The use of rhetoric in biographical portraits of the twelve Roman emperors in Alfonso the X's Primera Cronica General.

Over the last five years, students of Alfonso the Learned have shown that the Spanish monarch made conscious use of rhetorical devices to construct the biographical segments in his Primera Cronica General. On the basis of this premise, an analysis of the lives of the caesars would show Alfonso's selection of rhetorical topoi and his editing process. The topics found in Priscian's translation of Hermogenes' progymnasmata, a rhetorical handbook which circulated in the twelfth century, more closely approximate the biographical characteristics which Alfonso chose for his portraits of the twelve caesars. Upon investigating the authorities used by the Spanish king as the source of material for his Roman portraits, it became clear that Suetonius' Lives of the Twelve Caesars, and to a lesser extent Orosius' Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, constituted the basis of the twelve biographies. This study discovered that Alfonso employed rhetorical amplification to shape the lives of the emperors in accordance with his own bias. The monarch translated and altered many passages by use of a rhetorical technique denominated 'amplificatio.' Thus, the biographies constitute more than just their translation into the Spanish vernacular to become the monarch's Christian, medieval interpretation of the pagan rulers. From Alfonsine perspective, Julius Caesar exemplifies military brilliance and Caesar Augustus, by establishing peace, unwittingly paves the way for the coming of Christ and Christianity.PhDBiographiesLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsModern languageRomance literatureSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129215/2/9409769.pd