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Pragmatics of Reading

William A. Johnson

in Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities

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 ... More

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

Omisso speciosiore stili genere

D. A. Russell

in Aspects of the Language of Latin Prose

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 ... More

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

Classical Education and the Early American Democratic Style

Joy Connolly

in Classics and National Cultures

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, ... More

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

Introduction

Andrew Wallace

in Virgil's Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England

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 ... More

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

Bilingualism and Biculturalism in Antonine Rome *: Apuleius, Fronto, and Gellius

Simon Swain

in The Worlds of Aulus Gellius

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 ... More

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

The Man of Many Genres in His Death

James Ker

in The Deaths of Seneca

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 ... More

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

Teaching

Malcolm Heath

in Menander: A Rhetor in Context

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 ... More

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

Did Shakespeare Study Creative Writing?

Neil Rhodes

in Shakespeare and the Origins of English

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 ... More

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

Isocrates, Plato, and Quintilian: Revision, Pedagogy, and the Formation of Selves

Sean Alexander Gurd

in Work in Progress: Literary Revision as Social Performance in Ancient Rome

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 ... More

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

A Sense of the Past: The Truth of Rhetoric

Peter Van Nuffelen

in Orosius and the Rhetoric of History

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 ... More

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

Educating the Orator

Christopher Reid

in Imprison'd Wranglers: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons 1760-1800

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 ... More

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

The Manual and the Child

W. Martin Bloomer

in The School of Rome: Latin Studies and the Origins of Liberal Education

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 ... More

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

The Child an open Book

W. Martin Bloomer

in The School of Rome: Latin Studies and the Origins of Liberal Education

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 ... More

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

Rhetorical Habitus

W. Martin Bloomer

in The School of Rome: Latin Studies and the Origins of Liberal Education

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 ... More

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

Juvenal and his Age

Peter Green

in The Shadow of the Parthenon: Studies in Ancient History and Literature

This chapter discusses the work of Juvenal, which contains almost no autobiographical material—in marked contrast to the satires of his predecessors Horace and Persius—and notes that of his ... More

This chapter discusses the work of Juvenal, which contains almost no autobiographical material—in marked contrast to the satires of his predecessors Horace and Persius—and notes that of his contemporaries, only the epigrammatist Martial ever refers to him. It has been argued that Juvenal was a pupil of Quintilian, and that the Institutio Oratoria alludes to him among ‘contemporaries of promise’, but this is pure speculation. The chapter notes that after his death—it is unlikely that he survived for long after the accession of Antonius Pius in ad 138—the Satires dropped out of sight absolutely for about a century.Less

Quintilian 12.11.11–12

Michael Winterbottom

Antonio Stramaglia, Francesca Romana Nocchi, and Giuseppe Russo (eds)

in Papers on Quintilian and Ancient Declamation

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 ... More

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