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...

Reviews 271 Tersite (p. 251): L. Spina analyse, dans le cadre des rapports entre l'orateur et le contenu de son discours, condamnations et réhabilitations de Thersite (Iliade, II, 211-277), de Libanios à La Stampa. Dans La testimonianza diAtanasio sul Péri hupokriseôs di Teofrasto (177,368 Rabe = 712 FHS & G) (p. 271), M. Vallozza examine un texte d'Athanasios dans les Prolégomènes au Péri staseôn d'Hermogène comme témoignage sur le Péri hupokriseôs de Théophraste et justifie la correction par Rabe de ton tonon tes psukhês en ton tonon tês phones. On se réjouit que chaque article soit accompagné d'une bibliographie judicieusement sélective et parfaitement à jour. Cela contribue à faire de ce livre une mise au point sur la recherche dans le champ de a rhétorique et une invitation à s'engager sur les pistes tracées, qu'il s'agisse d'auteurs, de thèmes ou d'approches nouvelles. Michel Nouhaud Université de Limoges Michel Patillon, Hermogène, l'Art rhétorique. Traduction française inté­ grale, traduction et notes, Préface de Pierre Laurens (Paris, L'Age d'homme, 1997), 640pp. In his Lives of the Sophists Philostratos tells of the rise and fall of the adolescent prodigy Hermogenes (577K). By the age of fifteen his reputation was such that Marcus Aurelius came to hear him declaim and left amazed by his talent for improvisation. But, says Philostratos, his powers suddenly and inexplicably deserted him, leaving him to live out the rest of his life in obscurity, far from the glittering prizes of the sophistic performance circuit. The rhetorical textbooks attributed to him, however, became the standard rhetorical curriculum throughout the Byzantine middle ages, before being introduced to Reniassance Europe through the work of Greek émigrés like George of Trebizond. Only two of the treatises, On Issues (Peri Staseôn) and On Types of Style (Peri Ideon Logou) are now accepted as second-century works, the others having been added in the 5th or 6th century. But the corpus as edited by Rabe and as translated here in its entirety for the first time, does show us the full range of the rhetorical curriculum of the later Empire. Starting from Progymnasmata, the collection progresses to the complexities of stasis theory — the systematic analysis of the types of question arising in declamation — in On Issues. The treatises Peri Heureseôs (On Invention) and On Types of Style treat the art of composing a speech, and the choice of style. Finally, the curious treatise on the method of "forcefulness (or simply skillfulness as in Patillon's choice of the French term "habileté"), Peri methodou deinotêtos, provides a collection of advice on a variety of problems likely to face the declaimer such as "how to praise oneself". 272 RHETORICA The two treatises generally accepted as works of Hermogenes have been translated separately into English (On Types of Style by C. Wooten, On Issues notably by M. Heath) and into Russian. But, with the exception of the Progymnasmata, the others have never before been available in a modern language, nor has the corpus been accessible as a whole. Patillon's elegant and clear translation is accompanied by copious notes elucidating the mean­ ing of Greek terms, unpacking the unspoken assumptions about language and communication which inform the texts, opening up questions which the rhetoricians themselves took for granted. He also pinpoints the relevant passages of the Late Antique and Byzantine treatises and commentaries preserved in the largely uncharted waters of Walz's Rhetores Graeci. The sub­ stantial introduction (over 100 pages) provides a concise characterisation of the literary and rhetorical culture from which the Hermogenean corpus emerged, discussion of questions of authorship, and an invaluable overview of each of the constituent parts of the corpus. A preface by Pierre Laurens traces the reception of the corpus, particularly the treatise On Types of Style, in the Renaissance and Early Modern periods. The bibliography and indices are full and extremely useful (though the index of Greek words does not always give every occurrence of a term). The publication date did not allow for the inclusion of Patillon's...