Joy Connolly

Such was the Art of Rhetoric. It bears all the marks of its Greek origin. It was the creation of the Greek intellect, with its intellectual subtlety and its love of logic and fine distinctions, but of the Greek intellect in its decline, no longer adventurous and creative, but confined within professional and pedagogic bounds. . . But on the whole the Romans took to it with surprising readiness.2

Greek rhetoric in Rome: any essay on the topic must begin by acknowledging that it threatens to subsume Latin literary production tout court. A few examples prove the point. From Varro, the prolific late republican polymath, to the minor Augustan grammarian Cloatius Verus, who composed a catalogue of Italian fruits and nuts, Roman writers of technical literature owe the logical structure of their work to the system of definition and division developed by Greek rhetoricians. The stylistic catchwords of Latin lyric and elegy such as tenuis, ‘slender’, are affiliated with the stripped-down oratorical aesthetic known to Greeks and Romans in the first century as ‘Attic’. Horace’s Ars Poetica draws on the Peripatetic theory of style. The innovative Coelius Antipater, the first historian to abandon the year-byyear format of the traditional Latin annalistic style, ornaments his monograph on the second Punic war with the polished rhythms and figures used by contemporary Greek prose writers, themselves deeply influenced by Hellenistic rhetorical theory. Later Latin historians follow Coelius in treating history, in Cicero’s phrase, as an opus oratorium, ‘an orator’s job’ (De Legibus 1.5). As for oratory proper, speeches in Latin from the second century, the date of our earliest evidence, follow a template that is recognizably Greek. Under the rule of the Caesars, interest in declamation and epideictic oratory steadily spreads throughout the Greek - and Latin-speaking parts of the empire, a development reflected in literary experiments across genres in both languages. In the field of rhetoric proper, the Greek conceptualization of rhetoric as the disciplining of language, in the sense both of institutionalizing an area of study and of mastering a thing that resists, is early transposed into a Roman key, with important consequences for the literary and political culture of the empire.

The main debt Roman rhetoric owes to Greek is the formal system of classification and organization that Greek rhetoric applies to language, according to which the rhetorician distinguishes and names types of arguments, approaches to topics, parts of speech, ornaments, styles, and so forth. To classify language is, of course, to place it in systematic order. Given the practical contexts and uses for which rhetoric is designed, this is a point of major significance. To Aristotle, rhetoric is the study of‘the available means of persuasion’ in the political contexts of the lawcourt and Assembly, as well as in epideictic displays where civic values were reinforced (Rhet. 1.2). Roughly two centuries later, Hermagoras declares that rhetoric involves ‘treating the proposed political question as persuasively as possible’ (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 2.62). Hermogenes repeats (c. AD 200) that the most important element of rhetoric is the division of ‘political questions’ (politika zetemata) arising from any ‘rational dispute’ (amphisbetesis logike) based on established laws or social customs (On Ideas, 1.1). The notion that ‘by investing Demosthenes’ in the speaker’s soul, rhetoric cultivated the penetrating insight and self-control necessary for good government, underpins rhetorical pedagogy into the fifth century AD and beyond.3 Horace famously describes the presence of Greek culture in Rome as an act of conquest: ‘captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror, and brought the arts into rustic Latium’ (Epistles 2.1.156). Throughout its ‘occupation’ of Roman culture, as the continuity of these definitions shows, Greek rhetoric is a political discourse, and it is on this point that I will anchor my survey. The intellectual history of the era encompasses complexities obviously unmasterable in any single essay, and several important topics will have to be omitted altogether. My sketch of the history of Greek rhetoric at Rome is thus guided by this argument: that what M. L. Clarke characterizes in the epigraph to this chapter as the ‘surprising readiness’ of the Romans to adopt Greek rhetoric is best explained by viewing rhetoric as the imposer of limits, the arbiter of communal propriety, the source and guard of standards of rational communication across time and space, a universalizing adhesive for the social order that worked its effects through the disciplined mind, breath, nerves, and muscles of each speaker.

Rome was a militaristic, deeply conservative society whose political institutions retained much of the flavor of a small agrarian city-state - demanding citizens to be physically present in Rome in order to vote, for instance - even after its conquests had won it power on a scale hitherto unknown in the Mediterranean world. The incessant demand for military manpower to expand and defend the imperial borders, in tandem with the inflow of slaves and treasure from conquered provinces, changed the face of Roman society, creating new pockets of poverty and wealth and placing intense pressure on traditional beliefs and practices. Empire meant that the governing elite, which based its legitimacy in part on its reverent preservation of ancestral custom (mos maiorum), had somehow to marry tradition with innovation and flexibility in order to meet the unpredictable challenges of imperial rule. How were the rights of Roman citizens to be guaranteed in far-flung provinces? How would citizens and non-citizens interact, in legal, political, and social terms? Would Roman law become the law of conquered nations? How would Rome communicate its will to the communities it defeated, and how would they in turn convey their concerns to Rome? How would education prepare the citizen for his place in the imperial order? Translated and adapted from Greek sources, in a process that began during the Punic Wars of the third and second centuries and lasted into the fifth century AD, rhetoric offered Roman culture the discursive resources to meet the challenge of empire. To cite a text that was viewed within a generation of its composition as the quintessential Roman poem, preoccupied as it is with the problem of limits and haunted by the vision of boundless power: ‘For them I set no limits of things or time, I have given empire without end’ (Vergil, Aeneid 1.278-279). Rhetoric is a discipline for the new world order Vergil describes.

My survey begins with two competing versions of Greek rhetoric’s journey to Rome, which shed light on the cultural prejudices that shape its reception and early development. Next, in the longest section of the chapter, I turn to the earliest Roman rhetorical treatises, composed by Cicero and the anonymous author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (hereafter referred to as ‘the Auctor’), and their counterparts in Greek and Roman rhetoric of the high empire. In the chapter of his authoritative and influential history of Greek rhetoric that deals with Hellenistic theory, G. A. Kennedy concludes that Greek rhetoricians after the fourth century do not share the concern, especially characteristic of Aristotle and Isocrates, with ‘the place of rhetoric in society.’4 This view ignores these writers’ goal of constructing a logical system of rational discourse for the public arena, and I will suggest that it should be abandoned. The third section considers the debate over style in Cicero’s later works, Caesar’s fragmentary De Analogia, and the essays of the Augustan critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in light of the emerging canonization of the literature and culture of fifth and fourth century democratic Athens. In the fourth section, staying with the topic of style, I address the tradition of Isocrates, Theophrastus, Cicero, Quintilian, and Hermogenes. The chapter concludes with rhetoric in the Roman empire, concentrating on the preoccupation of so-called ‘Second Sophistic’ orators with re-enacting the events and accents of the past in performances whose cultivated refinement embodies a universalizing imperial Roman ideal even as it sustains the memory of Greek uniqueness.