Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism)

Staging Masculinity

THE BODY, IN THEORY

Histories of Cultural Materialism

The Subject as Action: Transformation and Totality in Narrative Aesthetics

by Alan Singer

Power and Knowledge: Astrology, Physiognomics, and Medicine under the

Roman Empire by Tamsyn S. Barton

Under the Sign: John Bargrave as Collector, Traveler, and Witness

by Stephen Bann

Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser

The Deluge, the Plague: Paolo Uccello

by Jean Louis Schefer, translated by Tom Conley

Philodemus in Italy: The Books from Herculaneum

by Marcello Gigante, translated by Dirk Obbink

The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection by Francis Barker

Picturing Silence: Emblem, Language, Counter-Reformation Materiality

by Karen Pinkus

The Gay Critic by Hubert Fichte, translated by Kevin Gavin

The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World

by Slavoj Zifek / F. W. J. von Schelling, translated by Judith Norman

The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability

edited by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder

Constructions of the Classical Body edited by James I. Porter

An Utterly Dark Spot: Gaze and Body in Early Modern Philosophy

by Miran Boiovic

The Pedagogical Contract: The Economies of Teaching and Learning in the

Ancient World by Yun Lee Too

Cutting the Body: Representing Woman in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's

Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis by Eliane DalMolin

Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World

by Erik Gunderson

Staging

Masculinity

The Rhetoric of Performance

in the Roman World

Erik Gunderson

Ann Arbor

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Gunderson, Erik.

Staging masculinity: the rhetoric of performance in the

Roman world / Erik Gunderson.

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Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2000 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America @ Printed on acid-free paper

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criticism. 2. Psychoanalysis and literature - Rome.

3. Homosexuality and literature - Rome. 4. Homosexuality,

Male, in literature. 5. Body, Human, in literature.

6. Masculinity in literature. 7. Men in literature.

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A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gunderson, Erik. Staging masculinity : the rhetoric of performance in the Roman world I Erik Gunderson. p. em. - (The body, in theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472-11139-6 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Speeches, addresses, etc. , Latin - History and criticism. 2. Psychoanalysis and literature- Rome. 3. Homosexuality and literature- Rome. 4. Homosexuality, Male, in literature. 5. Body, Human, in literature. 6. Masculinity in literature. 7. Men in literature. 8. Rhetoric, Ancient. 9. Oratory, Ancient. I. Title. II. Series. PA6083 .G86 2000 875 '.0109353- dc21

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Preface

EVERYONE KNOWS WHERE BABIES COME FROM. The same cannot be said

for men. Presumably they come from babies. The standard recipe is rather

vague: just add time. The theorists of ancient oratory were not content to

sit by idly and to wait for nature to take its course. They offered their own

formula for ensuring that a man became himself and attained to his mascu-

line station. One had to work at becoming a man, and, significantly, this

work involved learning how to perform masculinity. This book is a reading

of the ancients' precepts.

This is a book about rhetoric. It is also a rhetorical book. The text

contains numerous examples of anaphora, asydeton, and alliteration: is the

author not just reading oratory but also performing it? To some readers, all

of this will no doubt seem to be just so much rhetoric, an insubstantial and

hollow exercise. I would ask such a reader to consider that this study also

asks what it means to declare that an argument or even a style of argumen-

tation is a sham.

Scholarship has already provided levelheaded and accurate descrip-

tions of what the ancients said about oratory. Indeed, antiquity itself is

filled with just such accounts of its own rhetorical practice. This is a neces-

sary labor: a critical reevaluation of oratory is predicated on the hard work

of this sort of research. Ancient authors and some portion of the moderns

have warned what divergence from their descriptions and prescriptions

would mean: willful folly, crass deception, and worse. Breaking with the

familiar account, though, is not necessarily as radical as it might at first

seem: the body, gender, and authority show no signs of vanishing in the

face of a skewed reading of them. It would be impossible to stage an

account of the fringes of the dominant narrative without restaging many of

the central issues of that narrative precisely as central. To the extent that

my reading seems radical or disruptive, I can only remind the reader that

Rome did not fall in a day. Indeed, one perhaps still awaits the collapse. I

am implicitly arguing for a renewed study of Cicero and Quintilian as vital

viii PREFACE

to present purposes. One might justly comment about the conservatism of

such a move.

This book engages "theory." Such is usually taken as modern or even

postmodern. The ancients are often asked to be off there in the past, a

stable point that contemporary modes of thought have advanced from and

fought against. Surely we have liberated ourselves from that all but forgot-

ten age. Yet antiquity itself has a theory of bodies, perhaps even a theory of

the theory of bodies. The ancient discourse on discourse is by no means

naive, nor is it some well-wrought statue standing in stony silence, a dead,

"classical" piece of workmanship that we might admire as in a museum and

then subsequently ignore. It is worth asking, then, how modern are we?

The story of becoming a Roman man is not, I would argue, so unfamiliar as

some would hope. Nor, for that matter, is this process as automatic as

others might pretend.

In other words, this book would claim to be neither a piece of anti-

quarianism nor a postmodern translation of ancient oratory into an alien

idiom. If anything, it is a study of the literary critical buzzwords from the

past filled with the theoretical jargon of the present. Put positively, this is a

discussion of some of the problems involved in producing and performing

authoritative knowledge. Whom will we take seriously? What sort of argu-

ment do we heed? How are the two related?

Two sorts of readers may be expected to take interest in such ques-

tions, readers whose paths have perhaps diverged even as they continue

to run in parallel. First the student of antiquity will be asked to weigh and

consider the arguments of Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan. To what extent

should such a scholar take these contemporary classics seriously? What

does the classical world offer to their theories in its turn? This is a ques-

tion particularly worth considering for a second set of readers, those who

are perhaps all too familiar with the doings of the French even if they

have not engaged with Cicero and his countrymen for some years. I hope

to convince each sort of specialist of the value of taking the trouble to

puzzle through the seeming obscurity of unfamiliar languages: it is worth

the trouble to understand the meaning of both phallologocentrism and

ingenium. Rather than having the last word, though, I hope only to

encourage others to pursue their own studies down some of the same

paths outlined here: the road to Rhetoric is not an easy one, and I do not

claim to have reached the summit.

Horace once complained that a picture that started as a woman on top

and ended as a fish below would make for bad art. Horace's forbidden

monster resembles epic's Scylla. Horace was no fool. He knew that there was

something to be said for mixing one's media, and some of his more unusual

creations attest to this. I hope that I have offered a study whose own outland-

PREFACE

ix

ish form will please rather than offend: the aesthetic of the exotic has an

ancient pedigree as well.

I wish to thank a number of parties who made this work possible. Without

the support, encouragement, and generous funding of the Department of

Classics of the University of California at Berkeley I would never have been

able to pursue my work and to see it to its completion. I owe a similar debt of

gratitude to my colleagues at The Ohio State University for assisting me both

intellectually and practically in the labor of reworking and polishing this text.

