The two final Major Declamations of pseudo-Quintilian make for a fitting close to the Latin declamatory corpus as it has been transmitted to us. The chosen theme, “A son suspected of incest with his mother (infamis in matrem),” marks them as two of the most horrible and fantastic specimens of an already outlandish genre. Yet these speeches provide appropriate if fortuitous end-points to the study of declamation for another reason as well. The problem of speech and silence obsesses each. We are therefore going to follow up on the themes of the prior chapter.

Declamation as a genre is fond of the paradoxical, and this time we have arrived at a paradox that goes to the heart of declamation: how does one speak of the unspeakable? In not speaking the unspeakable, what gets said by implication? We will find in these speeches a portrait of the mechanism by which the domain of the speakable is constituted. Moreover the realm of possible discourse is fundamentally related to the set of exclusions, erasures and denials that surround this territory. This unhappy family romance emplots and encodes the rules for normativity.