Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joy Connolly is assistant professor of classics at New York University. She is the author of Talk about Virtue (forthcoming, Duckworth), a book about Roman political theory.

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"This is a brilliant exploration of how rhetoric works as a means of fashioning political awareness. Showing an enviable command of political theory from Plato to Habermas and a sure grasp of Roman political practice, Connolly has written a seminal work that opens up a rich array of new insights by breaking up and infusing new life into traditional distinctions. With her own remarkable powers of rhetorical persuasion, Connolly seduces the reader into entering the complex negotiations of Roman political life."--Elizabeth Asmis, University of Chicago

"This is an admirable book in every way: in its ambition to read Roman rhetorical thought seriously, as political thought, in the breadth of its reference and the depth of its learning, and in its desire to connect themores of the Romans with our own."--Robert Kaster, Princeton University

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"This is a brilliant exploration of how rhetoric works as a means of fashioning political awareness. Showing an enviable command of political theory from Plato to Habermas and a sure grasp of Roman political practice, Connolly has written a seminal work that opens up a rich array of new insights by breaking up and infusing new life into traditional distinctions. With her own remarkable powers of rhetorical persuasion, Connolly seduces the reader into entering the complex negotiations of Roman political life."--Elizabeth Asmis, University of Chicago

"This is an admirable book in every way: in its ambition to read Roman rhetorical thought seriously, as political thought, in the breadth of its reference and the depth of its learning, and in its desire to connect themores of the Romans with our own."--Robert Kaster, Princeton University

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The State of Speech

Princeton University Press

Introduction

Just as Rome's legions left their mark on the map of Europe, Roman ideas about citizenship and constitutions helped frame Western political thought. The concept of individual liberty guaranteed by law, the beliefs that the end of political rule is the common good and that the community stands and falls on the civic virtue of its citizens, a strong notion of collective identity expressed in terms of cultural solidarity and common love for the fatherland-these compose the core of republican political ideas that, through the texts of Sallust, Cicero, Vergil, and Livy, were revived starting in the twelfth century by European thinkers seeking to develop alternatives to feudal government, and that remain matters of concern to political theorists today. In this book I pursue a new approach to republican political thought in Rome, one that explores notions of civic virtue and collective identity in texts that seek to guide and govern public speech-in writings belonging to the discipline known since Plato's time as rhetoric. I treat rhetoric, especially the work of Cicero, as an extended engagement with the ideals and demands of republican citizenship. Above all, I concentrate on rhetoric's representation of the ideal orator, which I read as an exploration of the ethos of the ideal citizen. Just like the persuasive speech he utters, this citizen is a complex, paradoxical construction, at once imperious and responsive, masterly and fragile, artifical and authentic, who seeks civil concord through the exercise of seductive authority.

Active, reactive, and rich with resources for self-reflection, rhetoric in Rome always meant much more than learning to deliver a speech, which is why it has lived for so many centuries not in dusty library corners or the memories of curious antiquarians but at the center of European culture, in monasteries, rural schools, and royal courts. One of the three members of the trivium of the liberal arts, along with grammar and dialectic, rhetoric constituted the core of study for educated Romans by (at the latest) the first century bce. With the emergence of a cosmopolitan Greek-and Latin-speaking elite in urban centers across the empire, rhetoric formed the pedagogical and political bedrock of a common imperial culture stretching from Spain to Syria and from southern Britain to north Africa, creating a literal language of imperium that was preserved by Rome's European and Byzantine descendants and their global colonies. Transmitted in the form of technical handbooks of logic and composition, the study of classical rhetoric spurred early modern practices of politics and political communication, and survives today in literary criticism, writing manuals, and even self-help books on fashion and public speaking.

Rhetoric arises from the practice of oratory, acts of formal speaking before citizens gathered together-political orations, sermons, law court arguments-and also bears the influence of artistic performances and casual exchanges of conversation. All these practices, in different ways, influence the formation of civic identity and relate directly to the exercise of popular sovereignty and the achievement of social justice. Not only will we better understand classical Rome and the political work done by the spoken word in senate and Forum, we will also enrich our own political culture, I propose, if we examine Roman rhetoric's contribution to ideals of civic identity-if we explore the meaning, in rhetorical discourse, of dialogue, civility, and compromise, of the expression and the critique of traditional authority, the limits of reason, and love of country.

However remotely we sense the connection, each of us is a member of a political community. At the same time, we are all individual subjects, isolated bundles of sensation, imagination, memory, and desire. What shapes us as subjects from without, and enables us to reach out to other citizens from within, is language, the spoken word. "There is no way we could be inducted into personhood except by being initiated into a language," Charles Taylor asserts, citing George Herbert Mead's contention that we emerge as selves out of our common embedding in "webs of interlocution." Concerned as they are with interlocution, rhetorical texts shed light on the process by which language connects human beings within the community and effects change in the world. Eloquence is power: the power to convey ideas and information, to persuade, and to bring pleasure: docere movere delectare. "It is easily understood how much we owe to language," Thomas Hobbes wrote in Man and Citizen, echoing Isocrates and Cicero,

by which we, having been drawn together and agreeing to covenants, live securely, happily, and elegantly: we can so live, I insist, if we so will. But language also hath its disadvantages; namely because man, alone among the animals, on account of the universal signification of names, can create general rules for himself in the art of living just as in the other arts; and so he alone can devise errors and pass them on for the use of others.... Therefore by speech man is not made better, but only given greater possibilities. (1.3)

No practice is more central to politics than communication, and to the Roman writers that I discuss in this book, as to Hobbes, no act of communication exists in isolation from moral judgment. If philosophy may be "divided into three branches, natural philosophy, dialectic, and ethics," Cicero declares in his dialogue de Oratore (On the Orator), "let us relinquish the first two," but, he continues, rhetoric must lay claim to ethics, "which has always been the property of the orator; ... this area, concerning human life and customs, he must master" (1.68). It is crucial to understand from the start that Cicero is not principally concerned in his rhetorical writings with the ethical formation of the private individual but with a civic ideal whose dynamic constitution reflects the constitution of the republic, what I call the state of speech. This is a key difference between my work and that of previous studies of self-fashioning in classical rhetoric that have concentrated on the formation of the internal self, its construction through self-contemplation, and its grasp of its relation to the external world.

The resources rhetoric offers the republic are rich. Classical rhetoric nowhere offers a robust theory of knowledge that can compete with the epistemologies of Plato and other philosophers, but it seeks, in the competition it cultivates with philosophy, to understand and refine the processes by which citizens make decisions and consensus is forged-in short, the ways in which public knowledge, if not philosophical knowledge, is determined. Roman rhetorical writings are also, of course, the textual articulations of a particular political form: they constitute a theoretical and practical discourse of power in the republic (res publica). The demanding blend of bodily and mental skills involved in rhetorical training, which combined and mingled rival discourses of traditional senatorial authority, logical reasoning, literary knowledge, deportment, theatrical strategies of popular appeal, and sheer pleasure in the grain of the voice, prescribed normative practices of identity formation designed to reflect the values of the Roman governing class...