Institutions, of course, are composed of people, and I must thank in particu-

lar a number of individuals who were especially generous with their time and

ideas. Thomas Habinek, Mark Griffith, Catherine Gallagher, and Judith

Butler oversaw this project from its inception. Each offered an inspiring

model of scholarship, and I profited from their teachings, which were as

varied as they were uniformly excellent. Were panegyric not the most sus-

pect of all of rhetoric's forms I would gladly expatiate on the many details of

the kindness of each. I regret that I cannot thank by name the anonymous

readers at the University of Chicago and University of Michigan presses. I

hope that they note with pleasure the many improvements for which they are

responsible without feeling too pained at those errors that they were unable

to prevent. Lastly I must offer my sincerest gratitude to Victoria Wohl for

reading, rereading, discussing, improving, and generally enduring this proj-

ect over the span of so many years. I doubt that I shall ever adequately repay

her generosity with her time and her ideas.



Contents

Introduction

1

CHAPTER I. Reading and Writing

29

CHAPTER 2. Discovering the Body

59

CHAPTER 3. Self-Mastery

87

CHAPTER 4. Actors

111

CHAPTER 5. Pleasure

149

CHAPTER 6. Love

187

Conclusion: We Other Romans

223

NOTES

231

BIBLIOGRAPHY

251

GENERAL INDEX

261

INDEX LOCORUM

267



Introduction

WHAT DID ANCIENT ORATORY LOOK LIKE? This study started with this

question, but it does not end by answering it with a collection of bodily

facts. I offer neither a catalog of gestures nor a script to be used for

reproducing the ancient orator. At least, I hope that I do not offer these

things: this examination of performances is intended to raise the issue of

the implications of theoretical speculation upon performance.

It will be useful, though, to begin with a genealogy of the project itself

in order both to appreciate the origin of its subsequent concerns and to

understand why its original query will remain fundamentally unanswered.

The majority of the most important passages that might be used to reveal

the truth of the ancient orator's gestures can be found in the pages of this

book. If one were to extract and assemble all of the ancient citations, one

might swiftly come to appreciate such finer points of the spectacle of rheto-

ric as the following: the left hand was used sparingly; the orator tends to

put his weight on his left foot, though raising up the right foot is bad form.1

As interesting as these tidbits might be, they cannot be simply collected and

assembled until a body stands before us, a body patched together from

fossilized textual fragments, yet somehow also a faithful representative of

the species homo rhetoricus. There is a world of difference separating the

quick from the dead, and the orators themselves would be the first to point

out the problems of using dead letters to breath life into their practice. But

they were themselves no more deterred by this recognition than, in the

end, was I.

When I began my own inquiries, I felt that though I had read my share

of ancient orations, I had long neglected one of the most obvious elements

of these speeches, namely, that they were delivered before a public. The

performative aspect of ancient oratory is of course but one element among

several possible approaches to these texts: in fact, ancient authorities invite

the prospective author of an oration to attend to five aspects of a speech, of

which delivery is only one. And obviously a reading based on a literary or

aesthetic appreciation of any given speech is not only possible but usually

2

STAGING MASCULINITY

very rewarding. Likewise, a historical or a sociological reading of a speech

can itself yield a variety of fruits.2 But oratory as practice and performance

tends to be neglected, or treated only as an afterthought, both in the

canonical texts of antiquity and in much modern scholarship on ancient

rhetoric.

What comes of neglecting performances? And to what extent are

other possible approaches to ancient oratory complicated and comple-

mented by the performative aspect of oratory? The following study will

hopefully serve as a set of preliminary answers to these questions. I have

opted to approach the question of performance in ancient oratory by look-

ing at ancient theorists of oratory such as Cicero and Quintilian. This

reading leaves entirely to one side the question of what Cicero actually did

with his voice and body during one of his Philippics. This reading also

dodges the question of the difference between the preserved written texts

of a speech and the version actually performed. The text we have is by no

means a simple script for an earlier performance. The most famous exam-

ple of this is Cicero's own Pro Milone, where the speaker failed in public,

only to return to his desk to pen a speech that later generations would

proclaim a rhetorical masterpiece. While it would perhaps be a useful

exercise to try to imagine a specific performance in detail, one cannot

advance very far without falling into mere speculation. Instead of the specu-

lative, then, I have opted for the theoretical. To a certain extent such a

choice represents the embracing of necessity: since the preserved speeches

are not self-scripting, what was said of performance by contemporary schol-

ars of the craft? A careful reading of the theorists of oratory will help to

explain the impossibility of a precise restaging of ancient rhetoric. Our

ignorance cannot be wholly attributed to the accidents that can govern the

preservation of ancient materials.

Ancient rhetorical theory does not serve as a textbook or cookbook

for performance. In fact there is often great resistance to explicit and

detailed formulations of rhetorical performance: how can a text - mere

words on the page - either reflect or instruct such physical elements as

gestures or vocal modulations? Ancient rhetorical theory itself puts into

question any project that would read a speech and produce from that

reading the lived truth of the original performance. Rhetorical theory in-

stead forces the issue of the relationship between texts and bodies in mo-

tion or voices ringing through the air. Accordingly, it is not the particular

plight of the modern student of ancient oratory that performance is lost to

his or her eyes and ears owing to the centuries that separate us from the last

of the speakers of antiquity. Antiquity already senses this same loss.

Analysis and discussion of speeches in a theoretical light commence

with a mourning for the loss of the presence of the living voice and body. In

INTRODUCTION 3

fact, loss of the body in the text is mourned as early as Plato, Phaedrus

276a8, where the living voice (Xoybg E ~pxog) is pitted against writing.3

One can compare the remarks of Freud on loss and mourning: "Now in

what consists the work which mourning performs? I do not think there is

anything far-fetched in the following representation of it. The testing of

reality, having shown that the loved object no longer exists, requires forth-

with that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to this

object" (1963a, 165-66). Since the libido never willingly abandons its ob-

jects, a struggle ensues, and the ego experiences suffering. To the extent

that rhetorical theory acknowledges the loss of the living voice, it is a

fundamentally sad project: the theorist has to "get over" a circumstance

fundamental to his speculative position of distance, detachment, and objec-

tivity: performance is gone, it is out there. Yet the object of study is no

mere object, and hence the theoretical project also partakes of the melan-

cholic. That is, if melancholy is the unconscious loss of a love object experi-

enced in oneself (Freud 1963a, 166, 168), the theorist labors uncertainly

between recovery and relapse. He can never abandon the living voice

because it is that logos to which he aspires. He is himself in all probability a

speaker and a performer, not some disinterested academic. Moreover, the

speech he seeks to recover is one that I will argue embodies virile self-

presence and authority.4 Hence this is a speech with which the theoretical

ego identifies even as speech comprises a lost object (Freud 1963a, 170).

