Abstract

Reviews 477 e una vasta messe di rimandi a loci paralleh interni ed esterni alia scrittura declamatoria; non ce virtualmente passaggio, giro di frase o singólo termine rilevante che non sia puntualmente delucidato o del quale non si dibattano le possibili interpretazioni. Infine, la vasta bibliografía che chiude il volume dà conto dello scrupolo documentado di B. e offre ogni possibile sussidio per ampliare la prospettiva di ricerca sui due pezzi pseudo-quintilianei e in generale sulla declamazione latina. In conclusione, è lecito vedere nel volume di B. non solo il frutto maturo di un lucido e coerente percorso di ricerca dell'autrice, ma anche e soprattutto il punto di partenza e la pietra di paragone irrinunciabili di ogni futura ricerca sulle due declamazioni e sulla gamma di questioni délia piú varia natura che esse, come tutti i testi giunti a noi dalla scuola latina, pongono alio studioso e al lettore moderno. Mario Lentano Universitá di Siena Christianizations of Rhetoric Carol Harrison, The Art of Listening in the Early Church, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 302 pp. ISBN: 9780199641437 Stanley D. Porter and Bryan R. Dyer, Paul and Ancient Rhetoric: Theory and Practice in the Hellenistic Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 330 pp. ISBN: 9781107073791 Mark F. M. Clavier, Eloquent Wisdom: Rhetoric, Cosmology and Delight in the Theology ofAugustine ofHippo, Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. 303 pp. ISBN: 9782503552651 For readers of Rhetorica (and for historians of rhetoric more generally), the Christianization of rhetoric is one of the basic intellectual historical pro­ cesses of Late Antiquity. What are the principal options for representing that process? In reviewing volumes by Carol Harrison and Mark Clavier, as well as one edited by Stanley Porter and Bryan Dyer, we can survey three options. According to one school of thought, rhetoric is at its most intellectually generative when it cannot do the things that it was originally built to do and when as a result it must transpose its themes into a new key to fulfill new purposes. Carol Harrison gives us an example of this kind of displacement in Late Antiquity when she explores the implications of a Christian transfor­ mation of rhetoric from an art of speaking into an art of listening. The contexts in that Christianizing world may have been new, but she is adamant that the intellectual foundations were rhetorical. In her words, "if we do not 478 RHETORICA pay attention to the rhetorical culture [of Late Antiquity], we will fail to appreciate why the fathers wrote and spoke in the way they did; why their style is so distinctive and yet so easily identifiable as that of an educated per­ son of their day; what their hearers expected of them; how their hearers were able to hear them effectively" (Harrison p. 48). Indeed, Harrison is showing the figure of the orator itself being transformed into the person of the listener when she parses Augustine's assertion in On Christian Doctrine that one would have to pray (and be an orator) before one could speak (and be a dictor ). Her gloss is supple: "prayer is perhaps one of the most intriguing exam­ ples of the practice of listening in the early Church, for it is not at all clear who is doing the listening and who is speaking" (Harrison p. 183). And this spon­ sors two thoughts: that the speaking of prayer was a particularly intense lis­ tening and that there might be a kind of "confidence, or parrhesia" deriving from "the assurance that [the] hearer is God, the Father" (Harrison p. 195). Now, contingency had been one of the great categories of ancient Greek rhetoric. Within a Christian frame of reference, this orientation to contingency began to look like an immersion in the world encountered by human beings after the Fall. On the one hand, God's creation in fact expres­ sed a stability, equilibrium, and symmetry. On the other, as it was encoun­ tered by the human sensorium, that world (and human entanglements with it) seemed thoroughly, endemically, mutable. Just so, Harrison's book privi­ leges the embodiment of that human sensorium and begins with the assumption that, when developing an art of listening, we should look...