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Ethics, Identity, and Community in Late Roman Declamation. By Neil W. Bernstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 240.

2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 112; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/689612

1546-072X

W. Martin Bloomer,

Classical Antiquity Studies

Previous article FreeBook ReviewsEthics, Identity, and Community in Late Roman Declamation. By Neil W. Bernstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 240.W. Martin BloomerW. Martin BloomerUniversity of Notre Dame Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis is a study devoted chiefly to the theme, broadly and acutely conceived, of authority in the nineteen declamations composed from the first to the third century CE known as the Major Declamations. The far more numerous but briefer Minor Declamations are tied probably to the milieu of Quintilian’s school; the third Latin corpus is the extracts of declaimers of the Augustan era, and a little later, made by the elder Seneca—Neil Bernstein knows all this evidence and its bibliography thoroughly and brings this to bear on his analysis of his slightly later material, and on occasion brings in Greek declamation. The Major Declamations have lively topics, or, better, one should acknowledge that they are interesting much as lethal fiction, the slasher film, or the police drama can be, with the additional caveat that they share also the marks of the slightly desperate screenwriter who comes late to a genre that seems to have tried out already and often every trick in the book. They hover then on the edge of nightmare or urban legend, but with the sophisticated twist that the reader knows he is not really in contact with reality. A wonderful example is the case of the murderous vivisecting doctor.The Major Declamations are true to the genre of declamation as a whole in that they present cases of slightly outré Romans acting contrary to type: a cannibal who has grown tired of his diet or a prostitute who dispenses medicine (see the list of themes that B. has translated in Appendix 2). The actors at the edge of Roman society act more Roman than the authoritative figures, the commanding officer, most often the pater familias. B. is advancing the relatively recent flourishing of research and methodology on Roman declamation. Indeed, his first chapter gives the best, succinct history and state of the question for the subject. As a whole, B. gives us the best treatment of the corpus and a thoughtful and insightful lens to bring to bear on all of declamation.The introduction begins with that customary locus, complaint about declamation, but thankfully dispatches this quickly and moves on, so as to come ultimately to describe the turn of scholarship that examines the pedagogic and literary genre of declamation in relation to the social and cultural history of Rome. The chapters that follow, which are in fact a series of lightly connected case studies, spring most directly from Mario Lentano’s argument that declamation offers a “juridicization of ethics,” that is, declamation reflects systematically on Roman social and familial ethics and makes these into a system just as Cicero or Seneca did in a treatise.1 Declamation is then not really almost a nightmare or almost gossip, but a genre preeminently interested in focusing disagreements about ethics by means of a quasi-legal mode and procedure. This formulation is an extremely useful departure from those older approaches that tended to see declamation as law manqué, at best the exaggerated rhetorical and scholastic pretraining of Roman youth who, when mature, would go on to the real thing.Here it may be said that B. follows in the line of Emanuele Berti and others in seeing declamation as a genre of literature deeply important for the imperial Roman world. While such approaches take as an impetus the more sociologically and anthropologically oriented work of Mary Beard and others, the foci of B.’s study are less strictly familial and social relations than the extension and confusion of these with legalistic and procedural ones: the construction of authority (chap. 1), verification of claims (chap. 2), conventions of reciprocity (chap. 3), and ethics of spectatorship (chap. 4).2 The categories that are named as chapters may seem less visceral than those approaches that compare declamation to mythology or psychology, but they do represent a new turn of interpretation: declamation is here being treated very seriously as a way of knowing, and the subject of that knowing or ludic inquiry are the fundamental relationships of Roman society.One of the virtues of the book is that it presents so much of the declamations. The first chapter on authority gives a detailed reading of the story of the common soldier whose commanding officer is the archetype for sexual intimidation. The virtuous common soldier, who prefers his castitas to the officer’s auctoritas, is delivered from this oppression by the special intervention of Marius himself. All sorts of interesting lines are being blended and crossed here, including a kind of moral reinterpretation of the extra- or suprajudicial power of the general who was seven times consul, and again a moral refraction of that important facet of Marius’ legacy, the various reforms of the Roman army, and his popularism generally. Abuse of office is solved also by the declamatory jury, that proxy for the reader, but within the plot by Marius. The slightly uneasy reflections on tyranny, or displacement of tyranny onto the lecherous and homosexual officer, come back to the tyrant or the righteous autocrat. This chapter is then essential reading as a good, detailed analysis of the literary portrayal of tyranny under the emperors. B. is alive to the literary qualities of all of this: the threat of sexual violence succeeded by the happy outcome via plot twist recalls the scuttling and salvaging of paternal and social/sexual authority in New Comedy.Chapter 2 considers specialists’ claims to authority (the astrologer, the torturer, and the doctor). B. rightly emphasizes that these are epistemic systems rival to the investigative techniques of declamation itself (and, one might add, all of them allied as not quite Roman or not quite the real thing of the Roman court). B. stresses that declamation is not a closed genre: the reader has the