immense geographical and chronological scope this empire requires a correspondingly comprehensive research endeavor. And so, the author helpfully includes a map of some of his extensive research travels. The inclusion of this map leads to the inevitable question: where in the world is Stuart McManus? The answer, it seems, is that while preparing this book he might have been found in any number of far-flung archives and libraries. The result of McManus' scholarly travels is a study that is, in his words, both "meta-geographical" and "polycentic." He contends that "the early modern Hispanic monarchy, and arguably the Iberian world as a whole, cannot usefully described only in terms of a series of bilateral relationships between the crown and subject territories" (197). Accordingly, McManus traces the interconnections between the practice of rhetoric in the various colonies, enclaves, dependencies, allies, and outposts that made up the Iberian world. And despite the great diversity of that world, its rhetorical culture exhibited remarkable consistency and continuity. Most notably, "the early modern Iberian world saw an unprecedented flowering of epideictic oratory" (40). The Empire of Eloquence is, therefore, a cultural and intellectual history constructed around the oration and, in particular, the epideictic oration—sermons, academic discourses, civic celebrations, and funeral orations. This work is, therefore, a history of oratory rather than a history of rhetoric (in the sense of the rhetorical theory and precepts found in the handbooks and treatises of the early modern period). This is not to say these handbooks and treatises are neglected—they are not—but simply that they are ancillary to the story of the oration. Indeed, one of the strengths of McManus' book is that it analyses an impressive variety of neglected, and mostly unpublished, speeches. These are important artifacts that have been often overlooked by scholars in favor published, and thus more accessible, rhetorical treatises and textbooks. This intellectual history is comprised of a series of case studies which typically examine either individual orators or a particular variety of epideictic oratory. An example of the latter is the study of the epideictic oratory following the death of Philip IV in 1665. The Spanish King's death prompted commemorations (exequias) which included funeral oratory as well as poetry, ephemeral architecture, and other memorial forms. McManus studies 42 exequias between 1665 and 1667 which were celebrated from "the Philippines to Flanders and from Mexico to Milan" (51). The content of funeral orations reveals a remarkable similarity despite their wide geographical distribution. These encomia were, of course, speeches praising Philip's virtues, most notably justice and religious devotion. But they also emphasize that Philip's virtues should be embraced and emulated by the citizens and authorities who inhabited the empire, thereby strengthening its political and social structures. Thus, these funeral orations were, according to McManus, a form of "virtue politics" that served both to honor the...

Reviewed by: The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk by Samuel McCormick Daniel M. Gross (bio) Samuel McCormick, The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 326 pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-67763-7. Implicitly McCormick's book addresses a question that is urgent in the US academic context, where current rhetoric and communication practices are in fact much studied: Why study history at all? At best, so the skeptic might offer, historical work provides some interesting background to the pressing problems of today. At worst, historical work exacerbates some of those same problems around rhetorical power by simply by spending too much time on received traditions. (I've long admired Malea Powell's sly and self-consuming conference paper title "Aristotle Is Not My Father.") At the same time a set of distinct answers to this history question has been brewing at The University of Chicago Press, thanks in large part to the late editor extraordinaire Douglas Mitchell, who had himself learned about rhetoric from the late century Chicago scene, and Richard McKeon in particular. The series Mitchell started at Chicago "Rhetoric and Communication" has published different types of concept-oriented histories by scholars including Nancy Struever, John Durham Peters, Debra Hawhee, David Marshall, and now Samuel McCormick. Taken together, this group of scholars shows how rhetoric and communication can't be studied adequately without some strong historical version of conceptual work, because that is how the very [End Page 90] things we wish to study appear as such in the first place. In what follows I discuss how McCormick's book makes the case elegantly. First of all, why for McCormick "conceptual history," especially as it would apply to "everyday talk" counterintuitively? Shouldn't we study everyday talk by recording and coding ordinary speakers in face-to-face settings? No doubt, replies McCormick, such grounded study of the first type gets at something sociological (2). But how can we study the very concept of everyday talk as it has shifted significantly online for instance, showing up as "chat," which can't be the same thing? For that sort of study, historical work on the concept is essential, because that is the only way we know what our object of study is in the first place. It is not "conversation," which McCormick calls an interpersonal modality, that achieved its highest art and greatest conceptual clarity in the Enlightenment. At the same time, it is not public sphere discourse legitimated by (again Enlightenment) institutions of oratory and journalism (291). Instead, McCormick argues with a nod to paradox, "everyday talk" is a distinct concept that rises with modernity and its industrializing momentum (4), what Kierkegaard first identifies as snak. This is where McCormick must demonstrate—and he does so beautifully—why we turn to Kierkegaard at this point of inquiry, and not only to his rich archive of wagging tongues, noise and nonsense, cliché and bombast, wordplay and witticism, tangent, reprise, gossip, gimcrack, diversion, duplicity, tedious anecdote, absurd abstraction, abrupt interjection, and endless logorrhea (44). Methodologically, McCormick's powerful point is that snak is the concept that names this verbal efflorescence, and Kierkegaard's work is where the concept appears in its sharpest and critical form. If we studied for instance only Gert Westephaler's fictional talk, or the philosophical talk of Hegel's Danish parrots (44), we would lose track of the concept snak altogether, and thus we would not really understand what we were talking about ourselves: an irony that McCormick has to dance with throughout this substantial section steeped in Kierkegaard's first language Danish, and in his vast corpus that we no longer know how to handle academically. One outstanding virtue of McCormick's book is that it will teach a new generation of scholars what Kierkegaard did besides anticipate existentialism. The next section of the book, a book that runs 326 pages in total, picks up the work of Martin Heidegger, who was himself a keen reader of Kierkegaard. Now focusing on the 1920s, which were for Heidegger both a period of tremendous intellectual ferment that includes his 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric and...

