In September 2016 then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told a group of potential donors that ‘… you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it … . And he has lifted them up’. While the term ‘basket of deplorables’ was immediately cast by the media as a political gaffe of the highest order, the language that Clinton used was in many ways appropriate to the context in which she was speaking: to spur her audience to donate to her campaign. Clinton gave her opponent's followers a name (‘deplorables’) that cast them as a dangerous group who posed a threat to the way of life that her supporters held dear. By defining what makes a ‘deplorable’ in terms of the values (‘racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic’) that her supporters saw as unsavoury and immoral, she cast Donald Trump's followers as an ‘out-group’, a point reinforced by her use of third-person pronouns to describe Trump (‘he’) and his supporters (‘them’). It was thus up to Clinton's supporters as the ‘in-group’ to take action to keep their community safe by donating to her campaign.

It is this constellation of issues – the use of rhetoric to unite and divide for a larger purpose – which the edited volume under review aims to address. Originating from a 2017 conference held at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, entitled ‘The Rhetoric of (dis)unity: Community and division in Greco-Roman prose and poetry’, the volume seeks ‘to contribute to a developing appreciation of the capacity of rhetoric to reinforce affiliation and disaffiliation to groups in a wide range of texts and contexts’ (p. 1). The study begins with an introduction by the editors, which articulates its purpose and the theoretical background that informs it. Here we learn that the volume differentiates itself from other studies on ancient rhetoric through recourse to sociopsychological theories of community (B. Anderson's ‘imagined communities’) and group identity (H. Tajfel and J. Turner's Social Identity Theory) as well as sociolinguistic studies of rhetoric (K. Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives). The introduction also usefully reprints the abstracts for all 20 chapters, giving prospective readers the ability to discern which essays will be of most use to them.

The chapters that follow are divided into six thematically organised sections. The first of these sections, ‘Authors, Speakers and Audience’, traces the various strategies that orators use in order to connect with their audience and to alienate their opponent, while the second, ‘Emotions’, analyses the use of emotions as a means of promoting unity in the imagined audiences of Demosthenes’ Against Aristogeiton and Xenophon's Anabasis. The third, ‘Drama and Poetry’, and the fourth, ‘Historical and Technical Prose’, look at how the rhetoric of unity and division is deployed outside of oratorical contexts in support of genre-specific goals. The fifth, ‘Gender and the Construction of Identity’, and the sixth, ‘Religious Discourse’, examine how various topoi related to gender and religion are deployed to convince the audience of the speaker/writer's larger points. The material covered is chronologically diverse, ranging from the late fifth century bce (Aristophanes’ Acharnians) to the fifth century ce (Paulinus of Nola), and discusses texts from a number of different literary genres, including oratory, drama, epic poetry, pastoral poetry, historical texts, literary critical texts, technical prose and philosophical texts. The heterogeneous make-up of the contributions is purposeful, as the editors believe that such a ‘holistic approach’ can ‘provide new insights into, and open up the terms of debate about, unity and division’ (p. 6).

The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of oratory, most of all those who study fourth-century Athenian oratory. By my count, six of the twenty chapters (M.J. Edwards; N. Fisher; Serafim; E. Volonaki; D. Spatharas; S. Ferrucci) focus on Athenian courtroom oratory. When these contributions are read together, they paint a vivid picture of the wide array of rhetorical techniques (e.g. humour, hostility, appeals to collective morality) that Athenian orators had at their disposal, as well as the political contingencies, like the passage of Pericles’ citizenship law (Ferrucci) and eisangeltikos nomos (Volonaki), that dictated how these strategies were used. This sextet of essays also provides useful theoretical (e.g. Spatharas's discussion of humour theory) and analytical models (e.g. Serafim's quantitative study of forms of address) for future research. For instance, one can quite easily see how Serafim's study of forms of address could be repeated in the Roman context to shed light on the differences between courtroom, comitial and contional oratory or even for the purpose of engaging in cross-cultural analysis of Attic and Roman rhetoric (cf. E. Dickey 1997, 2002 for a broader analysis along these lines).

