The Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus: Text, Translation, and Commentary (review)

Throughout the Hellenistic and Roman period members of the educated elite composed and delivered imitation speeches about hypothetical sets of historical, legendary, or fictitious circumstances. This was a practice capable of exciting the enthusiasm of adults as well as schoolboys, of amateurs as well as professional rhetors; witness (for example) Pliny's report of Isaeus' public displays (Ep. 2.3). Considering its importance in classical culture, surprisingly little attention has been paid to declamation; scholars have perhaps been too ready to disparage and dismiss it on the basis of misleading secondhand characterisations.

Admittedly, firsthand acquaintance has been hard to come by in the past, requiring arid labours over obscure, often badly edited and inaccessible texts without much by way of secondary literature to help in orientation. But the situation has improved in recent years. On the Greek side, Donald Russell's Greek Declamation (Cambridge 1983) is indispensable. Innes and Winterbottom have opened up the way to a usable text of Sopater's Diaresis Zetematon in their commentary (London 1988); alas, we still await someone willing to produce a text answering to their prolegomena. Building on these foundations, my own Hermogenes On Issues (Oxford 1995) makes some attempt to explore the connections between theory and declamatory practice.

Latin declamation has been even better served. The elder Seneca has been edited and translated by Winterbottom (1974), with monographs by Fairweather (Cambridge 1981) and Sussman (Leiden 1978). The Minor Declamations ascribed to Quintilian (D. Min.) have been edited by Shackleton-Bailey (Stuttgart 1989) and (with an excellent commentary) by Winterbottom (Berlin 1984); and there is Dingel's Scholastica Materia (Berlin 1988). The Major Declamations have been edited by Håkanson (Stuttgart 1982) and translated by Sussman (Frankfurt 1987). Håkanson also edited the declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus (Stuttgart 1978); Sussman now puts us further in his debt with a revised text of Calpurnius, accompanied by the first English translation and the first commentary since Burman's in 1720.

Of Calpurnius Flaccus himself we know nothing beyond what can be inferred from the text; stylistic indicators point to a second-century date. His Declamations are in fact excerpts of varying length from treatments of fifty-three declamation themes; in nine cases only, extracts are given from both sides of the argument. By contrast with Seneca's eclectic collection, the excerpts seem to be the work of a single hand. But the kind of explicit commentary and advice from the teacher provided by the sermones in the Minor Declamations attributed to Quintilian, and more systematically by Sopater, is entirely absent. This makes for a frustrating read. The sparse highlights collected here convey little sense of the structure of the declamation as a whole, or the overall manner in which its argument was laid out; one may compare, for example, Calp. 6 with the far more instructive treatment of the same theme in D. Min. 351.

Sussman's introduction sets out the context efficiently and lucidly. But he reproduces a common error in explaining the terms controversia and suasoria (3, 12). Although most suasoriae were based on history or legend, this was not a defining characteristic; the crucial distinction is that between the forensic controversia and the deliberative suasoria (respectively de factis and de futuris, as Quintilian says, 7.4.2; cf. 2.4.25). Thus a forensic declamation based on historical events is a controversia (e.g., Sen. C. 9.2); fictitious deliberative themes, such as Calp. 18 and 39, are suasoriae.

The text does not vary greatly from Håkanson's; many of the changes adopt proposals advanced but not printed by Håkanson. The result is sometimes a definite improvement and usually plausible. But at 7.23 (reference by page and line in Håkanson) perneg>antes nec<avit is the least successful solution on offer (the argument is, "they denied the charge under torture: even so the torturer, because he was an...