Sean Alexander Gurd
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199837519
- eISBN:
- 9780199919505
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199837519.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Prose and Writers: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This book offers an in-depth study of the role of literary revision in the compositional practices and strategies of self-representation among Roman authors at the end of the republic and the ...
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This book offers an in-depth study of the role of literary revision in the compositional practices and strategies of self-representation among Roman authors at the end of the republic and the beginning of the principate. It focuses on Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, Martial, and Pliny the Younger, but also offers discussions of earlier Greek material, including Isocrates, Plato, and Hellenistic poetry. The book argues that revision made textuality into a medium of social exchange. Revisions were not always made by authors working alone; often, they were the result of conversations between an author and friends or literary contacts, and these conversations exemplified a commitment to collective debate and active collaboration. Revision was thus much more than an unavoidable element in literary genesis: it was one way in which authorship became a form of social agency. Consequently, when we think about revision for authors of the late republic and early empire we should not think solely of painstaking attendance to craft aimed exclusively at the perfection of a literary work. Nor should we think of the resulting texts as closed and invariant statements sent from an author to his reader. So long as an author was still willing to revise, his text served as a temporary platform around and in which a community came into being. Much more was at stake than the text itself: like all communities, such textual communities were subject to imbalances and differentiation in taste, ideology, capability and willingness to participate, and above all power, the ability to propose and enforce a specific set of textual choices.Less
This book offers an in-depth study of the role of literary revision in the compositional practices and strategies of self-representation among Roman authors at the end of the republic and the beginning of the principate. It focuses on Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, Martial, and Pliny the Younger, but also offers discussions of earlier Greek material, including Isocrates, Plato, and Hellenistic poetry. The book argues that revision made textuality into a medium of social exchange. Revisions were not always made by authors working alone; often, they were the result of conversations between an author and friends or literary contacts, and these conversations exemplified a commitment to collective debate and active collaboration. Revision was thus much more than an unavoidable element in literary genesis: it was one way in which authorship became a form of social agency. Consequently, when we think about revision for authors of the late republic and early empire we should not think solely of painstaking attendance to craft aimed exclusively at the perfection of a literary work. Nor should we think of the resulting texts as closed and invariant statements sent from an author to his reader. So long as an author was still willing to revise, his text served as a temporary platform around and in which a community came into being. Much more was at stake than the text itself: like all communities, such textual communities were subject to imbalances and differentiation in taste, ideology, capability and willingness to participate, and above all power, the ability to propose and enforce a specific set of textual choices.
William A. Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195176407
- eISBN:
- 9780199775545
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195176407.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, European History: BCE to 500CE
Readers and Reading Culture in the High Empire examines the system and culture of reading among the elite in second-century Rome. The focus is on deep sociocultural contextualization for ...
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Readers and Reading Culture in the High Empire examines the system and culture of reading among the elite in second-century Rome. The focus is on deep sociocultural contextualization for reading events within specific communities, and thus the investigation proceeds in case-study fashion using the principal surviving witnesses. Explored are the communities of Pliny and Tacitus (with a look at Pliny’s teacher, Quintilian) from the time of the emperor Trajan; and from the time of the Antonines, the medical community around Galen, the philological community around Gellius and Fronto (with a look at the curious reading habits of Fronto’s pupil Marcus Aurelius), and the intellectual communities lampooned by the satirist Lucian. Along the way, evidence from the papyri is deployed to help to understand better and more concretely both the mechanics of reading, and the social interactions that surrounded the ancient book. The result is cultural history deeply written, of individual reading communities that differentiate themselves in interesting ways even while in aggregate showing a coherent reading culture with fascinating similarities and contrasts to the reading culture of today.Less
Readers and Reading Culture in the High Empire examines the system and culture of reading among the elite in second-century Rome. The focus is on deep sociocultural contextualization for reading events within specific communities, and thus the investigation proceeds in case-study fashion using the principal surviving witnesses. Explored are the communities of Pliny and Tacitus (with a look at Pliny’s teacher, Quintilian) from the time of the emperor Trajan; and from the time of the Antonines, the medical community around Galen, the philological community around Gellius and Fronto (with a look at the curious reading habits of Fronto’s pupil Marcus Aurelius), and the intellectual communities lampooned by the satirist Lucian. Along the way, evidence from the papyri is deployed to help to understand better and more concretely both the mechanics of reading, and the social interactions that surrounded the ancient book. The result is cultural history deeply written, of individual reading communities that differentiate themselves in interesting ways even while in aggregate showing a coherent reading culture with fascinating similarities and contrasts to the reading culture of today.