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

Reviewed by: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Sara C. VanderHaagen Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-4968-2383-0 While often dismissed as a straightforward failure, arguments advocating the removal of free Black Americans to Africa are rhetorically significant: they continued for more than fifty years, engaged white and Black Americans alike, and powerfully shaped understandings of Blackness and Black communities into the twentieth century. As I have found when [End Page 213] teaching courses on the African American rhetorical tradition, the shadow of this discourse lurks in the words of speakers from Sojourner Truth to Marcus Garvey. Its presence—much less its rationale—can be difficult to explain. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard’s excellent book helps to address that challenge by offering a rich, complex analysis of this persistent occurrence of “peculiar rhetoric.” Beginning with speeches given at the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816, the first chapter examines what Stillion Southard calls the “peculiar argumentation” of colonization’s founding advocates. These speakers’ arguments in favor of colonization were shaped (or, more accurately, misshaped) by their effort to appeal to two diametrically opposed audiences: southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists. Attempts to meet such a strange rhetorical task left key ideas in what Stillion Southard terms “jangling relation” (33) to one another and opened the ACS to critiques from all sides. Although the ACS treated free Black Americans as “objects of the scheme, not subjects to be addressed” (25), as the author astutely notes, it is not difficult to imagine that they would have had strong opinions about the proposal. Chapter two explores a response to the founding of the ACS whose authorship was attributed to the “Free People of the District of Columbia.” Because the authorship of this text cannot be clearly identified, Stillion Southard focuses instead on its “peculiar voice” in order to demonstrate that it is “hermeneutically diasporic; it both belongs to and flees from familiar interpretive frames” (42). The analysis deftly deploys familiar rhetorical concepts, such as polysemy, in unfamiliar ways in order to draw out the text’s three voices: serious, ironic, and signifying. Each of these three voices suggests a different set of authors and distinct purposes vis-à-vis colonization. While the analysis provides solid evidence for all three voices, I found the discussion of signifying most insightful and potentially productive for scholars seeking to understand and amplify Black voices from the past. The concept of signifying used by Stillion Southard, while departing slightly from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s variation, “signifyin’,” reveals a compelling insight: “Being black and subversive was much more difficult in public discourse than being white and ironic” (57). Further evidence of that insight appears in chapters three and four, which focus on texts produced by Black colonists. Chapter three examines the “negotiation of blackness, power, and material conditions” (66) in free Black landowner Louis Sheridan’s correspondence with the ACS and his eventual emigration to Liberia. Adapting Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of planning in the face of “exclusionary forces” (66), Stillion Southard demonstrates how colonization discourse created limited possibilities for free Blacks who sought to emigrate and reveals the inventive ways in which these individuals rhetorically negotiated their severely constrained subjectivity in the face of limitations. This analysis effectively engages both Afro-Pessimist and Black optimist thought, which compellingly illustrates Sheridan’s own journey from optimism to pessimism as a result of his “peculiar planning for emigration. The focus on Black subjectivity is critical here, [End Page 214] as it helps to show how one individual Black person experienced and responded to the peculiar machinations of a colonization scheme that treated him as “neither slave nor free” (71). Chapter four turns to a more empowered settler colonist, Hilary Teage. Just before the Republic of Liberia declared independence in 1847, Teage gave two speeches that constituted “settler colonist civic identity” by outlining, respectively, their “peculiar obligation to debate” and their “peculiar obligation to commemorate” (89; emphasis in original...

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...

As professor of Greek and theology at the University of Wittenberg, Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) authored three of the most important rhetorical textbooks of his era. Melanchthon’s addition of a new genre of rhetoric, the didactic, to the classical genres of demonstrative, judicial, and deliberative oratory illuminates his view of rhetoric as an instrument for the renaissance and reformation of traditions and institutions. Cultivating faculties of judgment and understanding was Melanchthon’s prescription for survival amid theological and political chaos—a prescription that continues to hold value for rhetors in the current historical moment.

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes ed. by Tom F. Wright Gero Guttzeit Tom F. Wright, ed. Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 312 pp. ISBN: 9781474426268 For the study of oratory, the long nineteenth century from the American Revolution to World War I is a particularly fruitful period, in which the expansion of democratic rights transformed the public sphere and emerging [End Page 470] print capitalism functioned as a catalyst for the distribution of the spoken word. Building on such collections as Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900 1998 and Women at the Podium: Memorable Speeches in History 2000, Tom F. Wright’s anthology Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes presents a novel, multifaceted canon of speechmaking that enables its readers to construct a history of the momentous political, social, and cultural changes of the period. It stands out especially because of its methodological integration of transnational perspectives. Wright is well-known to scholars of the period because of two publications closely related to Transatlantic Rhetoric: his edited collection The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) and his monograph Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons 1830- 1870 (Oxford University Press, 2017). The anthology continues this approach of the nineteenth-century practice of eloquence in its production, performance, and reception from a transatlantic viewpoint. Like its predecessors, the collection reframes comparisons between British and American eloquence and also extends to such issues as “the varying tone of Irish, Haitian and American nationalisms” and “the shared metaphors of abolition and the women’s movement” (10). For instance, it illustrates how the struggle for Irish Home Rule provoked a backlash in American nativist discourses against the Irish diaspora (219–228), and how the reception in Britain and France of Alexander Stephens’ white supremacist arguments for the Secession of the American South in his so-called “Cornerstone Speech” (1861) influenced Europe’s refusal to recognize the Confederacy as an independent state (260–263). Putting together a revisionist anthology such as this comes with particular challenges with regard to the length of the book and the necessity for selection. Wright’s departure from the ‘great speeches’ model is certainly commendable. In contrast to the latter, the chapter structure for his selection of seventy-three speeches in total is based on the “great ‘questions’ of the century” (2); for him, these are Nationalisms and Independence (ch. 1); Gender, Suffrage and Sexuality (ch. 2); Slavery and Race (ch. 3); Faith, Culture and Society (ch. 4); Empire and Manifest Destiny (ch. 5); and War and Peace (ch. 6). Speeches on what French and German call the ‘social question’ (question sociale, soziale Frage)—that is, issuer relating to class, poverty, and the proletariat—appear as a subsection of chapter four, called “Society and Class” (178–195). The selection includes what have become mainstays of speechmaking in the period, such as the two printed versions of Sojourner Truth’s “Speech to the Women’s Rights Convention” (1851), Frederick Douglass’s “What to the slave is July 4th?” (1852), and Emmeline Pankhurst’s “Freedom or Death” (1913). But it also ranges from Jean-Jacques Dessalineo “Haitian Declaration of Independence” (1804) and Nanye’hi and others’ “Cherokee Women Address Their Nation” (1817) to Swami Vivekananda’s “Address at the World’s Parliament of Religions (1893). Overall, the focus is quite clearly on political speech, although the collection also touches on other [End Page 471] issues popular on the nineteenth-century lecture circuits, such as education and literature. What makes Wright’s anthology stand out from among its peers is the detailed editorial matter, which proposes an argument of its own about the period in question. Each of the six chapters features an introduction, contextualizing headnotes for the speeches or excerpts, and explanatory annotations. Taken together with the introduction to the volume, the illustrations, the suggestions for further reading, and the index, these elements make Wright’s book an important contribution to research on public speaking in the long nineteenth century. Wright argues that “the antique...

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.

Book Review| August 01 2021 Review: Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions, edited by Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel 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 Christoph Pieper Christoph Pieper Leiden University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2021) 39 (3): 346–349. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.346 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 Christoph Pieper; Review: Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions, edited by Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel. Rhetorica 1 August 2021; 39 (3): 346–349. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2021.39.3.346 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.

