Goldhill, 'REVIEW ARTICLE: Sophistry, Rhetoric, History', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9506
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9506-goldhill-review
@@@@95.6.19, REVIEW ARTICLE: Sophistry, Rhetoric, History
George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. xii, 301.
$55.00. ISBN 0-691-03443-5. Pbk. $17.95. ISBN 0-691-00059-X.
G.W. Bowersock, Fiction as History: Nero to Julian.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Pp. xiv, 181. $.
ISBN 0-520-08824-7.
Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in
Ancient Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pp.
xxxii, 193. $29.95. ISBN 0-691-04800-2.
John Poulakos, Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994. Pp. 290.
$39.95. ISBN 0-87249-899-9.
Reviewed by Simon Goldhill -- King's College, Cambridge
After many years as a Romantic ruin, rhetoric has once again
become established as a fundamental element in the exploration of
Greek and Roman culture. The study of ancient rhetoric and, in
particular, the sophistic rhetoric of the classical polis and of
the Second Sophistic has made a remarkable recovery in the last
few years, during which there have been a string of important
studies which have re-established the ancient discussions of the
workings of language--and the ancient displays of words in action
-- at the very heart of Greek and Roman society, where so many
ancient writers placed them. In part, this is a product of what
Richard Rorty called the twentieth-century's 'linguistic turn'.
Recent heirs of Nietzsche, most notably Paul de Man and Jacques
Derrida, not only have made the nature of language itself the key
question of their writing, but also have turned back to ancient
rhetorical formulations and texts for their working materials.
Roland Barthes, whose most famous studies analyze Balzac and
Greta Garbo's face, taught a lengthy course on ancient rhetoric,
and published its prospectus. This modern interest has had a slow
but steady influence even among classicists. In separate areas of
expertise, the turn to language itself has produced remarkable
critical steps. Jean-Pierre Vemant's discussion of tragedy as a
genre dedicated to exploring the 'tensions and ambiguities' in
civic language has been perhaps the most influential of post-war
critical developments in ancient theatrical criticism. More
recently, Josh Ober's Mass and Elite has become in a very
short time a paradigm for treating the performance of oratory in
Athenian institutions as a fundamental exercise in the formation
and negotiation of civic identity. Nicole Loraux's L'Invention
d'Athenes (translated as The Invention of Athens)
brilliantly investigates an institution and genre of epideictic
oratory, the Funeral Oration, and shows why and how this was an
integral part of Athenian self-projection. The opposition of
philosophy and rhetoric has been subject to exhaustive critique,
and permanently central works like Plato's Phaedrus have
been anatomized with increasing sophistication (e.g. G. Ferrari
Listening to the Cicadas) and the more marginal, the
Rhetoric itself, for example, returned to the centre stage
(e.g. Essays on Aristotle's Rhetoric ed D. Furley and A.
Nehemas). There are a host of recent books looking at the history
of rhetoric that go far beyond the recapitulation of formalistic
models for the production of speeches: I mention exempli
gratia only what is on my desk at the moment of writing this
review: J. Swearingen Rhetoric and Irony; S. Jarratt
Rereading the Sophists; B. Vickers In Defence of
Rhetoric; T. Poulakos (ed.) Rethinking the History of
Rhetoric; T. Cole The Origins of Rhetoric; and the
several new or increasingly influential journals (Rhetorica:
Philosophy and Rhetoric; PRE/TEXT; Rhetoric Review [and so
forth]). Even Christians have joined in with e.g. P. Brown
Power and Persuasion. The field has indeed grown so
rapidly that to be a Professor of Rhetoric once again can mean a
lot more than director of Freshman Writing Programs. Rhetoric, it
seems, is back.
The four books under review here show very different
responses to this sea-change. They range from work heavily
influenced by the Nietzschean heritage to a style and content
familiar to generations of classical scholars; from the
articulation of tropes to the study of the face. Together they
testify to a field undergoing rapid change, and to the excitement
and retrenchments that mark such change.
One author referred to by all the works cited above is
George Kennedy. His three volumes The Art of Persuasion in
Greece, The Art of Rhetoric in Ancient Rome and Greek
Rhetoric under Christian Emperors are extremely well known.
They each summarize in clear and intelligent formulations the
major ideas of central figures from the ancient world who write
about rhetoric, and look briefly at some examples of rhetoric in
action especially in the law-court and Assembly or Senate or
Imperial Court (rhetoric's influence on other forms of writing,
and other writings' influence on rhetoric is scarcely treated
despite the first volume opening with Homer and tragedy). The
panoptic vision, the reliable accounts, and deeply conservative
view of what constitutes rhetoric and rhetorical theory have
justly made these books standard for classicists and other
disciplines. Kennedy's A New History. of Classical
Rhetoric, therefore, raises fascinating prospects with the
bold adjective 'new'. How 'new'? In one sense, at least,
especially with regard to the rapidly changing field, this volume
is very far from 'new', since it offers an abridged compilation
of the three already published volumes. Often with the same
chapter headings, and with similar discussions (especially in the
later sections), there is a sense of a boat sailing serenely on
in the well-charted waters of classical appreciation of rhetoric.
