In Rome, as in most western cultures, manly men are better known for war-making than wordplay. Near the end of Vergil’s Aeneid, in a council scene rich with material for the student of Roman rhetoric and gender, the Latin leader Turnus is taunted by his rival Drances, a man largus opum et lingua melior, sed frigida bello / dextera, consiliis habitus non futtilis auctor, / seditionepotens (‘‘rich in resources and very good with his tongue, but with a cold right hand in war; in counsel-taking considered no useless leader, strong in quarrel,’’ Aen. 11.338-40). Turnus retorts that Drances should keep silent until he has joined the fight, asking: an tibi Mavors / ventosa in lingua pedibusque fugacibus istis semper erit? (‘‘or is your martial spirit to be found always in that wind-fickle tongue and those flying feet of yours?’’, Aen. 11.389-91). Tricked by Juno in book 10, Turnus had abandoned the battlefield; here, with his belligerent equation of Drances’ oratorical powers with unmanly cowardice, Turnus redeems himself as a man of action, paving the way for his emergence as a lion-like hero before his final combat with Aeneas (himself, we remember, no great speaker). The eloquent Drances, by contrast, uniting verbal artfulness with riches and soft habits, is the embodiment of cultural corruption in the Roman moralist tradition (e. g., Sen. Controv. 1 praef. 8). His political skills, described with the litotes non futtilis auctor, are coupled with disloyalty (seditione potens); his flapping tongue and scurrying legs signify a capricious physicality that recalls the rushed, talkative, gesticulating, plotting slaves of Roman comedy (e. g., Plaut. Mil. 200-17; Graf 1991). In a subtle touch Vergil describes Drances as a man goaded by invidia (‘‘resentful envy,’’ Aen. 11.337) of Turnus’ glory - invidia being one of the emotions Roman orators sought most eagerly to arouse in their efforts to turn juries against their opponents (Quint. Inst. 4.2.75, 4.2.128, 4.3.6; Cic. Inv. Rhet. 1.22, De Or. 2.189, 203).
Practically speaking, rhetoric and oratory in Rome were wholly male endeavors in that the art of persuasive speech was taught, studied, and practiced in public space,
Which is to say in male space, by men, for men, to men, according to men’s interests: it formed the core of Roman education and was the primary instrument of the law court, Forum, and senate. Quintilian writes in the introduction to his Institutio Oratoria: oratorem autem instituimus illum perfectum, qui esse nisi vir bonus non potest (“we seek to create the perfect orator, who cannot exist unless he is a good man,’ 1 praef. 9). By defining speech itself as the exclusive domain of men, rhetoric at once sweepingly symbolizes, supports, and enacts men’s dominance. More specifically, as the central focus of Roman education, rhetoric reinforces conventional beliefs about gender as it seeks to inculcate in students ideal masculine values and practices. The confidence to give a speech, the properly expressive but dignified posture to adopt when speaking, and the aggressive dominance of adversaries in the law court are all described as masculine properties, and from evidence outside rhetorical texts it is clear that Roman ideas about masculinity (which stress, for instance, propriety and gracefulness) are shaped in part by the defining experience of rhetorical education in youth and performances through adulthood (Keith 1999; Krostenko 2001: 233-90). As Richlin points out, a complete study of rhetoric’s identity as a male and masculine social system would have to address the Forum as a gendered space, the socialization of Roman youths, the subject matter of the declamatory exercises they practiced, the links between gender and ethnic prejudice in rhetorical criticism, and the construction of women as a group excluded from the world of rhetoric (Richlin 1997: 91).