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: 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: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Durée of Black Voices ed. by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson Mudiwa Pettus Young, Vershawn Ashanti, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson, eds., The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, New York: Routledge, 2018. 894 pp. ISBN: 9780415731065 In their preface, Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson herald The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices as a landmark publication in the field of rhetorical studies. The reader, they contend, is the only comprehensive rhetoric anthology to “speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, religious, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslaved period in America to our present era, as well as to the Black Diaspora” (xxi). As expressed in their introduction, Young and Robinson hoped to meet two goals in undertaking their editorship of the anthology. First, they aimed to deliver a collection of “unequivocally rhetorical” texts that reveals how African Americans have sought to influence American society. Second, they intended to illustrate that African American rhetoric exists “all around us,” performed in every genre and mode of communication (xxi). In the final analysis, Young and Robinson achieved these goals marvelously. The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a singular pedagogical and reference text that presents African American rhetoric in all its contours, complexities, and, even, contradictions. Containing almost 900 pages of primary and critical works, the reader is wonderfully expansive. Interviews, autobiographical writings, folktales, speeches, social media posts, poetry, and theoretical treatises are among the genres showcased. Expertly, this wide-ranging content is organized into [End Page 237] four major units that are divided into sections based on themes. While Young and Robinson provide introductions to each of the major units, thirteen “expert editors,” a cohort of scholars culled from a wide range of disciplines, have provided introductions, selected readings, and crafted explanatory annotations for most of the reader’s subsections. Part 1, “African American Rhetoric—Definitions and Understanding,” presents readers with the contextual and theoretical framing for navigating the anthology. In the unit’s first half, Young and Robinson delineate the book’s purpose and codify the six elements of African American rhetoric: language, style, discourse, perspective, community, and suasion. The unit’s second half is composed of the work of Molefi Asante, Geneva Smitherman, and Keith Gilyard, foundational theorists of African American rhetoric who clarify the philosophical underpinnings, linguistic features, and the history of the systematic study of African American rhetoric, respectively. Part 2, “The Blackest Hours—Origins and Histories of African American Rhetoric,” includes texts that highlight the enduring imprint that African orature has left on African American expressive culture; the varied faith systems through which African Americans have theorized their lived experiences; Black epistemes of language, literacy, and education; and the diversity of African American political rhetoric. Part 3, “Discourses on Black Bodies,” centers the premise that considerations of gender and sexuality are essential to the study of African American rhetoric. The unit features readings on Black feminisms, Black masculinity, and Black queer/quare rhetorics. Part 4, “The New Blackness: Multiple Cultures, Multiple Modes,” is the book’s final and most eclectic unit. Potent readings that parse Caribbean intellectual thought, African American technoculture, the rhetorics of Hip Hop, and the self-reflexiveness of Black artistry are the focus. Indubitably, the anthology’s apparatus provides readers with a wealth of entry points into the study of African American rhetoric. Reinforcing the anthology’s intended pedagogical function, each section is followed by a bibliography and a set of discussion questions. Readers can use these paratextual resources to further process the anthology’s readings independently and/or within a group, in and outside of institutionalized classrooms. A companion website, containing links to recordings of public addresses, comedic performances, musical selections, and other artifacts that complement the anthology’s primary readings and critical introductions, has also been made available. The cumulative effect of these supplementary materials is that individuals with both an advanced and burgeoning knowledge of African American rhetoric can find their footing in the anthology’s vast terrain and that Young and Robinson’s contention that African American...

Reviewed by: Attic Oratory and Performance by Andreas Serafim Matteo Barbato Andreas Serafim, Attic Oratory and Performance (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies), London and New York: Routledge, 2017. 156 pp. ISBN 9780367871277 In this slim book, Andreas Serafim sets out to provide a holistic perspective on the performative aspects of Attic oratory through an analysis of two pairs of interrelated judicial speeches: Demosthenes’ and Aeschines’ respective speeches On the Embassy; and Aeschines’ Against Ctesiphon and Demosthenes’ On the Crown. As stated in his introduction, Serafim believes that the speeches of the Attic orators, despite surviving as written texts, can only be fully appreciated if one gives appropriate weight to the interaction between speaker and audience. He adopts an approach based on linguistics and performance studies. This leads him to define performance as the “interactive communication, explicit or otherwise, between the transmitter of a message and its receiver” (pp. 16–17)—in other words, as anything that enables the speaker to elicit a reaction in the audience. Serafim distinguishes between two types of performance techniques (direct/sensory and indirect/emotional) and proposes to look at both in combination. In Chapter 1, Serafim lays out the methodology of his study. He identifies the main areas of performance (rhetorical construction of the audience; relationship between oratory and theatre; inter-generic character portraiture; delivery) that provide the subjects of Chapters 2–5, and he illustrates them through references to ancient and modern scholarship. The discussion, though mostly solid, is at times undertheorized. This is most evident in the analysis of emotions in pp. 21–3. Despite rightly stressing the significance of emotions for performance,i Serafim overlooks an important body of scholarship that highlights the complex nature of emotions, which encompass [End Page 114] social and cognitive as well as bodily aspects.ii Engaging with such studies could have nuanced the distinction between sensory and emotional performance techniques and could have offered an interesting lens for investigating delivery. Chapter 2 examines the strategies (e.g. emotional appeals; imperatives and questions) deployed by the orators to construct the identity of their audience and invite them to act accordingly. Chapter 3 analyses the interrelationship between oratory and theatre, with a focus on the characterisation of one’s opponents as deceitful actors on the judicial stage. While Serafim provides a good discussion of Demosthenes’ use of poetic quotations to stress Aeschines’ connection with theatre, it is surprising that no comparison is made with Aeschines’ own use of quotations in Against Timarchus. This would have allowed Serafim to investigate Aeschines’ negotiation of his image as an actor and its significance for our understanding of Athenian attitudes to theatre. Chapter 4 looks at the orators’ construction of their own and their opponents’ character through patterns borrowed from comedy as well as tragedv and epics. Serafim rightly notes that the judges had experience as theatregoers, which he suggests was exploited by the orators to create favourable and unfavourable dispositions towards themselves and their opponents respectively. Chapter 5 focuses on delivery and is the most effective in stressing the interconnection between the different aspects of performance analysed in the book. Through comparison between rhetorical theory and oratorical practice, Serafim convincingly shows how some rhetorical features of the speeches may be taken as indicative of the gestural and vocal ploys adopted by the orators as part of their performance. Chapter 6 briefly summarises the book’s findings and delineates possible areas for future research. Serafim is at his best when providing rhetorical analyses of specific passages, and he makes a convincing case for understanding performance as a multidimensional phenomenon. The book, however, is somewhat lacking in conceptual breadth, as its main merit lies in combining existing strands in scholarship that focus respectively on oratorical delivery and on rhetoric’s relationship with drama. Serafim’s arguments are sometimes weakened by a lack of engagement with the institutional nature of judicial oratory. At pp. 48–9, for example, Serafim argues that Aeschin. 3.8 addresses the judges with the civic address (“men of Athens”) as opposed to the judicial address (“judges”) in order to make them “realise that both their duty and their status as judges is wholly intertwined with the best interests of...

It is a sustained concern for Aristophanes studies to assess the political commitments expressed in the comedic poet’s drama tic corpus. Though generally synoptic in describing his critique of democracy, political interpretations of Aristophanes’s plays diverge in justifying that critique as affirmative of democratic principles. This essay argues for considering the Aristophanic critique as external to democratic principles, on account of its assertion of the demos’s basic incapacity for legitimate and effective rule. The essay concludes by identifying where engagement with the Aristophanic critique of democracy may clarify and challenge theories of artful discourse and political community supported by public and counterpublic studies.

Book Review| November 01 2020 Review: The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, edited by Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Beatrice da Vela 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 Hilary J. C. Lehmann Hilary J. C. Lehmann Knox College Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (4): 437–439. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.437 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 Hilary J. C. Lehmann; Review: The Theatre of Justice: Aspects of Performance in Greco-Roman Oratory and Rhetoric, edited by Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Beatrice da Vela. Rhetorica 1 November 2020; 38 (4): 437–439. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.437 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. © 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.

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.”

