Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory (review)

Following the trend of several recent books, classicist Thomas Habinek's Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory is, primarily, an attempt to reread the history and significance of the classical rhetorical tradition from the vantage point of recent cultural studies and performance theories. While avoiding explicitly locating his work within the discourse of contemporary cultural studies as other recent books have done (see, for example, Hawhee [2004]), Habinek, nevertheless, adopts the overarching worldview and modus operandi of many of these works by envisioning ancient rhetoric as a set of social practices whose very enactment both solidifies itself as a tradition and, moreover, demonstrates the radical contingency of power manifested in its formulations. Emphasizing the ability of persuasive speech's to call into being certain ways of organizing societies and/or to legitimate specific sets of cultural practices, Habinek, in the preface, defines rhetoric as "the discourse of citizens and subjects . . . struggling to recompose the world" (vii).

While the title may suggest the book to be a general overview of the field of classical rhetoric, Ancient Rhetoric and Oratory is by no means an introductory text.

Demonstrating (and assuming of the reader) far-reaching knowledge of the intellectual and historical trends of antiquity, Habinek instead offers a new synthesis of the traditions of classical rhetoric using contemporary social constructionist ideas. Although Habinek's rereading of the traditions of classical rhetoric is social constructionist through and through, the author largely avoids articulating what this new reading offers and what its stakes are. That is to say, Habinek takes contemporary scholars' insights into the social construction of communities, gender, and cultural practices and applies these insights to the practices of antiquity in a largely unreflective manner.

The book is divided into five chapters. Habinek follows up the main body of the text with a concise and useful appendix in which he offers definitions of several of the key tropes, figures, and terminological concepts of the classical rhetorical tradition. The volume also contains a comprehensive and explanation-rich section offering suggestions for further reading.

In chapter one, "Rhetorical and the State," Habinek argues that one of the primary functions of the use of oratory by the powerful in antiquity was to legitimate contemporary social orders and to solidify pre-established political and cultural systems. Habinek, for example, suggests that "speechmaking becomes part of the culture of strategic performance in which observance of protocols of manliness and almost obsessive concern with the decorous presentation of the body mask an underlying and chronic anxiety over status" (6). Habinek does not, however, believe the maintenance of social codes to be, in itself, necessarily a bad thing. Habinek instead argues that rhetoric and ritual speech worked to promote the non-violent enactment of masculinity. Habinek suggests, for example, that rhetoric is "an activity that orders the community in the face of primordial chaos" (3).

In chapter two, "The Figure of the Orator," Habinek seems to make an implicit argument for a soft form of the great man theory of history. Habinek describes how the life and works of four famous rhetors each engendered a "meta-rhetoric" (21) capable of promoting the rhetors' value systems among their respective communities. Analyzing the rhetorical formulations of Pericles and Demosthenes, Habinek finds that "their fostering of an analytic stance and approach [in their speeches] allow[ed] the orator to reshape the community from within" (23). That is to say, Habinek believes that the governing forms of argumentation of several of Pericles and Demonsthenes's speeches worked to promote, in themselves, the very changes that the two rhetors sought to effect in their broader projects.

Continuing along these lines in chapter three, "The Craft of Rhetoric," Habinek argues that the canon of rhetorical instruction perpetuated itself largely by creating an 'arms race' for knowledge of the persuasive arts. Habinek suggests that the ideas of the canon of rhetoric reached a critical mass during antiquity, thereby encouraging rhetors to consciously enact over-idealized precepts from the rhetorical tradition. Offering a reading of a speech by Lysias, Habinek...