The theoretical ego lives an ambivalent life under the shadow of this lost

object: there is a sort of melancholic identification with performance even

as performance eludes theory's grasp.5

This complex relationship between text and life, words and the body,

means that one cannot simply "bring to life" an ancient text: antiquity itself

rebels against the notion. But the struggle to speak of speech and to repre-

sent its representations is itself a fundamental moment of any approach to

the history of rhetoric. Hence one pursues performance not just on a lark,

but rather because we find already in the ancient theoretical discourse a

recognition of the performative power of discourse and theory's power to

capture those performances. The endless turning around the question of

the performative within rhetorical theory is itself a miming of the melan-

cholic trope whereby identity is assumed at all (Butler 1997b, 167-68):

rhetorical theory thus "performs" its own impossibility relative to com-

passing full, authentic performance, and it performs this impossibility in a

manner homologous to a crisis of authenticity inhering within performance

itself. This difficult "distance" between theory and practice is a dimension

that must be carefully watched and measured: we can take for granted

neither the objectivity of the scholar nor, as we will see, the innocence of

the performer who has been asked to take up a theoretical position relative

4

STAGING MASCULINITY

to himself. Indeed if the melancholic process is an ambivalent movement

that sustains the topographical distinction between ego and superego (But-

ler 1997b, 174), then one might imagine as well that rhetorical theory

assumes its role as a "critical agency" relative to the rhetorical ego after the

same ambiguous process of loss and identification. Ultimately these same

questions will need to be asked of modern studies as well, but this is a

project I will defer until the conclusion of this book.

If there is an uneasy tension between the textual and the material, then

the problem of the lexicon, vocabulary, and syntax of the body as revealed

in the theoretical literature is opened up anew. In other words, if we cannot

trust the text as transparent or revelatory, how can we ready the body

found in the text simply, or the text as a documentary witness to ancient

bodies? This problem holds true both for a speech of Cicero and for Cic-

ero's technical works on how to write speeches. The body within these texts

needs to be reread, and read as a textualized body. The ancient theoretical

text is implicated in the production of a vision of the body more than it is a

simple witness to the "facts" of performance. The theoretical text generates

the body in the same gesture as it reveals the body. I will argue that the

process of the textual production or staging of the body within rhetorical

literature acts to construct and to socialize a certain kind of body. Thus the

body, a discursive body and a body that is a product of its own description,

finds itself swept up within a vast network of sociological implications.

These implications, though, were awaiting it from the beginning. This was

a body destined to be read as an element within this same network. The

body within the rhetorical textbook is accordingly never neutral territory,

and once again the "actual" body of performance remains lost to the extent

that it is never free from an interpretive apparatus that constrains its mean-

ings and valences in advance.

The study of ancient bodies in performance thus encounters a double

impediment to any simple, positive, or "factual" account. The original

commentators and theorists are uncomfortable with their own position and

productions: they are displeased with their own act of inscription. And,

furthermore, when, after an initial moment of hesitation, they do describe

the body, this description itself has the force of an institution of a vision of

the body: the body they write is also a body they make and one whose truth

is compromised by the problems of textuality. These problems arise around

issues of optics and perspective: where does one stand relative to physical

performance when textuality mediates this relationship? And one may ask

a related question that does not arise for the ancient author: is there such a

thing as a seeing that does not participate in or contribute to structures of

power and order?

A third and related problem of positions may be added to these two. If

INTRODUCTION 5

rhetorical theory is intended also as a means of training the orator and is

likewise produced by a man who professes to know how to speak, then

where is the place for objectivity in this discourse that is always about the

self? Naturally there is and can be no such objectivity. In fact, rhetorical

theory responds to the problems of theoretical complicity and compro-

mised objectivity by embracing them. Rhetorical theory declares itself to

be a theory of self-mastery. Thus, while the gaze of the theorist can be

critiqued as a constitutive exercise of power, this same gaze is turned upon

the speaker himself and turned into a positive discipline. The orator be-

comes a theorist of himself and his own spectator. In this guise, his inspira-

tion and model is the famous Demosthenes, imprisoned in a cave of his

own making and observing his performance in a mirror.

Against this self-mastery and discipline the rhetorical theorists pit wan-

ton pleasures. In other words, moral problems of propriety and impropriety

arise as the excluded opposites of legitimate knowledge. Thus rhetorical

morality is closely adjoined to the theoretical issues that have come before:

the "facts" of performance are always ethical as well. It would thus be

impossible to restage an ancient oration without also simultaneously revivify-

ing an ancient morality within whose terms the performance would be intelli-

gible. Such moral issues are interesting in themselves: why should perfor-

mances be an ethical matter rather than a question of success and failure or

clarity and obscurity? The theoretical discourse is itself articulated so as to

expose and to comply with the ethics of oratory. Thus theory also plays a role

in the production, reproduction, and hermeneutics of good and bad bodies.

The immoral body is contrasted to the known body, the authentic body to the

pleasurable body. Truth's antonym is vice.

If good performances are "true" ones, what about "mere" perfor-

mance or performances that only seem true? Is the orator just an actor?

Does he mean what he says, or is there a divide between the real man and

the meanings he produces? A crisis of authority arises in such a situation.

Into this breach the orator brings to bear his theoretical apparatus: the

theoretical position of self-observation and mastery is directly pitted

against a vision of uncontrolled public pandering in its absence. One op-

poses this self-relationship to populist and extravagant performances.

Here, in a sense, theory becomes a sort of enemy to practice and its

pleasures. Theory disavows the body in favor of the textual representation

of corporal virtue and a regulated relationship to one's own body. The

truest body becomes the textualized, self-knowing body whose ideal perfor-

mance is limited to auto-affection or a subterranean soliloquy. Inverting

the initial position of theoretical impotence and loss, the "theory of the

self" now provides the most potent, authoritative, and self-possessed posi-

tion to its subjects. And here the theory even embraces the ironies of the

6

STAGING MASCULINITY

grammar of subjection: one becomes subject to, subject of, and the subject

for whom.

These, then, I take to be the key issues within the theoretical literature

on performance within antiquity: what is the relationship between theory

and practice or text and deed? What is the body; how is it known; what are

the implications of this means of knowing the body? Where does the theo-

rist stand; and particularly, where does he stand in relationship to his own

practice? What are the ethics of practice; why is it ethical; and what are the

implications of such an ethics? I offer provisional and partial answers to all

of these questions in the first five chapters of this study. Each section is

intended to give a coherent account of a key issue within its own terms. In

the sixth, however, I hope to show how all of these issues, elements, and

problems come together in Cicero's De oratore, a text that presents its own

solutions to the intertwined themes of textuality, presence, performance,

authenticity, authority, and pleasure.