At the same time a cluster of interconnecting tensions marks the complex relations of rhetoric and masculinity in Rome, and it is these that underpin the angry exchange of Turnus and Drances: between eloquence and virtue, word and action, style and substance, artifice and integrity, politics and war. Considering these oppositions in their context in Roman culture from the second century bce to late antiquity, the problem that gender poses is obvious: namely, it is impossible to map “masculinity’’ cleanly onto one half of the grid. If, as many textual and visual exempla of Roman culture suggest, virtue, action, substance, integrity, and war constitute the ideal values of Roman manliness in its most archaic form - the purest expression of Rome's collective cultural fantasy - words, style, eloquence, artifice, and politics are no less essential in the world in which Roman men live. Yet Roman ideology burdens the second list with heavily negative associations of unmanliness and vice - a habit that culminates, in the post-Roman tradition, in tendentious observations like Thomas Howell’s remark in 1581 that “Women are Wordes, Men are Deedes,'' and Michel de Montaigne's meditations on the contrast between feminine caquet (“chatter”) and manly action (Parker 1989: 452). Rhetoric and its object, eloquence, are constituted in and made possible by things that the Romans (and other cultures, ancient and modern) defined as not-manly: the artful manipulation of words, the willingness to deceive, the equation of power with persuasion rather than action, verbal ornament, theatricality, emotional demonstrativeness. The failure of ideal masculinity to square with the demands of eloquence makes rhetoric's legitimacy a fundamental issue for Roman rhetoricians - its legitimacy as a social practice, a pedagogy, a professional discipline, and a theory of language. Understanding this is a necessary first step to grasping the many-sided role masculinity plays in rhetorical texts.
Regarding the issue of legitimacy, Vergil’s Aeneid prompts one more fruitful line of thought. What is the eloquent Drances’ parentage? His mother is noble; his father, unknown (incertum depatre, 11.340-1), a fact that places him outside the normative net of family and social legitimacy. Like Drances, rhetoric at Rome has a doubtful genealogy. Cicero simultaneously asserts and denies the foundational role of the Greeks who, like bad styles of oratory, are represented as lacking in moral and political restraint (Cic. Tusc. 4.70, QFr. 1.1.16, Flac. 16), excessively erudite (De Or. 2.18), and pedantic (De Or. 2.75). Cicero cites the Greeks’ founding role in inventing the art of speech and conveying it to Rome, but he also uses Greece as a way symbolically to exile bad oratory from Rome, in his claim that the Romans, rescuing Greek oratory from its decline into vice, have made (virtuous) rhetoric their own rightful property (De Or. 3.130; cf. Tusc. 2.5). Driving Cicero’s resourceful handling of the ethnic origins of rhetoric lies the remark of the elder Cato, outspoken if not transparent critic of Greek influence on Roman culture (Gruen 1992: 52-83), that the orator should simply rem tene, verba sequentur (‘‘seize the point, and the words will come,’’ lulius Victor 17; Halm 1863: 374). Cato’s maxim is, and was perhaps designed to be, an uncomfortable reminder of the liminal place that artful speech occupies in Roman culture and its carefully tended ‘‘straight-talking,’’ manly image.
In its moralist tradition, historiography, and sculpture, and in other ways, such as the preservation of agriculture as a theme for high art and literature, Roman society carefully memorialized, and in the process made constantly problematic, the consequences of transition from agrarian, small-town culture to grand imperial cosmopolis. Gender is a key player in this ongoing communal self-critique. Might the men who built a Mediterranean empire transform into half-men, emasculated by the loot they carried home from Carthage, Greece, and Asia? Roman writers make up a chorus of anxieties about the cultural decay ushered in by empire (Sall. Cat. 10; Vell. Pat. 1.16; Petron. Sat. 88;Plin. HN 14.1). The elder Seneca complains in the introduction to his collection of rhetorical exercises called controversia that Rome has sunk into a daily worsening state of decline where cantandi saltandique obscena studia effeminatos tenent (‘‘shameful enthusiasms for singing and dancing seize hold of the effeminate youth,’’ Controv. 1 praef. 8). The Roman love of competition, once properly exercised on the battlefield and law court, has moved into women’s bedrooms, as young men compete with women ( certare cum feminis) in the arts of femininity: hair-braiding, cosmetics, training the voice in the rhythmic, sing-song effects suitable only for women (ad muliebres blanditias), and making the body soft and pliable (mollitia corporis).
