Although a more or less refined sense of effective public speech must have existed in Rome significantly prior to the introduction of Greek rhetores into the city, the birth of an established system of Roman rhetoric might best be described as the end result of a somewhat unlikely coupling of refined Greek professionalism and proud Roman amateurism. As the story is alluded to in our Roman sources, we are invited to imagine this coupling (and subsequent gestation) in one of two ways. First, and following an ‘‘influence’’ model, we might suppose that although a certain rudimentary ‘‘excellence of speech’’ may have existed in Rome prior to the introduction of the Greek professionals, it was only under the influence (and name) of formal Greek teaching that Roman public and political speech making developed into an identifiable system (so Cic. De Or. 1.14). Secondly, and following what I would term the ‘‘appropriation’’ model, it was precisely the virile Latinitas of early Roman intellectualism that was able first to impose itself upon (and in no small sense to correct) the abstract theoretical musings of the Hellenistic theoreticians, and eventually to transform these musings into the concrete and utilitarian practice of the late republic and beyond (De Or. 1.23).
Both versions of this process appear in our Roman authors - indeed, often by the same author (Cicero) in the same text (e. g., De Oratore) - and it is precisely this that makes any attempt to unravel this meeting of Greek and Roman, of east and west, such a tantalizing and difficult one. In Cicero and subsequent authors, the influence model fits nicely into the vilification of seductive Greek influence, just as the appropriation model jibes well with the extolling of Roman manhood as the presumed prerequisite of all subsequent Roman domination. Indeed, as much as both models play neatly into cross-genre Greek-Roman binaries of professionalism, ethnicity, and gender, neither model accounts sufficiently for the highly charged process of social,
Intellectual, and political give-and-take that must occur at the dynamic margins of any cultural overlap.
This chapter is divided into three distinct parts, each of which will examine one element in the overlap through which the established Greek rhetorical tradition entered Rome, met with alternating eagerness and resistance, and was finally transformed - or made anew - in the image of a purely Roman school of rhetorical thought, practice, and literary topos.
The first part of the chapter is devoted to an overview of the Greek tradition of the late Hellenistic and early Roman period, a time when technical professionalism and intellectual specialization became increasingly prized as a sign of social refinement. In these years, the study of rhetoric assumed a dominant - perhaps the dominant - role in both the curriculum of the schools and the political and cultural capital of the period as a whole. The story gets murky in the particulars, due to both the relative paucity of evidence and the ways in which this evidence is treated by our later authors. But we can nevertheless identify the major schools of the period and the major foci of these schools, and so postulate various sources of tension in the later Roman reception of Hellenistic rhetoric and rhetoric teaching. I turn next to the censorial edict of 92 BCE, directed against the ‘‘professional’’ teachers of Latin rhetoric in Rome but seeking neither their expulsion nor punishment. Of particular interest will be the ways in which the phrasing of the edict points to broader intellectual and cultural issues at stake in the confrontation of these two educational models - the amateur, and traditionally Roman, as opposed to the professional, and newly Greek - in the years of the late republic. Finally, and using Cicero’s De Oratore as a representative case study, I consider the ways in which foreign rhetoric came to be represented and contained in the intellectual discourse of the late republic. For as this treatise, and indeed much later literature, would suggest, the Greek rhetores came not only to represent the interaction of Greek ‘‘artificial’’ rhetoric with the ‘‘natural’’ landscape of Roman oratory but also to stand as a literary and intellectual symbol for an overarching and imminently Roman contest between binaries of professional and amateur, Greek and Roman, the conquered and the conqueror.
World History
