‘Communication is a two-way street.’ This phrase is often prescriptive in modern contexts: effective communication should be a dialogue if its goals are persuasion and agreement. It is likewise descriptive of ancient rhetoric — forensic, deliberative and epideictic. The last of these is most prevalent in our surviving sources, and its subgenre panegyric has enjoyed increasing appreciation as key to understanding the period’s political, intellectual and literary cultures. However, these must be handled with care, neither taken uncritically as historical sources for the rulers and events they describe, nor dismissed as mere flattery by obsequious propagandists parroting precisely what the emperor wants to hear and be heard. Rather, panegyrists exercised a significant degree of independence and originality. According to Guy Sabbah (Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé 43 (1983)), encomia not only disseminated to hearers (and subsequent readers) the policies and image of the ruler (communication descendante), but also conveyed the wishes of the orator, and the communities he represented, for what policies and image the ruler should aspire to (communication ascendante).

Emperors and Rhetoricians highlights panegyric as such a ‘two-way street’, an essential communicative conduit between emperors and subjects in order to advance the interests of both and build consensus. The book focuses mainly on Julian’s imperial career from the mid-350s to early 360s c.e., as a case study that is simultaneously representative and exceptional (at least among extant sources), given that Julian himself, as Caesar and later Augustus, used panegyrical discourse aimed at his august cousin Constantius II as well as employed on his own behalf. Marcos conducts careful and comparative rhetorical and historical analyses of several works in Greek and Latin, not only of epideictic oratory but also epistolography and historiography that utilise the discourse of praise and blame.

First, he considers Julian Caesar’s first three Orations — two addressed to Constantius and one to the empress Eusebia (and Constantius, arguably) — alongside three delivered by the philosopher-statesman Themistius to the same emperor. These are his debut panegyric delivered at Ancyra, his speech of gratitude for his adlection to the Constantinopolitan senate (M. reads this alongside Constantius’ letter authorising it), and his embassy speech to the senate of Rome during the emperor’s visit in 357. Themistius’ and Julian’s idiosyncratic approaches to panegyric can be best appreciated through parallel reading, leveraging their own intellectual credentials to boost Constantius’ reputation for paideia among the empire’s eastern elites, and assuring western stakeholders of his commitments to them, while simultaneously soliciting his continued support and promoting themselves as advisors on imperial conduct and policy. Among the varied scholarly interpretations of Julian’s panegyrics, M. takes a plausible position that they were all intended for Constantius to hear/read as voluntary and sincere professions of loyalty and commitments to cooperation, whose seemingly subversive elements should be taken as honest criticisms. By then circulating them in written form among the empire’s elites, the Caesar increasingly used them to promote his own ambitions and political philosophy as a prospective Augustus.

Julian’s use of panegyric to subtly deconstruct his cousin’s image and negotiate their relationship previews his more explicit fusion of encomium and invective following his elevation to Augustus by his troops and diplomatic breakdown with Constantius in 360–361: the Letter to the Athenians legitimises Julian through auto-panegyric and delegitimises Constantius through anti-panegyric. The key ideological motif here is Julian’s recusationes imperii, ‘refusals of power’, proving his worthiness thereof. The comparative case study here — curiously inserted before the analysis of Julian’s Letter — is Ammianus Marcellinus’ account of Julian’s elevation, as evidence not only of the historian’s use of ‘near-panegyrical material’ (paene laudativa materia), itself influenced by the Letter, but even a dig by implicit contrast at the dubious circumstances of Theodosius’ elevation in 379.

The remainder of the book treats Julian’s career as sole Augustus, with his use of auto- and anti-panegyrical discourse in letters to cities and, finally, Misopogon, which M. reads as a merciful response to the communication breakdown between Antiochenes and emperor, even prescribing terms of prospective reconciliation. Such a tendency to frame Julian as a shrewd politician more inclined to consensus-building than antagonism stems from M.’s analyses — replete with valuable insights — of contemporary panegyrists Mamertinus, Himerius and Libanius, who promote Julian’s virtues and promises for urban renewal and military victory in manners sensitive to stakeholders in their respective audiences. Most significantly, M. traces through these orators a measured and gradual deployment of Julian’s pro-pagan policies that remained tolerant of Christianity, either downplaying religious references or taking them (in Himerius’ and Libanius’ case) as evidence of largely pagan audiences. And yet, beyond Julian’s recall of exiled clerics hardly being ‘edicts of toleration’, M. largely ignores the frequent pro-pagan, anti-Christian statements of the emperor’s writings throughout his reign. He also misdates the Hymn to the Mother of the Gods, which was written during the vernal equinox of 362, right after To the Cynic Heraclius with its divine mandate to reverse Constantinian Christianisation. There is hardly a word on the school edict or Against the Galileans. The fundamental issue here may be the short shrift M. gives Himerius and Libanius, largely neglecting to investigate how either orator advances his own interests and expectations, rather than simply being semi-official mouthpieces. Julian had likely already left Constantinople before Himerius arrived, and so had no direct input into the speeches, while Libanius was certainly more a religious moderate than Julian.

These are minor shortcomings, however, of an overall excellently researched, argued and polished monograph that substantially advances our understanding and the rehabilitation, not only of Julian but also the functioning of epideictic oratory within imperial politics at large.