Rhetorical treatises offer to improve their readership. The anonymous

Rhetorica ad Herennium claims to be a text offering instruction on how one

is to speak (de ratione dicendi) (1.1), and it is ostensibly written in response

to a request by the addressee, Gaius Herennius. Cicero's De oratore is

likewise a record written so that Cicero's brother Quintus may know what

past Roman luminaries thought about how one is to speak.6 On the other

hand, this same goal of inculcating good speech can also be furthered by

looking to hypothetical models in addition to merely listing precepts: the

Orator is written to Cicero's young disciple Brutus and paints for him a

portrait of the ideal speaker, one who has perhaps never been seen.7 The

Brutus is similarly an evaluation of the orator, but this time done by way of

actual speakers.8 And Quintilian's encyclopedic Institutio oratoria presents

itself as a work designed to train the ideal orator; and this time the ideal

speaker and the ideal man are expressly conflated:

Oratorem autem instituimus illum perfectum, qui esse nisi uir bonus

non potest, ideoque non dicendi modo eximiam in eo facultatem sed

omnis animi uirtutes exigimus.

[I am training the consummate orator, a figure whose existence is

predicated on his being a good man (vir bonus). Accordingly I demand

of him not only an exceptional speaking ability, but all of the moral

and spiritual virtues.]

(Quintilian 1.pr.9)

Quintilian's formulation unites the man, his art, and his place in the world.

In fact, Quintilian expresses a sentiment nearly as old as Roman oratory.

INTRODUCTION 7

Quintilian tells us that, to his knowledge, Cato was the first Roman to write

on rhetorical theory (3.1.19), and Cato had himself defined the orator thus:

"Marcus, my son, an orator is a good man who is experienced at speaking"

(orator est, Marce fili, vir bonus dicendi peritus).9 The training of the orator

can never be dissociated from the ideas contained within the collocation vir

bonus, or "good man,"10 a fixed character who remains at the center of the

rhetorical enterprise from its beginning to its end.11

Who, or what, is a good man? Taken separately, the two sides of the

term bonus (good) and vir (man) can be analyzed by reference both to their

lexical entries and to the broader social discourse of Rome. Such a distinc-

tion is perhaps tendentious to the extent that words can never be segre-

gated from the society that uses them, but I would like to start from the

dictionary and proceed from there to demonstrate the social scope of this

phrase.

In Latin, a vir is an adult male. But the same word also signifies a man

who is a husband or a soldier. Thus, in "pregnant" uses, a man in Latin is a

real man, a manly man. The term also designates a position of authority and

responsibility: the adult is enfranchised, while the child (or slave) is not;12

the man rules his wife in the household; the soldier is the defender of the

safety of the state. In short, the term evokes more than mere gender.13 Maria

Wyke has discussed the imbrication of the physical enactment of gender and

the Roman social field, and she concludes of this relationship, "In the prac-

tices of the Roman world, the surface of the male body is thus fully impli-

cated in definitions of power and civic responsibility" (1994, 136).

On the other side of the phrase, bonus means "good." This goodness

can be very open-ended and impute a broadly positive moral, aesthetic, or

utilitarian quality to the term it modifies: a good person, a good painting, a

good tool. More specifically, though, this goodness may indicate that a

person is socially reliable or reputable: a good chap, a good citizen.14 And,

when used of men, it often indicates men of substance or social standing: a

prominent citizen, a leading citizen.15 Thus the masculine plural of the

adjective standing alone, boni, or "good (men)," also implies the wealth

that goes with station.16 Good, then, is not so much a bland qualifier as it is

a pointer to evaluation within a social context. In other words, a "good

man" is a man seen tout court in his full, dominant social capacity and one

who has proven himself valuable within this society. He is an asset to the

world, and in all likelihood has derived assets (bona) from the world. He is

the man on top of society, and the man most invested in it.

Having charted this semantic territory, I would like to explore briefly a

third term that has a prominent position within rhetorical discussions. This

term is auctoritas as a possession of the good man and as something evinced

in and by rhetorical performances. Auctoritas means authorization or the

8 STAGING MASCULINITY

responsibility taken for having given authorization. It also means guidance

or leadership. It means authority in general: the right to lead, prestige,

influence. Auctoritas can be rewritten as hegemony, or legitimate and recog-

nized domination. For the good man and good orator, then, auctoritas is

the term that ought to accompany both his station and the impression lent

by his speeches. Auctoritas is the performance of authority as a lived social

experience (cf. Hellegouarc'h 1963, 295-320).

When Cato and his successors speak of good men, then, they mean

something much more than a man who has done no wrong or a man who

can be trusted. When they speak of rhetoric as the provenance of good

men, they mean that rhetoric is the field of discourse in which good men

are the speakers. In the context of this study, rhetoric is the field in which

good men act and are enacted. Watching an orator, one ought to behold the

performance of the dominant, masculine subject and one ought to hear the

voice of legitimate authority. Where virility or social station is in doubt, a

performance fails: the orator has not been a good man, and whatever

experience he has in speaking has gone for naught. His authority evanesces

and with it his claim to that authority. If this proposition seems circular, it

is: good manliness and performative authority are a mutually reinforcing

dyad. The two require practice and iteration. Neither is given: they are

performed and lived.17

These handbooks that purport to aid one to speak well are thus hand-

books to the elite male self. Maud Gleason has elegantly summarized this

situation: "In a value system that prized rhetorical skill as the quintessen-

tial human excellence, and in a society so structured that this perfection

could be achieved only by adult males, arbiters of rhetoric were also arbi-

ters of masculine deportment" (1995, 104). The man who speaks and per-

forms well is, by this very fact, also the good man. In these handbooks one

learns both to recognize and to produce virile goodness. When an author

says, "Do this" or "Avoid that," he is always also teaching his reader about

the shape of the social space; and this teacher of rhetoric is likewise teach-

ing his student how to conform to this space. The man, his performance,

and the theory of this performance here form a triad that expands and

complicates the twofold relationship between being a good man and main-

taining the authority that accompanies hegemonic performances. The hand-

book forms the point of explicit and expressed knowledge from which one

comes to see and to know both good men and their authoritative perfor-

mances. One the other hand, the authority of oratory as a practice of good

men motivates the development of rhetorical theory. Herennius wanted to

know how to speak well. Cicero offers to his brother portraits of famous

authorities and their ideas on rhetoric. Quintilian offers his books as an aid

INTRODUCTION 9

to a father who would educate his son, books that will see a future orator

from his diapers to the peak of his art (1.pr.6). Thus rhetorical theory is by

no means a disinterested point from which to view rhetoric; instead it is a

full participant in the dialectic of the production, reproduction, mainte-

nance, and recognition of good men and their authority.

