Invective then was capable of speaking to different groups and playing on their social concerns. In this respect it is interesting to consider Cicero's use of insults involving the os impurum, the ‘‘unclean mouth’’ which performs oral sex and the reprehensible activities of excessive eating and drinking. Cicero seems to direct such insults at less powerful men of a lower social standing (with one notable exception at Cic. Phil. 2, 68). The two men associated with the os impurum are the relatively unimportant Apronius, Verres’ assistant, and Sextus Cloelius, the henchman of Clodius (Verr. 2.3, Dom. 25, 26, 47-8, 83). In order to implicate his real targets in the charge of immoral oral behavior, Cicero applies a complex manipulation of the themes related to os impurum so as to let Apronius and Sextus Cloelius carry the direct weight of immorality, while at the same time presenting Verres and Clodius as so deeply connected to their henchmen that they are implicated in this non-elite behavior (Richlin 19922: 99; Corbeill 1996: 99-127). It seems reasonable to conclude then that the disgrace connected with the unclean mouth was more strongly felt among the elite, and as such the orator had to deploy this insult with considerable care. Nevertheless, the basic anxieties that gave the insult its force - a concern with smell, cleanliness, and appearance - were shared by all ranks of society. Indeed, the fear of being contaminated by the target of the insult plays a major part in Roman invective of all types (Richlin 19922: 27).
It is no surprise then that in graffiti, satires, and lampoons as well as rhetorical invective we find the same categories of insult connected to the general and omnipresent themes of food, sex, drink, and gambling (Richlin 19922; Ruffell 2003). While the orator in the courtroom had to adopt a degree of explicitness different from the anonymous writer on a wall, a review of the topics of invective reveals a close connection between the different literary genres of comedy, poetry (both popular and elite), and rhetorical invective. There seems to have been a continual osmosis between these diverse literary forms that went far beyond the borrowing of witty expressions (cf. Cic. Fam. 12.16.3). As Ruffell has emphasized, the reperformativity of popular verses, such as the soldiers’ verses on Caesar and Nicomedes sung at the Gallic triumph, would allow for a ‘‘fluid interchange of material between social agents and contexts,’’ so that ‘‘the distinction between elite and mass verse, literary and subliterary breaks down, or at least becomes very problematic. In terms of its consumption and reproduction there is nothing to control their absorption into the same cultural blender’’ (Ruffell 2003: 52). As part of this cultural milieu, rhetorical invective operated in a world that was permeated by formal as well as ideological interchange. In its poetic and rhetorical forms, invective worked on a body of shared concepts which were reelaborated and remodeled with varying degrees of subtlety at different social and cultural levels (see Ruffell 2003: 61).
Moreover, invective imposed the authority of a system of collective values. What had been subject merely to private rumors or hostile glances now became publicly named and exposed - a process that involved the complete redefinition of the private and public spheres. And while such verbal assaults gave expression to serious conflicts present within the community, their ritualization helped to structure and regulate these tensions. Even when the aim was to drive out the chosen target from the community, the cultural practice of invective to some extent channeled and controlled this conflict.
Thus the assertion of Corbeill (2002b: 213) that invective was a tool of open humiliation that reaffirmed publicly ‘‘what was right and proper for the true, elite Roman’’ does not tell the whole story. If we look beyond Cicero, it becomes more difficult to sustain that invective was adopted as a mechanism ‘‘at the service of stability’’ (Corbeill 2002b: 215). This image of internal cohesiveness was more a Ciceronian creation than a historical reality. Invective in fact will be effective only as a moment of public disgrace, when the contest moves beyond the members of the ruling elite and becomes a judgment of the community. That is, invective is an attempt by one member of the community to disgrace another in the eyes of the rest, arrogating for himself the right to act on behalf of the whole group.
World History
