Introduction
Dio Chrysostom's First Tarsian Oration (Or. 33) is arguably one of his most entertaining works; it is certainly one of the most peculiar. The speech, which some scholars date to the reign of Vespasian (69–79 ce) and others to that of Trajan (98–112 ce), is addressed to the citizens of Tarsus, a prosperous city in the province of Cilicia in south-eastern Asia Minor.Footnote 1 In terms of content and structure, the First Tarsian bears less resemblance to the more ‘political’ Second Tarsian (Or. 34) than to two of Dio's better-known speeches, the Rhodian (Or. 31) and the Alexandrian (Or. 32). In these, as in the First Tarsian, Dio severely criticizes his putative addressees – the given city's inhabitants – for practising an activity that he finds reprehensible and symptomatic of deeper moral failings. For the Alexandrians it is their uncontrolled and wanton behaviour at public performances; for the Rhodians their economically profitable but ethically suspect habit of re-dedicating statues by changing their labels. The First Tarsian's similarities with the Alexandrian are particularly striking: both feature a long exordium in which Dio explains why he has decided to blame and chastise, rather than praise, his listeners, followed by a sustained attack on the vice in question that employs a battery of remarkably parallel mythological allusions, rhetorical analogies, and anecdotes.Footnote 2
What sets the First Tarsian apart from the other speeches, however, is the puzzling obscurity that surrounds the object of Dio's opprobrium. There is no doubt that Dio believes that the Tarsians are engaged in some morally questionable activity; he sees it as a sign of madness (ἀπóνοια), shamelessness (ἀναισχυντία), and the worst kind of degeneracy (ἀσέλγεια) and insolence (ὕβρις).Footnote 3 Various indications in the text suggest that this activity consists in emitting some kind of sound from the nose, and indeed at one point Dio refers to the practice with the verb ῥέγκειν (which means ‘to snore’ or ‘to snort’).Footnote 4 But the question of what exactly this sound was and why Dio thought it was so horrific has never been satisfactorily explained.Footnote 5
I am not going to discuss the numerous and varied solutions that scholars have proposed over the last century or so.Footnote 6 I pass over the literal interpretations such as Callander's ‘nasal singing’Footnote 7, Bonner's ‘harsh, disgusting sound produced by violent inhalation or exhalation through the nose’ and linked to ‘the pathology of the sexual act’,Footnote 8 or Highet's ‘snorts or snuffles…which sound like men engaged in sexual intercourse’.Footnote 9 I will not mention the metaphorical readings, such as Desideri's suggestion that Dio ‘means to allude to that part of the Tarsian population that speaks a Syriac language…or to those that, though Greek, tended toward assuming the cadences of that language’,Footnote 10 Bost-Pouderon's proposal that Dio is talking not so much about the Tarsians' ‘oriental’ accent but about their ‘Asianist’ (that is, musical and rhythmic) style of speaking,Footnote 11 or even Welles's belief that the entire speech was a ‘burlesque attack’ on the Tarsians' neglect of philosophy.Footnote 12 And now is not the time to address the most recent attempt to solve the problem, Kokkinia's bold (but ultimately unworkable) thesis that Dio was alluding to the Tarsians' deplorable propensity for farting.Footnote 13
Rather than contribute another item to this impressive list of conjectures, I want to shift attention instead onto the features of the oration that have enabled such diversity of scholarly opinion – Dio's curious refusal to name the subject of his speech explicitly and the welter of varied and seemingly incompatible descriptions that he provides in his vain attempts at clarification. It is often supposed that the confusion emerging from the oration would disappear had we witnessed the performance itself (‘You had to be there’) or at least possessed better knowledge of the peculiarities of Tarsian behaviour. But, as we shall see, there are good reasons to suspect that the sound Dio describes was as enigmatic to the Tarsians as it is to us. If so, it is worth asking whether Dio's failure to make his target clear to his audience was involuntary, as he claims, or was the point all along? Could it be that Dio recognized that harnessing the considerable power of not saying something would achieve his ends (whatever those might have been) more effectively than being explicit? And that the urge to supply what Dio has omitted – the desire to identify the elusive subject of the speech – is precisely the response that Dio has sought to foster and produce? In fact, the technique of pointedly passing over, or omitting, something in order to force one's listeners to imagine or infer it for themselves was of great interest to ancient rhetorical theorists. In this article I therefore argue that in the First Tarsian Dio is fashioning his own idiosyncratic, experimental, and expansive take on such strategies, as embodied in the group of rhetorical figures that includes aposiopesis, paraleipsis, and huposiôpêsis.
