Introducing Roman Declamation: A New Cultural and Anthropological Perspective

By Mario Lentano and William Short

Introducing Roman Declamation provides an overview of school declamation, that is, the themes on which students of the Roman rhetorical schools cut their teeth and proved their talent. Beginning in the late Republican period and throughout the entire imperial age, the rhetorical schools were an obligatory step in the curriculum of elite education.

Despite its huge importance and the sizeability of the preserved material, almost 300 themes, declamation has only in recent times received the scholarly attention it deserves, as the victim of a prejudice that was already widespread in antiquity, owing to the chasm between school themes and the real world. But in fact declamation provides a privileged lens through which to investigate the culture of the imperial age, the evolution of law, family and social relations, the relationship with literature and with contemporaneous politics. With an up-to-date bibliography, the book explores these and other aspects of Roman declamation, highlighting both long-standing conclusions of research, and points that remain debated by scholars or that still remain to be investigated.

The book is particularly intended for undergraduates who wish to become familiar with this important aspect of Latin literature, as well as for scholars of the ancient world and of Roman history, and for specialists in Roman rhetoric, to whom it presents the state of the art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Exeter Press
• Release date: Sep 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781804131022

Mario Lentano

Mario Lentano teaches Latin language and literature at the University of Siena (Italy). His research interests include comedy, declamation, the myths of Rome’s origins and family relations, especially the father-son relationship.

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INTRODUCTION

I set forth notions that are human and my own,

simply as human notions considered in themselves,

not as determined and decreed by heavenly ordinance

and permitting neither doubt nor dispute.

Michel de Montaigne

This book is intended for university students as well as scholars who may be unfamiliar with Latin declamation. By way of a brief overview, it gives the reader a reasonably precise idea of this fascinating but underappreciated aspect of ancient education. Despite renewed interest in scholastic rhetoric since the 1990s, which has finally freed the discipline of its (already ancient) ostracism from scholarship, controversiae and suasoriae remain the domain of a highly circumscribed specialist circle. Although almost three hundred complete texts have been preserved for us, they have been almost entirely marginalized in textbooks, and academic studies—though increasing yearly—are still very far from covering every aspect of the field.

The silver lining is that in research on Roman school rhetoric there is still vast area for exploration around controversial questions on which the academic community has not yet reached consensus. What is more, these questions regard not only minor aspects or cruces of a textual-critical nature (no matter how relevant these may be), but also key themes, such as the relationship between declamation and its political context(s); between academic jurisprudence and practical legislation; between formative training and effective forensic practice (towards which training was directed). There is even much debate around what meaning should be attributed to declamation, understood as a didactic practice and also as a foundational educational and cultural experience that continued throughout the imperial period to influence the aristocracy. What the ramifications of this experience might have been for the diffusion of specialized knowledge, for the creation of a common imaginary, and for the elaboration of an élite world-view, are still not easily judged.

Consequently, in this book I will often take a position on some of these questions—not only highlighting current scholarly debates on unsettled problems, but also stating explicitly which among the marshalled arguments I view as more persuasive and compelling. Bibliographic references allow the interested reader to evaluate this position in the context of other coherent or conflicting interpretations. In this respect, I want to state immediately that the bibliography at the end of the book is not meant to be exhaustive on the subject of Latin declamation. Rather, it aims to highlight some of the most important recent scholarship where it is possible to find references to earlier literature, as well as discover the names of scholars working internationally in areas of scholastic rhetoric. More comprehensive references can be found in the now abundantly available bibliographic resources that cover both declamation in general and the specific authors to whom the various texts available to us have been attributed (often only traditionally).1

Furthermore, I want to clarify that this brief introduction has been intentionally and selectively organized according to three distinct profiles. In the first place, I am interested in the declamations as texts: the concretely compiled themes that make up the major and minor anthologies of Seneca the Elder, Pseudo-Quintilian, and Calpurnius Flaccus. Dozens of declamatory argumenta are present in Quintilian’s seminal Institutio oratoria and more can be found in the massive late antique rhetorical manuals. But this body of work is usually limited to citations, notes, and possible themes for controversiae or suasoriae, often illustrating one or another type of legal case. Normally, they do not offer any extended development of arguments, providing only scattered or terse indications whose elaboration is left to the schoolmasters for whom these manuals were intended.