William A. Johnson
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195176407
- eISBN:
- 9780199775545
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195176407.003.0002
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, European History: BCE to 500CE
This chapter examines various practical and logistical aspects of reading in antiquity. The chapter presents in detail the ways in which “bookroll culture” in the first and second centuries AD ...
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This chapter examines various practical and logistical aspects of reading in antiquity. The chapter presents in detail the ways in which “bookroll culture” in the first and second centuries AD differed from reading a modern book, and the ways in which the reading system worked symbiotically with the particularities of the ancient reading experience, including the use of scriptio continua, relative lack of punctuation, and the use of lectors. The text of Quintilian is examined for what it has to say about early imperial education in reading, both of schoolboys and of more experienced readers, and how literate education among the elite differed in habits and assumptions from reading today.Less
This chapter examines various practical and logistical aspects of reading in antiquity. The chapter presents in detail the ways in which “bookroll culture” in the first and second centuries AD differed from reading a modern book, and the ways in which the reading system worked symbiotically with the particularities of the ancient reading experience, including the use of scriptio continua, relative lack of punctuation, and the use of lectors. The text of Quintilian is examined for what it has to say about early imperial education in reading, both of schoolboys and of more experienced readers, and how literate education among the elite differed in habits and assumptions from reading today.
D. A. Russell
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263327
- eISBN:
- 9780191734168
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263327.003.0012
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Prose and Writers: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter first examines in detail the three passages in which Quintilian’s comments on the way he is presenting his material, and comparing what follows the announcement of a change with what ...
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This chapter first examines in detail the three passages in which Quintilian’s comments on the way he is presenting his material, and comparing what follows the announcement of a change with what precedes it. But before coming to the passages themselves, it makes a few preliminary observations. Quintilian announces that he is now going on to the traditional core of rhetoric. The chapter then turns to omisso speciosiore stili genere, the programmatic announcement made at 7.1.54. But it must put it in its context, which has several interesting features. Quintilian often changes register without giving prior warning. Periodic writing does of course make recognizable patterns more frequent and obvious, but even in his simplest writing Quintilian appears to be rhythmical by instinct.Less
This chapter first examines in detail the three passages in which Quintilian’s comments on the way he is presenting his material, and comparing what follows the announcement of a change with what precedes it. But before coming to the passages themselves, it makes a few preliminary observations. Quintilian announces that he is now going on to the traditional core of rhetoric. The chapter then turns to omisso speciosiore stili genere, the programmatic announcement made at 7.1.54. But it must put it in its context, which has several interesting features. Quintilian often changes register without giving prior warning. Periodic writing does of course make recognizable patterns more frequent and obvious, but even in his simplest writing Quintilian appears to be rhythmical by instinct.
Simon Swain
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199264827
- eISBN:
- 9780191718403
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199264827.003.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Having considered the Romans' relationship with Greek culture from Cicero by way of the Elder Seneca, Quintilian, the Younger Pliny, and Suetonius down to Apuleius, in particular, the implications of ...
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Having considered the Romans' relationship with Greek culture from Cicero by way of the Elder Seneca, Quintilian, the Younger Pliny, and Suetonius down to Apuleius, in particular, the implications of code-switching and the linguistic annexation that made Greek a resource for the improvement of Latin and a mark of superior Roman education, the chapter turns to the specific cases of Fronto, in whom Greek negotiates social complications (as in the correspondence with Marcus, does the language of love), particularly between superior and inferior, and of Gellius, who is far more relaxed about Greek discourse and ready to admit that Latin cannot always compete, but brings out cases where it does. Moreover, he expects a Roman to be master of the latter, his own language, as well as Greek. Finally, these authors' practice in respect of Greek is compared with those of Tertullian, Aelian, and Ulpian.Less
Having considered the Romans' relationship with Greek culture from Cicero by way of the Elder Seneca, Quintilian, the Younger Pliny, and Suetonius down to Apuleius, in particular, the implications of code-switching and the linguistic annexation that made Greek a resource for the improvement of Latin and a mark of superior Roman education, the chapter turns to the specific cases of Fronto, in whom Greek negotiates social complications (as in the correspondence with Marcus, does the language of love), particularly between superior and inferior, and of Gellius, who is far more relaxed about Greek discourse and ready to admit that Latin cannot always compete, but brings out cases where it does. Moreover, he expects a Roman to be master of the latter, his own language, as well as Greek. Finally, these authors' practice in respect of Greek is compared with those of Tertullian, Aelian, and Ulpian.
