Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World

Preface

Preface EVERYONE KNOWS WHERE BABIES COME FROM. The same cannot be said for men. Presumably they come from babies. The standard recipe is rather vague: just add time. The theorists of ancient oratory were not content to sit by idly and to wait for nature to take its course. They offered their own formula for ensuring that a man became himself and attained to his masculine station. One had to work at becoming a man, and, significantly, this work involved learning how to perform masculinity. This book is a reading of the ancients' precepts. This is a book about rhetoric. It is also a rhetorical book. The text contains numerous examples of anaphora, asydeton, and alliteration: is the author not just reading oratory but also performing it? To some readers, all of this will no doubt seem to be just so much rhetoric, an insubstantial and hollow exercise. I would ask such a reader to consider that this study also asks what it means to declare that an argument or even a style of argumentation is a sham. Scholarship has already provided levelheaded and accurate descriptions of what the ancients said about oratory. Indeed, antiquity itself is filled with just such accounts of its own rhetorical practice. This is a necessary labor: a critical reevaluation of oratory is predicated on the hard work of this sort of research. Ancient authors and some portion of the moderns have warned what divergence from their descriptions and prescriptions would mean: willful folly, crass deception, and worse. Breaking with the familiar account, though, is not necessarily as radical as it might at first seem: the body, gender, and authority show no signs of vanishing in the face of a skewed reading of them. It would be impossible to stage an account of the fringes of the dominant narrative without restaging many of the central issues of that narrative precisely as central. To the extent that my reading seems radical or disruptive, I can only remind the reader that Rome did not fall in a day. Indeed, one perhaps still awaits the collapse. I am implicitly arguing for a renewed study of Cicero and Quintilian as vital viii PREFACE to present purposes. One might justly comment about the conservatism of such amove. This book engages "theory." Such is usually taken as modern or even postmodern. The ancients are often asked to be off there in the past, a stable point that contemporary modes of thought have advanced from and fought against. Surely we have liberated ourselves from that all but forgotten age. Yet antiquity itself has a theory of bodies, perhaps even a theory of the theory of bodies. The ancient discourse on discourse is by no means naive, nor is it some well-wrought statue standing in stony silence, a dead, "classical" piece of workmanship that we might admire as in a museum and then subsequently ignore. It is worth asking, then, how modern are we? The story of becoming a Roman man is not, I would argue, so unfamiliar as some would hope. Nor, for that matter, is this process as automatic as others might pretend. In other words, this book would claim to be neither a piece of antiquarianism nor a postmodern translation of ancient oratory into an alien idiom. If anything, it is a study of the literary critical buzzwords from the past filled with the theoretical jargon of the present. Put positively, this is a discussion of some of the problems involved in producing and performing authoritative knowledge. Whom will we take seriously? What sort of argument do we heed? How are the two related? Two sorts of readers may be expected to take interest in such questions , readers whose paths have perhaps diverged even as they continue to run in parallel. First the student of antiquity will be asked to weigh and consider the arguments of Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan. To what extent should such a scholar take these contemporary classics seriously? What does the classical world offer to their theories in its turn? This is a question particularly worth considering for a second set of readers, those who are perhaps all too familiar with the doings of the French even if they have not engaged with Cicero and his countrymen for some years. I hope to convince each sort of specialist of the value of taking the trouble to puzzle through the seeming obscurity of unfamiliar languages: it is worth the trouble to understand the meaning of both...