Cicero identifies rhetoric as the art that engineered the transformation of humans from a savage to a civil state: it is literally what makes culture ( cultus) possible (Inv. Rhet. 1.4). In the ancient societies of Greece and Italy, however, cultural achievement is the object as much of anxiety as it is of desire, from the endless labor endured by Hesiod’s farmer to the tragedy that results from the Argo’s shattering of the natural boundaries of the seas in Horace’s Epode 16 and Seneca’s Medea. In Rome, rhetoric is a target for those fears: it crystallizes worry that imperial expansion would lead to the replacement of the mos maiorum (‘‘ancestral custom’’) of a smaller, agrarian, military-oriented age with the refined and potentially unmanning arts of high urban civilization. Aulus Gellius captures this anxiety in his description of Hortensius, the most famous orator of the generation just preceding Cicero’s:
Quod multa munditia et circumspecte compositeque indutus et amictus esset manusque eius inter agendum forent argutae admodum et gestuosae, maledictis compellationibus-que probris iactatus est, multaque in eum, quasi in histrionem, in ipsis causis atque iudiciis dicta sunt. sed cum L. Torquatus, subagresti homo ingenio et infestivo... non iam histrionem eum esse diceret, sed gesticulariam Dionysiamque eum notissimae salt-atriculae nomine appellaret, tum voce molli atque demissa Hortensius ‘‘Dionysia,’’ inquit ‘‘Dionysia malo equidem esse quam quod tu, Torquate, amousos, anaphroditos, aprosdionysos.’’ (Gellius, Noctes Atticae 1.5.2-3)
Because he dressed very elegantly, draped his toga with care and precision, and when pleading cases used quite distinctive gesticulations, he was harassed by many rude remarks and rebukes, and in the court itself, before the jury, many things were said against him, as though he were an actor. But when Lucius Torquatus, an ill-mannered and aggressive person. . . said Hortensius was not just an actor, but a pantomime and a Dionysia, the name of a notorious dancer, then in a soft and mild voice Hortensius responded, ‘‘Dionysia, yes, I would much prefer to be a Dionysia than like you, Torquatus, with no Muses, no Aphrodite, no Dionysus.’’
Rhetorical education was designed to instill in Roman boys habits that would make their masculinity literally visible to the world: along with constructing logical arguments, handling narration and interrogation, and creative ways to use words, they learned to stand up straight, look others straight in the eye, gesticulate with grace and authority, and speak with easy confidence. As Gellius’ anecdote shows, the challenge for them lay in tracking the slender, shifting line separating masculine urbanity from feminine softness, old-fashioned bluntness from crude vulgarity.
The canonical goals of persuasion are three: docere movere delectare (‘‘to teach, to move, and to please,’’ Cic. Brut. 185; cf. De Or. 2.128). Too much pedantry, pathos, or pleasure, however, and the orator risked crossing over to unmanly territory, the social space inhabited by actors, teachers, dancers, prostitutes, and others who used their arts for gain. As Quintilian notes, vice and virtue enjoy remarkably close relations (Inst. 8.3.7). The cosmetics necessary to the skillful orator - the graceful movements of his body and the ornamentation of his words - easily cake into the heavy makeup of the eunuch slave (5.12.17-20).
Rhetoric is at heart a discourse of codification and evaluation. With its burden of longstanding associations and prejudices, the binary opposition of gender makes ideal shorthand for virtue and vice. Just as men’s bodies are represented as being ‘‘naturally’’ better disciplined than women’s bodies, just as men are better equipped to reason and to dispense justice, so their speech tends to obey laws ofmoderation - and if it fails to do so, the rhetorical treatise is available to redress that failing (Parker 1989: 113-19). Social and economic order rests on the maintenance of law, and rhetorical manuals and treatises, with their emphasis on proper speech, posture, and gesture, literally make those laws physical, by advising their readers how the good man - whether noble, king, monk, or merchant - behaves. Consider this influential passage of Cicero on the ideal orator’s physical appearance:
Idemque motu sic utetur, nihil ut supersit. in gestu status erectus et celsus; rarus incessus nec ita longus; excursio moderata eaque rara; nulla mollitia cervicum, nullae argutiae digitorum, non ad numerum articulus cadens; trunco magis toto se ipse moderans et virili laterum flexione, bracchii proiectione in contentionibus, contractione in remissis. (Cicero, Orator 59)
By the same token he will use motions that are not excessive. In his movements he will stand straight and tall; he will rarely stride around, and then in small compass; he will dash forward only a little, and rarely; there will be no soft curving of the neck, no flicking of the fingers, no counting the rhythm on the knuckles; he will govern himself in his whole frame, and in the manly stance of his torso, stretching out the arm in aggressive argumentation, and pulling it in at lighter moments.
