This short sketch of rhetorical education offers one explanation for the change in emphases that we find in our literary sources as the form of government changes from a republic run by a competitive elite into an empire where members of the elite soon witnessed the disappearance of oratorical eloquence as a means for advancement. During the republic, rhetorical education was de facto restricted to those with the means to access it in the face of linguistic and financial barriers. Those few who were able to progress to this advanced level participated in training that entailed replication of the already existing elite, inasmuch as the rhetorical education included rehearsing key moments in Roman history and witnessing the orations and deliberations of respected orators and magistrates. With the empire, replication remains a dominant feature of rhetorical education but, with the political power of the elite diminished, the newly coined exercises of‘‘declamation’’ turn to exploring the social realm and testing its boundaries. Society functions best when the fledgling imperial speakers are taught to repeat to one another, from a multiplicity of perspectives, how hierarchies remain stable and impermeable. Father knows best; slaves have their masters. Not even a slave would contest that.
FURTHER READING
Most primary sources on rhetorical education are available in the Loeb Classical Library series, with Latin text and facing English translation, including Rhetorica ad Herennium, the complete works of Cicero, and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. Kaster (1995) offers text, translation, and commentary for Suetonius’ treatise on teachers of grammar and rhetoric. With the exception of the elder Seneca (available in a Loeb edition), specimens of imperial declamation are less readily accessible: for Calpurnius Flaccus, see Sussman (1994a); for the Declamationes Minores (Minor Declamations) ascribed to Quintilian, see Winterbottom (1984) although there is no English translation; for an English version of the Declamationes Maiores (Major Declamations), see Sussman (1987). Morgan (1998) includes a consideration of the evidence found in extant papyri, where rhetorical education rarely reached beyond the stage of offering basic paraphrases of literary texts, thereby offering a reminder that the importance of rhetoric in our literary texts ‘‘is out of all proportion to the relatively small number of literates (and the minute proportion of the population) who studied it’’ (Morgan 1998: 190).
Of secondary works, Bonner (1977) remains the standard survey of Roman education in the republic and early empire, and is especially good on the mechanics and physical setting, less so on the sociology of ancient pedagogy; for this, a series of works by David (esp. 1979, 1980, 1983, 1992), all in French, analyzes perceptively the ways in which rhetorical education in the republic tends to be restricted to the already established elite; see also the essays in Too (2001). Clarke (19963) provides a clear survey of rhetoric throughout the Roman period which includes many details on the rhetorical stage of education. Bonner (1949) is a general account of declamation, while Beard (1993) and Gunderson (2003) suggest how its often odd content responds to needs and tensions within imperial Roman society.
A Companion to Roman Rhetoric Edited by William Dominik, Jon Hall Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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