Figures of silence
One notable feature of the First Tarsian that rarely gets mentioned in modern treatments of the speech is the fact that Dio does not even get around to broaching his ostensible topic until halfway through the speech (at paragraph 31, of 63). Dio's teasing of his audience by means of this lengthy postponement – a thirty-paragraph exordium – suggests that his frustrating inability to explain himself in the second half of the oration is not just due to the peculiarities of his topic but part of an overarching rhetorical strategy that foregrounds perplexity and encourages conjecture. In fact the oration opens with the tables turned, with Dio at a loss concerning the Tarsians' purposes: he wonders why in the world the Tarsians have invited him to speak (1) – ‘What, then,’ he asks them, ‘do you expect us to say?’ – and he can only offer his ‘suspicions’ (ὑπόνοιαν; 3) as to the reason for the invitation. It turns out, of course, that to Dio's thinking the Tarsians, previously lulled like so many other audiences into a self-satisfied stupor by flattering sophists, are hoping to hear something similarly ‘sweet and pleasant’ (7) from him.
In the course of this opening salvo, however, Dio insists that this is precisely what he will not do – that is, praise the city and its inhabitants – even if such behaviour is what the Tarsians are looking forward to.Footnote 14
Or do you expect to hear some encomium concerning yourselves, some official hymn of your city about Perseus, Heracles, the trident of Apollo and the oracles given to you, which declare that you are Greeks and Argives and men of even greater worth, and that you have heroes and demigods – or better yet Titans – as founders? A hymn that further speaks, I suppose, about your land and the mountains within it as well as the [river] Cydnus here, [saying] that it is the most favourable and beautiful of all rivers, and that those who drink from it are ‘rich and blessed’, according to Homer?
(1–2)As Bost-Pouderon has noted, in this passage Dio is employing the rhetorical figure known as paraleipsis (παράλειψις; praeteritio in Latin), in which a speaker announces his intention to pass over certain things, but then proceeds to enumerate precisely what he is planning to leave out.Footnote 15 Here Dio lists a series of Tarsus' praiseworthy features only to emphasize that he will not be talking about them.
But Dio characteristically adds a little twist of his own. Typically in paraleipsis, as Silvia Montiglio has shown, orators ‘pass over’ immoral or shameful activities; by announcing that they will not dwell upon such things they advertise their propriety, but by listing them they both pique their audience's interest and also intimate that they possess a great deal of information about these crimes.Footnote 16 Dio follows this basic strategy but inverts the ethical values: he ‘passes over’ the aspects of Tarsus that have traditionally been praised, not condemned. But this sort of praise is precisely what Dio considers shameful, and by affecting not to mention them he is thus demonstrating his own idiosyncratic ‘propriety’. Moreover, his extensive enumeration of what he will not talk about suggests a vast reserve of knowledge about Tarsus' purportedly praiseworthy qualities, a fact that makes his refusal to utter them that much more agonizing to his audience.
The beginning of the First Tarsian, then, is already looking forward to some of the issues that will arise later: Dio's own uncertainty as to why he was invited to speak prefigures his audience's perplexity concerning the object of his vitriol in the second half of the speech, while his teasing, paraliptic refusal to give the Tarsians what they desire – an encomium of their city – sets the tone for the remainder of the exordium, which is characterized by Dio's frustrating refusal to get to the point. Rather than reveal his topic, Dio offers an array of arguments for why praises of a city's material and natural resources are useless; what matters are ‘sobriety and wisdom’ (σωφροσύνη καὶ νοῦς; 28), and in fact the exaggerated sense of pride engendered by such praise has brought about ‘men who are degenerate, mindless, unrestrained, and inclined toward violence, laziness, and luxury’ (23). Instead, the Tarsians should welcome ‘someone who will point out to you some fault of yours’ (τι τῶν ἁμαρτημάτων; 23).