Needless to say, many of the qualities admired in the three
volumes are transferred elegantly to the briefer format. There
are few scholars who could construct such a compilation--a
project which in itself recalls so many ancient anthologies and
repetitions of rhetorical precepts from generation to generation.
The briefer scope does have a definitely cramping effect,
however. There is no room for much extended reading of any text;
often the reader is advised by a footnote to consult the earlier
volume; and there is a distinct sense of unease in the author's
own rhetoric, as he is forced to apologize, for example, for
trying to treat the corpus of Libanius--his extant 51
declamations, 96 progymnasmata, 64 orations, 1600 letters, and
the collection of hypotheses to Demosthenes--in just under three
pages. A lot of the scholarly apparatus has been removed, which
is perhaps justified in such a general introduction, but the
entries in reduced form become too close to encyclopaedia
articles. There is little sense of an overall history, and no
engaging narrative. It is rather a roll-call. A run through of
greatest names. So we get 15 pages on Demosthenes, Lysias and
Aeschines, with some of the good points readers will remember
from The Art of Persuasion in Ancient Greece; but
insufficient framework to help the student understand where and
why such speeches were being delivered, what was at stake in
being an orator in Athens, what the power games and social
manoeuvres were. This makes for very dry reading indeed, and I
imagine few students or scholars would want to sit down and read
this cover to cover. It is a starting point, to be used with
care. Useful as a book for a library, but unlikely to turn any
student towards the institutions and practices of rhetoric with
excitement and relish.
Yet there is one further and important sense in which this
is a new history. For the first section of the book which
rewrites The Art of Persuasion in Ancient Greece, is
indeed a new history, considerably redrafted and rethought in
interesting ways. Now Kennedy offers the term 'metarhetoric' to
express the object of his study--that is, the explicitly didactic
and explanatory material about formal speech making. He feels
forced to make this change because 'there is no such thing as
nonrhetorical discourse' (a conclusion he attributes to
'linguistic, philosophical and critical studies in the twentieth
century'). Indeed, 'epideictic rhetoric is best regarded', he
writes, 'as any discourse that does not aim at a specific action
but is intended to influence the values and beliefs of the
audience'. So broad a definition of one of the three basic
elements of 'metarhetoric' allows no discourse to escape the
'metarhetorical' net, and threatens to collapse the distinction
Kennedy started from. This new, theoretically charged, opening is
regrettably not followed through, although the sections on Greek
rhetoric from the fifth and fourth centuries are largely
redrafted. A new methodological sophistication is hinted at, but
scarcely developed. The remainder of the book follows largely the
well-trodden path of accounting for technai and
philosophical oppositions to rhetoric. The fear of stepping
outside these boundaries is palpable. There is not even a place
for Isocrates' telling arguments that training and rules may help
hone a speaker, but could never replace native wit and
experience: rhetoric is not, he argues, to be treated 'by analogy
(paradeigma) as an art with hard and fast rules
(tetagmenen tekhnen)' [Against the Sophists 12].
One wonders what a history of rhetoric would look like that
seriously developed the worry that all language was rhetorical,
and looked at e.g. the rhetoric of rhetoric manuals, or at the
rhetoric of modern writers about rhetoric, or, say, at the novel
in the Second Sophistic as much as the handbook, the Gospels as
well as St. Augustine.
The jacket offers the book as a 'comprehensive history of
classical rhetoric, one that is sure to become a standard of its
time' and as a 'broad and engaging history'. Caveat
emptor. The volume has much of use in it, and many signs of
the honed judgement of someone so steeped in the tradition of
ancient writing on rhetoric, but, regrettably, it cannot match up
to such a billing. Because of the rewriting of The Art of
Persuasion in Ancient Greece, the New History will
take its place on the shelves next to the three volume history,
but 1 expect it will still be those three volumes which will be
the first port of call for most scholars and students.
Glen Bowersock, like George Kennedy, has been toiling for
many years with immense distinction in a field which has suddenly
caught fire and become as trendy as trendy can be. His Greek
Sophists in the Roman Empire of 1969 is a standard and
pathbreaking study, and, in a string of articles and more recent
books such as Hellenism in Late Antiquity, he has shown a
mastery of the complex sources of late antiquity, and a gift for
compelling narratives within the period. Fiction as
History, as its title suggests, marks a departure. It does
not engage in the rhetoric-led analysis of historiography
pioneered by Hayden White; nor does it opt for the engaging, if
intellectually superficial, attractions of Simon Schama's
story-telling history in Dead Certainties (first published
in Granta). Rather, he wants to use the fictions of the
second sophistic to explore its cultural history, and in
particular to make the startling claim that the novels and other
writing less often treated by historians from the period are
influenced by the growth of Christianity in very particular ways.