Book Reviews A. Quiroga Puertas ed.z Rhetorical Strategies in Late Antique Literature. Images, Metatexts and Interpretation, (Mnemosyne Supplements 406), Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017. 227 pp. ISBN 9789004340091 Gli studi sulla letteratura nel tardo-antico si arricchiscono di un prezioso e agile strumento di ricerca grazie alia pubblicazione, a cura di A. Quiroga Puertas, di una raccolta di saggi su testi e autori di II-V sec. L'approccio esegetico e di natura retorica e tende a individuare nelle fonti le diverse soluzioni adottate dagli scrittori per rispondere alle istanze che le mutate condizioni sociali, politiche e culturali hanno imposto alia comunicazione letteraria. L'introduzione di Lieve Van Hoof (pp. 1-6) apprezza il contributo che la mis­ cellanea porta alia bibliografia di settore: l'analisi di testi trascurati, come il Simposio di Metodio o le Vite di Eunapio, ma anche il ricorso a un'ampia gamma di "interpretative strategies'' che, aggiungiamo noi, e possibile declinare in rapporto ai tre motivi-guida evocati nel sottotitolo. L'interesse per le immagini e in generale per gli effetti di evidenza visiva provocati dal testo sostanzia i lavori di J. B. Torres Guerra, A. Quiroga Puertas, L. Miguelez Cavero. J. B. Torres Guerra (Image and Word in Eusebius of Caesarea, VC 3.4-24: Constantine in Nicaea, pp. 73-89) prende in esame la descrizione dell'ingresso solenne di Costantino al concilio di Nicea nel terzo libro della Vita omonima per analizzare le tecniche ecfrastiche usate da Eusebio di Cesarea per rappresentare vividamente la scena. L'attenzione alia registrazione dei dati visivi si traduce nella costruzione di un autentico tableau vivant in cui ogni particolare assume valore simbolico per esprimere l'idea di ordine e armonia assicurati all'impero e alia cristianita dal monarca. A. Quiroga Puertas (In Heaven unlike on Earth. Rhetorical Strategies in Julian's Caesars, pp. 90-103) ritrova la stessa relazione tra ekphrasis e propaganda politica nelle Vite dei Cesari di Giuliano dove l'allusione si carica di valenze filosofiche legate al Neoplatonismo nella scena del banchetto di dei e imperatori (307c-308b), mentre il riuso dei procedimenti encomiastici codificati dalla precettistica (Menandro) e applicati da Giuliano per costruire la galleria dei ritratti imperiali, talora fortemente sarcastici , e finalizzato alia restaurazione dei vecchi ideali di moralita pubblica e pagana. Anche nello studio di L. Miguelez-Cavero, che considera la des­ crizione della collana di Armonia nelle Dionisiache di Nonno di Panopoli (Harmonia s Necklace, Nonn. D. 5, 135-189: a Set of Jewellery, ekphrasis and a Narrative Node, pp. 165-197), l'analisi delle tecniche di visualizzazione si Rheforzczz, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 4, pp. 432-442. 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. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.Org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.4.432 Book Reviews 433 allarga a considerare le relazioni con il contesto di circolazione dell'opera e Yekphrasis diviene uno spazio per interrogarsi sull'intersezione tra retorica e societa. Attraverso una serie di puntuali raffronti con la produzione artistica di eta imperiale e con la tradizione della manualistica retorica, l'autrice indica gli elementi che realizzano la scrittura visiva di Nonno di Panopoli individuando modelli iconografici e letterari senza rinunciare a contestualizzare il brano nell'economia narrativa del poema. L'intertestualita e l'elemento su cui vertono gli studi di R. C. Fowler, B. MacDougall e J. Campos Daroca. R. C. Fowler (Ecyppoouvr) and Self-Knowledge in Methodius' Sym­ posium, pp. 26-43) si propone di ricostruire l'ampio spettro di significati che il termine acocppoabv^ assume nel Symposium di Metodio e che non e possibile sintetizzare in traduzione con un singolo vocabolo. L'analisi degli echi platonici presenti nell'opera supporta l'interpretazione di questo ter­ mine che non si identifica semplicemente con la castita, ma interessa anche la conoscenza di se e il rapporto che l'uomo ha con la realta circostante . La soluzione adottata da Metodio smorza l'intransigenza di alcune posizioni cristiane in tema di verginita in contrasto...

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 435 Nazianzo attraverso le categorie della stilistica antica sulla falsariga della polemica tra retori asiani e retori atticisti! Questo volume, che si conclude con utili indici di nomi e luoghi notevoli, offre un'interessante sintesi suggerendo con i suoi contributi proficue linee di indirizzo e metodologie d'indagine per le future ricerche sul tardo-antico. Francesco Berardi University of Chieti Kristy Maddux, Practicing Citizenship: Womens Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 256 pp. ISBN: 9780271083506 The 1893 Chicago World's Fair lasted a mere five months, but the copi­ ous records of speeches and programs from the event capture the tremen­ dous social, economic, and political evolution that took place during the Gilded Age. In Practicing Citizenship: Women's Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Kristy Maddux zeros in on this fascinating period during which women were "caught in a dilemma of citizenship" (vii), meaning that they were legally full citizens but were not allowed to vote. The fair marked an almost unprecedented occasion for women's public address. Close to 800 women spoke as part of the fair's congresses on issues such as education, government, and religion. Maddux argues that the participation of these women enacted diverse citizenship practices that complicate previous understandings of women's citizenship in this era. To uncover how women negotiated greater participation in public life, Maddux analyzes a large batch of texts to identify "interrelationships or overlaps and how they wor­ ked together to project ideas of women's citizenship" during the fair (46). Maddux brings together the subjects of practicing citizenship, which has been of ongoing interest to rhetorical scholars, and women's public address at the fair, which is a subject that is ripe for analysis but has yet to receive extensive consideration from rhetorical scholars. Maddux conducts a rhetorical analysis of a discursive event that has largely been the purview of English and history scholars. She also moves away from what has been a traditional focus on suffragist rhetoric and toward previously unconsidered or undervalued women's citizenship practices. She argues that scholars have previously limited their focus to women's citizenship as the fight for suffrage, which fails to account for all the other ways in which women were organiz­ ing together and defining their public roles in the late nineteenth century. To recover women's citizenship practices, Maddux considers the fair as a "multivocal projection of the circulating discourses of the Gilded Age," rather than more common readings of the fair as a representation of contem­ poraneous ideas or an illusory vision of a perfect United States (25). Maddux identifies four practices of women's citizenship that frame the remaining analysis chapters: deliberative democracy, racial uplift, organized womanhood, 436 RHETORICA and economic participation. In Chapter 2, Maddux analyzes programs and promotional documents that demonstrate how the fair's congresses "pro­ jected a vision for deliberative democracy" for women (52). The congresses served as spaces for women's self-government and for defining their civic role. Women could celebrate their identities as women but also depart from their gendered identities when they spoke about their accomplishments in civil, scientific, and educational work. Chapter 3 considers how sixteen Congress speeches characterized acts of racial uplift as practices of citizen­ ship. For these women, the goal of racial uplift was to help women of vari­ ous ethnicities, races, and classes succeed, which in turn would benefit all of humankind. African American and white women forwarded discourses based on evolutionary progress against a backdrop of racial oppression that infused the fair and projected a model of racial uplift through working together. Chapter 4 examines how women considered membership and ser­ vice in voluntary organizations as platforms for citizenship. Women partic­ ipated in civil society and shaped their futures, and the futures of their nations, through organized womanhood. Finally, Maddux focuses on women's industrial participation and financial leadership as political prac­ tice in Chapter 5. Through speeches based in liberalism and republicanism, says Maddux, "these speakers offered models of female financial leader­ ship" and portrayed this leadership as an act of citizenship (172). The con­ clusion attends to...