Despite this suggestion, Dio neglects to tell the Tarsians what ‘fault’ of theirs he will be talking about for another further seven paragraphs, preferring to expound further upon the reasons for which his audience should welcome his hostility. It is only then, after a total of thirty paragraphs of prefatory postponement, that Dio abruptly and self-consciously interrupts his own speech, placing himself in his audience's position and enacting their presumed exasperation and perplexity: ‘So’, he imagines the Tarsians asking, ‘what are we doing wrong?’ (31). Dio relents; he will finally disclose the subject of his speech. His revelation, however, turns out to be anything but straightforward:
I declare that many in this city suffer from a certain outrageous condition (θαυμαστόν τι πάθος) – one that I have heard has afflicted others before you. What is it? If I am not able to indicate it clearly (μὴ δύνωμαι δηλῶσαι σαφῶς), well then, try to figure it out (πειρᾶσθε ὑπονοεῖν). Believe me, I am not talking about anything secret, or anything that is concealed by those performing it, even if it will seem extremely outrageous.
(31–2)Part of the joke, I argue, is that even now, after acknowledging his extensive deferral, Dio still leaves his audience in the dark; he never makes clear to the Tarsians what their ‘condition’ is. But this passage also provides a potential clue to the purpose of Dio's wilful obfuscation. Behind the sly mandate to his audience to ‘figure it out’ (ὑπονοεῖν) lies a complex network of rhetorical concepts concerned with encouraging one's audience to ‘conjecture’ or ‘guess’ what the orator has intentionally omitted. The author of the anonymous Hellenistic rhetorical treatise On Style, for example, presents two slightly different formulations of this idea, using the same verb, ὑπονοεῖν, that Dio does. The first emphasizes the amount of conjectural work required by the listener: ‘For it is necessary to figure out a great deal (ὑπονοῆσαι τὰ πλεῖστα δεῖ) from a brief statement, as in the case of symbols (τὰ σύμβολα)’ (243). The second highlights the tendency of listeners to magnify what speakers leave unsaid: ‘In certain cases concision (ἡ συντομία), and especially aposiopesis (ἡ ἀποσιώπησις), produce grandeur, since some things seem greater when they have not been openly expressed but rather have been figured out (ἔνια γὰρ μὴ ῥηθέντα μείζονα φαίνεται καὶ ὑπονοηθέντα μᾶλλον)’ (103).Footnote 17 Taken together, the use of ὑπονοεῖν (‘suspect’, ‘conjecture’, or ‘guess at’), the reference to ‘symbols’ in the first passage, and the assertion in the second that the material that has been ‘figured out’ ends up magnified in the minds of the audience imply that, to the rhetorician, the nature of what is left out and has to be conjectured is by no means obvious to the listeners.Footnote 18 Likewise Dio specifically warns his audience that he might not be able to define his subject clearly (δηλῶσαι σαφῶς); his decision to choose ὑπονοεῖν to describe their impending task intimates that it will not be an easy one.
While many rhetorical figures require extensive decipherment by the audience – brachylogy, allegory, and ‘figured’ speech, to name a few – Dio's method, in which he pointedly omits mentioning something to which he has called attention, is particularly close to that of the three related rhetorical figures that Silvia Montiglio has called ‘figures of silence’ – aposiopesis, paraleipsis, and their less familiar sibling, huposiôpêsis (or periplokê).Footnote 19 We have already discussed an instance of paraleipsis in the First Tarsian above; if paraleipsis is a feigned omission, in which one announces what one intends to pass over, aposiopesis (ἀποσιώπησις; Latin reticentia, praecisio) is a genuine ‘lapse into silence’: ‘the omission of the expression of an idea, made known by breaking off a sentence already begun, sometimes also explicitly confirmed afterwards’.Footnote 20
Modern scholars tend to be interested in what aposiopesis and paraleipsis convey about the character or emotional state of the speaker (huposiôpêsis, on which more below, is seldom discussed);Footnote 21 Greek and Roman rhetoricians, while not ignoring the emotive aspects, place more stress on the suggestive and amplifying effects of leaving something unspoken. On occasion, they describe these effects in terms reminiscent of Dio's ὑπονοεῖν.Footnote 22 We saw above that aposiopesis in On Style involved the amplification of material that had been ‘figured out’ (ὑπονοηθέντα) rather than explicitly stated; in other treatises, the term ὑπόνοια (‘suspicion’) is used to refer to what the speaker places in the mind of his listener by means of a pointed omission. So the anonymous Imperial rhetorical treatise On the Method of Forcefulness asks: ‘When do paraleipsis and aposiopesis occur? Whenever we want to implant greater suspicion about the subject (τὴν ὑπόνοιαν μείζονα καταστῆσαι τοῦ πράγματος) in the mind of the hearers (ἐν τῇ γνώμῃ τῶν ἀκουόντων) than we actually state’ (7).Footnote 23 Similarly, the third-century ce rhetorician Tiberius states in On the Figures of Demosthenes: ‘Aposiopesis is whenever someone, intending to say something (πρᾶγμα), falls silent (ἀποσιωπήσῃ) concerning it, but leaves behind the suspicion of it (τὴν δὲ ὑπόνοιαν αὐτοῦ καταλίπῃ)’ (5).Footnote 24 Common to these formulations and Dio's remarks in paragraph 31 is the idea that a strategic omission (such as the Tarsians' alleged fault) has the power to implant a huponoia – a ‘suspicion’ – concerning the unspoken ‘thing’ or ‘matter’ (τὸ πρᾶγμα) in the mind of the listener, who was thereby encouraged to huponoein – ‘figure out’, or ‘conjecture’ – what it might be.
