Reviews 451 Nancy Worman, Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2008. 385 + xii pp. ISBN 9780521857871. Insult and character assassination have a long and entertaining history in the annals of rhetoric. Not only do they generate theoretical meditation but they can provide scholars and amateurs alike with the guilty (and for Aristotle, vulgar) pleasures of nicely turned invective. Nancy Worman's fascinating study allows classicists and those with more general interests in ancient rhetorical forms to follow patterns of defamation from Homer and the beginnings of preserved Greek literature to Aristotle and Theophrastus at the end of the fourth century B.C.E. Of the two possibilities adumbrated above, her work facilitates the austere rewards of the theoretical rather than enjoy­ able indulgence in multiple examples of splenetic venting. For the latter one might settle down with Thomas Conley's Toward a Rhetoric ofInsult (Chicago 2010), which, in addition to quotation of virtuosic and delectable passages of invective (starting with Cicero and proceeding through the Flugschriften of the Reformation to end with Monty Python and modern political cartoons), does a useful job in sketching multiple patterns of defamatory language and specifying the factors that constrain their operation. Conley surveys how slurs connected with social status, gender, ethnicity, sexual habits, and the practices of eating and drinking (among others) recur in multiple cultures. He is interested in how invective can be used to create group identity through assertion of communal values, but also in the use of insult to interrogate per­ ceived hierarchies. This generalist orientation makes the book a valuable introduction to the invective mode, and thus, coincidentally, an interest­ ing counterpart to Worman's specialist study. W. carefully maps out how a discourse of abuse developed around public and professional speakers in Classical Greece. This discourse was rooted in practices of commensality associated with banquet and symposium, and was further extended in drama, until it became part of the rhetorical arsenal in the public oratory of Demosthenes and Aeschines. W.'s narrative of a gradual elaboration of a critique of public speaking and the move of this critique into ancient oratory make this an important book. The body of the book is divided into six chapters, charting the devel­ opment of an iambic discourse ranging over a variety of genres. W. uses the ideas of Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Barthes to trace the operations of social performance and figuration in invective, relying in particular on a central notion of metonymy, so that the mouth acts as an emblem (Barthes' "blazon") of behavioral excess. After a scene-setting introduction, Chapter 1 looks at iambic literature in Archaic Greek epic, lyric, and Classical tragedy, where the language of invective is deployed to regulate excess and is regularly as­ sociated with ravenous mouths and dangerous types of consumption. Thus we encounter rapacious and aggressive kings (Agamemnon in Homer is a people-eating king," 29), harsh talk connected with (potentially cannibal­ istic) battlefield savagery, and clever speaking conceived as a trade-off for food. Greed leads both to uncontrolled aggressive speech and sly rhetorical 452 RHETORICA manipulation. These two possibilities will crystallize throughout the course of the book into two broad and recurring types: on the one hand the braggart and voracious politician characterized by crude consumption, and on the other the decadent and manipulative sophist. Chapter 2 explicitly juxtaposes these two types: voracious demagogues are set against glib, effete, and decadent sophists in the comedies of Aristo­ phanes, where "male protagonists engage the culinary as the primary metaphorical register in relation to the regulation of the appetites" (81). No accident, then, that the figure of the comic butcher or cook (mageiros) also becomes prominent. Whether effete or a braggart, an excessive speaker can be imagined as one who cooks up feasts of (deceptive) speech. Yet Worman also complicates (fruitfully) her model by considering how her types are measured against female appetites. In Greek comedy, women are cautionary models for men in their desires for sex, food, and wine; thus the prattling and decadent speaker is also feminized. Sexual appetite becomes an impor­ tant factor in the figuration of public speaking, not only in terms of female desire, but also...