Three other oratorically oriented chapters (B. Breij; C. Kremmydas; S. Mollea) give us a sense of the teaching and practice of rhetoric in the High Empire. Breij provides an insightful analysis of sententiae as a rhetorical tool in the declamations of Pseudo-Quintilian, highlighting how these seemingly banal statements can be used to explore and even contest common moral values. Kremmydas and Mollea show how two of the most eloquent orators from the Roman provinces, Dio Chrysostom and Apuleius, use the language of unity, homonoia in the case of the former and humanitas in the case of the latter, as political tools to navigate the complex system of power relations in the Roman world of the first and second centuries ce. The focus on the rhetoric of the High Empire draws attention to the absence of Ciceronian oratory from the volume. Indeed, the absence of Ciceronian oratory is emblematic of a larger problem with the volume, namely the lack of discussion of the rich literature written during and about the Roman civil wars. The lack of coverage of such material represents not only a missed opportunity to examine rhetorical tactics of inclusion and exclusion in a period where they were of utmost importance, but also means that the volume does not engage with some of the most significant theoretically developed scholarship on rhetoric and community construction in the ancient world (e.g. R. Morstein-Marx 2004; K.-J. Hölkeskamp 2010; V. Arena 2013).

The volume also provides key insights into the formation of what we might term textual communities. Vatri and M. Romani Mistretta show through their contributions the ways in which texts could bring together people who did not inhabit the same physical or temporal space. By analysing the use of first-person pronouns in the writings of Aristotle, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Longinus and Hermogenes, Vatri demonstrates how these literary critics used pronouns to take on a particular persona in the hope of persuading their readers. Romani Mistretta, on the other hand, looks at how a shared method and history in two disparate technical fields, medicine and artillery engineering, not only created a community of knowledge but offered a clear-cut way for readers of Hippocrates and Philo to join them. While both essays are innovative in the fields and time periods they bring together, it is surprising that neither cites recent scholarly work on the formation of intellectual communities in antiquity (e.g. W. Johnson's Readers and Reading [2012]). Nonetheless, the idea of building textual communities across time might bring new and interesting ways to think about intertextuality and reception. We might consider how later readers respond to the rhetorical prompts of the source text and as well as how they use their own rhetoric to construct their relationship with the past. To build on Romani Mistretta's analysis of the De vetere medicina, what do we make of the fact that Hippocrates is still considered by modern health professionals as the founder of medicine? How does recalling Hippocrates frame the ways in which modern health professionals construct their own community?

Along similar lines, the importance that the volume places on taking a holistic approach towards the rhetoric of unity and division by considering a broad range of time periods and genre highlights the possibility of comparative work that actively considers the relationship between ancient and modern rhetoric. Such comparative analysis could help clarify some of the larger systemic factors that shaped the rhetoric of unity and division in the Graeco-Roman world. For instance, we might ask how the fact that, as a result of modern technological changes, a speaker's words may be heard by people other than the audience in front of them has altered the way in which they make claims about unity and division. Similarly, we might consider whether the ease with which information can be ‘fact-checked’ has changed the tactics that speakers use to unite or divide communities. These kinds of analysis would help us to articulate more clearly what, if anything, was unique about rhetoric in antiquity.

Unfortunately, this volume is marred by a number of inconsistencies. For one, the degree to which the contributions appear to have been revised from their initial presentation is highly variable, resulting in significant variance in the length of the chapters. While the five chapters in the first section total 125 pages, roughly 25 pages per chapter, the three chapters in the sixth section come in at only 35 pages, slightly under 12 pages per chapter. There is similar inconsistency in terms of engagement with relevant bibliography, which leads to some rather significant absences in individual contributions – E. Sanders's generally insightful piece on Xenophon's dealings with mutinous soldiers misses E.L. Wheeler's 1988 work on the vocabulary of military trickery, and T.D. McClain's reading of Livy's narrative of the repeal of the lex Oppia as an assertion of the historian's authority could have benefited from K. Milnor's 2005 analysis of the episode in light of Augustan moral legislation. Finally, though I am loathe to mention it given my personal difficulties with copy-editing, the volume suffers from a high number of stylistic, grammatical, typographic and syntactic infelicities. These inconsistencies as well as the absence of certain important topics like the literature of the Roman civil war means that, while many of the chapters will become important contributions to their individual fields, the volume as a whole falls short of becoming the go-to work on the rhetoric of division and unity in ancient literature.