Malcolm Heath
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199259205
- eISBN:
- 9780191717932
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199259205.003.0007
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter discusses the practice of rhetorical education in the Greek-speaking parts of the Roman Empire as well as Menander’s commentary on Demosthenes, drawing on the evidence of Quintilian and ...
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This chapter discusses the practice of rhetorical education in the Greek-speaking parts of the Roman Empire as well as Menander’s commentary on Demosthenes, drawing on the evidence of Quintilian and Libanius, and technical writers such as Theon and Hermogenes of Tarsus. The structure of the rhetorical curriculum is discussed, and it is shown that the developments of rhetorical theory in the 2nd century AD had consequences for the shape of the curriculum. The relationship between practical exercises (such as progymnasmata and declamation), the study of classical models, and the study of theory is examined.Less
This chapter discusses the practice of rhetorical education in the Greek-speaking parts of the Roman Empire as well as Menander’s commentary on Demosthenes, drawing on the evidence of Quintilian and Libanius, and technical writers such as Theon and Hermogenes of Tarsus. The structure of the rhetorical curriculum is discussed, and it is shown that the developments of rhetorical theory in the 2nd century AD had consequences for the shape of the curriculum. The relationship between practical exercises (such as progymnasmata and declamation), the study of classical models, and the study of theory is examined.
Joy Connolly
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199212989
- eISBN:
- 9780191594205
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199212989.003.0005
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Prose and Writers: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter examines classical rhetoric's central role in the formation of early American cultural identity. It surveys classical education in eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century America, ...
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This chapter examines classical rhetoric's central role in the formation of early American cultural identity. It surveys classical education in eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century America, focusing on the way claims about the universalist appeal of eloquence and certain habits of elocution transformed the exemplary tradition of civic republican virtue into a lived stylistics of democracy. Inculcating a personal style of classical ‘simplicity’ and ‘naturalness’, classical rhetoric both reinforced notions of white male superiority and (through its own universalist claims) opened a way for women and people of colour to claim roles in civic life. In concluding, it argues that, like the imperfect or suicidal heroes dear to colonial and revolutionary Americans, rhetoric's status as an ethically and epistemologically suspect discourse reveals the dissonances and compromises resting at the heart of republican culture.Less
This chapter examines classical rhetoric's central role in the formation of early American cultural identity. It surveys classical education in eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century America, focusing on the way claims about the universalist appeal of eloquence and certain habits of elocution transformed the exemplary tradition of civic republican virtue into a lived stylistics of democracy. Inculcating a personal style of classical ‘simplicity’ and ‘naturalness’, classical rhetoric both reinforced notions of white male superiority and (through its own universalist claims) opened a way for women and people of colour to claim roles in civic life. In concluding, it argues that, like the imperfect or suicidal heroes dear to colonial and revolutionary Americans, rhetoric's status as an ethically and epistemologically suspect discourse reveals the dissonances and compromises resting at the heart of republican culture.
Andrew Wallace
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199591244
- eISBN:
- 9780191595561
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199591244.003.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
The introduction establishes the importance of the assertion by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c.70–c.130 CE) that the freedman and grammarian Quintus Caecilius Epirota (first century BCE) had started ...