The book consists of six short chapters which were delivered as
the Sather lectures in 1991, annotated with notes and appendices.
The book is very slim (the text itself is well under 150 pages of
large print), each chapter has clear signs of its lecture origin
in being a snap shot of an area rather than a fully worked out
and developed thesis, and the content and tone of the whole,
which barely constructs a continuous argument, especially in
contrast with Bowersock's earlier work, smack of a holiday in
California. It is simply much harder to use fiction for cultural
history than Bowersock allows.
The first chapter looks at the types of fiction circulated
in the Empire, and finds four major types: 'fantastic tales,
Homeric revisionism, tragic or romantic novels, and comic or
satiric novels' (categories which can, of course, overlap). The
argument is that this explosion of fiction is quite new, and that
a new relation is being forged between truth, lying and writing.
A surprising hero emerges in the figure of Ptolemaeus Chennus,
Ptolemy 'the Quail', who collected stories of the quaint, bizarre
and miraculous (who has been one of my favourites ever since I
discovered he wrote that Odysseus was called outis because
he was a big-ears (otis), something not picked up by the
many psychoanalytical writers on the Cyclops episode). The agenda
to this account is that the stories of the miraculous that are
integral to the growth of Christianity emerge in a particular
context, a context where miraculous fictions are part of the
lingua franca. Bowersock does not really consider the
reception of, say, Odysseus' tales over the years, or the
Platonic tradition of the noble lie (which emerges from a
contemporary discussion of 'deception' as the forthcoming work of
Jonathan Hesk demonstrates), or Aristophanic fantasy; but his
central point that Christian narratives emerge in a culture which
privileges certain types of narrative, is a good starting point
for further work.
The second chapter, entitled 'Other People, Other Places'
looks at the interest in the bizarre--the other--in Empire
writing, and notes the strong interest in the fantastic which he
sets against the perception of a unified paidea of the
educated classes. Despite this excellent framework as a starting
point, this is the least successful chapter, which barely
scratches the surface of a huge topic. Lucian, we are told,
completely rejects 'the Hellenic standard' in his Toxaris
because the 'Greek Mnesippus in the end accepts the idea that the
Scythians have a culture just as advanced and civilized as the
Greek'. Here and elsewhere the drastic oversimplification of
fiction, especially Lucian's fictions, debilitates the argument.
Lucian's multiple personae and his ironies are ignored; the
engagement with a fictional Greek expressing ideas in a dialogue
is reduced to a simple didactic message; the positioning of the
foreigner within a culture as commentator on the culture is left
unanalyzed. Consider a text that Bowersock fails to mention, the
de dea Syria. Here, Lucian, himself from Syria, writes in
the language and style of Herodotus on a Syrian deity, but
introduces the narrator, in the first person, as a Syrian, but
refuses to name the narrator. Unlike the Herodotean (self-)
definition of Hellenismus through his trips around the
other (as Hartog and Gould would put it), Lucian writes as an
insider, a Syrian, commenting for the educated Greek reader, as
if he were an outsider. In the Empire all are insiders, but some
are more insiders than others, and Lucian negotiates a complex
self-positioning. What is more, it is crucial that Herodotus
begins his history with his name and provenance: the de dea
Syria refuses to name its narrator, and, indeed, ends by
saying you can find his name ritually inscribed in the shrine of
the goddess, but again doesn't tell us what it is. Lucian is
playing with the identity of the historian as commentator. So we
find a whole series of plays with the narrative voice of Lucian,
and with what Bracht Branham calls the 'serio-comic'--a writing
style that constantly plays with its own claim to seriousness,
and makes its own jokes serious. This writing cannot be processed
so transparently into an 'absorption...in alien customs'. There
may indeed be 'new standards of otherness' emerging in this
period, and a new sense of the Hellenic standard, but it will
need a far more careful and far-reaching study to trace such
developments adequately.
The third chapter looks at Dio's reading of Philoctetes--the
three versions by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides--and traces
how different writers responses to suffering are articulated. Is
it proper for Philoctetes to be represented as broken and
screaming with pain? This leads to the claim that 'Philoctetes
provides a polytheistic mirror for the Christian passion'. The
argument is provocative, but contains the excellent point that
responses to ancient tragedy, works of art, and the Gospel
and martyr narratives depend on a complex discourse of
self-control and physicality--the rhetoric of pain. It remains a
provocative point here, true to the lecture style. A similar
strategy is seen in chapter 5 which looks at stories of
resurrection from Protesilaus to Jesus and sees an influence of
the Gospel stories in the prevalence of Scheintod
narratives in the novels. So 'an unmistakable echo' of the
Gospels is found in Lucian's Peregrinus when the narrator
is told of Peregrinus' resurrection by an old man 'garbed in
white and crowned with olive', since in Mark, Mary Magdalen finds
a young man dressed in white in the tomb of Jesus. This is rather
strained. The leuke stole of what is probably an angel in
a tomb with its associations of death might possibly have some
connection with an old-man's festive garb, leuke esthes,
(and note the garland) at a feast at the Olympic games, but when
there are so many reasons and times for dressing in white robes,
to call this 'an unmistakable echo' is desperate. There are many
tales of apparent death in the fiction of the Empire (as there
are many tellings of Iphigeneia's apparent sacrifice in an
earlier time): but there are many elements beyond a 'reflection
of the remarkable stories that were coming out of Palestine' that
should be part of an account of this narrative strategy. And what
does 'reflection' really mean in that sentence? That the
Scheintod story in, say, Plutarch's Amatorius or in
Chariton is a 'reflection' of the Gospels?