In her study of the Second Sophistic, Maud Gleason has not only admirably

analyzed some of the key details of ancient rhetorical training and perfor-

mance, but has also provided invaluable commentary on the community of

men that share this training and these performances as a common bond.

Gleason's own introduction offers a concise and clear formulation of rheto-

ric as a social practice. Theoretically influenced by the work of Peter Brown,

Michel Foucault's studies of antiquity, Michael Herzfeld's The Poetics of

Manhood, a study of a contemporary Cretan village, and Pierre Bourdieu's

sociology, Gleason's own investigation sets out to examine rhetoric as a form

of cultural and symbolic capital and rhetorical training as a means of ground-

ing the student within this symbolic economy (1995, xx-xxiv). Within this

sociology of rhetoric, she develops a theory of the construction of gender and

masculinity (59). Gleason argues that the opposition between masculinity

and femininity within the rhetorical context is actually a technique of divid-

ing men into two camps: the legitimate and the illegitimate (xxviii). Hence

contests over the definition of rhetoric become contests over the imposition

of styles of masculine comportment (104; cf. 73).

My own work covers many of the same issues as does Gleason's,

although there are a certain number of formal distinctions that can be

drawn. For example, Gleason focuses on vocal training (pronuntiatio),

while I concentrate mainly on physical delivery (actio). Similarly, Gleason

uses for the most part later Greek material; I am most interested in rela-

tively earlier Latin authors.

Much as the subjects of inquiry overlap in my own work and Gleason's,

so do we share a good deal of theoretical common ground. I also am inter-

ested in the sociology of rhetoric, including in particular its relationship to

gender. Indeed, our work shares as its founding premise the constructed

nature of gender and the subject.

At the same time, though, Gleason's book has not asked the same

introductory questions as has this study. Her work does not take the prob-

lems of reading performances through texts and producing performances

via texts as central to the investigation of ancient rhetoric. Instead, Gleason's

readings are aimed at a recovery of lost performances. Hence her approach

to the texts often is gauged so as to reconstitute the "participant ob-

server status" of an anthropologist (Gleason 1995, xi). While Gleason does

10 STAGING MASCULINITY

admirably succeed in giving a vivid and lifelike portrait of the many curious

practices of ancient speakers, in the process of restaging her characters for

us, certain issues of textuality get left behind.

My work also differs from Gleason's in its temporalization of the

relationship between theory and practice. Gleason sees the second century

C.E. as a hotbed of advice-manuals on the production of the elite self, and

in this abundance a sign that "the wordless replication of the elite habitus

could no longer be counted upon."'18 On the other hand, before this, "The

rhetorical performer embodied his civilization's ideal of cultivated manli-

ness. The young men who consciously studied his rhetorical exempla uncon-

sciously imitated the gestalt of his self-presentation. The result was, for

many generations, the smooth-flowing cultural reproduction of the pat-

terns of speech, thought, and movement appropriate to a gentleman"

(Gleason 1995, xxiv). This model can be compared to remarks of Bourdieu

that pose an even greater divide: theory actively destroys the immanence of

practice (1990, 58, 71).

While I agree with Bourdieu and Gleason in their basic sociological

outlook, I believe that we need not assume that all must "go without

saying." According to Bourdieu, "The body believes in what it plays at: it

weeps if it mimes grief. It does not represent what it performs, it does not

memorize the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life" (1990, 73).

But these same sentiments could actually be translated into imperatives

and inserted within an ancient rhetorical handbook. Ancient theory thus

requires the disposition to which some would think it inimical. Instead, an

important and durable social labor takes place in the act of explicitly

training the body, even if this labor is itself an insufficient representation

of actual, natural, unaffected practice. The intervention of theory into

practice complements social norms and does not represent their decay. I

would say that such an uncomplicated practice does not and cannot exist

so far as ancient rhetoric is concerned: rhetorical practice lives in a state

of symbiosis with its own theory. Rhetorical theory both observes and

changes rhetorical practice and the habitus of the elite male. But such a

role for theory means only that we cannot positively say what actually

happened and cannot read through these texts for true acts and gestures.

Instead we catch sight of theory as one of the partners in the game, an

active participant and not an impartial observer. One should hesitate

before accepting Bourdieu's remark that the theoretical stance produces

"disenchantment."19 In the case of rhetorical theory, a good deal of en-

chanting takes place.

The theoretical stance one needs to adopt relative to ancient theories

of rhetoric, though, ought to aspire to transcend the naive opposition

between objectivism and subjectivism (see Bourdieu 1990, 1-51). Objectiv-

INTRODUCTION 11

ist accounts of ancient rhetorical theory are all too easily produced: for

example, faith in the veracity of Quintilian will yield a compelling "con-

struct of the second degree," a "construct of the constructs made by the

actors on the social scene."20 That is, the contemporary theoretician of

rhetoric shall have reproduced both the contents of the ancient text and a

structural relationship to the object of the study qua object that will govern

the interpretation of those contents. The end product might be unimpeach-

ably accurate from a philological standpoint, but it would have failed to

account for practice as worldly and practical in the name of a "fetishism of

social laws" derived from rhetorical maxims (Bourdieu 1990, 41). Con-

versely it would be possible to give an account of ancient rhetorical practice

by way of a subjectivism that privileged a hypothetical speaker whose

choices were rational products of his willed intentions (Bourdieu 1990, 49-

50). Quintilian then becomes the author of a collection of pieces of advice

and an avuncular figure offering dos and don'ts.

While it is not clear that anyone actually reads ancient rhetoric exclu-

sively after either of these models,21 embracing the two approaches does

not solve the problems of either. Hence one can understand Bourdieu's call

for a reflexive sociology that transcends the opposition between objectiv-

ism and subjectivism by way of a sort of dialectical overcoming.22 Bour-

dieu's method, though, requires a reinvestment in the immanence of prac-

tice by way of habitus. While the power of this notion is undeniable, it is

precisely within the context of reading texts on practice that one should be

wary of deriving from them an account of a disposition that produces

responses "in relation to objective potentialities, immediately inscribed in

the present" (Bourdieu 1990, 53). An account of the lived ancient habitus,

"which is constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical

functions" (Bourdieu 1990, 52), cannot be produced from treatises that can

at best only claim to be accurate representations of practice. Put bluntly,

even if one believes in the notion of habitus, are we in a position to produce

an account of it?