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| May 01 2020 The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory, by Peter A. O'Connell Peter A.O'Connell, The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, 282 pp. ISBN 9781477311684 Ruth Webb Ruth Webb Ruth Webb Universite dé Lille ruth.webb@univ-lille.fr Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (2): 227–229. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.227 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 Ruth Webb; The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory, by Peter A. O'Connell. Rhetorica 1 May 2020; 38 (2): 227–229. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.227 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.

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...

Not much is known about the actual practice of delivering orations in the Renaissance. In some instances—particularly in instances of orations held at universities—there is the possibility to consult sources like the diaries of the faculties, in order to get some information about the actio of a specific oration. In other instances, sometimes the printed orations themselves, the context they were given in, the author's rhetorical upbringing, and the links between oratory and contemporary acting can provide indications of the way orations were performed. The Latin oration Europa heautentimorumene by the Spanish doctor Andrés Laguna, which was delivered in January 1543 at the University of Cologne and printed shortly afterwards, constitutes such a case.

Not much is known about the actual practice of delivering orations in the Renaissance. In some instances—particularly in instances of orations held at universities—there is the possibility to consult sources like the diaries of the faculties, in order to get some information about the actio of a specific oration. In other instances, sometimes the printed orations themselves, the context they were given in, the author’s rhetorical upbringing, and the links between oratory and contemporary acting can provide indications of the way orations were performed. The Latin oration Europa heautentimorumene by the Spanish doctor Andrés Laguna, which was delivered in January 1543 at the University of Cologne and printed shortly afterwards, constitutes such a case.

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...

126 RHETORICA argument seems to be the subject of his next book, so perhaps we shall have to wait and see (Conversational 11). Relatedly, the exclusion of some significant studies feels puzzling. Peter Mack's 2011 A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, for instance, is nowhere to be found, while Cheryl Glenn's Rhetoric Retold would have been a useful interlocutor regarding women's place in rhetorical history. Finally, the books' sweeping arc narrating conversation's inevitable march toward the Madisonian republic may leave readers—especially ones well-versed in par­ ticular figures and periods—wishing for greater consideration of complicat­ ing biographical and cultural context. My own interest in the English Civil Wars, for instance, left me wanting greater attention throughout to the influence of theology, as religion largely disappears by the midpoint of The Conversational Enlightenment. Nonetheless, as Randall concedes, it is impossible to read (and therefore write about) everything (Conversational 16). His bibliography is long enough, and his claims about specific texts are modest. The citations point readers to internecine arguments on individ­ ual texts and authors. In penning a broad history of conversation that capablv finds continu­ ities and productive discontinuities, Randall has written two books that largely succeed in many of their aims. Though they are on conversation rather than toleration, the books share a kindred spirit with the similarly sweeping Toleration in Conflict by Rainer Forst. For historians of rhetoric, Randall provides a useful primer on the history of conversation and renders visible its ongoing tensions with oratory in ways that should open produc­ tive areas of inquiry. Readers who are curious about how Randall's argu­ ment about Habermas will conclude are advised to read both volumes, but thanks to a generous summary of The Concept of Conversation that opens The Conversational Enlightenment, scholars invested in specific periods or figures may read whichever volume is more germane to their work with lit­ tle trouble. In this reader's estimation, The Conversational Enlightenment is the better book if only for Randall's conceptual bravura in tracking conver­ sation's broader metaphorization and influence beyond obviously verbal texts and mediums. How Randall's revision of Habermas will resolve remains to be seen, but these books make a compelling case that there is still plenty more to say about conversation. James Donathan Garner University of Texas at Austin Xing Lu, The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its Peo­ ple. Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2017, 261 pp. ISBN 978161177527 Much ink of mostly binary ilk has been spilled ox er Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic of China. A revolutionarx and charismatic leader, Mao was hailed as a savior for liberating millions of Chinese people Reviews 127 from the Japanese Occupation and for ending the civil war in 1949, but he was also blamed or condemned for the social and economic turmoil he single-handedly brought about through his many political campaigns, including the disastrous Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, not much has been written about his rhetoric, about how he deployed language and other symbolic resources to weaponize his political campaigns, to mobilize the Chinese people and to transform Chinese society. In the process, he also transformed himself into a demigod who was both greatly admired and worshiped by his people and feared and despised by his opponents. The 2017 publication of The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its People by Xing Lu, an award-winning scholar of Chinese and comparative rhetoric, certainly has provided a much-needed response to this lack or absence. In fact, the monograph also opens a timely window onto the mak­ ing of political discourse in the twentieth-century China and beyond. As a first book-length study of Mao Zedong's rhetoric, Lu's mono­ graph has a lot to offer to rhetoric scholars and students of political rhetoric in the twenty-first century. Consisting of seven major chapters plus an intro­ duction and a conclusion, The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong develops a detailed and highly contextualized study of Mao's writings and speeches throughout his lifetime beginning in 1913 and ending in 1975, the year before his pass­ ing. Rejecting past...

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...

Using a set of examples drawn from imperial concern with Christian theological unity in the fourth century, this essay describes the heretofore unremarked-on functioning of homonoia concepts in addition to persuasion: justification of coercion and propaganda. Grounded in the idea that unanimity and consensus are natural goods, the rhetorical form persuaded through eliciting a desire to participate in those natural goods. Such rhetoric implicitly justified coercive social policy (a.k.a. punishment) when positive persuasion proved insufficient. Additionally, imperial pundits could assert the desirability of consensus as a form of propaganda when “unanimous” decisions were publicized to imply a lack of dissent and make it harder for other would-be dissenters to find allies, therefore decreasing the likelihood of dissent elsewhere.