Dio's coy command therefore shows that he is very aware of the effects that his decision to ‘fall silent’ concerning the Tarsians' fault will bring about, but it is also significant that he has chosen to help the process along by making those effects explicit and encouraging his audience to make sure that they occur. Rather than just leave the Tarsians' fault unexpressed, Dio announces that he will do so; and rather than just letting the Tarsians ‘figure it out’, Dio challenges them to do so. The logic may be taken from the figures of silence, but the game to which they are applied is very much Dio's own. Dio throws down his gauntlet to his audience: I will not name it; see if you can figure it out.
Ῥέγκειν
Some readers, however, have claimed that Dio does name the Tarsian's fault – using the word ῥέγκειν – and that therefore his plea to his audience is made with tongue firmly in cheek. Let us take a look at the passage in question, which follows immediately after the paragraph we have been discussing. ‘At any rate,’ Dio begins, ‘most of you, although walking and talking, are asleep (καθεύδουσιν)’ (32).
So what do these people do that is characteristic of those who are asleep? There are many things, for almost all of their actions resemble dreams. They are happy for no reason; they are sad, courageous, and frightened even though no one else is present; they eagerly seek and desire the impossible; they believe in the existence of non-existent things, but fail to perceive the things that do exist. Now these things are perhaps common to us all. But in my opinion, they do that thing which is the clearest sign of sleep – they snore (ῥέγκουσιν). For by the gods I cannot say it in a more appropriate way.
(33)Dio's use of the word ῥέγκουσιν –‘they snore’ – in the second to last sentence has led some to assume that he has chosen ῥέγκειν, in a sort of baptismal naming, as the official designation for the object of his tirade.Footnote 25 But, while such a reading is possible, several factors militate against it. First of all, it seems odd that Dio would name the ‘fault’ in such a straightforward fashion right after suggesting that he would have trouble doing so; even Dio tends not to be so openly (and cheaply) ironic.Footnote 26 Second, he never mentions the word ῥέγκειν or any cognate again in the speech, displaying instead a consistent vagueness when referring to the Tarsians' activity. He speaks variously of ‘some condition’ (τι πάθος: 33; cf. τι νόσημα: 50), an ‘action’ (ἔργον: 34, 45), ‘the thing that is happening’ (τὸ γιγνόμενον: 34), and most often just ‘this thing’ (τοῦτο: 55, 56; ταῦτα: 38, 44; τὸ τοιοῦτον: 35; τὰ τοιαῦτα: 37). In fact, the most specific label that Dio can muster is ‘this thing from the nose’ (τουτὶ…τὸ τῶν ῥινῶν: 50); otherwise the best he can do is a ‘sound’ (φθόγγος: 36; φωνή: 50, 56, 60) or a ‘noise’ (ἦχος: 36, 39, 41).Footnote 27 This lack of precision would certainly be unusual were ῥέγκειν actually the name of the fault in question; the resulting awkwardness can be evidenced by the frequency with which H. L. Crosby, the Loeb translator, feels the need to add the word ‘snorting’ for clarification where it is absent in Dio's Greek.Footnote 28 As we shall see, to my mind the oration is far more effective and provocative if its target remains somewhat ambiguous, and if ῥέγκειν is only an analogy,Footnote 29 a surrogate term for the Tarsians' reprehensible activity, which also involves a sound emitted from the nose. When he calls it ‘snoring’ (ῥέγκειν), Dio is only presenting the first in a long series of analogues and clues, not providing an immediate and definitive answer to his puzzle.
