Abstract

218 RHETORICA voulu, p. XIII, sou peu, p. XIV n. 3; Fisiognomica, p. 1.... C'est en somme un ouvrage foisonnant, marquant et stimulant, à lire et à conserver. Pierre Chiron Université Paris XII-Val de Marne Michelle Ballif and Michael G. Moran, eds., Classical Rhetorics and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. 402 pp. As programs in rhetorical studies in the U.S. grow, the field has come to acknowledge the need for a fuller complement of reference materials. In their introduction to this collection of short essavs on ancient Greek and J Roman rhetoricians, Michelle Ballif and Michael G. Moran point out the paradox of one of the oldest areas of studies in the humanities discovering in the late twentieth century a dearth of scholarship on its own history. The seemingly tireless efforts of George A. Kennedy and James J. Murphy have been indispensable, but a healthy discipline cannot be sustained on the work of a very few scholars. Over the past decade, rhetoric specialists such as Theresa Enos, James Jasinski, Water Jost and Wendy Olmsted, and Thomas O. Sloane have been moving to fill this gap. With its focus on figures rather than concepts and its concentration on the pre-modern period, the work under consideration here distinguishes itself from other recent publications. Falling between the Speech Association of America's 1968 Biographical Dictionary of ancient rhetoricians (Bryant et al.; now out of print) with its very short entries and the huge, comprehensive Oxford Classical Dictionary, perhaps too expensive and broadly conceived for many rhetoric scholars to justify owning, Ballif and Moran's book is a welcome contribution. The volume includes sixty-one alphabetically arranged entries, most on individuals, with a few on clusters of rhetors (Attic orators, Pythagorean women), anonymous works (Rhetorica ad Herennium), works whose author­ ship is in doubt (Anaximenes' Rhetorica ad Alexandrian, Demetrius' On Style, and Longinus' On the Sublime), and rhetorical practices (dissoi logoi, progymnasmata ). The forty-five contributors come from a range of institutions and disciplines-classics, communication studies, and English. Established schol­ ars in the field of classical rhetoric are well represented, and the contributors include a few writers from outside the U.S., but the project is primarily ori­ ented toward those who work with rhetoric in conjunction with composition or communications, a largely North American phenomenon The volume is distinctive in its resistance to the typically conservative function of reference works, the tendency of which is to consolidate, repro­ duce, and canonize. Ballif and Moran take a revisionary historiographical approach to their task, outlining in the introduction their desire to expand Reviews 219 and realign the historical boundaries of the field in several ways. They take in a broad historical sweep, including Homer and the pre-Socratics at one end and Augustine and Boethius at the other. Further, they work against the male-dominance of ancient rhetoric by including a number of female fig­ ures (e.g., Sappho, Aspasia, Hortensia, and Hypatia). Finally, they heighten the significance of sophistic contributions to the rhetorical tradition. This revisionarv approach is carried into the entries in many cases. Thankfully, the editors did not demand strict adherence to a template, so contributors were able to shape their material to the contours of their widely varied subjects. But there is consistency, so that in each case the reader is offered biographical data, an account of the significant texts, a discussion of rhetor­ ical theory and practice, and a perspective on the legacy of the figure in question. Numerous entries foreground on-going scholarly debates, realiz­ ing the editors' revisionarv commitments. Notable in this regard are Patrick O'Sullivan on Homer, Michael Gagarin on Antiphon, Janet Atwill on Aris­ totle, Takis Poulakos on Isocrates, and Joy Connolly on Quintilian. For the most part, the writers avoid the flattening or deadening effect that seems al­ most inevitable in such works, and figures come across not as clearly drawn monoliths but as sites of contestation. Particularly lively moments come in the entry on Diogenes of Sinope by D. Diane Davis and Victor J. Vitanza, and in Vitanza's characteristically zealous encounter with Favorinus. The quality of scholarship in general is high, as one would expect...