The fourth chapter is on dreams, and takes Foucault and
Winkler to task for misrepresenting Artemidorus as a guide to
everyday concerns (he calls it 'one of the most serious, if
well-intentioned, misrepresentations of antiquity that the modern
world has yet beheld'). For Bowersock, Artemidorus is an
exception, not a paradigm, and he takes the regular use of dreams
in the novel to indicate a very different sense of how dreams
function. Not only is there quite insufficient analysis of the
generic and sociological differences involved in such a
comparison, but also the reading of many of the dreams in the
novels is perverse. In Achilles Tatius, Pantheia dreams,
according to Bowersock, that her daughter is sliced in two,
which, he says, 'since the daughter survives...could hardly be
called predictive'. Bowersock quite ignores that the bandit
actually inserts a sword into the girl's vagina, and the dream
happens at the very moment her lover is about to have sex with
her in the next room, and the mother's scream prevents the
penetration violently imaged in the dream. It is typical of
Achilles Tatius to play with the idea of prediction and with the
imagery of violence to the female body. To say the dream is not
predictive (as Artemidorus would have it) because the girl is not
killed simply misses all the jokes. If this is how historians are
going to read fiction it will make for very unsatisfying cultural
history.
The final chapter looks at the imagery of cannibalism in the
Eucharist and tries to find a context for this very 'new'
testament. Again, the material is provocative, but mired with
bizarre judgements (in 'Achilles Tatius' novel...parody is an
element hard to find'). It is a pity that Heliodorus, the
novelist who appears to 'be the latest and to have the most
strongly 'religious' narrative does not receive more attention
and a stronger contrast with the earlier novels (which might test
the claims of development); it is a pity that Daphnis and
Chloe and almost all poetry gets no mention; it is a pity
that the history starts with the Empire: Hellenistic wonder tales
and collections of stories; Xenophon's prose; the Exagoge
of Ezekiel (with its evidence of Alexandrian Jewish adoption of
early literary forms): all have contributions to make to the
history of fiction (and the fiction of history). In this book,
Bowersock has emphasized the need for two very important issues
to be set firmly on the agenda: the interplay of cultural
traditions in the Empire, especially around the growth of
Christianity, and the role of fiction for understanding the
culture of the past as a culture. It is to be hoped his book will
lead to more and to more developed attempts to explore these
fascinating problems.
Maud Gleason's Making Men straddles the same period
as Bowersock, but not only looks at quite different texts, but
also utilizes quite different methodological concerns and
sensitivities. This book focuses on the interrelations of gender
definition and rhetorical practice in the Second Sophistic, as
mediated through rhetorical treatises and biographies, with a
specific interest in physiognomics, and, most excitingly to me at
least, voice training. It too is a slim volume, elegantly
written, with a host of interesting examples, and in the chapters
on speaking exercises it opens an area that, to my knowledge, has
scarcely been treated in English, even in technical works on
rhetoric, and certainly not with the sophistication and flair
that Gleason brings to the subject. It shows up with stunning
clarity issues wholly ignored by Kennedy's history, and the
constitutive and damaging partiality that grounds his claim to
comprehensiveness.
There are six chapters: the first and last are concerned
with the life, or more correctly, with the biographical fictions,
of the first-century public-speaker and super-star Favorinus. As
a 'Gaul who spoke Greek, a eunuch prosecuted for adultery, and a
man who quarreled with the emperor and was still alive', to quote
Philostratus' account of his own paradoxical self-description,
Favorinus was a bizarre figure, good--or hard--to think with. He
flaunted his own precarious position within gender, class, and
racial categories, and this very flaunting means that the
descriptions of Favorinus both by himself and by others are
extremely revealing of the categories he puts under such strain.
