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  • The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome
  • Josiah Osgood
Joy Connolly . The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. xii + 304 pp. Cloth, $45.

What made the Roman Republic cohere? Why did ordinary citizens endure so much inequality in political life? Or did they? In this ambitious, and challenging, book, Joy Connolly attempts to provide fresh answers to these longstanding questions by turning to neglected evidence, Cicero's rhetorical works. The orator to emerge from Cicero's theorizing-but not, apparently, his speeches, which are banned from the discussion-is one who affirms the civic identity of all, his own "dynamic constitution" reflecting "the constitution of the republic, what I call the state of speech" (3). In looking at Cicero's engagement with this civic ideal, Connolly productively turns the focus away from the rhetorical self-fashioning of the self, or the self-advertisement of Cicero, familiar from recent studies: already in his extraordinarily creative first dialogue, De Oratore, she reminds us, Cicero is starting to fashion his ideal res publica, a response to Plato's more chilling exemplar. Even more boldly, she submits that in examining Cicero's contribution to ideals of civic identity, "we will also enrich our own political culture" (2). Cicero, she claims, is a resource for a modern republicanism which tries to heighten the value of public deliberation (in contrast with the traditional liberal focus on individual rights), the so-called "deliberative democracy" advocated by such scholars as Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. As educators, she believes, we have "urgent political work to do," namely, that of "creating citizens and subjects for a global world in which [. . .] communication means everything" (273). Connolly will need to write more, to show what, tangibly, Cicero can bring to a "deliberative democracy" and a pedagogy that fosters it, and (as she acknowledges) her approach risks losing sight of crucial differences between the constitution of ancient and modern republics; but she does succeed in offering valuable readings of Cicero's theoretical writings.

After an introduction laying out her approach, Connolly examines in chapter 1 ("Founding the State of Speech") the origins of Roman rhetoric and [End Page 601] its role in Republican life. In line with recent scholarship, she argues that politics was legitimized in Rome through the endlessly repeated performances of the ruling class-triumphs, funerals, games, and, above all, public speeches. But whereas most have believed these performances a "top-down display of charismatic authority," Connolly uses Marxist and postcolonial theory to suggest that they were "an affirmation of the consensual fantasy of membership in an ideal civic body" (48). Public speaking created bonds between "mass" and "elite" and affirmed the citizenry's strength: a crowd came out not just to extol the speaker but also themselves, and they united with the orator by participating in his moral judgments (58). Rhetoric as a discipline thus emerged in the second century B.C.E. to help keep the expanding Republican empire together. Connolly ends the chapter with the earliest extant rhetorical writings of Rome (Ad Herennium and Cicero's De Inventione), revealing how they treat speech as a civic act and rhetorical training as civic education.

But consensus, as anybody who lived through Rome's civil wars knew, was no mere fantasy: it existed, it broke down, it was restored by Augustus. What the history of the late Republic so spectacularly shows is that there were many disempowered groups in society who, once they found a champion, were ready to express dissatisfaction with the traditional dominance of the nobility. To divide the complex society of Rome into "mass" and "elite" is a misleading simplification, one that prevents understanding what really did intermittently hold the imperial Republic together. Oratory, to be sure, played a role (as did law and military service and conquest), but one might wish to emphasize too how much, at least in its Ciceronian form, oratory relied on so unreasoned and uncivil an attack-such demonizing of Catilina or Antonius-that it fueled bitter partisanship and could foment armed confrontation. When oratory turns into irrational demagogy, it is a menace to Republican stability...

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