This latest entry in the Présence de l'Antiquité series offers 24 contributions (17 in French, 4 in Italian, 2 in German, one in English) on ancient Greco-Roman declamation and its afterlife. The coverage is remarkably varied: contributors discuss a wide array of literary genres and trace the persistence of declamatory themes and narrative structures up to the present day. There is accordingly little overlap with the other major collection on declamation published last year, Law and Ethics in Greek and Roman Declamation (edd. E. Amato, F. Citti and B. Huelsenbeck [2015]), which is more narrowly focused on the themes of its title, entirely in English and restricted to antiquity.
Many of the early modern figures discussed in this new collection should be familiar to scholars of ancient declamation, such as the Renaissance humanists Erasmus and Perotti or the eighteenth-century Venetian scholar Lorenzo Patarol, who wrote responses to each of the unpaired pseudo-Quintilianic Major Declamations. J.-L. Vix (pp. 355–75) discusses the first publications of Greek declamation in the sixteenth century and their adaptation into school curricula. Studies are also devoted to less familiar figures (to classicists at least), such as the Aragonese humanist Juan Lorenzo Palmireno (1524–79) and Montaigne's friend Étienne de La Boétie, author of Discours de la servitude volontaire (1576). P. brings the story of declamation down to the present day by contributing a chapter on Pascal Quignard (pp. 451–72), best known as the author of Tous les matins du monde (1991). Quignard also wrote a fictionalised version (La Raison [1990]) of the life of Porcius Latro, the star declaimer of Seneca's collection.
The reader's approach to this collection is therefore most likely to be selective, and the remainder of the review will accordingly be devoted to the contributions on ancient declamations in Latin. A particular strength of this group of contributions is their focus on interactions with Latin poetry, a subject that has received recent attention but where much more fundamental work needs to be done. As might be expected, Ovid receives fullest attention: A. Romeo (pp. 129–46) examines declamation in the Metamorphoses, B. Larosa (pp. 177–92) in the Ex Ponto. F. Klein (pp. 75–88) looks for subversive messages in Ovid's multiple apparent references to Cicero's assassination, indirectly evoked through echoes of Senecan declamation.
N. Hömke's discussion of Lucan's Cato (pp. 235–52), based on a recent Habilitationsschrift, is an outstanding contribution. The life and death of Cato provided one of the most stable series of exempla across numerous Roman literary genres. First-century Latin literature shows him starring in the Elder Seneca's declamatory collection, Valerius Maximus' handbook of instructive examples, the Younger Seneca's philosophical essays and Persius' satires, among many others. Hömke emphasises Lucan's destabilisation of readerly expectations of Cato as the prime exemplum of dura uirtus and bene moriendum. Where Johnson (Momentary Monsters [1987]) read the Cato narrative as bizarre caricature and Leigh (‘Lucan and the Libyan Tale’, JRS 90 [2000], 95–109) as an exploration of the impotence of philosophical allegory, Hömke focuses instead on Lucan's cynicism regarding the use of exempla. The personification of the stock exemplum no longer exemplifies the same meaning, and only a naïve reader would think that he still could under imperial autocracy.
Some of the more productive approaches in this collection examine the interaction between declamation and an author's full corpus in a different genre. H. Vial (pp. 147–76) surveys the whole Ovidian corpus and isolates several attractive points of entry for further, more comprehensive studies. For example, Ovid never uses suadeo in the first person in the Heroides (other things may persuade, but speakers do not), while words typically fail to persuade in the Amores. The Ars and Remedia use the figure of the praeceptor and the structures of the progymnasmata, while Tristia 2 can be read as a lengthy suasoria. The Metamorphoses focuses in part on the failure of persuasion (e.g. Sol to Phaethon, Narcissus to himself). M. Ribreau (pp. 283–307) offers a similar approach to a very different corpus, the sermons and polemics of Augustine, who had been a rhetoric teacher at Milan before his conversion.
Other late ancient works receive attention. V. Pageau (pp. 57–73) surveys the emperors who declaim in the SHA, whether at the rhetoric school or later in life. Unlike the first-century rhetoricians, the redactor of the SHA does not criticise the exercise as useless or unfit for an authoritative figure. É. Wolff (pp. 89–100) examines Anth. Lat. 21 Riese as a controversia in verse that attacks fishing in general and sacrilegious fishermen in particular. This exercise in style differs from the majority of traditional declamations in that it takes the side of the rich against the poor. A. Stoehr-Monjou (pp. 101–26) returns to the same poem to ask if it is a literary or political parody, aimed at Christians who exalt the poor and look for miracles.
The topics of other contributions on Latin declamation will be more familiar from recent studies. J.-P. De Giorgio (pp. 39–56) interrogates the usual suspects in discussing ‘bad’ audiences of declamation who do not respect its ‘pacte fictionnel’. These are Petronius' Trimalchio, who lacks urbanitas; the Elder Seneca's Maecenas, who called attention to Latro's potential failure to separate fiction and reality; and Pliny's Javolenus, dubiae sanitatis, who replied as if an apostrophe had actually sought a response. Fuller interaction with discussions by E. Gunderson, D. van Mal-Maeder and others of these well-known scenes might have been expected. P. Paré-Rey (pp. 193–213) and A. Casamento (pp. 215–37) review the well-studied interaction between the Elder Seneca's declamations and the Younger's tragedies, while A.-M. Favreau-Linder (pp. 257–86) catalogues the appearances of pirates in declamation and the novel.
L. Spina's envoi (pp. 473–82) to the collection (its varied contents resist anything as neat as a conclusion) points to the potential endlessness of this kind of reception study. He imagines what an inventory of modern declamatory genres might look like: ‘les interviews impossibles, les lettres ouvertes aux personnages de l'Antiquité ou d'un passé plus ou moins récent, les dialogues imaginaires, les procès fictifs'. Declamation's narrative elements are hardly distinctive: its characters, situations and discursive structures recur in many literary genres. Divisio is therefore central to any study of declamation, and particularly so for its reception, in order to avoid studying what Spina calls ‘une pan-déclamation gratuite’ (p. 475). The collection does point productively, however, to the difficulty of deciding where to draw the line. Klein's study, for example, suggests that through its echoes of declamation on Cicero's death, Ovid's coda to the Metamorphoses offered the image of poetry triumphing not only over the body's limitations but over the rival genre of rhetoric – for which Cicero's name would become a synonym. The Augustan reader may therefore have received Cicero's ‘présence’ in Ovid in its corporeal as well as figurative senses.
