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ACCEPTING THE OMEN: EXTERNAL REFERENCE IN GREEK DECLAMATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2017

William Guast
William Guast*
Affiliation:
University of Bristol, UK
*
*Email: william.guast@bristol.ac.uk
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Abstract

Traditional accounts of Greek declamation paint this important imperial genre as a flight from the alleged impotence of Greek cities under Roman rule into a nostalgic fantasy of the autonomy of the classical past. But there is clear evidence of declaimers using their works to refer to the world outside the fiction, often to the immediate performance context, and above all to themselves. This paper examines examples from Aelius Aristides, Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists and Polemo, and shows that such a practice facilitated vigorous and eloquent communication, while also allowing for any external message to be plausibly denied.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Cambridge Classical Journal , Volume 63 , December 2017 , pp. 82 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2017. Published by Cambridge University Press 

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Footnotes

For helpful feedback of all kinds, which has improved this article immeasurably, I wish to thank Prof. Tim Whitmarsh, Prof. Chris Pelling, Prof. Jaś Elsner, audiences at Radboud University, Nijmegen (particularly my respondent on that occasion, Prof. Bé Breij), the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (particularly Prof. Glenn Most) and Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, and the two anonymous CCJ readers. This article was begun when I held a Stavros Niarchos Foundation graduate scholarship at the University of Oxford, and finished when I held a fellowship funded by the A. G. Leventis Foundation at the University of Bristol's Institute for Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition: I wish to place on record my deep gratitude to all three organisations, without whom this research would not have been possible.

I cite Hermogenes, De statibus according to the edition of Patillon (2009), [Hermogenes,] De inventione according to the edition of Patillon (2012) and Apsines, Ars rhetorica according to the edition of Spengel and Hammer (1894); following convention, I cite Polemo's two surviving declamations as ‘A’ and ‘B’. RG refers to Walz (1832–6). All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

References

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