The link between masculinity and propriety runs deep in rhetorical writings. Decere, to be proper, is the caput artis, the essence of the art (De Or. 2.132). Gendering the proper performance as masculine in the manner of Cicero in Orator 59 (quoted above) is a standard move in Quintilian and post-Roman writings on rhetoric. Following both Roman writers, Thomas Wilson’s 1553 Arte of Rhetorique and Baldesar Castiglione’s 1528 Il Libro del Cortegiano (Book of the Courtier) teach men to mold their bodies into embodiments of civilized and civilizing power: strong and supple, full of grace and force, back straight, head held high, hands and feet moving in serene rhythm (Rebhorn 1993).
But the proper management of the male body in the delivery of the speech is only half the story. The author of the Ad Herennium, Cicero, and Quintilian devote a much larger proportion of their writings to verbal propriety. They seek to enforce the order and orderliness of ideas and words with terms such as dispositio, the proper ‘‘arrangement’’ of arguments (the second element in the canonical parts of rhetoric, along with invention, style, memory, and delivery) or tropes like hyperba-ton/verbi transgressio, change in customary word order. They are equally concerned with the orderliness of language in an extended sense, namely the restraint of excessive speech, embodied in the careful distinctions drawn between the proper and improper use of tropes and figures. As Quintilian comments, in hac autem proprietatis specie, quae nominibus ipsis cuiusque rei utitur, nulla virtus est, at quod ei contrarium est, vitium. id apud nos improprium... quale est...de cruce verba ceciderunt (‘‘there is no virtue in the appearance of propriety, by which we call things by their own names, but there is vice in the opposite, and this we call impropriety...as in the phrase...‘the words fell from the cross,’ ’’ Inst. 8.2.3). No less than those men who adopt a rhythmic delivery, fluting voice, and languid gestures, Quintilian characterizes the speeches of orators who experiment with the resources of verbal style as vicious and unmanly: impropria, obscura, tumida, humi-lia, sordida, lasciva, effeminata (‘‘inappropriate, obscure, inflated, lowly, mean, without restraint, effeminate,’’ 2.5.10). Men seduced by ornament are like those who are attracted to shaved and hairless bodies, with artificially curled hair and heavy makeup (2.5.12).
Two points are worth considering here. First, in these prescriptions, the personal is the political. The elder Seneca’s censure of the effeminate young men of his age and the younger Seneca’s letter to Lucilius declaring that ‘‘as a man speaks, so he lives’’ (Ep. 114.1) express their belief that oratorical decline is linked to moral decline on a broad social scale. If the effeminate orator ‘‘communicates’’ moral disease that corrupts the whole state, the good orator is the speaking embodiment of the res publica, protected like an elected magistrate by his skill, a crucial element in its good government: conquirimus... eum virum (‘‘we seek that man,’’ Cic. De Or. 1.202). The heavy emphasis in rhetorical treatises (and speeches) on the orator’s masculine nature and his obedience to the rules of masculine propriety is born from Roman political ideology, which equates masculinity and its virtues with the order of society itself. To perform according to expectation and custom is thus a matter not only of obeying the ethical and aesthetic code of masculine convention as an individual Roman, but of making visible the unity and health of the body politic.
We can compare the policing of women’s bodies and speech, which offers ‘‘proof’’ that social structures are secure and stable. In his early books on Rome’s archaic past, Livy consistently identifies the violation of Roman women (or its imminent threat) as the reason for regime change and social upheaval, from the birth of Romulus and Remus to Rhea Silvia after her rape by Mars, to the rape of the Sabines, to Lucretia, raped by the tyrannical prince Tarquin, to Verginia and Cloelia. By the same logic inverted, violence and chaos is again the outcome in Livy when abnormally powerful women like Tanaquil and Tullia, transgressing conventional restraints, seize a role in early Roman politics. The elder Cato condemns women speaking in public, and indeed speaking about public affairs at home (Livy 34.2-3). Similarly, with the policing of men’s bodies, the carriage and style of individual men (their habitus, to use the sociologist Bourdieu’s term) and their proper use of words proclaim the health and vitality of the state. Like the boy whose youthful fire and luxuriant style must be tempered by moderation and experience, the Roman state too learns self-government through a painful adolescence (Cic. Rep. 2.30, De Or. 1.134-5).
The ars rhetorica, the property and tool of the dominant order, is devoted to sustaining it in all its guises: the aristocracy, the propertied classes, and men in general. Habits of language usage are centrally important in sustaining the belief system that underpins material structures of power - naming the rich and politically powerful optimates, or ‘‘the best men,’’ for example, or retaining two words for ‘‘man,’’ the elite vir and the common homo. This is the second consequence of the Roman rhetorical treatise’s prescriptions on the body and everyday language usage: the discipline of rhetoric naturalizes those beliefs and structures. The reality of masculinity, its purchase as a concept, is created through repeated social enactments whose ‘‘stylized repetition,’’ to use Butler’s phrase, places them beyond question, beyond criticism, beyond reason (Butler 1990: 140-1). The rhetorician’s particular contribution is to construct a system that simultaneously divides and evaluates language, inventing or copying categories that distinguish ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ types of verbal and bodily expression. Most important are the value-laden distinctions of propriety, between what is supposed to work and what does not, according to the audience’s expectation and taste - itself a dynamic construct of custom, memory, and current fashion.
Cicero links propriety with protecting the social order from the taint of disruption. In the third book of De Oratore, which is devoted to proper style and delivery, the excensor Crassus recalls his decision to shut down schools of Latin oratory because they taught students nisi ut auderent (‘‘nothing but how to be rash,’’ 3.94). Whether or not Crassus is speaking the truth here (scholars have speculated on political reasons for the shutdown), his description of it as a policing action is an example of the identification Cicero makes between ordered style and political order: sic enim statuo, perfecti oratoris moderatione et sapientia non solum ipsius dignitatem, sed et priva-torum plurimorum, et universae rei publicae salutem maxime contineri (‘‘for this is what I believe: by the moderation and the wisdom of the perfect orator not only his dignitas, but the safety of the mass of private citizens, and indeed the entire republic, is embraced,’’ 1.34).
The presence of gendered terms in the style-disciplining language of rhetoric helps create a seamless identification between masculinity and civic virtue. When elites exploit the ‘‘natural’’ language of gender to describe and evaluate themselves, the visible and verbal signs of masculinity become both evidence and source of political stability and power. Because the unmanly orator threatens to disrupt that order by fracturing the identification of dominance and masculinity, he is censured, both in the text of the rhetorical treatise (e. g., Brut. 225; Quint. Inst. 8 praef. 19-20) and, these texts expect, the world outside the text (but see Quintilian, who acknowledges the appeal of unmanly speech, 5.12.17-20). At the same time, the notion of threatening the male status quo becomes itself (in rhetorical treatises) an effeminized, and hence unnatural, idea. The manly orator signifies virtue, and virtuous men constitute a virtuous political community. Women - and the many men who do not meet the class-based standard of the vir - are entirely excluded from the system, in thought and practice.
World History