right to judge, for the text invites the reader to apply a sophisticated and sympathetic hermeneusis which will distinguish him, and declamation, from all those severe parents, ingrates, and overzealous litigants of declamation who are tied to the letter of the law and to a strict notion of authority. For the orator and the reader to prevail over doctor, astrologer, and torturer is for rhetoric (and Roman social status) to prevail. Again social, familial, and political strife are best resolved by the Roman elite trained in declamation.Chapter 3, on reciprocity, shows in effect how declamation continues the subgenres De officiis, De beneficiis, and De amicitia, which are both Roman ethical philosophy and political theory. All the best roles of declamation, I would say, are the substitutes: stepmother, uncle, prostitute whose sense of social obligation is far more genuine and far better than the real kin, father, mother, or sibling. The twins of declamation are another interesting mode to contrast pietas. B. demonstrates the real ethical issues at play (for example, can one owe to a friend what one owes to a father), and explores how the declamatory plot imagines all manner of social equivalences. Of course this is done neither in a normative, prescriptive fashion nor by reasoned argument, but with the probably much more effective and certainly more memorable fashion of the extreme example, with all the attendant collision and potential chaos that such an extreme brings to traditional values and relations. While B. clearly lays out all these systematic or categorical contrasts, he also offers fine insights, for example, the declamatory plot recurrently focuses on nurture and physical needs—in declamation we witness hunger and physical impediment and good and bad responses to these human conditions.There is in Roman declamation a certain hunger for the resolution of conflict that is inexplicably joined to a rivalrous love of verbal conflict. Perhaps what unites them is a seeking for authority, which since this is a plastic and iterable genre will never be attained. B.’s focus is on concrete connections between literature and its society. So apropos Major Declamation 7, whose young man demands to be tortured to prove his testimony, B. adduces the challenges to corporal immunity of the free from the second century onward. In turn, B. sees the scenes of torture as challenges to the reader’s ethical conceptions. The tortured body receives the most direct treatment in the fourth chapter, on visuality. Again the character imperiled by the plot confronts auctoritas and somewhat desperately and graphically seeks some potent redress. Can the real, the horribly visually real, be the trump in the declaimers’ search for argument and for finality? Thus declamation does not merely delight in those rhetorical figures of visual efficacy, evidentia, prosopopoia, descriptio, but explores through them the status of body and argument. Here it must be said B. is again rather concrete (in contrast to many who write about the body and the body in literature). He posits that declamation is asking what authority does a tortured or injured body have. It is easy to see the tortured body as the structuralist opposite of the free Roman male. From the peculiarly Roman, imperial interest in the spectacle of the infirm body, B. notes the prominence of the issue of the reliability of such bodies. Certainly, this has connections with the theme of authority that runs throughout these chapters, but the subjectivity and agency of such impaired bodies and compelled voices make a nice contrast to the free, able-bodied Roman elite boys and men who were concocting and speaking the declamations.Frankly, this is important because the torture scene seems a bit blasé, given all the gore handed around by Lucan and Seneca tragoedus. It is good to be reminded not simply of gladiatorial games and slave punishment, but of the literary and intellectual ramifications of all this injury. Declamation is rather good at staging the limits of the verbal and the literary. B. neglects to some degree that the scene of injury is a scene: there is a staginess to all of these literary scenes which again, I would argue, makes the horrible business of looking at and listening to the injured a ludic enterprise, an intellectual event in which declaimer and audience, schoolmaster and students collude on extremely set grounds.After these interesting chapters comes the nucleus of a second book, a call to arms for new research on the reception history of the declamations. B. reintroduces the work of the great humanist Juan Luis Vives, who wrote for Sir Thomas More a speech in defense of the stepmother of the first Major Declamation. The Venetian polymath Lorenzo Patarol (1674–1727) set about to improve Vives’ work by the addition of his own responses to the declamations (the first is translated in an appendix). This section is a brief, valuable addition to scholarship and nicely prepares for the final true call to arms wherein B. argues for the educational utility of these declamations today. Here he stresses the value, moral and intellectual, of learning to speak from different subject positions. Perhaps declamation, like rhetoric itself, suffered a decline both from Enlightenment interest in a more empirical argumentation and then from a literary taste for the poetic and the genuine, but the history of the classics has many surprises, and many texts prove far more tenacious than the generalizations about change that I have just given. We need studies of the fortunes of the declamations to enrich our understanding of the state of the “classics” when the classics were a rather different canon and were studied for rather different reasons. Notes 1. See Graziana Brescia and Mario Lentano, Le ragioni del sangue: Storie di incesto e fratricidio nella declamazione latina (Naples, 2009).2. Emanuele Berti, Scholasticorum studia: Seneca il Vecchio e la cultura retorica e letteraria della prima età imperiale (Pisa, 2007); Mary Beard, “Looking (Harder) for Roman Myth: Dumézil, Declamation and the Problems of Definition,” in Mythos in mythenloser Gesellschaft: Das Paradigma Roms, ed. Fritz Graf (Stuttgart, 1993), 44–64. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 112, Number 1January 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/689612 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.