The Art of Veiled Speech: Self-Censorship from Aristophanes to Hobbes ed. by Han Baltussen, and Peter J. Davis (review)

The very timely collection, The Art of Veiled Speech: Self-Censorship from Aristophanes to Hobbes, edited by Han Baltussen and Peter J. Davis, explores the “tension between ‘frank speech,’ typical of the ideal free citizen, and the art of ‘veiled speech,’ that is, the methods of expression adopted by the less-than-free” throughout antiquity and into the early modern period (1). These fourteen essays each focus on particular historical, politically tense “flashpoints” illustrating how balancing frank and veiled speech is an integral and perennial tension in the Western inheritance of Greek, Roman, and Christian modes of subjectivity, propriety, and the powers of language.

Exploring different Ancient Greek cultural practices, chapters 2, 3, and 4 investigate the problems and functions of parrhesia, or “speaking all.” Andrew Hartwig focuses on the political censure of comedic dramatists like Aristophanes. Lara O’Sullivan compares the different forms of frankness in the democratic polis and aristocratic symposia. Han Baltussen presents the life philosophy of Diogenes of Sinope. Each of these cases illustrates tension between the right of the citizen to speak without reprisal and recognition that such speech can be politically dangerous, whether a tongue-in-cheek questioning of Athenian foreign policy through drama, denigrating the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton, or insulting Alexander himself. While this certainly led to both formal and informal repressive practices, it also forced artists, philosophers, and orators to be creatively deceptive with their frankness. Originally a right of the free citizen, by the Hellenistic period, autocracy turned parrhesia from a risky right to a righteous risk, from “honesty” to “good counsel.” This shift is repeated by the Romans, exacerbated and complicated by their appropriation of Greek culture.

Rather than parrhesia, the Romans had libertas, of which “free speech” was a part. In chapters 5–9, each author focuses on one or more pagan Romans and their works, illustrating how frank speech changes with the shift from republic to empire. Gesine Manuwald explains that Romans saw drama as “an improper venue for comments on people’s conduct and... unfair because of its one-sidedness,” leading to informal rules of propriety for political critique or survival under rulers like Nero and Caligula, an interesting corollary to Hartwig’s Aristophanes (98). Ioannis Ziogas focuses on the relationship between Augustus and the poets Horace, Ovid, and Virgil to examine the “dynamic tension between imperial and artistic” concerns of auctoritas or “authority” (117). Marcus Wilson examines Seneca’s eclectic Epicurean attitudes in his Epistles as a strategic choice rather than a philosophical position; stoic self-exile from politics was an accusation of the state’s corruption beyond repair (140). Peter J. Davis focuses on Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica, which uses the mythic Greek setting to criticize Roman notions of primacy, struggle, and virtue because “indirection was the safest way of avoiding censorship” (172). John Penwell examines the use of subtext (emphasis) by poets like Martial, Tacitus, and Pliny, “writers wishing to probe the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of the age [who] found that just as before they had to resort to a form of coded discourse,” because explicit critique could be deadly (196). The Roman trajectory of libertas resembles that of Greek parrhesia: both begin as civil rights and become dangerous under autocracy. This development of censorship is complicated with the spread of Christianity, whereby Earthly authority is augmented and challenged by heavenly justification.

Whereas Greek and Roman frankness was a political or personal act, chapters 10 and 11 illustrate that Christian metaphysics imbues frankness with spiritual risk, unlike pagan antiquity: dissent becomes blasphemy, difference becomes heresy. Pauline Allen examines the interesting ecology of friendship, secrecy, and risk of fourth-century, fifth-century, and sixth-century Christian letter writing and letter bearers, who were given “controversial, important or personal news [verbally], a strategic process in which the...