Reviews Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. 352 pp. ISBN: 9780300228106 Elocution has long been relegated to the margins of rhetoric's history. While it was dutifully acknowledged as the subject of numerous treatises, the elocutionists' elevation of delivery over the presumably more substantial aspects of rhetoric often led historians to conclude that elocution was inferior to more recognizable approaches to eighteenth-century rhetoric. And the elo­ cutionists' penchant for diagrams, notational devices, charts, and elaborate illustrations seemed more a sign of eccentricity than seriousness. This histor­ ical inattention to elocution was rather at odds with elocutionism's incredible popularity, prevalence, and persistence in the Anglophone world. In recent years, scholars have begun to see the movement not as an aber­ ration but rather as an important cultural and educational moment in the development of rhetoric. This réévaluation of elocution has been furthered by relatively recent essays in this journal by Philippa Spoel, Dana Harrington, Debra Hawhee and Cory Holding, Paddy Bullard, Thomas Sloane, and others. More recently, the almost simultaneous publication, in 2017, of three major books has significantly enhanced our understanding of elocution: Marian Wilson Kimber, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word (Univer­ sity of Illinois Press); Paula McDowell, The Invention ofthe Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices In Eighteenth-Century Britain (University of Chicago Press); and, of course, the subject of this review, Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home. All three of these books extend, in important ways, our understanding of elocution beyond existing accounts. "Elocution" does not appear in the title, but nearly every page of The Social Life of Books is about the movement, either directly or indirectly. Williams calls her subject "sociable reading," and reading is what elocution was about. Although elocutionists would sometimes attend to oratory, their focus remained the reading of a text written by another, and reading it aloud and well. Williams considers many familiar figures of what she calls the "elocu­ tion industry" including William Enfield, Thomas Sheridan, and John Walker. But she goes well beyond the recognized scenes of elocution—the schoolroom, the lecture hall, and the pulpit—to investigate, in intimate detail, the mostly unexplored patterns and practices of oral reading in the English home. Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 1, pp. 83-94. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 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. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37T.83. 84 RHETORICA Her portrayal of the quotidian orality of the eighteenth-century English derives from an impressive immersion in letters, diaries, journals, periodi­ cals, library records, commercial transactions, and myriad other documents. What emerges from this meticulous scrutiny of the records of ordinary Britons is the realization that oral reading was a pervasive feature of English home life that transversed social class, educational attainment, economic status, and geographical boundaries. Williams explains that sociable reading was so ubiquitous because, well, it was sociable. Reading aloud to others is a pleasurable and very human experience. In addition to sharing the pleasures of the printed word, Williams also documents other more practical motiva­ tions for sociable reading. Such reasons include what she calls "limited oph­ thalmology." Thus, "reading aloud gave those with failing vision access to books and letters" and so "many read with others' eyes" (66). The ill and the dying were also read to as a source of comfort and a demonstration of the reader's sympathy. And, of course there were economic reasons for read­ ing aloud. While book ownership increased in the eighteenth century, books remained expensive. Communal reading became a form of "book sharing" in which many could participate without incurring the cost of book own­ ership. And perhaps most importantly, reading aloud at home offered an effective method of moral instruction. This was particularly applicable to young ladies "whose solitary, compulsive reading of fiction in their...

Come “regola”, la tortura di schiavi innocenti che è stata concordata dai querelantia fini probatori (βάσανος probatori) fu ritenuto dagli oratori lo strumento più efficace per giungere alla verità. Questo paper, con riferimento alla psicologia dell”antica Grecia, spiega perché la menzionata regola fu di cruciale importanza per la retorica. Gli oratori, sulla base della presunta attendibilità dell”istituzione dei βάσανος, furono in grado di sviluppare argomenti basati sulle sfide (πρόκλησις), che possono essere comprese al meglio alla luce della concezione greca, piuttosto che moderna, di razionalità ed azione umana. Di conseguenza, a dispetto dell”incertezza che circonda l”attualità della tortura a fini probatori nell”età degli oratori, l”importanza retorica dei πρόκλησής εις βάσανον è innegabile e va esaminata attentamente.

The article demonstrates how the Constitution of Medina (622 ce) is a multidimensional rhetoric of justice that countered rampant violence in the nascent city-state known as Medina. To make this argument, the article first introduces this legal-political text and explicates the rhetorical exigence that mandated Medina's inhabitants to articulate a framework for rights and obligations. Second, the article demonstrates how the constitution unified this citizenry by (1) recognizing everyone's equal standing, equality, and rights—especially to religious freedom and justice—across their religious and tribal affiliations; and (2) establishing institutional measures that realize these rights. As rhetoric of possibility, the Constitution of Medina constituted a community and modeled rights discourse.

The article demonstrates how the Constitution of Medina (622 ce) is a multidimensional rhetoric of justice that countered rampant violence in the nascent city-state known as Medina. To make this argument, the article first introduces this legal-political text and explicates the rhetorical exigence that mandated Medina’s inhabitants to articulate a framework for rights and obligations. Second, the article demonstrates how the constitution unified this citizenry by (1) recognizing everyone’s equal standing, equality, and rights—especially to religious freedom and justice—across their religious and tribal affiliations; and (2) establishing institutional measures that realize these rights. As rhetoric of possibility, the Constitution of Medina constituted a community and modeled rights discourse.

324 RHETORICA claim that "Despite his ambivalence with regard to rhetoric, Milton remain­ ed loyal in many respects to the tradition of the rhetoric handbooks, of Wilson, Peacham and Puttenham, on which he and his generation, in educa­ tional terms, were raised" (29), a claim repeated in various ways through­ out. I can think of no reason whatsoever to assume that Milton depended on English vernacular summaries of classical rhetoric unless it be that Lynch is relying on an outdated narrative about English Renaissance rhetoric. In reality, these English vernacular texts were so meagerly published as to make virtually no contribution to early education; neither were these texts included in any university curricula (Green 74-76). This is not to say that Lynch's 27-page bibliography does not already include many of the author­ itative texts for her discussion, yet other texts are missing, such as recent work on Milton and rhetoric by William Pallister and James Egan or Stephen B. Dobranski's magisterial summary of earlier Samson Agonistes criticism. But one might work forever to produce the perfect book. In the one that we have here, Lynch makes some original contributions to various conversations. Historians of rhetoric with an interest in her topics or period may well find in her text some new directions for those conversations. Stephen B. Dobranski, A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton: Volume 3, Samson Agonistes, intro. Archie Burnett, ed. P. J. Klemp (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009). James Egan, "Oratory and Animadversion: Rhetorical Signatures in Milton's Pam­ phlets of 1649," Rhetorica 27 (2009): 189-217. James Egan, "Rhetoric and Poetic in Milton's Polemics of 1659-60," Rhetorica 31 (2013): 73-110. Lawrence D. Green, “Grammatica Movet: Renaissance Grammar Books and Elocutio," in Peter L. Oesterreich and Thomas O. Sloane, eds., Rhetorica Movet: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour or Heinrich F. Plett (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 73-115. William Pallister, Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe of Paradise Lost (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). Daniel Shore, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Jameela Lares The University of Southern Mississippi L écriture des traités de rhétorique des origines à la Renaissance, textes édités par Sophie Conte et Sandrine Dubel, Ausonius, Scripta Antiqua 87, Bordeaux 2016, 241 pages. ISBN: 9782356131614 Ce livre, qui rassemble 11 contributions, traite un sujet qui est souvent abordé dans les ouvrages sur la rhétorique de manière indirecte ou margi­ nale . 1 écriture des traités de rhétorique, c'est-à-dire leur forme et leur style. Reviews 325 L idée majeure est qu il y a à la fois homologie entre le fond et la forme et contamination de la forme par le fond. Posée au début de Pouvrage avec une citation de Boileau - traducteur et éditeur du Traité du sublime au XVIIe siècle . « Souvent il fait la figure qu'il enseigne et, en parlant du sublime, il est lui-même très sublime », cette idée se décline sur différents plans : la composition des traités, leur mode d énonciation, les métaphores récurren­ tes, la place des citations et des exemples. Sont pris en compte à la fois les traités grecs et les traités latins, l'ordre suivi étant l'ordre chronologique, avec successivement des articles sur la Rhétorique à Alexandre, Démétrios (le Pseudo-Démétrios de Phalère), la Rhétorique à Hérennius, le De oratore de Cicéron, Denys d'Halicarnasse, le Traité du sublime, Quintilien, Fronton, les Progymnasmata d'Aphthonios, Martianus Capella, et enfin, sur un plan un peu différent et en guise d'ouverture finale, des traités de poétique de la Renaissance. Il y a nécessairement des manques, comme Isocrate, Aristote ou les autres traités de Cicéron, mais ces textes sont pris en compte à propos d'autres traités ; et surtout, l'introduction générale y pallie en présentant l'ensemble de la production rhétorique. Notons que la bibliographie, pré­ sentée à la fin de chaque article, est à jour et véritablement multilingue. L'Introduction, due à Sophie Conte, est...