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The introduction establishes the importance of the assertion by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c.70–c.130 CE) that the freedman and grammarian Quintus Caecilius Epirota (first century BCE) had started teaching Virgil's poetry at Rome in 26 BCE. If Suetonius is correct, Virgil would have spent the last years of his life knowing that he had written (and, in the Aeneid, was still writing) schoolbooks. Against the backdrop of this inaugural scene of Virgilian instruction, the introduction surveys late antique, medieval, and Renaissance interest in Virgil's own educational profile, arguing that this interest is in part generated by enigmatic moments in the poems themselves. However strange the forms the ascription will assume, the mixed voices of the Virgilian tradition are not wrong when they ascribe to Virgil canny, intense, and even theoretically adventurous meditations on instruction. Biographers, commentators, and schoolmasters perceive in Virgil's poems more than a simple aspiration to teach readers. They also locate in ‘the book of Maro’ a series of close studies of pedagogical diction (in the Eclogues), of the unfathomable currents that connect poetry to precept and action (in the Georgics), and of the counterintuitive relationship between mastery and forgetting (in the Aeneid).Less
The introduction establishes the importance of the assertion by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c.70–c.130 CE) that the freedman and grammarian Quintus Caecilius Epirota (first century BCE) had started teaching Virgil's poetry at Rome in 26 BCE. If Suetonius is correct, Virgil would have spent the last years of his life knowing that he had written (and, in the Aeneid, was still writing) schoolbooks. Against the backdrop of this inaugural scene of Virgilian instruction, the introduction surveys late antique, medieval, and Renaissance interest in Virgil's own educational profile, arguing that this interest is in part generated by enigmatic moments in the poems themselves. However strange the forms the ascription will assume, the mixed voices of the Virgilian tradition are not wrong when they ascribe to Virgil canny, intense, and even theoretically adventurous meditations on instruction. Biographers, commentators, and schoolmasters perceive in Virgil's poems more than a simple aspiration to teach readers. They also locate in ‘the book of Maro’ a series of close studies of pedagogical diction (in the Eclogues), of the unfathomable currents that connect poetry to precept and action (in the Georgics), and of the counterintuitive relationship between mastery and forgetting (in the Aeneid).
James Ker
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195387032
- eISBN:
- 9780199866793
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195387032.003.0004
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter identifies the ways in which Seneca's death can be understood as a performance of authorship, both as shaped by his literary career and as shaping his literary afterlife. It traces ...
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This chapter identifies the ways in which Seneca's death can be understood as a performance of authorship, both as shaped by his literary career and as shaping his literary afterlife. It traces Senecan echoes in Tacitus, arguing for a complex intertextual relationship with multiple works of Seneca. Next it surveys Seneca's genres and uses the testimony of Quintilian to speculate on early receptions of Seneca's writings. Within his oeuvre it identifies the diverse literary approaches Seneca adopted toward the representation of mortal experience. The exitus form, for example, is deployed in the description of Cato's death in the De providentia, and this can be read alongside Seneca's other exitus descriptions in the Dialogi and elsewhere, and other portrayals of Cato in different genres.Less
This chapter identifies the ways in which Seneca's death can be understood as a performance of authorship, both as shaped by his literary career and as shaping his literary afterlife. It traces Senecan echoes in Tacitus, arguing for a complex intertextual relationship with multiple works of Seneca. Next it surveys Seneca's genres and uses the testimony of Quintilian to speculate on early receptions of Seneca's writings. Within his oeuvre it identifies the diverse literary approaches Seneca adopted toward the representation of mortal experience. The exitus form, for example, is deployed in the description of Cato's death in the De providentia, and this can be read alongside Seneca's other exitus descriptions in the Dialogi and elsewhere, and other portrayals of Cato in different genres.
Neil Rhodes
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199245727
- eISBN:
- 9780191715259
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245727.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
This chapter moves from speech to writing and argues that while Shakespeare did not study ‘English’ as part of his own schooling, he nevertheless had a literary education. Elizabethan Latin learning ...
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This chapter moves from speech to writing and argues that while Shakespeare did not study ‘English’ as part of his own schooling, he nevertheless had a literary education. Elizabethan Latin learning is best regarded as covering a range of active, expressive skills that can be grouped under the term ‘rhetoric’, and the study of literature and drama was seen as an important way of acquiring those skills. If the Elizabethan regime is understood in terms of process rather than content, then Shakespeare did indeed study creative writing. Examples are given from Ovid, Quintilian, Erasmus, the Parnassus Plays, John Brinsley, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The second part of the chapter focuses on Nashe and on Love’s Labour’s Lost, the play where Shakespeare specifically tackles the question of educational aims and objectives. It is argued that Shakespeare’s work was the product of a creative abuse of the Tudor education system.Less
This chapter moves from speech to writing and argues that while Shakespeare did not study ‘English’ as part of his own schooling, he nevertheless had a literary education. Elizabethan Latin learning is best regarded as covering a range of active, expressive skills that can be grouped under the term ‘rhetoric’, and the study of literature and drama was seen as an important way of acquiring those skills. If the Elizabethan regime is understood in terms of process rather than content, then Shakespeare did indeed study creative writing. Examples are given from Ovid, Quintilian, Erasmus, the Parnassus Plays, John Brinsley, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The second part of the chapter focuses on Nashe and on Love’s Labour’s Lost, the play where Shakespeare specifically tackles the question of educational aims and objectives. It is argued that Shakespeare’s work was the product of a creative abuse of the Tudor education system.