The first chapter is concerned with his 'Corinthian
Oration', a speech preserved under the name of Dio Chrysostom
([Dio] 37), in which Favorinus attacks the Corinthians for having
taken down a statue of himself they had previously dedicated in
his honour. Gleason sets this speech next to Plutarch's near
contemporary advice in 'On Inoffensive Self-praise' to explore
how self-promotion and self-expression--'self-fashioning', as
Greenblatt influentially has put it--are the aims of rhetoric in
process. This is an essential claim of the book: Gleason wants to
move the study of rhetoric away from the cataloguing of rules,
away from the Romantic or Marxist accusations of rhetoric as
falseness or false consciousness, away from the slough of
denigration into which the heyday of German Altertumswissenschaft
cast it, towards a recognition of rhetoric's essential place as a
cultural process that policed not merely gender definition--how
to be a real man--but also the claims of paideia,
Graecitas, Romanitas, and the power games of
status. In short, rhetoric as the fashioning of the self. Indeed,
the vast collections of Roman rhetorical exercises are seen
almost as playing the roles of 'myth' in earlier Greek culture,
in that they provide the source of a culture's telling stories, a
space for the exercise of a culture's imagination, and a central
site for the parade of non-native messaging. (Gleason does not go
far enough in exploring this line of argument, developed by Mary
Beard in Colloquium Rauricum 3, Mythos in mythenloser
Gesellschaft, ed. F. Graf (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1993).)
This central claim runs throughout the book and in its general
form it marks a considerable development over a great deal of
more traditional writing on rhetoric. Classics has been painfully
slow to recognize, let alone account for or criticize, the
immense influence of Romantic thought on the development of the
discipline (for all the easy opposition of Romanticism to
Classicism elsewhere), and this is nowhere more evident than in
the study of rhetoric. It is still commonplace to see the
dismissal of ancient remarks or whole speeches as 'mere
rhetoric'; and to find scholars who think that the recognition of
a topos is the end of the critic's task; and to see
analyses that have no sense of rhetoric as a performative process
integral to civic life. Gleason's analysis sets out its stall
against such approaches, and firmly and explicitly places itself
under a modernist flag, citing Bourdieu, Goffman, Greenblatt,
Herzfeld, and her much lamented predecessor at Stanford, Jack
Winkler, as major influences. As such names would suggest,
Gleason brings a largely anthropological or sociological
perspective to bear--rhetoric as social process--and it is a most
profitable view, from which many classicists will learn.
Quintilian famously endorses the definition of an orator as 'vir
bonus et dicendi peritus'. Gleason reminds us that in the spheres
of rhetorical practice above all, the category 'vir bonus' is
inevitably and fiercely contested.
For all that her general position is powerfully and
persuasively articulated, the first chapter leaves several areas
insufficiently investigated. Gleason wants--quite rightly--to
offer an account that situates her texts as paradigms of
second-sophistic culture. Hence her readiness with parallels from
Plutarch, Lucian and other Greek and Roman writers of the period.
Yet there is scarcely any reference either to the classical
period to which the Second Sophistic plays continual homage or to
contemporary material beyond the restricted areas of rhetorical
training and commentary. In Isocrates, for example, over four
hundred years earlier there is a remarkable rhetorical paradigm
of self-fashioning through fictions as well as a developed theory
and exposition of paideia. (She could not have read Yun
Lee Too's very fine, just published study of Isocrates, The
Rhetoric of Identity in Isocrates: Text, Power, Pedagogy
(Cambridge, 1995).) It is in Isocrates' Antidosis after
all that we have the most developed example of Plutarch's advice
on how to praise oneself by imagining an attack and defending
oneself against it. The way in which Plutarch et al. are
responding to the inherited models of self-presentation is a
basic factor in their writing: e.g. Plutarch's Platonicisms in
the Amatorius; Lucian's use of Heraclitus and Democritus.
Indeed, she seems to think that the Second Sophistic age was the
first to look back to the classical world with such longing: 'the
Hellenistic age did not know it was Hellenistic: it thought it
was still classical', she writes. Already in Isocrates, however,
there is a repeated harking back to the lost days of Pericles;
and in Theocritus and Callimachus and Apollonius there is a
constant strategy of what Peter Bing calls 'rupture and revival',
a sense of belatedness that informs their writing. The sense of
tradition which is so strong in the Second Sophistic needs more
careful expression. What is more, the variety of writing in the
Second Sophistic would help greatly in tracing the place of
rhetoric in an intellectual context. There is scarcely any
mention of any poetry, of the ancient novel or other contemporary
prose, or, say, of other sciences or technical philosophy or
theology, of the period. Lucian is the writer above all who
requires such a panoptic vision by his very output. But Favorinus
too would benefit from an increased contextualization.
The actual treatment of the 'Corinthian Oration' itself
suffers from this restriction of scope, and, indeed, from its
very briefness. Rather than offering an extended and detailed
reading, Gleason moves quickly to Favorinus' great rival, Polemo.
Where Favorinus flaunts his uncertain categorizations, Polemo not
merely sets himself up as 'vir bonus', but also, in his claim to
physiognomic expertise, takes the position of judge and jury
concerning the 'manliness' of others. Chapter two introduces
Polemo and his writing on physiognomics and rhetoric; chapter
three focuses on the ability of physiognomics to offer a semiotic
system to regulate the claims of manhood. Some of this material
is familiar from Gleason's chapter in Before Sexuality
(edd. D. Halperin, J. Winkler, F. Zeitlin), but it is a more
extended discussion that benefits greatly from the sense of
conflict between Polemo and Favorinus. Gleason develops well the
sense that the public face of the citizen was being constantly
scrutinized, attacked, defined and challenged. ('Face to face'
society here has strongly violent and contestatory overtones.)