Finally, there is a passage later in the oration where Dio goes out of his way to emphasize the unnamed status of this nasal noise, and which thus suggests that ῥέγκειν, or any other name for that matter, does not designate the sound in question. Moreover, the passage also serves as an example in miniature of Dio's larger strategy of employing omissions to tease and provoke his audience. To convey the inappropriateness of their behaviour, Dio asks his (presumably male) Tarsian audience to imagine their reaction if the women in their households – daughters, mothers, wives – were to make such a sound:
…answer me readily whether any of you would want to have a wife of this sort – I mean one whom someone, just as a woman is called citharistria, aulêtris or poiêtria, and so on from other pastimes, might customarily identify by a term derived from this deed.
(45)…ἀποκρίνασθέ μοι προθύμως, εἴ τις ὑμῶν ἐβούλετο γυναῖκα τοιαύτην ἔχειν, λέγω δέ, ὥσπερ κιθαρίστρια καλεῖται γυνὴ καὶ νὴ Δία αὐλητρὶς ἢ ποιήτρια καὶ τἄλλα ὁμοίως ἀπὸ τῶν ἄλλων ἐπιτηδευμάτων, οὕτως ἣν ἄν τις συνήθως ὀνομάσειεν ἀπὸ τούτου τοῦ ἔργου.
The oddity of this passage is the part after the dash in the translation; Dio's point – that no one would want a wife that makes such a sound – is effective enough without dwelling on what such a woman might be called. Dio's posing of the question serves primarily to emphasize the enigmatic nature of his subject – imagine what it would be like to have a wife like this, who was not a citharist, a flautist, or a poetess, but a…what? – and the fact that he has not actually named it. Even if this is not a textbook aposiopesis (since there is no real lapse into silence), nevertheless Dio has clearly left something out here and blatantly drawn attention to his omission.Footnote 30 In fact, the gap that he has left has been so effective that some editors have assumed that the ‘term’ in question must have dropped out of the text after τοῦ ἔργου; von Arnim supplies ῥεγκητρίδα (‘snorteress’, vel sim.), while Reiske suggested κερχνίστριαν (a mysterious coinage of his own with sexual overtones),Footnote 31 and in her recent Budé edition, Bost-Pouderon obligingly prints a lacuna.Footnote 32 But the omission here is surely intentional on Dio's part. His point is that he has not yet given the practice a name, and hence there could be no way to form a word describing a female practitioner of this particular art; naturally the members of his audience are free to ‘figure it out’ for themselves, and I am sure that Dio would be pleased to learn that some of his modern readers have taken his bait.
Huposiôpêsis: hinting in the First Tarsian Oration
The grand conceit of the First Tarsian, then, is crystallized in Dio's challenge to his audience to ‘figure out’ what he will fail to ‘make clear’; by refraining from naming the target of his disgust, Dio instils in the minds of his listeners the desire to make sense of his omission. As I showed earlier, his programmatic injunction is paralleled in rhetoricians' descriptions of figures such as aposiopesis and paraleipsis, where the suggestive effects of strategic omission are underlined. But the First Tarsian would hardly be as intriguing had Dio been satisfied with ‘falling silent’ and letting his audience fill in the blank. As the aforementioned passages on the sleepwalking Tarsians and the nameless female noisemaker illustrate, Dio, far from lapsing into silence, rambles on, offering multiple clarifications and definitions that ostensibly aim to circumscribe the Tarsians' ‘fault’ more narrowly. His relentless series of hints and clues, which nevertheless fail to bring the listener any closer to an identification, comprise the bulk of the speech and are the source of its mystery; if anything, Dio's supposed attempts to assist his audience in ‘figuring out’ his meaning only succeed in making it more obscure.
