The Dynamics of Rhetorical Performances in Late Antiquity by Alberto J. Quiroga Puertas (review)

It is not surprising that the modern study of the performance of ancient oratory has flourished for periods from which we have ample extant dramatic texts—classical Athens and republican Rome. The coeval phenomena of Euripides and Demosthenes allowed a methodological approach that took root in theater studies of the fifth century b.c.e. easily to be transferred to oratorical studies of the same period, with results that often stressed the close relation between the two. Thanks to the extant corpora of Libanius, Themistius, Gregory of Nazianzus, Symmachus, Ambrose, and others, the fourth century c.e. is as rich a period for the study of oratory as any that preceded it, but little attention has been paid to the socio-historical or literary aspects of the performance of these orators' speeches (perhaps, then, due to the comparative absence of contemporary dramatic texts, and any accompanying field of late antique theater studies). Quiroga's volume is the first serious attempt to investigate the dynamics of rhetorical performance in late antiquity. His scope, sensibly for a succinct book of 171 pages, is rather more focused than the title suggests: chronologically almost exclusively concerned with the fourth century c.e., and geographically/culturally with Greek orators of the eastern Mediterranean (albeit a mixed group of sophists, philosophers, and bishops). Furthermore, rather than primarily an attempt to reconstruct the physical or visual aspects of actual performance (as scholarship on classical oratory has done before him), his aim is "to explore what narrations of rhetorical performances from late antique sources can offer us in order to improve our understanding of the issues relating to cultural and religious debates of that time period" (2).

Quiroga's clearly-stated aim is important: this book offers an analysis of the way that oratorical performances are narrated by those who were themselves orators. In other words, its subject is the rhetoric of rhetorical performance. As Quiroga repeatedly demonstrates, orators of all hues rarely discussed their own performances directly, but frequently narrated the failings or shortcomings of their opponents' performances, especially in the context of rhetorical agones. The methods, contexts, and aims of these polemical narrations—many embedded within speeches themselves—form the principal subject matter of this book.

After an Introduction, the first half of Chapter One charts ancient theoretical discussions of oratorical performance (Greek hypokrisis, Latin actio/pronuntatio) from Aristotle to Philostratus, although it is the first-century Latin theorist Quintilian who has the most to say by way of guidance on delivery. Despite modern research's collocation of performance on the stage and on the speaker's platform, Quintilian was at pains to suggest that the performative techniques of orators should remain distinct from those of actors. This anxiety of being equated with an actor, as the subsequent two chapters argue, is exploited in attacks on opponents' rhetorical performances. The second part of Chapter One offers a brief overview of earlier negative narrations of oratorical performance, from Thersites in the Iliad via Demosthenes's depictions of Aeschines, to Cicero on his opponents.

The remaining two chapters of the book turn to an analysis of fourth-century narratives of performance. Chapter Two deals with philosophers (Themistius and Synesius of Cyrene) and bishops (Gregory of Nazianzus). Both groups, Quiroga contends, used narrative critiques of oratorical shortcomings to create distance between themselves and conventional sophists: Themistius attacked sophists' showiness and desire to earn money from their performances to create a distinction with oratorical philosophers such as himself, whose more muted performances aimed to convey truth; just as Gregory of Nazianzus wrestled with how to instruct clerics not to turn sermons into the sort of oratorical showpieces that audiences were familiar with from the secular world. It is in this chapter that religious comparison comes to the fore. Quiroga adds a further example to modern scholarship's deconstruction of models of competition and difference between Christian and pagan in late antiquity, instead stressing their commonality: both philosophers and bishops...