This fully annotated volume offers the first English translation of the orations of Himerius of Athens, a prominent teacher of rhetoric in the fourth century A.D. _Man and the Word _contains 79 surviving orations and fragments of orations in the grand tradition of imperial Greek rhetoric. The speeches, a rich source on the intellectual life of late antiquity, capture the flavor of student life in Athens, illuminate relations in the educated community, and illustrate the ongoing civic role of the sophist. (...) This volume includes speeches given by Himerius in various cities as he traveled east to join the emperor Julian, customary declamations on imaginary topics, and a noteworthy monody on the death of his son. Extensive introductory notes and annotations place these translations in their literary and historical contexts. (shrink)

Philostratus remarks on the terseness of the letters of Apollonius of Tyana , and letter 61 is a good example of that stylistic feature. Addressed to a Lesbonax, it says: ᾽Agr;νχαπσις ó Σκθης ν σπφóς εí δ Σκθης, τι καì ϳκθης . In my commentary to the letters, I observed that Apollonius is drawing here on the tradition of the Scythians as an idealized race, unspoiled by the cultivations of Greek city life, and is implicitly criticizing his contemporaries in the (...) Greek world for not living up to the high ideals of Hellenism. I compared a critical remark in letter 34 that alludes to Euripides, Orestes 485: “βαπβαπθ” ο “χπóνιος ὢν φ’ ‘Ελλδι. More can now be said. (shrink)

Eunapius's Lives of Philosophers and Sophists is a work of considerable importance for the cultural history of the eastern Roman Empire in the fourth century A.D. In particular, it opens a window onto two central aspects of late ancient paganism, Iamblichan Neoplatonism and academic rhetorical culture. This volume offers a close study of the Lives, much of it amounting more or less to a commentary in continuous prose. Greek Philosophers and Sophists in the Fourth Century A.D. will interest classicists, students (...) of the later Roman empire and those interested in the history of ancient philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century by Raffaella CribioreRobert J. PenellaRaffaella Cribiore. Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century. Townsend Lectures/Cornell University Studies in Classical Philology. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013. x + 260 pp. Cloth, $49.95.Raffaella Cribiore has earned her Libanian stripes, especially with her The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch (Princeton 2007). When she (...) was invited to give the Townsend Lectures at Cornell University, of which the book under review is the published version, she decided to use that occasion as an opportunity to settle some Libanian misunderstandings, to insist on certain methodological principles, and to offer solutions to some specific problems. The book touches on a good number of discrete points; it might be described as a Libanian mélange. But, as its title indicates, the agenda revolves around matters of rhetoric and religion.In chapter 1, “Rhetoric and the Distortion of Reality,” the central exhibit is Oration 1, Libanius’ so-called autobiography. Cribiore provides a good discussion of its compositional history—the main section (1–155) written in 374 when Libanius was sixty years old and the rest at various sittings from 380 to 393—and of the main lines of its narrative. Any autobiography is, of course, an interpretive construction, a “distortion of reality,” made at a certain point or points in one’s lifetime. Cribiore explores Libanius’ self-interpretations, most famously the [End Page 537] role he allots to Tychē in his life. She shows how Libanius’ letters, written with immediacy at a particular point in time, can sometimes act as a factual corrective to the autobiography. Cribiore wonders whether one source of Libanius’ self-shaping may have been the holy-man tradition. She is struck by commonalities in Libanius’ autobiography and biographies of Apollonius of Tyana, Pythagoras, and Plotinus, although she does not believe that the Philostratean and Neopla-tonic works in question directly inspired Libanius. On the other hand, she argues that he read Athanasius’ life of the Christian monk Antony, in which he “could find much that could help him shape the narrative of his own life” (74). While I would not deny that Libanius might have read this work, I am not convinced that we need to invoke it to explain similarities of motif (or of counter-motif) found in his autobiography. All the commonalities are better seen, in Mortimer Smith’s words, as arising “from the general religious and intellectual milieu” (63).Chapter 2, “A Rhetor and His Audience: The Role of Invective,” depicts Libanius as a master of the emotions—provoking pity, anger, and shame, and also consoling grief—and of invective and satire. Personal invective had deep roots in the classical past; and classical models of invective, especially Demosthenes and Aeschines, were still inspiring emulation in Libanius’ day. Libanius could control the size of his listening or reading audience and suppress proper names or resort to allusion in attacking contemporary figures in his orations, but Cribiore rejects Paul Petit’s view that Libanius kept his most abusive orations “hidden in his file drawers,” intended “only for himself or for an audience of two or three friends” (86–87). They were far more publicly intended than that. The publicity of invective, though, raises a problem: the same Libanius who condemns certain public figures in the orations is very polite to them in the letters. (Cribiore is particularly interested in the case of Proclus, comes Orientis in 383–84.) Does this not make Libanius a hypocrite who can turn easily from invective to flattery? Cribiore tries to mitigate bald inconsistency by observing that traditional invective would have been taken cum grano salis, whereas a friendly and restrained tone would have been expected in letters. Fair enough. But such an observation, based on conventions of genre and the expectations of the audiences, tells us very little about the writer’s actual state of mind and behavior in any particular case. Cribiore’s insistence here on the publicity (more or less) of orations is one side of a coin that first appears in chapter 1, although it is not put to much... (shrink)

This paper surveys the rhetorical works of the so-called School of Gaza of the late fifth and early sixth centuries in light of the recent wave of scholarship on the School. It focuses on themes, rhetorical genres, and structural features. The Gazan repertoire includes “real life” orations, declamations, dialexeis, progymnasmatic pieces, and oratorical paratexts such as preliminary dialexeis and protheōriai. The paper seeks to provide a map to this important but neglected body of texts, synthesizing recent scholarship and adding some (...) of the author’s own observations along the way. (shrink)

In a recent article I observed that Livy sees a dialectic at work in Roman history over the course of the reigns of the first four kings. The first king, Romulus, is associated with physical strength and is devoted to war. His successor Numa is devoted to peace and to the advance of religion, law and the civilizing virtues. The Romulean thesis, having been answered by the Numan antithesis, reasserts itself in the reign of the third king, Tullus Hostilius. This (...) time, devotion to war is even more intense: Tullus is ferocior than Romulus. Excessive devotion to war, however, entailed the neglect of other things: towards the end of his reign, during a plague to which he himself eventually fell victim, Tullus turned to religion, hoping that the gods would end the pestilence if he could balance his Romulean devotion to war with a Numan concern for sacra. But his efforts were too late and inept. It was not until the reign of the fourth king, Ancus Marcius, that a synthesis was achieved. Ancus had a medium ingenium that fused the Romulean and Numan tendencies. The adoption of the ius fetiale by the Livian Ancus symbolizes this synthesis: the ius fetiale was a martial ritual, but it also acknowledged the Numan claims of religion and right. (shrink)