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Conclusion: We Other Romans I WISH TO END WITH A READING of a reading of rhetoric. I have chosen as an example a piece by a leading scholar on Roman oratory. This essay is worth reading because its author is the master of a prevalent scholarly mode that others often only imperfectly execute. The work is charming, the style seductive, the scholar an authority in his field. In other words, I hope to examine the work of a legitimate heir to Cicero and the De oratore and to ask what it means to reproduce so faithfully one's patrimony . The air of tactlessness that hangs about my own reading itself indicates the extent to which one still writes within a certain rhetorical milieu. What emerges here, then, is not an attack on a person and a corresponding bid for my own fame - a young Roman's first public forensic act was traditionally a prosecution - but rather this critique is intended to call attention to styles of scholarly self-presentation. Harold Gotoff (1993) has written an excellent essay on Cicero as a performer of rhetoric. He starts with the page, and he retrieves from it a number of important insights into rhetoric as a living practice. This essay perhaps offers to many sufficient answer to my own initial query, "What did ancient oratory look like?" Gotoff's piece also necessarily confronts several of the key themes of the present study. Gotoff realizes the problems of textuality, he engages the ironies of acting as a metaphor for oratory, and he even addresses the question of performances of authority. The argument , the text, and the textual performance, though, reproduce in a striking manner many of the very problems of oratory that have preoccupied the present study as a whole. Gotoff emphasizes theater in Cicero. He praises Cicero as a master showman and rightly complains that too few readers of Cicero think of his dramaturgy. Gotoff furnishes welcome arguments against dreary technocratic readings of Cicero whereby the text of a speech is fed through the rulebooks on oratory. Gotoff overcompensates, though: he instead argues that every aspect of the speech is instead a function of the exigencies of the performance, and that the performance's only real end is victory, not 223 224 STAGING MASCULINITY veracity, coherence, or sincerity. Some critics believe almost everything, Gotoff nearly nothing. Gotoff thus seems an ardent partisan of Demosthenes ' alleged position that performance was everything, even as he subsumes the notion of performance within the broader category of illusion.1 "The fact is," he concludes, "that the orator of a judicial speech is concerned entirely with the momentary effect."2 Gotoff then reads a number of speeches for their effects. The ensuing discussion resembles in form and content the researches of Quintilian. A number of ambiguities arise within Gotoff's treatment of the theatrical metaphor. Gotoff imagines a Cicero asking himself, "Will he use his own auctoritas as a substitute for argument?" (1993, 292). Why should authority and argument be seen as mutually irreconcilable? As should be clear from my own earlier observations, every performance invokes the authority of the good man and plays within a carefully circumscribed and sanctified stage. Admittedly, Gotoff himself does insist that Cicero "has introduced himself as a character in the drama that is the speech" (1993, 312), that an oration is also very much about the orator. In fact, Gotoff sees Cicero the advocate as an agglomeration of characters, as "a variety of personae invented and portrayed by Cicero the orator" (312). Gotoff ends his essay with a veritable fugue on the illusory in and as oratory: In the drama of a Roman trial [Cicero] is merely his own protagonist. For when a man gets up to speak, his intention is clear and simple: to persuade. And in order to persuade he will say, do, become whatever is necessary to accomplish his aim. Verisimilitude is more important than truth; and the critic would be well advised never to trust the absolute sincerity of the man's words or the persona he presents. The only exception, of course, is when a scholar gives a public talk. (313) This is a clever ending. It is an urbane and self-aware gesture on the part of the author inviting his readers to savor a juicy irony. This text, we learn in the footnote that actually concludes the essay, was once itself a speech. The note naturally does not indicate the changes required to move from...

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