She points out how Polemo attempts to defend himself against the
pervasive threats of unmasking by his own rhetorical stance of
unchallengable and aggressive authority; and how the signs of
masculinity constantly slip and slide in the agonistic world of
gender identity. Difficulties similar to those in the first
chapter are well shown up, however, by contrasting Gleason's
discussion with Tamsyn Barton's Power and Knowledge:
Astrology, Physiognomics and Medicine under the Roman Empire
(Michigan, 1994). Barton places physiognomics in a context of
sophia framed by astrology and medicine, a
contextualization that greatly helps in understanding the
practice as a techne. Both Barton and Gleason refer to the
pseudo-Aristotelian treatise on physiognomics, but Barton has a
more developed treatment of how its logic and practice is related
not merely to a range of philosophical concerns, but also, and
most importantly, to ancient Greek ideas of 'likeness': the
stylistic figure of 'imago' gives precision and nuance to the
link between rhetoric and physiognomics. Barton is more concerned
to link ancient and modern discussions of physiognomics. Gleason
(whom Barton follows and acknowledges) is more interested in, and
treats with skill, physiognomic deception and the relations of
physiognomics to askesis, the training of the sell put on
the agenda by Foucault. Barton provides an excellent complement
to Gleason, and together they show the richness of this material
for the analysis of second sophistic culture. If Gleason is more
elegantly and wittily phrased, Barton's depth of reference to
technical writing in the ancient and modern world offers a far
more nuanced frame for the physiognomic texts to be discussed.
The finest chapters of Gleason and the most novel are the
two chapters on voice training and virility. She shows how there
is an extensive debate about the proper sorts of training for the
voice and how this training is an integral part of ancient ideas
about exercise and becoming a man. Where Plutarch can recommend
voice exercise as the perfect form of training for a gentleman,
Cicero, in a blast of Romanitas, despises it as an actor's
craft. Nicest of all, the younger Seneca recommends riding in a
litter so that the body can be jiggled up and down but so that
you can still read--and academic's anti-aerobics of the voice.
Here, Gleason uncovers a set of ancient prescriptions, sets them
persuasively in a context, and uses her anthropological concerns
to brilliant effect in uncovering a cultural nexus that has been
scarcely treated (though the article of Rousselle 'Parole et
inspiration' in History and Philosophy of the Life
Sciences 5.2 (1983) is an important precursor and complement
in its interest in the medical writers' treatment of the
physiology of voice production). The overlapping concerns of the
body, training, and intellectual activity are here fascinatingly
revealed.
The final chapter refers us back to Favorinus, as seen by
his enemies and friends, notably Aulus Gellius. Now Gleason
expresses her belief that one should not expect a conclusive
picture of a historical individual called Favorinus to emerge
from the contrasting images of him, but rather that 'it is naive
to ask the real Favorinus to stand up', and that we are always
'inside the world of the text'. While this is perhaps an
inevitable conclusion of the analysis of rhetorical
self-fashioning, the arguments for it are somewhat too briefly
explored. In earlier chapters, we are repeatedly offered details
and anecdotes from biographies of sophists without any
consideration of their textual status--of the fact that these
anecdotes are already processed through the machine of ancient
biographical fiction. We are told, for example, that the
well-known story of Cleanthes' discovering that a hairy macho man
is really a cinaedus by his sudden sneeze, is a 'vignette
of a physiognomist in action', which reveals the essence of
physiognomic practice--rather than the common narrative pattern
of sophia vindicated. We learn from Philostratus and
Polemo that Favorinus' voice was shrill and woman-like: this is
offered as a central characteristic of the 'real Favorinus'
throughout the book, without any great discussion of the role of
insult and invective in ancient biographical fiction (and without
a note of Isocrates' self-confessed 'weak voice' as a precursor).
This leads to a crucial problem in the conclusion. If masculinity
was so prized and policed, asks Gleason, why did so many dare to
adopt 'the "effeminate" style'? Her answer, tentative and
scarcely argued for, is that 'there was something manly, after
all, about taking risks', even with one's masculinity. This seems
to me not to take adequate account of the rhetorical dismissal of
femininity, and the role of such invective in the agonistic world
of rhetorical contestation. (Even Favorinus, the limit case,
proclaimed his masculinity in the prided prosecution for
adultery.) For all the accusations of 'effeminate style' and the
regret that such a style won over audiences, it is others
who use the 'effeminate style', and for Gleason to ask 'why this
more androgynous style of self-presentation was so effective with
audiences' runs the risk of ignoring the way in which orators
regularly accuse the audience it cannot persuade of corruption.
Of a slide away from 'real manliness'. Of susceptability to
others' femininity.