Peter Van Nuffelen
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199655274
- eISBN:
- 9780191745232
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199655274.003.0006
- Subject:
- Religion, Early Christian Studies, Religion in the Ancient World
In setting out the events, Orosius frequently has recourse to pathetic modes of writing and closely follows the Rhetorica ad Herrenium and Quintilian, especially regarding the use of enargeia. An ...
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In setting out the events, Orosius frequently has recourse to pathetic modes of writing and closely follows the Rhetorica ad Herrenium and Quintilian, especially regarding the use of enargeia. An analysis of Book 5 shows that he consciously seeks to conjure up the emotions of his readers with the aim of making them feel the misery of past events. Following rhetorical advice, not all episodes are described in a pathetic way: the Historiae present themselves as a synecdoche of reality. In line with Quintilian and earlier, classical historiography, Orosius suggests that his recourse to vivid description is a way of displaying the truth of the past, although this may seem counterintuitive to our modern understanding of the relationship between language and reality.Less
In setting out the events, Orosius frequently has recourse to pathetic modes of writing and closely follows the Rhetorica ad Herrenium and Quintilian, especially regarding the use of enargeia. An analysis of Book 5 shows that he consciously seeks to conjure up the emotions of his readers with the aim of making them feel the misery of past events. Following rhetorical advice, not all episodes are described in a pathetic way: the Historiae present themselves as a synecdoche of reality. In line with Quintilian and earlier, classical historiography, Orosius suggests that his recourse to vivid description is a way of displaying the truth of the past, although this may seem counterintuitive to our modern understanding of the relationship between language and reality.
Christopher Reid
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199581092
- eISBN:
- 9780191745621
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199581092.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, European Literature
This chapter looks at the education of the eighteenth-century parliamentary elite and considers how school and university prepared them for a role in public life. It begins with the idea of liberal ...
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This chapter looks at the education of the eighteenth-century parliamentary elite and considers how school and university prepared them for a role in public life. It begins with the idea of liberal education, and asks how far Roman models of the making of the orator (especially those set down by Cicero and Quintilian) retained their influence in a commercial age. In eighteenth-century England, as in republican Rome, a preparation for public life turned on moments of initiation and trial. Focusing on the unusually well-recorded educational career of one MP, Viscount Althorp, the chapter reconstructs these moments in the training of the public speaker, with a particular emphasis on rhetorical exercises such as declamation. It concludes with the most daunting trial of all, the maiden speech in the House of Commons, and the methods used by MPs such as George Canning to survive it successfully.Less
This chapter looks at the education of the eighteenth-century parliamentary elite and considers how school and university prepared them for a role in public life. It begins with the idea of liberal education, and asks how far Roman models of the making of the orator (especially those set down by Cicero and Quintilian) retained their influence in a commercial age. In eighteenth-century England, as in republican Rome, a preparation for public life turned on moments of initiation and trial. Focusing on the unusually well-recorded educational career of one MP, Viscount Althorp, the chapter reconstructs these moments in the training of the public speaker, with a particular emphasis on rhetorical exercises such as declamation. It concludes with the most daunting trial of all, the maiden speech in the House of Commons, and the methods used by MPs such as George Canning to survive it successfully.
Sean Alexander Gurd
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199837519
- eISBN:
- 9780199919505
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199837519.003.0002
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Prose and Writers: Classical, Early, and Medieval
The oldest and the most long-standing way to think about literary revision in classical antiquity was to see it as a teaching tool whose goal was to create what Pierre Bourdieu called a habitus, that ...
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The oldest and the most long-standing way to think about literary revision in classical antiquity was to see it as a teaching tool whose goal was to create what Pierre Bourdieu called a habitus, that is, a set of skills and expectations regulating social performance. In Isocrates, in Plato, and much later in Quintilian, the practice of revision created subjects capable of giving advice, pursuing philosophical dialogue, and engaging in oratorical debate. The primary aim of revision for these authors was to teach specific cognitive skills; these skills were like revision but occurred mentally. The practice of literary revision was thus a way of training thought or producing selves.Less
The oldest and the most long-standing way to think about literary revision in classical antiquity was to see it as a teaching tool whose goal was to create what Pierre Bourdieu called a habitus, that is, a set of skills and expectations regulating social performance. In Isocrates, in Plato, and much later in Quintilian, the practice of revision created subjects capable of giving advice, pursuing philosophical dialogue, and engaging in oratorical debate. The primary aim of revision for these authors was to teach specific cognitive skills; these skills were like revision but occurred mentally. The practice of literary revision was thus a way of training thought or producing selves.
