Abstract

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