Dio's technique in this part of the speech bears some resemblance to the one figure of silence that we have not yet examined: huposiôpêsis (ὑποσιώπησις) or periplokê (περιπλοκή).Footnote 33 The primary difference from its two close relations, aposiopesis and paraleipsis, lies in how the omitted content is expressed:
Aposiopesis says nothing at all (οὐδέν τι λέγει), but periplokê says it obscurely (ἀσαφῶς). Paraleipsis, speaking openly, delineates the things themselves (λέγουσα προδήλως αὐτὰ τὰ πράγματα ἀπαγγέλλει), but periplokê says them by means of hints and innuendo (ἐμφαντικῶς καὶ ἐσχηματισμένως).
Aposiopesis ‘passes over the matter in complete silence’ (παντελῶς ἀποσιωπᾷ τὸ πρᾶγμα), but huposiôpêsis ‘signals it through hints’ (δι' αἰνιγμάτων δὲ αὐτὸ σημαίνῃ).Footnote 34
What is characteristic of huposiôpêsis, then, is that the speaker's lapse into silence (-siôpêsis) is accompanied by mysterious, oblique, and insinuating remarks hinting at what that silence is hiding (hupo-, ‘under’). The association of huposiôpêsis with other ‘riddling’ and ‘hinting’ figures suggested by the terms in the quoted definitions – emphasis (ἔμφασις), figured speech (ἐσχηματισμένος λόγος), and allegory (αἰνίγμα) – illustrates its fundamentally enigmatic and obscurantist origins.Footnote 35 In the examples provided by the commentators, the hinting in huposiôpêsis is of a fairly restricted character, but the underlying premise describes Dio's procedure well. The pointed omission at the heart of the speech is the nebulous, mysterious ‘fault’ of the Tarsians; Dio not only enjoins his listeners ‘to figure out’ (ὑπονοεῖν) what it might be, but he also, through his repeated attempts to ‘indicate it clearly’ (δηλῶσαι σαφῶς) supplies his listeners with a continuous stream of oblique, riddling ‘hints’ meant to exercise, and perhaps short-circuit, their conjectural capacities.
This accumulation of clues is what gives the second half of the oration its breathless pace. Over and over again, Dio tackles the problem from a different angle. He describes what sort of people make the sound, what the sound signifies, the reactions of those who hear it, and the behaviours that resemble it, but rather than clarify his meaning, he only manages to create more ambiguity and uncertainty.
• If someone passing by a building hears such a sound, he will undoubtedly call that place a whorehouse (χαμαιτυπεῖον). (36)
• What kind of people emit such a sound? Isn't it characteristic of effeminates (τῶν ἀνδρογύνων)? Of those who have cut off their genitals? And even they don't make the sound all the time, nor to everyone, but it remains something private amongst them, like a password (ξύμβολον). (39)
• Come now, if someone were to form an idea of you from far away based on the sound reaching him, what sort of people would he suppose you to be? What activity would he suppose you to be doing? Would someone claim that you were colonists from Argos? Or from Arados?Footnote 36 That you were Greeks? Or the most degenerate (τοὺς ἀσελγεστάτους) of Phoenicians? (41)
But what is the sound that comes from a whorehouse? That androgunoi use as a password? That is made by the most degenerate Phoenicians? And what sound is all three of these things simultaneously? It is no accident that Dio associates the Tarsians' fault with unnatural sexual practices and ‘barbarian’ licentiousness; his descriptions are directed not so much at revealing the identity of the sound as at inflating the disgust and horror associated with it. As we mentioned above, this sort of amplification is one of the primary effects attributed to figures of silence: ‘some things seem greater when they have not been openly expressed’ (On Style, 103).Footnote 37 The fact that the identity of the Tarsians' fault remains unspecified and indistinct makes it all the easier to overload it with the negative overtones of the reprehensible activities so despised by Dio.
In keeping with this objective, many of Dio's attempts at elucidation are not even concerned with the sound itself, but with conveying its deleterious effects, by means of analogies and thought experiments. Imagine how repugnant it would be to live in a city where men of all ages spoke with female voices (38), walked around with tight clothing and tambourines (39), ‘always use[d] their middle finger’ when extending their hand (37), or walked with their clothes pulled up as if wading into a pool (37).Footnote 38 How would the Tarsians' illustrious ancestors react if they were visiting the city in such a state? Would Heracles not prefer even Busiris' Egypt or Diomedes' Thrace? (47); would Perseus not fly by their city without daring to stop? (47); and would Athenodorus, the revered former governor of Tarsus under Augustus, not refuse to reside there? (48).
