Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome by Maud W. Gleason (review)

448 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS Mter the decades of disparagement, it is good to see the powerful qualities of Senecan drama recognized by such prominent critics as Boyle and Segal, Rosenmeyer and Putnam, and not only recognised but demonstrated in detail. Boyle writes with confidence that Troades is a great play, one which can speak both to Latinists and to a wider public. His edition deserves to gain the attention of both audiences. JOHN G. FITCH DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA VICTORIA, B.C. V8W 3P4 MAUD W. GLEASON. Making Men: Sophists and SelfPresentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press. Pp. xxii + 193. Cloth US $29.95. ISBN 0-691-04800-2. The title, even the sub-title, of Maud Gleason's monograph does not do justice to its contents. In this work "Ancient Rome" means for the most part the largely Greek world of the Second Sophistic, and even closely related figures such as Fronto and Apuleius get only passing attention. Only a reader aware of David Gilmore's Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (Princeton 1985) would understand to what the title alludes; and nothing alerts a potential reader to the work's interest in physiognomy, one of the many pseudo-sciences that flourished in a brilliant, but sometimes intellectually uncritical, age. It will be a pity if the title prevents this work becoming better known. Gleason uses the competition of the two sophists, Polem9 and Favorinus, to explore important issues of self-definition; in particular, her study of the sexually ambivalent Favorinus considerably extends the insights of gender studies into new areas. Classicists whose perceptions of antiquity have been altered by the work of Michael Hertzfeld and Jack Winkler will find much here that is useful and pleasurable; I would also hope that those studying issues of gender and sexuality in other periods will also not find second-century Mediterranean intellectual showmen too exotic to be of interest. Gleason looks at rhetorical performance as an illustration of the in-your-face competitiveness of ancient society, emphasizing the BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 449 stress that was placed on physical deportment or habitus. It is in this context that Favorinus' failure to meet society's expectations of masculinity becomes of interest, as does Polemo's use of physiognomy to attack his rival. Successive chapters deal with "Favorinus and his Statue," an analysis of [Dio Chrysostom] 27 (Korinthiakos), a "Portrait of Polemo" based on his works and the account of him in Philostratus, "Deportment as language," "Aerating the flesh," a discussion of voice training, ''Voice and Virility in Rhetorical writers," and "Manhood achieved through speech," in which she returns to Favorinus and his self-presentation. Those familiar with the principal texts will not perhaps find much new in Gleason's paraphrases and analyses; but we must recognize that many are not familiar with these texts at all. They are well worth our attention, and Gleason provides a lively and insightful study of some key texts and a new approach to many of them. She admits that she depends on another (Margaret Malamud) for the interpretation of the Arabic text of Polemo (30, note 52); in the following note, she identifies the need for a modern synoptic edition of all the Scriptores physiognomonici, untouched since Forster in 1898. The absence of a standard text makes Gleason's study of the physiognomists at times difficult to follow, and leaves me wondering whether we should not work on a more scholarly text of Polemo before proceeding to much more analysis of his works and career. I am not always convinced that Gleason has correctly identified what is Polemo's original contribution, what is part of the already existing tradition, and what is post-Polemo commentary. For a work that deals with two important rhetoricians, there is far less use of the ancient rhetorical treatises and of modern rhetorical theory than I would have expected. Most occur in chapter five, on voice training; but Polemo's use of the "pure Greek" type as the ideal in ethnographic physiognomy (33-34) is surely not a case of "Greek scientific tradition" winning out over Roman empirical reality, but rather a...