Alan Cameron and Peter Brown firmly established rhetoric's centrality to the study of Late Antiquity with their seminal monographs on the subject, which both appeared in 1992. Although rhetoric is now a topic covered in almost any work on late-antique culture, monographs dedicated to the subject are surprisingly few. Q.P. fills the need for such a work with a collection of essays whose somewhat redundant aim is ‘to claim the indisputable centrality of rhetoric in the religious and cultural milieu of Late Antiquity’ (p. vii). This matter is hardly in dispute. Nevertheless, the essays register the kaleidoscopic and multiple applications of the rhetorike techne in literary texts from the third-century Roman Empire to tenth-century Baghdad. The contributions attest to rhetoric's status as both a shared discourse among diverse and, at times, antagonistic communities and one that simultaneously demarcated the boundaries between them. Such multiplicity, however, prevents the volume from becoming more than the sum of its parts.
Q.P. groups twelve essays into three subsections that each comprises four essays. His foreword provides a brief synopsis of each contribution and a concise picture of the competing purposes that rhetoric served in Late Antiquity. R.J. Penella's introduction charts the reinvigoration of rhetoric as a topic of study and evaluates issues of continuity and discontinuity between Classical and Late Antiquity. These two pieces mirror each other in their concern for the fluid cultural dynamics in which rhetoric flourished as a practice and continues to flourish as a topic of study. Yet neither piece offers a compelling vision for the quid novi that the volume offers the field beyond reaffirming rhetoric's centrality to Classical culture.
The first section, ‘Words and the Word: Rhetorical Strategies and Theology’, begins the collection on a high note and is the most successful in the volume. P. Rousseau, ‘Homily and Exegesis in the Patristic Age’, shows how the genre of homily became rhetoricised and adapted to the theatricality of didactic instruction in Christian communities. N. Baker-Brian, ‘Between Testimony and Rumor’, analyses Augustine's self-fashioning and the revision of his Manichean past. Both contributions focus on the use of rhetoric to discipline communication and to marginalise competing modes of speech, along with their practitioners, as deviant. I.L.E. Ramelli, ‘A Rhetorical Device in Evagrius’, contributes to the reassessment of allegory but devolves into a summary of Evagrius' kephalaia rather than offering a coherent analysis of the work. The section ends with J. Lössl's study of Firmicus Maternus' virulent invective in ‘Profaning and Proscribing’. The essay contributes a strong philological study of the terms that link Maternus to Roman moralism and establish his own voice as an heir to this discourse.
The second section, ‘Sacred and Profane in Late Antique Literature’, demonstrates just how far the boundaries of Late Antiquity have expanded. The temporal scope of its essays ranges from Heliodorus' Aethiopica to Julian's reception in tenth-century Baghdad. L. Miguélez-Cavero, ‘Rhetoric for a Christian Community’, contributes the gem of the collection with her study of the Codex Visionum. Miguélez-Cavero expertly shows how the codex constructed a communal identity for its monastery through narratives of saints' lives. Only the lack of any close readings of the poems takes away from the quality of this essay. M. Kraus, ‘Rhetoric or Law’, locates the study of rhetoric in a world of competing disciplines, where rhetoric's status, and that of its teachers and practitioners, was embattled and no longer guaranteed. In order to explain Libanius' use of Greek legal terminology in his progymnasmata, Kraus argues that Hellenic legal traditions associated with Athens were operative in Antioch in the fourth century. A. Pizzone, ‘When Calasiris got Pregnant’, presents a focused study on the manipulation of narrative through the control of rhetorical devices such as aphegesis in Heliodorus' Aethiopica. The section concludes with J.W. Watt, ‘Themistius and Julian: their Association in Syriac and Arabic Tradition’, a somewhat speculative study of the reception of the relationship between Themistius and Julian in Syriac and in an Arabic risāla of tenth-century Baghdad. The reception of Hellenism under the Caliphate and its transformation in new cultural circumstances encapsulate the dynamic transformations of Late Antiquity in nuce.
The final section, ‘Rhetoric and Political Speeches’, presents rhetoric in its most traditional setting: persuasive oratory. D. Konstan, ‘Themistius on Royal Beauty’, performs a close reading of the word κάλλος in the impresario's speech to Gratian, delivered at Rome. K. details the surprising way that Themistius models his relationship with Gratian on the relationship between an erastes and an eromenos, but he does not show how this affects our understanding of the speech. G. Lopetugui, ‘The Panegyrici Latini: Rhetoric in the Service of Imperial Ideology’, interprets the orations as mouthpieces for propaganda. L. contributes a new understanding of the Tetrarchic orators as priest-like figures in the cult of the emperors and uses this status to shed light on the religious terminology used in Mamertinus' speeches. The ramifications of this theory for post-312 panegyrics, however, are disappointingly left unexplored. L. Van Hoof and P. Van Nuffelen, ‘“No Stories for Old Men”: Damophilus of Bithynia and Plutarch in Julian's Misopogon’, seek to rehabilitate the rhetorical finesse of Julian's Misopogon. They skilfully show how Julian uses the formal relationship between the narrative frame of the text and the embedded anecdote from Damophilus to symbolise his own relationship with the Antiochenes. Julian's rhetorical aims and strategies emerge from the analysis of the emperor's use of competing narratives about Cato's misadventures in Antioch. The collection ends with a metatextual wink in Q.P.'s ‘Libanius’ Horror Silentii'. The essay places Libanius' existential dread of silence in the context of its transvaluation into the culmination of rhetoric in Christian texts. The silencing power of rhetoric becomes directed towards its speaking subject in its Christian application, a phenomenon unimaginable to Classical rhetoricians and orators.
The collection offers much to a reader whose focus is purely on literary rhetoric, but contributes little to expanding the discursive field of rhetoric itself in Late Antiquity. The absence of any study on rhetoric in the visual arts of Late Antiquity detracts from its engagement with the era itself. This is regrettable considering the recent fine work on this topic and the centrality of the visual to rhetoric, and vice versa, that may be the hallmark of Late Antiquity's inheritance from the Second Sophistic. Moreover, numerous typographical errors, especially towards the end of the volume, mar the production quality of the text and indicate that it did not receive the attentive care of a summa manus. Nevertheless, several outstanding contributions redeem a volume of uneven quality, and the collection succeeds in presenting new avenues for research within the field of literary studies.
