In this monograph L. sets out to examine the influence of Roman rhetorical education on Roman society, with an approach that is unique for its focus on practical manifestations of rhetorical education. Instead of analysing how rhetorical education seeps through the written Roman sources, he ‘speculates about the influence of the education of the Greco-Roman ruling class on the deeds, the public actions, done by those who received that education’ (p. xiii). To this end, L. employs three case studies, well spread out in time and coming from different domains: the murder of Julius Caesar, public building activities and Roman law. L. is aware of the limitations of his research; educational influence on public deeds always remains implicit and his argument speculative. Nevertheless, readers interested in how rhetorical education provides insight into the workings of Roman society will find in this book an impressive work of scholarship written in an engaging style, abundant in source material and – not unimportantly – containing some dose of humour.
L.'s first section deals with the content and history of Roman education. In Chapter 1 he shows that the more advanced parts of formal Roman education consisted of rhetorical theory and, mostly, rhetorical practice. Chapter 2 deals with the socio-cultural status of this education and examines its role in society. This section forms an important preliminary, since the main argument of the book hinges on the assumption that all upper-class Roman citizens partook in the same rhetorical education – from East to West and from 100 bce to the sixth century ce. L. supports this presupposition with a clear historical analysis based upon copious source material. His approach to the social function of rhetoric is practical and inventive, ‘combining’, as L. states (p. 25), ‘contributions of the philologists and the historians’. This results in a hypothesis that is put to the test throughout the rest of the book: that members of the ruling class acted according to social norms and scripts imprinted firmly in their minds by the rhetorical education they received.
In section 2 L. analyses the murder of Julius Caesar. L.'s account of this story (Chapter 3) is one of the most illuminating I have read to date. His reconstruction treats all the ancient sources, considers earlier scholarship on the events of 15–17 March 44 bce and has readers consider both the perspective of the conspirators and that of the Caesarians. Chapter 4 considers the many puzzling questions surrounding the conspiracy: why did all the senators want to stab Caesar themselves? Why were the conspirators surprised by the panic in the city? Although earlier scholars have offered answers solving some of these problems, L. finds that no single earlier explanation accounts for all of these problems. His solution: the conspirators followed a script known to them from their declamatory practice, in which the theme of killing a tyrant was common. In Chapter 5 L. sets out to address the pivotal question looming over this hypothesis: did the conspirators follow this educational script, or did the writers of ancient sources do so? L.'s clearest argument in favour of the former assumption is that the ancient historians provide many details that would complicate a declamatory account – for example the presence of so many conspirators instead of the two conspirators required in a declamatory script. L. closes the section with a survey of Domitian's and Caesar's behaviour, which he describes as a ‘gyration of behaviours between attraction to and repulsion from the tyrant of declamation’ (p. 62). With this examination, he argues that every member of the Roman elite – including the emperor and the dictator – was trapped in the rhetorical model and that, as such, it prevented Caesar from taking measures against his own assassination. It again illustrates the problem of the relation between literary accounts and reality, but its relevance to the main argument in this section is not abundantly clear.
Section 3 deals with three kinds of public buildings: monumental nymphaea, colonnaded streets and city walls. In Chapter 6 L. connects the abrupt and local rise (during the Flavian period, mainly in Asia Minor) of nymphaea to a change in the teaching of epideictic rhetoric: during the first century ce it became customary to ‘praise cities like people’, and orators resorted to lauding a city's water supply to illustrate the excellence of its position, its thesis. Therefore, cities – mainly in the East, where competition was fierce and the climate favourable – started to contest in building prominent fountains. Chapter 7 discusses colonnaded streets as an example following the same sudden and local development as monumental nymphaea. Moreover, the case of city walls is provided as a counterexample. Epideictic rhetoric gave every reason to praise city walls; yet there is a lack of walls both in rhetorical and in building practice. L. explains this lack using a different rhetorical tradition – ‘brave men provide more protection to a city than walls’ was a stock argument of deliberative rhetoric –, providing an additional example for his hypothesis.
The book's last section investigates the influence of rhetorical education on Roman law. L. states (pp. xiv; 155) that this influence can only be argued to be meagre and present only at the outskirts of Roman law. He concludes that for Roman judges, living away from Rome and having received rhetorical education, the morality and familiarity of declamatory law could trump ‘proper’ Roman law, which was reserved mainly for specialised jurists. L.'s treatment of different case studies (showing both acceptance of and opposition to declamatory law in real law and vice versa) is valuable to the age-old yet still current debate on whether Roman law was ‘uniquely resistant to the influence of rhetoric’ (p. 111). The multitude of case studies, however, may make readers lose track of how they relate to each other and what L.'s main point in this section is. Whereas the overall structure of the book is clear, the section structure could have been made more explicit.
L. uses the insights from these three domains to conclude that rhetorical education contained ‘large-scale ideological functions’ (p. 154) and provided its students with an alternate world and ‘thinking machine’ (p. 155) through which they were able to view the present world with some distance. As he announced in the introduction, this argument ultimately remains speculative. His scholarship is invaluable regardless. Researchers wishing to venture into a wide range of topics (from an account of the philosophical and rhetorical tyrant to bees in Roman law and declamation) will find in this volume concise examinations in which everything is richly annotated and indexed for further enquiry.
While the overall argument is sound, the book is not without some small shortcomings. Although the bibliography is extremely rich, it is locked behind the impractical barrier of endnotes, leaving readers to constantly switch between the main text and the notes. I was able to spot only two typographical errors. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I feel that L. could have made a more explicit link to present-day education. He alludes to the modern world in the last part of the introduction (pp. xiv–xv), but does not return to it in the conclusion. Mapping his excellent account of ancient education's influence on the ancient worldview to illustrate the shaping power of contemporary education and the responsibility we all bear for it could have made this book – quite literally – even more magisterial.