Bourdieu's notion of habitus is itself derived from Roman rhetorical

thinking. Specifically it owes a debt to the theoretical accounts of perfor-

mance that are the governing concerns of this book. Bourdieu strives for a

term that will encompass a sort of unconscious mastery of the objective

structures of the social world and a set of dispositions that allow for the

automatic orientation of practice within this world. Yet it is precisely an-

cient rhetorical theory that suggests that practice may not be autonomous,

that it ought to have supplementation, and that it is even incomplete with-

out a theoretical component. Thus the "subjective" aspect of ancient per-

formance is to be consciously inhabited by an objectivist relationship to

one's bodily performances. The idea of the text needs to be returned to the

12 STAGING MASCULINITY

theory of performance in order for us to read our evidence for what it is,

textual evidence.

Moreover, textuality is not an obstacle to understanding autonomous,

lived performance but instead comprises a fundamental element of the

performative. Textuality is coordinated by way of a specific mode of theo-

retical apprehension that is itself aligned with virile self-mastery: the idea

of the body and of the text cannot be removed from an account of rhetori-

cal performance because the ancient account of performance has made

them indissoluble. While my representations of theory may smack of an

objectivist hypostasis or reification of the category "rhetorical theory,"

such a move is fully justified to the extent that the ancients were themselves

obsessed with the insertion of theory into practice. The lived subjective

truth of the world thereby becomes indissociable from questions of objectiv-

ist abstraction.

As a consequence of her relationship to the sociological orientation of

a Bourdieu, Gleason's identification of a crisis in the elite male turns theory

into an unnatural act that perverts authentic performance. In this sense, the

rhetorical theorist has already lost participant-observer status and hence

already shares the sense of loss of practice that Gleason herself claims to

feel. Yet this portrait of theory does not seem to correspond to the deploy-

ment of our preserved texts. In particular, rhetorical handbooks had long

offered explicit advice on performance. Certainly the earliest extant Latin

treatment of rhetoric, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, is quite explicit when it

comes to delivery: It by no means offers unconsciously imbibed gestalten.

Instead it proposes the explicit, wordy replication of elite performances.23

Moreover, Aristotle's own Rhetoric, while not particularly expansive, does

give specific advice for delivery, after complaining that it is a somewhat

neglected aspect of oratory.24 And, most broadly, the history of rhetoric

appears to be coincidental with the history of rhetorical theory. In other

words, the practice is never radically independent from the theory: Corax

and Tisias, the first teachers of rhetoric, are said to have been writers of

technical rhetorical works (r~Xvca).25

Gleason's position requires, in effect, that there be no theories of

rhetoric and performance before there is a crisis in a certain mode of being,

that theory begin where being fails. I would prefer to take up the idea of

ontological crisis and to install it at the heart of the rhetorical tradition.

Failures of being and the anxiety of nonpresence or nonidentity enable the

very calisthenics of manhood that Gleason so well describes. But these

failures and anxieties are not to be thought of as temporally contingent and

unique to a specific time or ethos. The philosophical consequences of these

problems are recognized from the outset. In other words, the elite male of

antiquity is never a given: the infant never passes into aristocratic manhood

INTRODUCTION 13

without mastering a variety of recognized threats and crises. Similarly, as

will be seen in a later chapter, the orator can never radically establish his

self-identity via his oratory: he is always ready to be confused with a mere

actor. Likewise, while the distinction between men and women within

oratory may be used as a foil for qualifying and disqualifying different

varieties of men, the problem of sexuality remains a prominent one within

oratory. Man is to woman as dominant is to subordinate, but this same

gendered axis immediately invites other issues: what kind of pleasure does

one give or receive? As Foucault put it, what is the proper use of plea-

sure?26 And, naturally, since the "men" and "women" in question are all

males, this is a question of the proper relationship to the continuum of

sentiments spanned by the terms homosexuality and homosociality (see

Sedgwick 1985). What is one to feel vis-a-vis his fellow men? These ques-

tions and problems are less crises that arrive to trouble rhetorical masculin-

ity than they are the building blocks of the discourse of masculinity itself.

This discussion of Gleason is not intended to detract from the value of

either her own work of the work of the anthropologists and sociologists

upon which it relies. Instead I would suggest that such methods need to be

complemented by attention to additional considerations. Similarly, atten-

tion paid to these additional questions will turn out to be, after its own

fashion, merely another way of tracking down the same set of issues raised

at the opening of this introduction. First, in order to understand the role of

the text that records, transmits, regulates, and reproduces rhetorical perfor-

mance, theorists of textuality should be brought to bear. Here the work of

Derrida will be particularly useful, as will that of Foucault. The production

of a knowledge of the body within such a textualized context can again be

better understood with reference to Foucault and also to the work of Judith

Butler, who has made performativity and subject constitution her special

study. This pair of theorists will next help to explicate the self-relationship

of the orator to his body within rhetorical discourse. Yet this same self-

relation occurs not just at the level of a discursive apparatus, but also at the

level of the individual psyche, and hence appeal will be made to the work of

Freud and Lacan. The gains made by engaging with the ideas of these

various thinkers in earlier sections will, I believe, help to round out the

discussions of performance and pleasure that come in the second half of

this study.

Only in the light of this fuller examination of rhetorical theory can we

overcome the insufficiencies of a purely sociological approach. By itself

always raising questions of authority and the body as performed and experi-

enced, rhetorical theory aspires to the very objective status relative to these

questions that a simple sociological approach would itself seek to attain: its

impasses and quandaries thus become those of an objective sociology in

14 STAGING MASCULINITY

general. Rhetorical theory thus straddles the question of the objective and

the subjective: it prescribes rules concerning internal experience while play-

ing a practical role relative to the objective social relations for which the

rhetorical subject prepares himself. A reading of this theory must not itself

seek to deduce a habitus from a text on habitus. Instead it must ask ques-

tions about the significance of textualizing the performative, questions

fundamental to the production of a theory of performing. In other words,

Quintilian and Cicero already occupy the metatheoretical plane at which

level Bourdieu argues in order to ground his own theories. They occupy the

position of the invested sociologist, not his primitive subjects. Thus Bour-

dieu becomes useful to us precisely where he discusses the production of

knowledge, the theory effect, and problems of objectivity in the social sci-

ences rather than as the student of primitive societies and their habitual

performances. On the other hand, Bourdieu's theory of social theory will

not be given the last word. Instead, philosophical and psychological ques-

tions of performance will be used to explore a philosophy of virile authority

that transcends the specific logic of practice of the Roman Empire.