This advice escaped the bounds of the rhetorical manual, and it persists in remarkably unchanged form through late antiquity into the early modern period. In a letter to a friend and fellow seeker of the well-lived life, the younger Seneca advises his addressee that in order to understand why vicious styles of oratory become popular at certain periods of time, he must look to men’s character, since ‘‘men speak as they live’’ (talis hominibus fuit oratio qualis vita, Ep. 114.1). Seneca selects Maecenas, close friend and supporter of the emperor Augustus, as his exemplar of vice, citing Maecenas’ swaying walk, loose clothing, and unconventional household - a notorious image still remembered fifty years after his death. By intentionally parading his vices in public, Maecenas parodically inverts one of rhetoric’s primary educational goals, the techniques of concealing moral and physical flaws: quam cupierit videri, quam vitia sua latere noluerit (‘‘how he desired to be seen, how he was unwilling to hide his vices,’’ 114.4). Some of these points are echoed, ironically, in Quintilian’s assessment of Seneca, demonstrating the speedy evolution of style and criticism in imperial Roman rhetoric, and the flexibility of gendered language as a weapon of invective, which could easily be turned against its wielder: corruptum et omnibus vitiis fractum dicendi genus (‘‘a style corrupt and weakened by every vice,’’ Inst. 10.1.125; cf. 10.1.129).
Seneca’s critical terms infracta (‘‘broken, faltering’’), inverecunde (‘‘immodest’’), soluta (‘‘loose’’), and discinctus (‘‘loosely belted’’), catchwords in the rhetorical writings of Cicero and Quintilian, are embedded in the gendered language of Roman moralism, which itself rests on a tangle of folkloristic, medical, and philosophical beliefs. The female body was assumed to be weaker, damper, and more permeable than the male; just as they are more vulnerable to illness, the heaviness of their bodies makes women succumb more easily to mental disturbance (Hanson 1990: 317, 323). Most important for rhetoric and the emphasis that rhetorical education laid on training the body was the presumption that properly self-governed character manifested itself in physical characteristics normally belonging to men: in particular, a robust body and a deep voice (Gleason 1995: 91). Even virtuous women are barred from rhetorical virtue.
We are dealing here, it is important to remember, with symptoms of cultural fantasy, not reflections of reality. There is a near-total absence of women from the Roman rhetorical record. Quintilian stresses the necessity of ensuring that those caring for very young boys, including mothers and nurses, speak pure and grammatical Latin (Inst. 1.1.6-8). In his biographical history of Roman oratory, Cicero mentions the letters of Cornelia, whose pure speech exerted a profound influence over her sons, the politicians Gaius and Tiberius; he adds that Scipio Aemilianus’ close friend Laelius produced several generations of female descendants who shared his well-known ‘‘elegance’’ of expression (Brut. 211; repeated by Quint. Inst. 1.1.6). Valerius Maximus counts three Roman women who pleaded cases before magistrates (8.3; again, cf. Quint. Inst. 1.1.6) but elsewhere asks the rhetorical question quid feminae cum contione? (‘‘what do women have to do with public meetings?’’, Val. Max. 3.8.6). Justinian explains the prohibition on women’s pleading cases by appealing to natural divisions of labor that confine women to domestic life (Digest 3.1.1.5; Richlin 1997: 93).
Passages like these demonstrate that in Roman rhetoric the crux is not the avoidance of empirically observable habits of women per se: on the contrary, the tradition of aristocratic women’s speech features models of pure Latinity. Moreover, the critical category of femininity is a flexible one, perfectly capable of embracing groups whose members are biologically male. In Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the elder Seneca, and Quintilian, references to femininity or effeminacy connote the nonRoman (especially the ‘‘Asiatic’’ Greek), the enslaved, and the poor. By the same logic, references to the poor, the enslaved, and the non-Roman carry gendered overtones (Walters 1997: 30, 32). All these groups, legally, economically, and politically dominated by elite Roman men, are used as signs of the vices that the manly Roman orator must avoid. What is at stake is the inculcation and perpetuation of a particular set of attitudes and behaviors associated with masculinity and men. Like other aspects of identity, masculinity is established via differences that have become socially meaningful. Masculinity requires difference in order to exist, and it easily converts surface difference into essential otherness in order to secure its own ‘‘selfcertainty’’ (W. Connolly 2002: 64). Whether in Roman culture the difference with which rhetorical texts are ultimately concerned is gender identity is the question I address at the end of this chapter. In the next section I survey three areas of special significance in the conflict between rhetoric and masculinity in the canonical writings of Cicero and Quintilian: rhetoric’s identity as an art, its role in training verbal and bodily propriety, and the resources it offers for verbal ornament.
World History