Michael Winterbottom
Antonio Stramaglia, Francesca Romana Nocchi, and Giuseppe Russo (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198836056
- eISBN:
- 9780191873423
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198836056.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Prose and Writers: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Declamation—the practice of training young men to speak in public by setting them to compose and deliver speeches on fictional legal cases—was central to the Greek and Roman educational systems over ...
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Declamation—the practice of training young men to speak in public by setting them to compose and deliver speeches on fictional legal cases—was central to the Greek and Roman educational systems over many centuries and has been the subject of a recent explosion of scholarly interest. This book brings together a broad selection of scholarly work published since 1964. The papers and reviews focus on two related topics: the rhetorician Quintilian and ancient declamation in general. Quintilian, who taught rhetoric at Rome in the second half of the first century AD, was the author of the Institutio oratoria, a key text for Roman educational practice, rhetoric, and literary criticism. Subjects explored here range widely; they cover not only the establishment and interpretation of the text and its literary and historical context, but also Quintilian’s views on inspiration, morality, philosophy, and declamation, of which he was a practitioner. While the volume also offers detailed examinations of the texts and interpretations of a wide range of Latin and Greek authors, such as Seneca the Elder, Sopatros, and Ennodius, there is a particular focus on two collections wrongly attributed to Quintilian, the so-called Minor and Major Declamations. A previously unpublished re-assessment of the manuscript tradition of the latter collection is included here.Less
Declamation—the practice of training young men to speak in public by setting them to compose and deliver speeches on fictional legal cases—was central to the Greek and Roman educational systems over many centuries and has been the subject of a recent explosion of scholarly interest. This book brings together a broad selection of scholarly work published since 1964. The papers and reviews focus on two related topics: the rhetorician Quintilian and ancient declamation in general. Quintilian, who taught rhetoric at Rome in the second half of the first century AD, was the author of the Institutio oratoria, a key text for Roman educational practice, rhetoric, and literary criticism. Subjects explored here range widely; they cover not only the establishment and interpretation of the text and its literary and historical context, but also Quintilian’s views on inspiration, morality, philosophy, and declamation, of which he was a practitioner. While the volume also offers detailed examinations of the texts and interpretations of a wide range of Latin and Greek authors, such as Seneca the Elder, Sopatros, and Ennodius, there is a particular focus on two collections wrongly attributed to Quintilian, the so-called Minor and Major Declamations. A previously unpublished re-assessment of the manuscript tradition of the latter collection is included here.
Colin Burrow
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198838081
- eISBN:
- 9780191874604
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198838081.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
Imitating Authors analyses the theory and practice of imitatio (the imitation of one author by another) from early Greek texts right up to recent fictions about clones and artificial humans. At its ...
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Imitating Authors analyses the theory and practice of imitatio (the imitation of one author by another) from early Greek texts right up to recent fictions about clones and artificial humans. At its centre lie the imitating authors of the English Renaissance, including Ben Jonson and the most imitated imitator of them all, John Milton. Imitating Authors argues that imitation is not simply a matter of borrowing words, or of alluding to an earlier author. Imitators learn practices from earlier writers. They imitate the structures and forms of earlier writing in ways that enable them to create a new style which itself could be imitated. That makes imitation an engine of literary change. Imitating Authors also shows how the metaphors used by theorists to explain this complex practice fed into works which were themselves imitations, how those metaphors changed, and how they have come to influence present-day anxieties about imitation human beings and artificial forms of intelligence. It explores relationships between imitation and authorial style, its fraught connections with plagiarism, and how emerging ideas of genius and intellectual property changed how imitation was practised. Imitating Authors includes detailed discussion of authors who imitated (notably Virgil, Lucretius, Petrarch, Cervantes, Ben Jonson, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Kazuo Ishiguro) and of the theory of imitating authors in Plato, Cicero, Quintilian, Longinus, Castiglione, the Ciceronian controversies of the sixteenth century, in legal and philosophical discourses of the Enlightenment, and in recent discussions about computer-generated poems.Less
Imitating Authors analyses the theory and practice of imitatio (the imitation of one author by another) from early Greek texts right up to recent fictions about clones and artificial humans. At its centre lie the imitating authors of the English Renaissance, including Ben Jonson and the most imitated imitator of them all, John Milton. Imitating Authors argues that imitation is not simply a matter of borrowing words, or of alluding to an earlier author. Imitators learn practices from earlier writers. They imitate the structures and forms of earlier writing in ways that enable them to create a new style which itself could be imitated. That makes imitation an engine of literary change. Imitating Authors also shows how the metaphors used by theorists to explain this complex practice fed into works which were themselves imitations, how those metaphors changed, and how they have come to influence present-day anxieties about imitation human beings and artificial forms of intelligence. It explores relationships between imitation and authorial style, its fraught connections with plagiarism, and how emerging ideas of genius and intellectual property changed how imitation was practised. Imitating Authors includes detailed discussion of authors who imitated (notably Virgil, Lucretius, Petrarch, Cervantes, Ben Jonson, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and Kazuo Ishiguro) and of the theory of imitating authors in Plato, Cicero, Quintilian, Longinus, Castiglione, the Ciceronian controversies of the sixteenth century, in legal and philosophical discourses of the Enlightenment, and in recent discussions about computer-generated poems.
