Rhetoric in the ancient world was experienced primarily in the context of a live performance, a form of communication that presupposes an interaction between speaker and audience. Literature, on the other hand, often revolved around a private act of reading. The contrast, however, should be thought of as a fluid spectrum rather than a polarity. Much ‘‘literature’’ was also read out loud (see Kenney 1982: 12), and it is clear that speeches delivered in the courts or senate house were written down in order to be read. Rhetorical theory, meanwhile, was a form of writing that assumed private reading and study, but its lessons must be supposed at least to have both shaped live oratorical performances, and to have derived something of their content from an active rhetorical environment.
A clear distinction between rhetoric and literature was perhaps first recognized by Thucydides, who in his notoriously concise statement of aims (1.22-3) envisages his audience as an eternal readership rather than as the spectators at an oral performance. Thucydides seems skeptical about the potential of works written for performance to elicit serious moral reflection, and his portrait of Kleon (3.36-40) dramatizes his sense of the intimate connection between rhetoric and public amorality. Kleon, he seems to say, thinks he can get away with murder because he can argue persuasively and in the process can cynically denigrate the very rhetorical skill which gives him power over his audience. Thucydides’ ambition to commit his own understanding of history, and in particular of Athens, to posterity by writing is based on the desire to ensure the perpetuation of his ideas rather than his literary style. Writing granted them a permanence which he felt was an antidote to the fleeting and fickle effect of a rhetorical event. The notoriously unnatural rhetoric in which he cast his speeches is an indication of the consistency of his program: even his engagement with rhetoric was deliberately literary. The criticisms of Thucydides’ rhetoric found in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, written from the viewpoint of one teaching rhetoric at Rome, reveal that such an overtly literary rhetoric would be useless to the practicing orator; here Thucydides was successful for the most part in maintaining his skepticism about rhetoric while still writing set speeches. Dionysius of course misunderstood Thucydides’ motivation, since for him rhetoric had lost the sinister associations it evidently had for Thucydides. He was unable to conceive of a form of rhetoric that did not have as its aim the inspiration of future orators, men for whom rhetorical expertise was the main way of taking on a political role. Thucydides at least makes us aware of the possibility of a highly developed literary rhetoric, while Dionysius’ response reminds us that this would not necessarily be understood at Rome.
Examining the relationship between rhetoric and literature in broad terms thus involves thinking about what kinds of differences we can trace between rhetorical performance and private reading, and how far it is reasonable to talk about Rome as ‘‘a rhetorical culture,’’ in which rhetorical performance effectively set the standard for all forms of literature. There is no possibility of recovering the actual experience of individual readers at Rome, however. The best we can do is look at how different kinds of texts were given a social value: because ‘‘literature’’ as a category is hard to recognize at Rome, we need to focus instead upon rhetoric, and look at what rhetorical theory tells us about its place in the socio-textual hierarchy.
World History