Gleason's book makes a real contribution to the study of the
second sophistic: it is constantly enjoyable to read, it offers
new and potent insights, and opens up avenues for much further
work. Above all, it takes rhetoric seriously as a process of
self-fashioning, which will inevitably raise questions of the
sell of gender, of how the normative forces of society function.
John Poulakos, a professor of rhetoric at the University of
Pittsburgh, also aims to take rhetoric seriously, and he aims
first to set what he calls 'sophistic rhetoric'--the first
sophistic--in a cultural and historical context, and, secondly,
to explore the reception of this rhetoric by three exemplary
non-sophists, Plato, Isocrates and Aristotle. Their different
controlling responses to the freedoms of sophistic rhetoric head
Poulakos' vision of intellectuals throughout history constantly
attempting to remove the threat of sophistry's oppositional and
paradoxical tactics, the sophists' sheer joy in the playfulness
of language. Despite the recommendations from distinguished
classicists on the jacket--itself a form awaiting rhetorical
analysis--most classicists will be put off by the extremely naive
social and intellectual history that informs this project, and by
the huge gaps in exposition that undercut much of the argument. A
book that claims to offer a history of the reception of rhetoric
in the classical polis and fails even to mention Demosthenes,
Aeschines, Isaeus et al.--rhetoric in practice--is
unlikely to be able to nuance Aristotle's Rhetoric, say,
as a cultural product with much persuasion.
Poulakos' first chapter aims to investigate 'the
circumstances' of the sophists. For Poulakos, the sophists are a
recognisable group, a movement, which develops a distinctive
rhetoric (and theory to go with it), which can be opposed to
philosophy. When Plato calls someone a sophist, that person is
for Poulakos a sophist, it seems (and Socrates, most certainly,
is not). These sophists are defined by Poulakos as 'nomads' (in
Deleuze's sense of the term) and 'bricoleurs' (in de Certeau's
sense of the term), by which he means that they are culturally
marginal figures in terms of the power structures of society, and
that they adapt and adopt their tactics opportunistically to the
social and cultural positions in which they operate as marginals.
All sophists taught rhetoric, he claims, and not only did they
make rhetoric available thus to all for pleasure and profit, but
this importantly serviced a rising middle class. Their rhetoric
of opposition--both the 'two sides' of the dissoi logoi
and the eristics and paradoxes of aggressive challenge--is to be
seen as part of the agonistic structures of Greek society, just
as the love of epideixis fits into Athenian commitment to
spectacle as social event.
Poulakos develops each of these claims further than my bare
summary allows, but each seems to me to need considerable
qualification even as starting points for discussion. It is, in
my view, quite misleading to think of sophists as a 'movement',
especially one specifically linked to a shared teaching of
rhetoric. Doctors, city planners, artists, politicians, competed
for the title of sophos in the polis, and as G.E.R.
Lloyd's Revolutions of Wisdom has shown in great detail,
the development of many technai, including rhetoric and
philosophy, depends on a competitive and aggressive culture of
claim and counter-claim about what is true sophia and what
is to be denigrated as 'mere sophistry' (and its many denigatory
synonyms). (Lloyd's book is one of many absolutely central texts
apparently unknown to Poulakos, both primary and secondary
sources. From Moses Finley to Josiah Ober, almost all the most
important contemporary works on the function and practice of
rhetoric and politics in the polis are simply ignored.) The
argumentative strategies that are used to distinguish 'sophistic
rhetoric' are found throughout the writing of the fifth and
fourth centuries. The idea that, say, an argument of possibility
is something specifically 'sophistic' as opposed to one of the
commonest turns from the middle of the fifth-century on, evident
in medicine, history, tragedy, Plato, Demosthenes and so forth,
is simply false. Plato's definition of a sophist (especially but
not only in the Sophist is an argumentative construction,
and the fact that his Protagoras willingly confesses to
being a sophist needs much more careful analysis than Poulakos
can offer. Socrates, for all that Plato and others since have
tried to free him of such a charge, cannot easily be separated
from other intellectuals of the period simply by an appeal to
'philosophy', a term Plato develops as part of his own idiolect,
in part, of course, to try to separate himself. The discipline of
philosophy as a recognisable discipline cannot, with any
historical rigour, be read back into the fifth century. That many
sophists were wanderers from city to city is, of course, true.
But it must not be forgotten that even Gorgias, who had neither
family nor city in Isocrates' portrait, came to Athens as an
ambassador for Leontini; and sophists were chosen as law-givers
and city planners for new cities--scarcely marginal or
opportunistic roles. Socrates himself plays with the category of
notoriety and public service--but is one of the best-known
citizens of the fame-hungry age, well enough known to be the
centre of a play of Aristophanes. Hippias, the sophist, wrote
tragedies--another central civic role. The claim that sophists
serviced a 'rising middle class' is also deeply misleading:
'citizen' is the central category of classical self-definition
and a more complex picture would be necessary to take account of
the facts that aristocrats like Callias were major patrons of
'sophists', that aristocratic writers complained of the rich but
not highborn having access to the sophists, that everyone seems
to have worried about 'the young' attending sophists, that there
were different classes of 'sophists' from market-place
epideixis-mongers to the state ambassador and tragedy
writer. What is at stake in the city of words is the politics of
paideia, that is, who has access to knowledge, and who has
access to power, the ever-present questions of democracy.