Given this brief methodological outline of what is to follow, a few

words on my specific use of some of the major concepts contained within

the writings of this group of authors are perhaps in order.27 Before getting

into specifics, however, I would like first to insist that I do not at all pretend

to be giving comprehensive summaries of any of these theories. Rather, I

am taking up a set of questions and provisional answers within them, and

weighing them against observations and conclusions derived from a reading

of ancient source material. This I regard as the most practical and honest

approach to the matter. For, even if a methodologically narrow approach

were taken - for example a "strict" Lacanian reading - the question would

still arise as to which Lacan I was using and why. Instead, it is more helpful

to see each thinker's corpus as comprising a set of questions and issues that

are still in the process of evolving. The light that such considerations shed

upon the ancient texts in question is the only criterion for the selection of

any given theory or part of a theory. And, as no one theory exhausts the

intricacies of the rhetorical situation - nor, for that matter, are the theories

themselves exhausted by rhetoric - appeal is made to several at their most

useful points. Ultimately the relationship between contemporary theory

and ancient texts will not be unidirectional: critical readings of ancient

oratory call into question the modernity of the postmodern. The antiquity

of the concerns of modern theory thus ought to also raise questions as to

the possible associations with such suspect categories as aristocratic virility

and discourses of mastery.

Derrida's Of Grammatology, with its focus on writing as contrasted

with speech, offers a valuable set of observations for the problems of

INTRODUCTION 15

speech and writing that haunt rhetorical theory.28 Derrida champions writ-

ing against its disparagement relative to the authenticity and presence of

speech. Derrida presents writing's stigma as "the sign of a sign" as in fact

the most apt description of the action of language as a whole, a system that

is radically lacking a point of origin and wherein all meanings are derived

from appeals to other signs (see especially 1976, 7, 11-12). Partisans of

speech over writing lean upon the notion of a transcendental signified and a

theodicity wherein the soul is to the body as the logos is to writing (Derrida

1976, 20, 35). Within such a conception, "the ethic of speech is the delusion

of presence mastered" (139).

My own account of rhetorical theory will show within this theory a

similar disparagement of rhetoric's own inscription. At the same time, the

speech represented within such writings is a speech upon which presence is

predicated. This speech is the speech of the authentic man, the vir bonus.

Yet the vir bonus is himself called into question by any critique of the

phallologocentrism with which his speech is implicated. And such a critique

is immanent within the very texts that would reproduce the vir bonus, for as

texts they are necessarily affiliated with that writing which is the radical

other of speech and which designates nonpresence and diffirance for Der-

rida (1976, 56-57). Nevertheless, rhetorical texts act to give assurances that

writing can be brought under the sign of speech. Thus the rhetorical venue,

the stage upon which rhetorical theory gazes, acts as a scene of an impossi-

ble labor of consolidation of speech as presence against the forces inhering

within these theoretical texts, forces that would vitiate the authority and

self-presence of the speaking voice. Does writing of rhetoric help rhetoric

or harm it?

Preoccupied with the philosophical problem of writing, the handbooks

not surprisingly expend their energies trying to shore up a number of so-

cial categories that are dependent upon a prior ontology and the successful

positing of the subject as such. In this regard one can invoke on several

planes the notion of Derrida's dangerous supplement. For Derrida the

supplement has a twofold aspect. It adds itself in excess as a "plenitude

enriching another plenitude. . . . It cumulates and accumulates presence"

(1976, 144). At the same time, the supplement also "adds only to replace"

and "insinuates in-the-place-of" (145). It does so "by the anterior default of

a presence" (145). In this sense, then, the supplement is both savior and

ruin of that to which it is applied: as it piles up presence, it likewise

undermines it from below. For Derrida, there is no being as such, only its

eternal imputation.

I would like to suggest that the triad of notions I have discussed above,

the performance, the student, and the theory, play with and against one

another in a supplementary relationship. Performance requires the text as

16 STAGING MASCULINITY

its supplement or aid, but hates the text as its own effacement. Perfor-

mance likewise requires of the student that he be the supplement or efface-

ment of performance's "mere" performativity. The student here makes up

for the deficiency of performance by superadding to it his own presence

and authenticity. On the other hand, the student requires text as supple-

ment or as the assistant for his own self-mastery and self-presence. Yet this

student also requires performance as supplement or effacement of his non-

presence or incompleteness: he becomes and is the good man only as he

plays one. For its part, the text requires the student as supplement or

effacement of its death- a making present in the world and in speech of the

text. Similarly, the text requires performance as supplement or assistant to

its own incompleteness: performance means a putting of the text's precepts

into iterative and worldly time. In none of these cases, though, does the

supplement complete the thing to which it is applied: each complementary

gesture also contains within it a diminution of the authority of the item

supplemented. The task of this study, then, is not to pursue completion and

perfection, but to explore the shapes of these subjects, texts, and acts

precisely as incomplete and the practical consequences that ensue from

such incompleteness.

Within this eternal process of imperfection, the theoretical handbook

can be seen as a failed therapist within the Freudian paradigm. As will be

seen shortly, the consequences of such a failure are manifold, and they also

allow for the integration of the critiques of Freud within my portrait of

rhetorical theory. This failure, however, is meant to draw attention to the

labor of self-discovery that is enjoined upon the student. At the same time,

one never completes this process of self-discovery that I am likening to a

therapeutics. Nor, for that matter, does such a process ever offer a success-

ful psychoanalytic cure within Freud's own thinking. Instead, the student

has certain psychic elements dredged up and worked over and over in such

a way as to reinscribe certain dispositions rather than to overcome them.

Before getting into the details of this process of failed rhetorical ther-

apy as it relates to the Freudian corpus, I would like to lay out a few points

of Freud that I take as axiomatic starting points for investigation.29 First,

infantile life is suffused with desires that are thoroughly lawless so far as the

polite society that awaits the child is concerned. Thus, every child is a Little

Hans, a "paragon of the vices," as Freud calls him (1976, 57). Every child

can thus be justly accused of incestuous desires, homosexuality, heterosexu-

ality, and the rest. Likewise one notes that in part the production of such

vices is attendant upon the efforts of the same good people who are in some

measure scandalized by them, namely the family. For in Hans' case, his

parents were adherents of Freud and had destined their child for observa-

tion (Freud 1976, 48). Similarly, they themselves expressly utter the threats

INTRODUCTION 17

and injunctions that sexualize Little Hans' life.30 In other words, Hans does

not live in the state of nature, but is instead fully implicated in his culture.31

To the comparatively anomic desires of infantile life corresponds a

similar ambivalence in the structure of desire in the adult life: prohibited or

no, many more objects are invested by desire than any narrow heterosexual

paradigm can account for. While the inculcation and legislation of such

desires may be an important social project, there is nothing moribund in

the desires as such. Indeed, desire is an ineluctable fact of human life.

Further, one should accept the ideas of anaclitism and narcissism as intro-

duced by Freud as descriptive of a valid distinction. But it is not necessary

to adopt his hierarchy of modes of desire that devolves into a pathological

view of homosexuality.32 Furthermore, within the Roman context, male

same-sex desire is not itself ipso facto anathema; the age of the participants

and who did what to whom were far more pressing concerns (Parker 1997).

