Late Antiquity was a rhetorical age. The education of the governing and cultural elite was based on rhetoric, on the art of public speaking, whether political, forensic, or exhortatory (see Cribiore, ch. 16). Only a small number of people commanded a regular and assured income on the basis of their teaching rhetoric, but many more took private pupils, and many more again pursued careers in law or philosophical formation. The chapters in this section are devoted in part to this rhetorical tradition. There was a fine balance, frequently sought after and not infrequently achieved, between appreciating the wealth of literary forms and techniques inherited from Cicero, Quintilian, Demosthenes, or Menander and actually performing in public according to their canons of taste and skill. Although some could be criticized, even lampooned, for their facile, conceited, or merely greedy attachment to the power of words, it is remarkable how many public figures were also in a sense scholars, devoted to learned conversation, the writing of elegant letters and poetry, and the collection and emendation of literary texts.
The first two chapters in this section (Cribiore and Haines-Eitzen, chs. 16 and 17) describe in part the social settings within which rhetorical refinement was acquired, and trace indeed the ways in which rhetoric - both its learning and its practice - could create and sustain the very groups upon which its survival and dissemination depended. Rhetoric was part of the empire’s organic structure. Two further chapters (Pollmann and Ebbeler, chs. 18 and 19) provide examples of the rhetorical discipline - forms in which words to some extent acquired the silence of the written page - namely, biblical commentary and letter-writing. The earlier chapter on inscriptions (Trout, ch. 12) has something of the same character. One begins to see the extent to which the various sections of this Companion unavoidably overlap, for letter writing was part of the communicative system described earlier (by both Leyerle and Sotinel, chs. 8 and 9), and biblical commentary was part of the ‘‘sacred’’ world to be examined in Part V (especially, perhaps, by Graumann, ch. 36). Here, however, the focus is on text as such. Finally, the intricacies of language itself, and the ways in which it changed over time, are examined in the two special contexts of Italy and Egypt (Burton and Choat, chs. 22 and 23 respectively). And one might note the element of intimacy in some of this activity - the revelation or disguise of self in letters, the construction of a public persona in inscriptions, the urgency of self-improvement in the study of virtue and etiquette - which adds a new layer to the humanity hinted at in the territorial analysis of the previous section.
But the late Roman speaker demanded a stage: there was a place for rhetoric as well as a form. This was a dramatic, a theatrical society, in which the spoken word was qualified or enhanced by a setting, whether it be a court of law, a philosophical seminar, the dramatic staging of imperial ceremony with its elaborate addresses full of praise and erudite allusion, or the ritual of temple or church in which extended prayer and detailed moral exhortation was presented against a backdrop of imagery and wealth. Almost every word that has come down to us was accompanied by gesture, movement, a symbolic choreography; was delivered in architectural spaces designed to stimulate incorporation or awe, reinforced by visual comment - statuary, fresco, mosaic, the very bricks and stones - which brought to bear either recollection of past glories or anticipation of achievements yet to come. In that sense history, too, was a pregnant text, placing the individual’s life in a longer continuum that gave it dignity, both civic and religious, and made demands (see Woods, ch. 24).
To that extent, therefore, the visual - albeit silent, unspoken - was itself a set of words, a language with its own grammar, force, and familiar message. It was a language that became increasingly Christian (which anticipates observations made later in the volume by Lim, Lizzi Testa, and McLynn, chs. 33, 35, and 38 respectively). The ‘‘art’’ that we speak of here (Francis and Harley, chs. 20 and 21) was not a mere embellishment of the rhetorical culture: it was its mirror image, an echo of the voice of the age that took solid form in brush strokes and tesserae and in the very buildings that reflected back upon the eye and mind the impressions made first upon the ear. Some of this artistic wealth we now see only in museums, but an abundance still remains in its original setting, part of the ‘‘land’’ through which we are able to travel; and it needs almost to be listened to by the modern observer, so that one can gain a sense of the applause, the obeisance, the oratory and music that the art at once witnessed and inspired.
World History