Finally, while it is true that the culture of the agon and
the spectacle is fundamental to Athens, it is immensely
dispiriting to see Poulakos base his view of the role of drama in
the city primarily on the analysis of Grote (with a nod to
Nietzsche and William Archer Butler). Once again the complete
absence of relevant contemporary bibliography shores up the
poverty of analysis. The image of a movement of like-minded
sophists serving the rising middle classes of democracy offers
more distortion than help for understanding fifth-century
culture.
That the sophists need a cultural and historical framework
as well as an intellectual one is well taken. (It has been made
by several uncited scholars.) That the agon spectacle, and
democracy are three determining points of that framework is also
true. But Poulakos' account is so flawed and unscholarly that it
provides a very shaky basis for what follows. What does follow is
four chapters. The first is on 'Terms for Sophistical Rhetoric'
which argues, again in very general form, for a set of rhetorical
strategies to distinguish sophistic rhetoric, in particular,
'opportunity', 'playfulness', 'possibility'. It is interesting
that to eikos finds no place here, nor does any technical
device, such as the appeal to etymology or to redefinition. The
one text to get a reading is the Encomium to Helen, and
here the joke of the ending is drastically underexplored (as,
incidentally, it is in Kennedy). To say that 'Gorgias does not
seem overly concerned whether his argument will ultimately unseat
the arguments of his predecessors', ignores the joke's potential
relations to the arguments about the seductive power of
logos. Playfulness can be a very serious matter (as the
history of relations between tyrants and humourists shows. What
is the rhetorical force of 'just' in 'just a joke'?). This is the
briefest chapter, and it suffers from its lack of detailed
exposition. The following three chapters, however, constitute a
more weighty contribution. Each is concerned with the reception
of 'sophistic rhetoric' by Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle. (It is
nice to see Isocrates again, who is enjoying something of a
revival. See, as well as Yun Lee Too's book, A. Ford's fine and
lengthy study in T. Poulakos ed. Rethinking the History of
Rhetoric.) Poulakos argues that Plato found sophistry morally
unruly and dangerous; that Isocrates found its eristics damaging
to his desired political unity; and that Aristotle found
sophistry theoretically inconsistent. Each of these general
points has some value (and is scarcely original). Each reading
has some good points in passing, and develops a case through a
range of texts. In each case, Poulakos tries to link the change
to a social and political change in society, which is a bold and
difficult case to make. In each chapter, as in the first, certain
gross distortions distract from the better arguments. He decides
not to try to link Plato's dismissiveness of sophists to his
other intellectual concerns (which bizarrely truncates Plato's
argumentation), and claims that 'the sophists were trounced [by
Plato] because their persuasive tactics lacked the concern for
the moral improvement of the citizens'. What is left out here is
the whole discussion of 'can virtue be taught?' that motivates so
much of intellectual argument of the time. Whatever Plato claimed
or however he thought he had 'trounced' the sophists, the
teaching of virtue, 'moral improvement', remained a hot topic on
which Plato and Platonists scarcely had a monopoly. Indeed,
accusations of not really teaching virtue and not being a real
philosopher continue to be thrown about right through the
Hellenistic period into the Second Sophistic and beyond. 'Thus
the story comes to an end', writes Poulakos after his discussion
of Aristotle. Only if you don't read on...
Poulakos has written an essayistic introduction to an
exciting range of issues. He tries to take rhetoric seriously,
and in his serious commitment to the rhetoric of the sophistic
period his aim is one I share whole-heartedly. Yet as a reader of
texts and as a writer of history, he repeatedly shows himself to
be not merely the dupe of Plato's rhetoric--a position most take
up at sometime--but also a surprisingly naive analyst of the
fundamental business of how rhetoric is part of self-promotion
and projection, the self-fashioning that Gleason is so conscious
of. The move through language to society and culture is far
harder than this book would have it. The sense of 'protocol',
'ruse', and 'strategy' that so motivate Winkler's writing (and
have made it so influential), is worryingly absent from Poulakos'
analysis. It gives a very strange and unnuanced sense of what
'rhetoric' might mean and how it might function as a social
process.
There is clearly much to be done with ancient rhetoric yet.
Gleason and Bowersock show how constrained and constraining the
history of Kennedy can be; Poulakos shows the need for the solid
control of Kennedy, but also the requirement of thinking how the
study of rhetoric involves the political definition of the
citizen through paideia. We may not soon come back to the
days in which Demosthenes and Cicero are part of every educated
citizen's paideia, but there is, as these books show, a
growing case for reconsidering why for so many centuries rhetoric
was the name for the central processes of education and becoming
a citizen.