W. Martin Bloomer
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520255760
- eISBN:
- 9780520948402
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520255760.003.0005
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter focuses on two manuals of education of the late first century ad: the Institutio oratoria (The Orator's Education) of Quintilian; and the De liberis educandis (On the Education of ...
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This chapter focuses on two manuals of education of the late first century ad: the Institutio oratoria (The Orator's Education) of Quintilian; and the De liberis educandis (On the Education of Children), written by a student or follower of Plutarch. Despite their manifest differences of scope and detail—the follower of Plutarch writes an essay urging fathers to delegate but supervise their sons' literary education, while Quintilian offers a nearly encyclopedic guide to the training of the speaker/writer—both texts communicate an imperial educational ideology. As prescriptive manuals of nurture, they contribute to a hierarchy of knowledge and labor in the complex and differentiated world of the early empire. Both also celebrate the ancient traditions of rhetoric and philosophy, yet they do not simply synthesize Hellenistic manuals of rhetoric.Less
This chapter focuses on two manuals of education of the late first century ad: the Institutio oratoria (The Orator's Education) of Quintilian; and the De liberis educandis (On the Education of Children), written by a student or follower of Plutarch. Despite their manifest differences of scope and detail—the follower of Plutarch writes an essay urging fathers to delegate but supervise their sons' literary education, while Quintilian offers a nearly encyclopedic guide to the training of the speaker/writer—both texts communicate an imperial educational ideology. As prescriptive manuals of nurture, they contribute to a hierarchy of knowledge and labor in the complex and differentiated world of the early empire. Both also celebrate the ancient traditions of rhetoric and philosophy, yet they do not simply synthesize Hellenistic manuals of rhetoric.
W. Martin Bloomer
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520255760
- eISBN:
- 9780520948402
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520255760.003.0006
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter examines Quintilian's conceptions of the child: the dedicatory comments that present the child as the impulse to write; the processes of eruditio and castigatio which redirect the ...
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This chapter examines Quintilian's conceptions of the child: the dedicatory comments that present the child as the impulse to write; the processes of eruditio and castigatio which redirect the child's curbed passion toward manly use; and the competitive (yet social) process of learning itself. It concludes with his redefinition of rhetoric, certainly an act of intellectual poaching, but also an index of his fundamental position that education is not child production but the construction of orators. In these reflections, Quintilian far exceeds the predominantly negative anxiety about the malformation of the child that so possessed Pseudo-Plutarch's text.Less
This chapter examines Quintilian's conceptions of the child: the dedicatory comments that present the child as the impulse to write; the processes of eruditio and castigatio which redirect the child's curbed passion toward manly use; and the competitive (yet social) process of learning itself. It concludes with his redefinition of rhetoric, certainly an act of intellectual poaching, but also an index of his fundamental position that education is not child production but the construction of orators. In these reflections, Quintilian far exceeds the predominantly negative anxiety about the malformation of the child that so possessed Pseudo-Plutarch's text.
W. Martin Bloomer
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520255760
- eISBN:
- 9780520948402
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520255760.003.0009
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter presents a positive picture of the methods and effects of declamatory training. It first considers the intellectual debts of declamation, its continuity with ancient rhetorical teaching ...