Reviews Christopher S. van den Berg, The World of Tacitus' Dialogus de Orato­ ribus: Aesthetics and Empire in Ancient Rome, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781107020900 If, as Ronald Syme remarked, "Tacitus gives little away," this is espe­ cially true for the Dialogus de Oratoribus.1 Elusive as Tacitus is in his historical works, he is more so in the Dialogus: Tacitus himself plays no real role in the dialogue (unlike Cicero, who sometimes appeared in his own dialogues), and readers have long puzzled over which speaker, if any, wins the day or repre­ sents Tacitus. The enigmatic character of the Dialogus has led to a variety of readings, most of which seek to pinpoint either a single argument or a single speaker as embodying the text's positive message. Each of these readings faces inter- and intratextual difficulties, as Christopher S. Van den Berg amply demonstrates in this volume. Rather than seek to resolve these tensions by identifying a particular speaker with Tacitus or describing an argument or speech as more persuasive, van den Berg argues that the "manifold contradic­ tions" (p. 124) within and across the speeches are, in fact, intentional and pro­ ductive features of the dialogue. In grappling with these tensions, along with the intertextual and intratextual dimensions of the work, van den Berg deve­ lops an interpretive approach that he terms "argumentative dynamics," an approach rooted in the very dialogue(s) that van den Berg studies. The result is an original and deeply learned approach to a perplexing and important text. The book consists of seven substantive chapters, along with an introduc­ tion, conclusion, and appendix featuring a detailed, outline of the Dialogus. Chapter 1 focuses on the first set of speeches (Aper and Messalla), weaving this analysis together with an overview of Tacitus' biography, the external and internal dating of the Dialogus, the role of rhetoric and declamation in imperial Rome, the work's Ciceronian engagements, and the dialogue genre. The "argumentative dynamic" interpretive approach is outlined in Chapter 2, where it is contrasted with "persuasion oriented" and "character oriented" (p. 56) approaches. The "persuasion oriented" seeks to describe a speech or set of speeches as being more persuasive than others, while the "character ori­ ented" seeks to identify a speaker with Tacitus. Both, though, seek to develop a coherent interpretation of the Dialogus according to which a particular 1 Ronald Syme, Tacitus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), Vol. II, p. 520. Khetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 3, pp. 320-329. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2018 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: / /w\nv. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.Org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.3.320. Reviews 321 argument or speaker effectively wins. Both approaches face abundant difficul­ ties: the dialogue is far from the Platonic model, featuring neither Socratic elendms nor deliberative exchange (p. 124), while Tacitus himself undermines his own voice and, in Academic fashion, allows each speaker to subtly under­ mine the persuasiveness of the others without engaging in direct question and answer. Argumentative dynamics seeks, instead, to explore "how dialogue functions to create and communicate meaning" turning to the text itself to recover "these functional strategies" (p. 94). Reading the Dialogus in light of the dialogue form - and as a literary work rather than a philosophical work, per se - focuses our attention on a number of features, the result of which is a rhetorical-literary reading in which the dialogue's "rhetorical aspects" are in fact the "core message" (p. 95) of the work. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 turn to an interpretation of the Dialogus itself. Interstitial passages are the focus of Chapter 3, in which van den Berg explores the way in which interstices contain "categories which describe the evolution of eloqueutia" (p. 99). Chapter 4 centers on what van den Berg describes as a sort of "rapprochement" (p. 164) between poetry (championed, ostensibly, by Maternus) and oratory (championed by Aper). That is, rather than view Maternus...

322 RHETORIC A like to have read something more about what this approach to the Dialogus tells us about Tacitus' works, more broadly, and whether the insights that van den Berg derives from the features of Roman dialogues might shed light on Greek dialogues as well. As someone who, prior to reading this book, tended to identify Tacitus most closely with a particular speaker (Matemus) and to find a particular argument most (politically) persuasive (again, Matemus), van den Berg has shown me new and fruitful ways of approaching a challenging and important work.2 Tacitus remains elusive, but this elusiveness is productive and intentional. Daniel J. Kapust University of Wisconsin, Madison Helen Lynch, Milton and the Politics of Public Speech, Farnham, Sur­ rey: Ashgate, 2015. 283 pp. ISBN: 14722415205 Historians of rhetoric interested in public-sphere discussions or in the political discourse of the Renaissance may find interesting this sometimes imperfect but nevertheless suggestive study. Lynch demonstrates how the political rhetoric of John Milton (1608-1674) can be better understood in terms of the pre-Socratic polls as described by Hannah Arendt than in terms of the Continental Enlightenment as described by Jurgen Habermas. Lynch argues convincingly that "Arendt's position is more in sympathy with that of seventeenth-century classical republicans and encapsulates a key differ­ ence between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century perspectives on the pub­ lic realm" (24-25). Although there have been studies of Milton and rhetoric in the past, longer studies have tended to focus on the major poetry, as for instance Daniel Shore's excellent Milton and the Art of Rhetoric. The present text focuses throughout on republican speech in the public arena even as it culminates with a consideration of the dramatic poem Samson Agonistes. In the first chapter—to my mind, the strongest—the author traces image clusters in Milton's political texts that replicate Arendt's distinction between the free Greek citizen speaking in the polis as against the repetitive labor performed in the oikia or household by disenfranchised women, chil­ dren, slaves, animals, and—by extension—merchants, who were typically not citizens and could make no contribution to the important, non-repetitive work of the polis. Milton explicitly takes on the role of speaker in such a polis in his famous Areopagitica (1644), subtitled "A Speech ... for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." Indeed, Lynch correctly reports that the authors in 2 Daniel Kapust, "Between Contumacy and Obsequiousness: Tacitus on Moral Freedom and the Historian's Task," European Journal of Political Theory 8 (2009)293 -311. Reviews 323 contemporary pamphlet wars figured themselves as speakers rather than as authors. Throughout the text, Lynch usefully points out the many reversible and polarizing binaries of that period's polemics and especially Milton's tendency to "define the good and evil versions of all observable phenom­ ena" (61). In chapter 2 of her study, Lynch examines linguistic theories in the period, including various efforts to establish a universal language and also the Royal Society s quest to achieve a one-to-one relation between signifier and signified. Throughout the chapter, Lynch suggests that Milton shared Arendt's concern that political language not be separated from meaning and therefore from action. Chapter 3 examines how rhetoric was gendered in the period, including a delightful discussion of how "embroidery" can refer either to the adornment of masculine speech or to the actual craft activ­ ity that was intended to keep women quiet. The issues of the first three chapters—public polis vs. private oikia, theories of language and action, and gendered rhetoric—help prepare for Lynch's last two chapters on Mil­ ton's drama Samson Agonistes, the most Greek of his poetic texts. In chapter 4, she locates the redemption of language operating in the drama through various polemical binaries and also aligns Samson's experience with the public-sphere civic-mindedness of Pericles' funeral oration as well as with Arendt's image of light for the public sphere. In chapter 5, Lynch usefully discusses Samson Agonistes as a rejection of the romance tradition, particu­ larly in terms of the crime of recreance, which can mean not only treachery but also refusal to act. She compares...