In fact, it becomes more apparent as Dio continues that the actual sound in question is far less important than its status as a sign, or a symptom, of deeper moral turpitude and depravity. He declared near the beginning of this half of the speech that ‘this activity makes the city shameful and disgraces it publicly’ (34); soon he is reading it as a ‘sign of immodesty and the most extreme degeneracy’ (σημεῖον…ἀναισχυντίας, ἀσελγείας τῆς ἐσχάτης; 35), or of ‘degeneracy, violence, and the most extreme corruption’ (ἀσελγείας, ὕβρεως, τῆς ἐσχάτης διαφθορᾶς; 41).Footnote 39 As he piles up descriptions and analogies, the fault, the nasal sound, begins to recede into the shadows. Dio's oblique and obscure hints have shifted attention on to the sound's purportedly horrible, loathsome nature without providing any more information about its identity.
It should come as no surprise that Dio's treatment of the Tarsians' nasal activity as a sign or symbol of profound spiritual corruption is informed by the logic of physiognomy, the art of conjecturing the personality or character of an individual from the outward ‘signs’ manifest in their appearance or behaviour. As Bost-Pouderon has noted, physiognomic thought is never far from the surface of the First Tarsian, but it emerges most prominently near the end of the speech, when Dio espouses the basic physiognomic credo that ‘the voice, the gaze, the posture’ (or ‘dress’) (ἡ φωνή, τὸ βλέμμα, τὸ σχῆμα) are ‘signs’ (τὰ…ξύμβολα) that ‘reveal character and disposition (μηνύει τὸ ἦθος καὶ τὴν διάθεσιν)’ (52).Footnote 40 But the reference to physiognomy and its often arbitrary connections between outward behaviour and inner character calls our attention to another curious lacuna in Dio's oration: the lack of a link between the Tarsians' sound and the corruption and immorality that it symbolizes. Just as Dio never makes clear what the sound is, so too the question of why it serves as evidence of such awful qualities remains unanswered.
The dilemma is illustrated in the puzzling anecdote that Dio tells his audience about a renowned Tarsian physiognomist, who could unerringly identify the true colours of everyone he came across just by looking at them, although his speciality seems to have been uncovering unsavoury characters: the braggart, the lecherous man, the adulterer, the cinaedus (κίναιδος, ‘effeminate sexual deviant’) (53). One day the physiognomist was asked to examine a man who was ‘physically rugged, with eyebrows that met as one, squalid and in a sorry state, with callouses on his hands, wearing some rough, grey cloak, hairy down to his ankles, and sporting a terrible haircut’ (54). After looking at him for a long time, our physiognomist was stumped; he told the man to leave. But ‘just as he was departing, the man sneezed (πτάρνυται); the physiognomist immediately shouted out: “He's a cinaedus!” (κίναιδος)’ (54). Dio sums up: ‘So the sneeze proved the character of the man (ὁ πταρμὸς ἐξήλεγξε τὸν τρόπον) despite all of his other outward traits’ (55).Footnote 41
The perplexity to which Dio's anecdote gives rise is remarkably parallel to that produced by the speech in which it is embedded. On the one hand, Dio's analogy seems self-evident: just as the sneeze (another noise emitted from the nose) is the overriding sign of effeminacy in the story, so too the Tarsians' sound is a sign of a similar, albeit ultimately indeterminate, inner flaw.Footnote 42 But the obvious question that occurs to a modern reader is why the man's sneezing would identify him as a cinaedus. Sneezing was considered ominous in antiquity, but there is no evidence linking it with effeminacy, and this aspect of the story has utterly baffled the few scholars who have noted it.Footnote 43 In fact, the critical aporia concerning the significance of this sneeze recalls the similar scholarly uncertainty over the nature of the Tarsians' nasal activity, mentioned at the beginning of this article. And does the problem highlighted by the anecdote not echo the one that informs the entire second half of the oration? The sneeze of the cinaedus and the Tarsian's nasal activity have something in themselves that is more than meets the eye and that connects them to hidden perversity, but that something is purposefully left unstated. In the end, the anecdote explains nothing – in the logic of the story the sneeze is an empty signifier, devoid of content, and it has a completely arbitrary connection with its signified (being a cinaedus). Dio has told the story to show that a sound can be indicative of inner character, but he leaves us as much in the dark as before. The question of what the sound is has never been answered, and now the question of why the sound is so disgusting suffers the same fate.
