Vile eloquence: Performance and identity in Greco-Roman rhetoric

An oratorical performance in Greek and Roman antiquity was much more than a vehicle for legal argument or an expression of political beliefs; it was an opportunity for a speaker to assert his identity through a meticulous process of verbal and bodily self-fashioning. At the same time, however, the artifice and ornament of oratory was perceived as a threat to the integrity and virtue of the elite man. If a man\u27s speech was supposed to be a reliable index of his true character, how could the orator act under the necessarily theatrical constraints of the oratorical performance without engaging in the techniques of seductive cunning traditionally associated with female nature? Vile Eloquence explores the multiple identity of rhetoric, at once an essential element of ancient political activity, the core of the educational system, and a suspect discourse with intrinsically feminine aspects. The first chapter sets the stage with an investigation into the deeply rooted cultural associations in Greek drama and philosophy between women and duplicity, lack of restraint, mimesis, luxury and ornament, associations on which Euripides, Aristophanes and Plato draw in order to critique rhetoric as a practice with the power to destabilize natural categories of gender. The next three chapters move to the very different world of late republican and early imperial Rome, and to a set of texts which frame answers to the ethical dilemmas earlier identified in classical Athens. Roman rhetoricians attempt to exploit existing cultural prejudices about class and ethnicity as well as gender in order to establish oratorical education as an ideal pedagogy of elite manliness. But complex slippages in their own writings reveal that rhetoric remains an ars fallens, an art that trains men to perform the histrionic acts of elite Roman masculinity in a culture that considers performance, acting and histrionics themselves to be the native characteristics of Greeks, slaves and women. The prescriptions of Cicero, the elder Seneca and Quintilian, as well as the performances of the younger Pliny and Dio Chrysostom, reveal the complex network of fear and fascination that characterizes Roman attitudes toward oratory, a practice that grew increasingly problematic as Roman society evolved under autocratic rule