Second, our interest rests almost exclusively on aspects of the content of declamation. It is well known that scholastic rhetoric had its own particular style, with its series of formal solutions that exerted significant influence on literature throughout the imperial period. But such considerations rest outside this book’s scope; the reader may consult the many studies already available, beginning with the unsurpassed (though hardly empathetic) writing of Eduard Norden and continuing through the more recent work of Bé Breij and Emanuele Berti.2

A final (but particularly serious) limitation has to do with the choice to examine only Latin works. As a school practice, declamation originated in Greece and in the imperial period became a phenomenon across the entire area dominated by Rome, equally in the eastern territories and in the western Latin-speaking areas. Authors such as Libanius and, in the Byzantine period, Choricius of Gaza—to name only two—offer written themes in large number and of great interest, lending themselves to comparison with what was being produced contemporaneously in the West. Experts, arguments, and norms of the spurious declamatory jurisprudence circulated in equal measure from one end of the empire to the other, generating hybrids and reciprocal influences and justifying recourse to the idea of a koiné for referring to the phenomenon. In the period of Seneca the Elder—who preserves some material dating back, in the oldest layers, to the period of the second triumvirate—Greek and Roman rhetoricians work side by side in the same schools, participate in the same debates, and discuss the same themes. Despite this, a comparative study of Greek and Roman declamation remains, for the moment, forthcoming. The last chapter of this book, titled Greeks and Romans, broaches this question to some degree, discussing some examples and sketching out some lines of possible research, but does not exhaust it. In the rest of the book, I have preferred instead to privilege scholastic rhetoric as it developed within a specific cultural context, that of the Roman world.

Despite these limitations, I am confident my efforts have been worthwhile and that they may encourage other researchers to scrutinize a body of Roman society’s intellectual output that still has much to reveal about itself and the culture that produced and cultivated it for so long—a body of work whose importance can be inferred from, if nothing else, the fact that it contributed for centuries to the formation of the class that actively administered the empire, produced or commented on its laws, wrote its literature, and in turn educated its successors.

Mario Lentano

I wish to thank my dear friends and teachers Graziana Brescia and Maurizio Bettini for once more taking on the thankless task of reading the manuscript of this work and for having improved it by suggestions, critiques, and comments. Neither can be held responsible in any way for the inevitable mistakes a work such as this will contain; they have the merit, instead, of having reduced their number and limited their frequency. I requested the help of Emanuele Berti and Giunio Rizzelli for specific sections of the book and received precious commentary from them. I am also grateful for the help of Nicola Basile, Alfredo Casamento, Giuseppe La Bua, Jon E. Lendon, Lucia Pasetti, Alessandra Rolle, and Antonio Stramaglia in providing a bibliography. A final thanks to my colleague and friend William Michael Short for his invaluable translation.

I note that the critical editions used for the texts of the declamations are those of Lennart Håkanson for Seneca the Elder and for Calpurnius Flaccus (respectively 1989, and 1978), for the Declamationes minores that of Michael Winterbottom (1984), which I prefer to the more recent but more interventionist Shackleton Bailey (2006), and for the Declamationes maiores that of Antonio Stramaglia (2021), with the translation by Michael Winterbottom. Other translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.

1Cf. esp. Lentano (1999 and 2017a).

2Cf. Norden (1986), vol. I, 281ff.; Breij (2006a); Berti (2007).

1

DECLAMATION: A SHORT HISTORY

Cicero declaimed not what we today would call controversies, nor indeed what before his time were defined as theses: the genre in which we practice our exercises is in fact so novel that even its name is new! We speak of controversies; Cicero called them cases. To tell the truth, their other name is Greek—scholastic—but translated into Latin it ended up taking the place of the native term; the word controversy is instead much more recent, just as declamation cannot be found in any author before Cicero and Calvus. Calvus distinguished declamation from diction: he claims, in fact, to be only an elegant declaimer, but a good speaker, and believes that the first term refers properly to private exercises, the second to real trials. The name is relatively new and the associated practice has only recently come into vogue: for this reason, it is not difficult for me to know, from its very beginnings, a phenomenon that was born after me.1

