In assessing the relationship between rhetorical education and social reproduction, I shall examine in particular which themes a young orator of both republic and empire would normally treat in rhetorical exercises and how these themes change according to both the speaker’s expectations for advancement and his relationship with the Roman state. The means by which social power is created through education changes with the transformation from republic to empire. Implicit throughout is my assumption that Roman rhetorical education aims not toward some idealized state of objectivity to which its male students are ‘‘led out’’ (the root sense of educatio) but serves, both in its late republican and imperial manifestations, to replicate and reestablish the previous generation (as in the Latin institution for replication see Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). In articulating this process of replication for each period, I shall in part be addressing the challenges offered by Beard (1993), who suggests that the Roman declamatory exercises of the first centuries ce function as ‘‘cultural myth-making.’’ Declamation, that is, uses a restricted set of fictional scenarios to work out - through continual study, rehearsal, and performance - what it means to be ‘‘Roman.’’ This claim is quite suggestive and, as the final section of this essay details, recent scholarship indicates ways in which imperial declamation does act like myth as a site for debate, but it is a debate that ultimately serves to recreate and reinforce social and political hierarchies. I shall begin, however, in the late republic by asking what type of myth-making this imperial practice may have supplanted.
World History