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This chapter presents a positive picture of the methods and effects of declamatory training. It first considers the intellectual debts of declamation, its continuity with ancient rhetorical teaching and even with ancient philosophy. The chapter then discusses declamation as training in persona. The best evidence for declamation comes from the first and early second centuries ad. The chapter considers especially the evidence left by two great literary figures of the early empire. Seneca the Elder left a record of the virtuoso treatments of professional teachers and (higher-status) advocates, the Oratorum et rhetorum sententiae, divisiones, colores. Quintilian's great treatise and the declamations associated with his school reveal more directly school practice.Less
This chapter presents a positive picture of the methods and effects of declamatory training. It first considers the intellectual debts of declamation, its continuity with ancient rhetorical teaching and even with ancient philosophy. The chapter then discusses declamation as training in persona. The best evidence for declamation comes from the first and early second centuries ad. The chapter considers especially the evidence left by two great literary figures of the early empire. Seneca the Elder left a record of the virtuoso treatments of professional teachers and (higher-status) advocates, the Oratorum et rhetorum sententiae, divisiones, colores. Quintilian's great treatise and the declamations associated with his school reveal more directly school practice.
Michael Winterbottom
Antonio Stramaglia, Francesca Romana Nocchi, and Giuseppe Russo (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198836056
- eISBN:
- 9780191873423
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198836056.003.0019
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Prose and Writers: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This short paper, which appeared in 2006, suggests a new emendation of a passage of Quintilian’s Institutio that has long puzzled textual critics. Quintilian says that to become good is not so hard ...
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This short paper, which appeared in 2006, suggests a new emendation of a passage of Quintilian’s Institutio that has long puzzled textual critics. Quintilian says that to become good is not so hard as it might seem to those who have read his precepts in 12.2, for ‘the things that praemuntur are not so complex and hard that they cannot be learned in a few years’. Critics have in the past made the unintelligible verb into a word meaning ‘are handed down’. On a new tack, the paper suggests that the word should be praemetuuntur. These studies ‘are feared beforehand’, but are less formidable once they are embarked upon. Parallels in Quintilian for rare verbs prefixed with prae- are given, and a parallel is pointed out at 4.5.5.Less
This short paper, which appeared in 2006, suggests a new emendation of a passage of Quintilian’s Institutio that has long puzzled textual critics. Quintilian says that to become good is not so hard as it might seem to those who have read his precepts in 12.2, for ‘the things that praemuntur are not so complex and hard that they cannot be learned in a few years’. Critics have in the past made the unintelligible verb into a word meaning ‘are handed down’. On a new tack, the paper suggests that the word should be praemetuuntur. These studies ‘are feared beforehand’, but are less formidable once they are embarked upon. Parallels in Quintilian for rare verbs prefixed with prae- are given, and a parallel is pointed out at 4.5.5.
Michael Winterbottom
Antonio Stramaglia, Francesca Romana Nocchi, and Giuseppe Russo (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198836056
- eISBN:
- 9780191873423
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198836056.003.0028
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Prose and Writers: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This review of the fourth volume of Jean Cousin’s Budé edition of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (1977) appeared in 1979. The reviewer judges that this volume ‘is no better, and no worse, than its ...
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This review of the fourth volume of Jean Cousin’s Budé edition of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (1977) appeared in 1979. The reviewer judges that this volume ‘is no better, and no worse, than its predecessors’. He comments on some ‘wayward’ punctuation of the text, some unconvincing conjectures by Cousin, and an apparatus which ‘pullulates with error’. As to the apparatus, he is especially critical of the way in which, because of his misreporting of the manuscripts, Cousin makes it seem that manuscripts G and H (the latter of which, in the reviewer’s opinion, he should not be using at all) ‘are far more often right against A than is in fact the case, with the result that G is made to appear independent of A, and H a good deal more than a faithful duplicate of G’.Less
This review of the fourth volume of Jean Cousin’s Budé edition of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (1977) appeared in 1979. The reviewer judges that this volume ‘is no better, and no worse, than its predecessors’. He comments on some ‘wayward’ punctuation of the text, some unconvincing conjectures by Cousin, and an apparatus which ‘pullulates with error’. As to the apparatus, he is especially critical of the way in which, because of his misreporting of the manuscripts, Cousin makes it seem that manuscripts G and H (the latter of which, in the reviewer’s opinion, he should not be using at all) ‘are far more often right against A than is in fact the case, with the result that G is made to appear independent of A, and H a good deal more than a faithful duplicate of G’.
