Rhetoric is the ars dicendi, the ‘‘art of speech,’’ and Roman writers tend either to define ars as the technical province of hired (Greek) teachers and craftsmen or to associate it with a type of cleverness that bleeds into the realm of manipulation and cunning. The orator Antonius, one of the two senior interlocutors in Cicero’s dialogue De Oratore, protests against accusations that he drew on art and technique in one of his most famous performances, the defense of Manius Aquilius (2.195-6). Eloquence is an art of pleasure (one of its three canonical aims), and the pleasures it furnishes arouse the senses, from the aural delights of a well-trained voice embellishing dry argument with images and figures, to the sight of graceful gestures and elegant attire, and the sensation of being pulled, as into a drama, by emotion artfully introduced and subtly brought to a climax. Like poetry, eloquence moves and penetrates the listener. As Cicero writes: huius eloquentiae est tractare animos, huius omni modo permovere: haec modo perfringit, modo inrepit in sensus; inserit novas opiniones, evellit insitas (‘‘it is the property of this [grand style of] eloquence, to pull minds, to push them in every possible way: sometimes it shatters the senses, at other times it creeps into them; it grafts on new opinions, it tears out innate ones,’’ Orat. 97). Yet the gender ideology of elite Roman masculinity valorized bodily inviolability and impenetrability (Walters 1997). Compare the first-century ce satirist Persius’ description of the shattering effect of a contemporary poet’s recitation:
Tunc neque more probo videas nec voce serena ingentis trepidare Titos, cum carmina lumbum intrant et tremulo scalpuntur ubi intima versu.
(Persius, Saturae 1.19-21)
Then, not according to approved good custom, nor in moderate tones,
You may see the huge sons of Titus shake, when the poems penetrate their groins and itch their innermost parts with a trembling verse.
Describing the detailed techniques involved in training the memory and developing good delivery was a challenge for Roman rhetoricians because professional, paid performance itself was understood as an improper area for elite male participation (Edwards 1997a). Orators in the law court could not receive financial remuneration, according to the lex Cincia of204 bce: forensic speaking functioned instead as part of the exchange of favors that constituted the network of political amicitia, best translated in this context as ‘‘alliance’’ rather than ‘‘friendship.’’ Though certain actors (notably Cicero’s favorite, Roscius) were hailed as models for the aspiring orator, the rhetoricians are careful to emphasize the essential difference between actors, imitatores veritatis (‘‘mimes of truth’’), and orators, actores veritatis (‘‘agents of truth’’) who iiterally enact legal and political order (De Or. 3.102, 214; cf. Quint. Inst. 1.8.3, 1.11.3). Actors, musicians, and dancers held a low social status that could be equated with that of women, and prejudicially associated with femininity or effeminacy. In his discussion of delivery, the anonymous author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium observes that acuta exclamatio vocem vulnerat: eadem laedit auditorem, habet enim quiddam inliberale et ad muliebrem potius vociferationem quam ad civilem dignitatem in dicendo adcommodatum (‘‘a high-pitched outburst damages the voice: and further, it irritates the hearer, for it has something of the vulgar about it, and in oratory, is more fit for womanish screeching than the dignity of a citizen,’’ 3.22). Cicero’s De Oratore seeks to defuse the challenge by staging scenes where the interlocutors acknowledge rhetoric’s emotional power and theatrical aspects, only to insist that the good orator’s sincerity and natural sense of propriety can transform latent vice into virtuous persuasion. So, with regard to his melodramatic defense of Aquilius, Antonius claims that his act was entirely authentic: non arte...sed motu magno animi ac dolore (‘‘not by way of technique... but by way of a great passion of the mind and a feeling of indignation,’’ 2.195). The other major figure in the dialogue, Crassus, emphasizes Roman men’s natural moderation (especially as contrasted with Greeks) and compares stylized rhythms and verbal decorations to the beauties of natural phenomena like trees and stars (3.178-80). At every point the artifice of the performance is concealed, and authenticity and naturalness are made synonymous with the manly performance. The rhetorical treatise reminds readers that those who transgress the rule become exempla of vice and the object of notoriety in popular culture. Sextus Titius, for example, a tribune of the early first century bce, was supposed to have adopted such languid gestures that a dance was named after him - proof, as Cicero says, that cavendum est ne quid in agendo dicendove facias, cuius imitatio rideatur (‘‘you must guard against acting or speaking in ways that may be ridiculed,’’ Brut. 225).
Beyond the purely physical resemblance between the dramatic gestures of the orator and the actor or dancer, however, lies a more profoundly destabilizing question about the nature of masculinity itself. The human capacity to mime the attributes and appearance of another has been a target of moral anxiety throughout the western tradition (Barish 1966). The cultural tendency to construct a moral hierarchy that privileges authenticity over acting is an important aspect of the western association between femininity and theatricality, pretense, and dissembling. Femininity has been identified, in an influential psychoanalytic essay by Riviere (1927), with ‘‘masquerade,’’ and mimesis itself has been characterized as the sign of the feminine in Plato and Greek drama (Zeitlin 2002: 129-31). Within this tradition, rhetorical discourse may be seen to undermine its own quest: in its effort to inculcate the essence of manliness, rhetoric ends up constantly at war with itself. The self-knowledge and selfmastery promised by a rhetorical education emerges as an internally contradictory, highly unstable fantasy (Gunderson 2000). When Cicero advises that the good, manly orator should ‘‘be what he wishes to seem’’ (vero assequetur, ut talis videatur, qualem se videri velit, De Or. 2.176), his acknowledgement of the proximity between the rhetorical and the dramatic arts implies that masculinity, along with its assimilated values, such as sincerity, authenticity, and knowledge of the truth, are learned techniques, unnatural and artificial - the very inversion of the values masculinity is imagined to represent (Connolly 1998: 136-7).
This is the reason feminists have come to view rhetoric as a fruitful area for analysis: because it lays bare the contingent constructedness of gender difference, revealing the gap between the masculine ideal (in this case, its virtue, authenticity, and naturalness) and the social practices by which the power of men is actually realized. The rhetoricians’ careful codification of what De Lauretis (1987) calls the ‘‘technologies of gender’’ (related to Foucault’s framing, in non-gender-specific terms, of the ‘‘practices of self-care’’) show that it is precisely what cultures define as natural that tends to do the heaviest ideological work in sustaining cultural norms.
World History