432 RHETORIC A The final topic, that of chapter eight, is lexis, "style." Enos says very lit­ tle about traditional features of style (e.g., pleonasm, prose rhythm), but dis­ cusses instead Demosthenes's "stylistic strategy," which consists primarily of what he calls "chiastic contrasting" (191). More than to chiasmus, this seems connected to antithesis, that is, the "polar" or "diametrical" opposi­ tion between Aeschines and himself. Enos concludes that like Lincoln, Churchill, and King, Demosthenes raised political oratory to a literary art and created a speech perfectly fitted for the political and rhetorical moment. The book could have used some good copy-editing and proof-reading; in particular, the bibliography is not easy to use. It consists of four sections; texts and translation of Demosthenes, translations and studies of Aeschines, studies of Demosthenes, and general studies. The first section is especially difficult: almost all works are under Demosthenes as author, followed by the title, so that if one is looking for X's translation, one needs to remember its exact title (some of the Texas series have the title Demosthe­ nes: Speeches . . ., whereas others are just Speeches . . .). Dilts's OCT is listed as a translation, as are several commentaries (e.g., Wankel's). One author is "Harris Edward Monroe." Etc. In sum, this book has much of value, especially Walker's chapter. But starting from scratch rather than revising a fifty year old publication might have improved its value. Michael Gagarin The University of Texas Vasiliki Zali. The Shape ofHerodotean Rhetoric: A Study of the Speeches in Herodotus' Histories with Special Attention to Books 5-9. Interna­ tional Studies in the History of Rhetoric 6. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015. VIII + 383 pp. ISBN: 9789004278967 This is a well-researched, detailed, and well-presented literary analy­ sis of the Histories of Herodotus that substantiates the author's claim that the Histories is an under-appreciated contributor to the development of rhetoric in the 5th century. As Zali explains, the intent of the work is "to show that in the Histories there is great interest in the rhetorical situation per se; that speakers are very well aware of the process of manipulating and adapting their arguments to suit the particular audience, and they do so systematically" (3). In this way, Herodotus can be understood as anticipat­ ing the rhetorical developments of Thucydides and the more theoretically oriented works of both Aristotle and the author of the Rhetoric to Alexan­ der. The Shape of Herodotean Rhetoric is characterized by the use of specific textual examples to illustrate claims about how the text operates. It also provides an impressive mixture of contextual information that is historical, political, and cultural in scope. These elements are trained on the larger Reviews 433 purpose of "a comprehensive study of particular modes, kinds and effects of speech, exemplified through in-depth discussions of case studies and of the ways these related to two overarching narrative themes: the GrecoPersian polarity and the problem of Greek unity" (31). The focus on these two themes, through the analysis of Herodotus' rhetorical choices, is divided into three sections. In the first section, "Allo­ cation of Speech," the analysis extends to the impact of the speeches both included and excluded as well as the selective use of both direct and indi­ rect speech. Zali takes these selections and choices by Herodotus to be rhe­ torical, choices that are made in order to advance his interpretive and persuasive goals. They are also shown to be empowering for the Greeks as presented in the text and disempowering for the Persians. Zali thus makes a strong case that these choices by Herodotus were not random. As a result, while Cicero and many others have viewed him as the father of history, Herodotus should also be viewed as a significant figure in the development of rhetoric. The text includes an appendix that categorizes all of the debates and conversations in books 5-9 by speaker, addressee and mode of speech (i.e., direct, indirect, and record of a speech act). In the second section of the book, Zali shows that a narrow definition of debate, as consisting only of instances reported as direct speech, yields...

Reviews James J. Murphy, ed., Demosthenes' On the Crown: Rhetorical Perspec­ tives, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 232 pp. ISBN: 9780809335107 This book has a curious history. First published in 1967 by Random House under the title, Demosthenes' On the Crown: A Critical Case Study of a Masterpiece of Ancient Oratory, the exact same work was then republished in 1983 under the same name by Hermagoras Press. The current volume is a "revised version" of the 1983 publication; the 1967 publication is not acknowledged but is mentioned by one author (201, n. 30). The revision consists of a new Introduction by Murphy, five new chap­ ters (out of eight), and a new half-page epilogue by Murphy. The three retained chapters (from the 1967 publication) are chapter two, a brief sum­ mary of Aeschines' career followed by a summary of his speech Against Ctesiphon by Donovan Ochs; chapter three, a translation of On the Crown (OTC) by John J. Keaney; and chapter four, a brief structural abstract of OTC by Francis Donnelly, first published in 1941. The five new chapters are chapter one, a background chapter on Demosthenes and his times by Lois Agnew, chapters on Aristotle's three main rhetorical divisions - includ­ ing chapter five on ethos by David Mirhady, chapter six on pathos by Richard Katula, and chapter seven on logos by Jeffrey Walker - and an eighth chapter on lexis by Richard Enos. The goal of the volume, according to the introduction is to make OTC "come alive"; in more modest terms, the book seems to be aiming to pro­ vide everything a student unacquainted with the speech might need to appreciate Demosthenes's rhetorical ability and, for more advanced stu­ dents and scholars, to demonstrate how the principles of Aristotle's Rheto­ ric can help appreciate the greatness of OTC. In my view, several chapters succeed quite well in accomplishing this latter goal, while several are less successful. In chapter one, "Demosthenes and his Times," Agnew gives a thor­ ough account of Demosthenes's life and career; she is particularly good at sorting out facts from legends, and she produces a more balanced assess­ ment than the many pro-Demosthenes accounts. I note only two minor mis­ takes. On page 25, the three charges Aeschines brought against Ctesiphon's decree are misstated; the first (not having completed his term in office) is Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 4, pp. 430-439. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2018 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/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.Org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.4.430. Reviews 431 stated twice (in slightly different forms) and the second (presenting the crown in the theater) is omitted (the correct charges are on 38, 153). And in the Harpalus affair Demosthenes was not tried in the Areopagus but by a popular jury (see 29). Chapters two and three are adequate, though barely so. Ochs's account of Aeschines's career is highly oversimplified, especially after Agnew's more complex treatment, and his summary of the speech is based on the 1928 Bude edition; a few more recent studies could have been noted (espe­ cially Harris), which are in fact in the bibliography. I cannot see any use for Donnelley's structural abstract, chapter four, which I just find confusing. In chapter five, Mirhady uses Aristotle's view of ethos to understand Demosthenes's sustained and generally successful attempt to portray him­ self as a good democratic citizen, better than his rival Aeschines. Mirhady is a bit dismayed, however, by the (also successful) use of vitriolic rhetoric to portray Aeschines as a piece of scum. In his final thought, Mirhady cau­ tions that this "sustained invective should give readers today some uneasi­ ness about the tendency of democracies to fall under the sway of negative discourse" (126). Mirhadv's concern must be even greater now than it was when his chapter was written. Katula's assignment, chapter six, is pathos. Using Aristotle's theory...

In this paper we attempt to identify the traces of the past in the rhetorical writings and sermons by Francesco Panigarola (1548–1594), probably the most popular Italian preacher in the Cinquecento. Our aim is to highlight some aspects of his rhetorical background, trying to show that he draws not only on Classical and Christian models but also on contemporary ones. In fact, as we shall make clear, Panigarola's theoretical principles and his own preaching are the result of the harmonization of Classical and Christian models with the new demands of ecclesiastical rhetoric and oratory in the Counter Reformation period.