This passage, which opens the anthology of declamations circulated by Seneca the Elder at the beginning of the reign of Caligula, represents the first and the most articulated ancient reconstruction of the origins of declamation. Its author was a famous equestrian who came from the Roman colony of Cordoba in Spain, where he was born around the middle of the first century bce. In his youth, he had been a student of the schools of rhetoric, a close friend of Porcius Latro—a fellow Spaniard—and of other famous teachers of the late Republican and Augustan period. Seneca frequented the world of rhetoricians for most of his very long life. He tirelessly listened to, took notes from, and sketched profiles of the most prominent teachers and students. In old age, he decided to put into writing the mass of material he had accumulated throughout his life in a work that he dedicated to his three children (among them the philosopher who would later become Nero’s teacher). The declared aim of this work was, among other things, to preserve an inheritance of oratorical talent that, owing to the circumstantial nature of its creation, risked being lost once the generation of first-hand witnesses had passed.

Seneca produced a book unique in the whole panorama of ancient literature. It is not just an anthology of over seventy years of scholastic rhetoric, overseen by an intellectual who knew that world intimately and deeply. In passages by the author, Seneca mixes in anecdotes about this or that person, scenes from the daily life of rhetoric schools, accounts of debates and attacks that proliferated in that narrow and often self-referential world, and critical profiles of the best (and also the worst) orators known to or followed by him.

Seneca thus appears to occupy an ideal observation post for reconstructing the history of a cultural phenomenon, scholastic rhetoric, that he was able to observe both from afar and up close. In reality, his work is marred by a series of imprecisions and omissions. Among the most significant is his claim that Cicero was unfamiliar with that brand of exercise later known as declamation. Seneca himself (in 1.4.7) reports a theme of controversy undertaken by the statesman from Arpinum that is entirely of a piece with the others in his anthology.2 Furthermore, Seneca is completely silent on the Greek precedents of declamation, which in the final analysis go back to Athenian sophists of the fifth century bce, at least indirectly, and to the marked rhetorical interests of the Peripatetic School.3 And yet, even with such undeniable mistakes in his reconstruction, Seneca was not wrong to consider declamation born after him.

In the Roman world, teachers of rhetoric—mostly Greeks—were active from the first half of the second century bce. As proof, there is an act of the Senate of 161 bce empowering the praetor to banish rhetoricians and philosophers from Rome.4 This appeared in the context of the lively cultural battle of those decades, when the mass infiltration of Greek culture into Rome as a result of the recent eastern conquests provoked the reaction of an aristocracy that was anxious about contact with an intellectually unscrupulous and corrosive tradition of thought, infinitely more advanced than Rome’s—and because of this was rejected by those who saw in it a possible threat to Rome’s traditional morals and to the power structures supported by those morals.

The same hostile attitude can be observed in the edict of 92 bce in which the censors Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus and Lucius Licinius Crassus expressed their disapproval of the school of the so-called Latin rhetoricians, active in Rome at the time and where, for the first time, the teaching of rhetoric was imparted in Latin. In the text of the act (known to us through Suetonius), the censors fulminated against this entirely new kind of school, in which young Roman men—this is what occurs to the two authoritative magistrates—passed their time in leisure. They conclude that Our ancestors established once and for all what they wanted their sons to learn and that we do not like this novelty, which goes against tradition.

It is not hard to imagine what lies behind these repressive efforts. At the beginning of the first century bce, rhetorical training involved long and costly stays in the capitals of the Hellenistic East, where famous teachers imparted their lessons, in Greek, to the offspring of an élite scattered to the four corners of the Mediterranean. This curriculum, already strongly selective in itself, was associated at home with the so-called apprenticeship of the Forum (tirocinium fori), the custom by which young men attached themselves to established orators to learn their trade, meant to provide future members of the governing aristocracy with a moral as well as professional education. In both cases, access to forensic activity and the acquisition of knowledge necessary for launching a political career had a markedly censorial character. In particular, this apprenticeship allowed the ruling class to choose its successors, exercising a critical role in the co-optation of new members of the élite. In this context, we can understand why the efforts of the Latin