Ornament

The political context of the disciplinary language in Roman rhetoric also illuminates the remarkable gendering of elocutio, style, specifically verbal ornament. Quintilian condemns ornament’s emasculation of speech in no uncertain terms at the opening of his book on style: illa translucida et versicolor quorundam elocutio res ipsas effeminat (‘‘a translucent and variegated style emasculates the subject matter,’’ Inst. 8. praef. 20). Students contemplating this topic are advised to treat eloquentia like a vigorous male body (toto corpore valet) rather than simply polishing her nails and arranging her hair (unguespolire et capillum reponere, 8. praef. 22). The properly adorned oration must be, Quintilian self-consciously repeats (repetam enim), virilis etfortis et sanctus sit nec effeminatam levitatem et fuco ementitatum colorem amet, sanguine et viribus niteat (‘‘manly, brave, and pure, a lover not of effeminate smoothness and color tinted with makeup, but glowing with blood and strength,’’ 8.3.6-7; cf. sine ullofuco, Cic. Brut. 162). The best kinds of Attic-style speeches, pared down and plain, resemble the woman who is most beautiful when unadorned (mulierespulchriores... inornatae, Orat. 78).

Ornament presents a special problem in part because it recalls the artful speech of the actor or poet: its obviously superfluous presence draws attention to itself in a way uncomfortably close to those unmanly professions. Quintilian flatly admits that he is aware there are those who assert that ‘‘rough speech’’ (horridum sermonem) is more natural, and even more manly, than ornament (modo magis naturalem, modo etiam magis virilem esse, Inst. 9.4.3). Richlin cites his concern over ‘‘loosening the holiness of the Forum’’ by importing the rhythmic, heavily ornamental flourishes of the Lycians and Carians instead of the pressi (‘‘succinct’’) and integri Attic style (11.3.58; Richlin 1997: 107). I have already discussed a few general associations between artfulness and unmanliness: now I would like to explore precisely what kind of threat ornament is imagined as posing to ideals of masculinity.

How is it defined? Ornament is, first of all, superfluous: it is what fills the space between what is necessary for bare communication and what is not. To Quintilian, ornament is literally expansive: similes open up the field of signification in words by shedding light on familiar things (8.3.72); he lists many methods of amplification (8.3.90, and briefly, its opposite, 8.3.82; cf. Parker 1987: 8-35). Ornament is also a force of embodiment: it lends ‘‘blood’’ to the dry bones of words (Cic. De Or. 1.56). Of the two major forms of ornament, tropes and figures, the trope is a mutation (mutatio) of a word or phrase from its nearest or proper meaning (a propria sig-nificatione) to another (Quint. Inst. 8.6.1) and figures have to do with the particular conformation of language the orator chooses for his speech (9.1.5). Hyperbaton, a change in word order, is a trope, but repetition, ellipse, and impersonation are figures. Despite their differences, both trope and figure rest on the capacity of the meanings and contexts of words to shift and change, whether they actually connote different significations, as in the trope of metaphor, or allow the orator to speak in the voice of another (as in the figure of prosopopoeia).

In an influential early feminist study of medieval rhetoric, Ferrante (1975) suggested that women’s biological capacity to bear children was the factor that enabled the ideological and intellectual connection between ornament and femininity. Just as women’s bodies swell, dilate, and give birth, so ornament allows the expansion and dilation of language, literally and semiotically: ornament is an essentially feminine capacity and is properly described as such (Ferrante 1975: 37-64). We have already seen, however, just how distant is the rhetoric of gender from the lived material realities of Roman women and men. Rather than appeal to biology, it is possible to explain the gendering of ornament by recalling rhetoric’s civic context.

Ornament enables language to float free from its original meaning or set of meanings. It performs what one scholar calls the ‘‘radical suspension of fixed ontic categories,’’ where every word is transformed into a carrier of multiple significations (Paxson 1998: 164). Ornament thus spotlights the paradox that the formal public speech that codifies, legislates, passes judgment, and makes policy is far from being as clear as the rhetorical codes that seek to describe it: like all speech, political speech is (necessarily) mutable, unreliable, expansive, and open to many different interpretations. If, as suggested above, rhetoric plays an important role in symbolizing the security and stability of the masculine social order, then the rhetoricians’ ambivalence toward ornament becomes comprehensible. Ornament is defined by opposition to naked logic; it thus lives, in a sense, outside the law; it must also, then, exist outside the realm of virtue that Roman masculinity claims for itself.