Conclusions
Is it a coincidence that, in the passage following the anecdote, Dio seems to throw up his hands in defeat? He admits that he ‘would gladly inquire of the experts (τῶν ἐμπείρων) what this thing resembles or what it wishes to indicate (τίνι τοῦτο ἔοικεν ἢ τί βούλεται δηλοῦν)’ (55), implying that all of his efforts – both to describe the sound and to indicate its connection to the inner vices that it symbolizes – have been in vain. At this point, he tellingly defines the sound by what it is not, as if his only remaining option is to describe the sound in a purely negative fashion.
For it is neither a clucking, nor a smacking of the lips, nor a hissing [whistling?] (οὔτε γὰρ κλωσμὸς οὔτε ποππυσμὸς οὔτε συριγμός ἐστιν). What deed is it characteristic of? When does it especially occur? For men neither herd, farm, nor hunt in this manner, nor is the sound something sailors utter. Is it characteristic of those greeting each other, or calling, or expressing affection? No; just as the hymeneal is an ancient song specifically for those getting married, so this new rhythm belongs to some other festival.
(55–6)Footnote 44In the peroration that follows, Dio similarly characterizes the sound by listing what it does not resemble – as something ‘belonging to neither man nor woman nor any other living creature, not even imitating a whore whoring’ – and the only positive description of it that he offers is studiously vague and typically hyperbolic – it ‘belongs to the most shameful deed and the most degenerate practice (τὸ τοῦ αἰσχίστου ἔργου καὶ τῆς ἀσελγεστάτης πράξεως)’ (60).Footnote 45 As his fury rises near the conclusion of his speech, Dio collapses the difference between the sound and the ‘evils’ of which it is a symptom; the ‘disease’, he tells the Tarsians, ‘is attacking and invading every part of your bodies – feet, hands, eyes, and tongue’ (62).
It is perhaps fitting that any hint of the Tarsians' fault, or of any sound at all, has completely disappeared by the conclusion of the oration.Footnote 46 What were the Tarsians doing? Why was it so horrible? For all of his posturing, his insinuations, his injunctions, his clues, Dio never reveals the answer to either question. But this suppression enables him to overload the sound with connotations that evoke a world of dark, secret, and obscene behaviour, a world that he encourages and helps his audience to imagine, in an expansive deployment of the principles behind the so-called figures of silence.
What was Dio's point in delivering such an unusual oration? As with so many of his speeches, rhetorical analysis is unavoidably caught up with the question of ‘seriousness’.Footnote 47 Does he really mean what he says? Is he earnestly chastising the Tarsians, or are they in on the joke? Is this just a sophistic showpiece or a blistering moral broadside; a model example of a Cynic diatribe, or a parody of one?Footnote 48 A further consideration, of course, is whether the speech was not actually delivered in front of the Tarsians but somewhere else.Footnote 49 Many other Cilician cities were envious of Tarsus' prominence (e.g. Aegiae and Adana: 51; cf. Or. 34.10, 14, 47), and their inhabitants would presumably have enjoyed hearing Dio castigate the Tarsians, especially in such outrageous fashion. Or perhaps the oration was never ‘performed’ at all, and was produced and disseminated as a written composition, designed to be read and circulated as if it had been delivered to the Tarsians.Footnote 50 On this hypothesis, the intended audience of the speech would have been Dio's ancient readers, who are to be amazed at Dio's confrontational and hectoring persona – he went to Tarsus and did what? This astonishment is surely facilitated by Dio's obfuscating the details of the Tarsians' great fault; as Dio knew very well, the indefinition itself engendered suspicions of something much more scandalous, more repulsive, more depraved. In fact, if we see Dio's directive – ‘If I am not able to indicate it clearly, well then, try to figure it out’ – as addressed not only to his immediate audience but also to future readers of the oration, it is apparent that his call to interpretation has certainly been eagerly answered. In this sense, modern scholars' efforts to fix Dio's meaning are an anticipated, even a desired, response to this evasive, enigmatic text.