Yet even this relatively permissive configuration of male desire requires

key moments of refusal, and one must examine the psychic consequences

of this negation. Freud's view of the homosexual component of everyday

life will prove indispensable: the sublimation of homosexual desires into

homosocial ones is precisely the axis around which the rhetorical scenario

turns.33 Even if passive homosexuality is an anathema for the vir bonus, the

recognition of such a desire such that it may be prohibited or put under

erasure forms a vital move in the field of rhetoric.

The therapy offered by the rhetorical handbook plays upon the libidinal

structures of the psyche and reproduces the scene of the transference in

Freud. For Freud, the transference is an operation wherein the patient

transfers onto the person of the analyst desires whose fundamental structure

and origin lie in infantile sexuality (1970a, 105-7). Thus the scene of therapy

is a venue for the patient's rehearsal of the constitutive elements of his

capacity for love and desire. Freud insists that this structure is always repro-

ducing itself (1970a, 106), but that in the case of therapy, the analyst takes up

a definite position within a preexisting" 'series' already constructed in [the

patient's] mind" (107). Here again, rhetorical theory should be seen as only

one venue within a broader cultural labor of subjectivization, an endless and

overdetermined set of elements appertaining to the series of symbols operat-

ing within the Roman psyche. This reading is clearly a Lacanian one wherein

the Freudian transference is phrased in terms of signification in general (see,

e.g., Lacan 1982, 61-73).

Transference thus can inform any relationship between two subjects.

But it is, of course, keenest in a scenario like analysis, where the patient is

confronted by a subject to whom one must confess. Paradoxically this

confession will lead to self-knowledge, for behind the mirroring relation of

the analyst there lies a relationship to meaning in general (see Lacan 1988a,

18 STAGING MASCULINITY

273-87). The orator finds himself confronted with a similar scenario

whereby he is asked to know himself by way of a training that offers to

show him his own meanings within a broader context of signification. The

handbook even promises a means of controlling or containing signification,

as if language's protean forms could be wrestled into submission and a truth

extracted from it. In the rhetoric of rhetorical theory, the body is said to

signify as to the truth of its own bearer. The body comes to act as an

irreducible index of the truth that one is, in fact, a "good man." The

rhetorical handbook thus offers a bodily mirage and a discourse within

which to appreciate this image. The handbook's student is asked to accom-

modate himself to this body and this discourse in order to attain to this

ideal bodily self, this Idealich (see Lacan 1988a, 129-42).

Within psychoanalytic discourse, though, the transference, by appeal-

ing to structures of desire that precede the advent of the therapist, "pro-

vides the strongest resistance to the cure."34 The attainment to full self-

knowledge - to put for a moment a very lopsided gloss upon Wo es war, soll

Ich werden - is actually inhibited should the patient become captivated by

the alter ego with which he is presented and should he fail to move beyond

it into an understanding of meaning and desire as such. In fact, in the

countertransference, or the desire felt for the patient in return by the

therapist, one finds the possibility of a static circuit wherein there will be no

progress rather than a dialectical therapeutic advance.35

Rhetorical theory produces something akin to the transference by

reigniting prior structures of desire. In particular, one is meant to cathect all

over again to an image of virile authority and mastery, an image that is part of

the durable disposition of the subject. Rhetorical instruction is one of many

sites of the activation and reactivation of such desires: rhetoric is neither

radically originary nor radically derivative, even if it is in a unique position to

delve into the symbolic implications of the very virile authority that is every-

where presumed in Roman life.36 The handbook as failed therapist incul-

cates the same sorts of desires whose emergence within analysis Freud high-

lights. But in the case of rhetoric, these desires are cultivated without any

overcoming or getting beyond. The resistance to the cure that Freud sees in

the transferential admiration for the image of the therapist here becomes,

ironically, the cure itself. The orator is promised that his successive approxi-

mations to the body the text offers will lead him to acquire the authority in

general. And, obviously, this same authority has to be invested in the text as

itself authoritative and efficacious before the orator can even begin aspiring

to realizing the text's promises. From the outset, then, we find a sublime

body already folded into the speech of the text, an absent author who prom-

ises a mechanism to aspire to authority in general. If all of this seems ab-

stract, it is no accident: the trajectory of the performative ultimately extends

INTRODUCTION 19

beyond the material possibilities of any given performance. One reaches for

something that is never quite there.

As a therapist, the rhetorical handbook inculcates desire for the body

of a good man and the meanings that have been invested in such a body

but that also transcend it. The handbook modulates this desire, and it

moralizes desire in general. The handbook's self-knowledge is thus not a

release from a system of desires, but rather a refinement of the techniques

and tactics of that desire. We will in fact find a desire reaching out from

the handbook and the rhetorical teacher toward the student: the transfer-

ence and the countertransference thus suffuse the scene of oratorical

training. Moreover, the transcendental truth to which one might lead a

patient in analysis here becomes a striving for a place of privilege relative

to language and meaning. The orator is not offered a chance to appreciate

himself as the subject of language, some Es, but instead as meaning's

absolute master.

In the course of the handbook's therapy - a successful therapy to the

extent that it acts to produce a certain kind of subject - yet another Freud-

ian concept becomes relevant: repetition. Freud sees repetition as the ex-

pression in action of a desire that is being repressed by the patient in the

course of analysis.37 In the case of oratory homosexual desire is both re-

fused and likewise bound ever to return anew. Oratory is saturated with

problems of pleasure and desire felt between males. The good performance

of the orator and the one toward which he is educated is the enactment of

the body of the good man as a socially desirable entity, an entity that gives

pleasure specifically as a male and specifically to other males.

It is in many ways the function of rhetorical theory to "pacify" or

authorize these homosexual desires along more acceptable lines than the

potentially chaotic field of desire might otherwise offer. Rhetorical hand-

books routinely inculcate an oratory that is erotic, yet in the course of so

doing steer that Eros into such channels as are socially respectable. In other

words, Freud's euphemized homosocial pleasures are actively pursued, and

explicit homosexual ones are berated. The progress from homosexuality to

homoerotics is here not automatic or taken for granted, as in Freud: it is

the object of solicitude and deliberate labor. And the traces of this labor of

repression remain evident in rhetorical theory. Indeed rhetorical theory

thrives upon this process of concomitant incitement and refusal: for it is the

very desire that is prohibited that holds together the libidinal economy of

rhetoric in general.

Here one should compare Freud's essay on melancholia and the pro-

cess whereby one grieves over the loss of an object within oneself (1970b,

168). This process tends to produce a self-beratement that is a veiled cri-

tique of others (170). The student is asked to refuse traces of femininity in

20 STAGING MASCULINITY

himself, and this is an activity of active refusal that produces a lost object.

At the same time, this care for the self and beratement of effeminacy,

servility, and other illegitimate characteristics as found in one's own body

also contains a critique of the social order for being too servile or effemi-

nate. In other words, there is a desire expressed in this gesture for a world

populated only by hegemonic men, a pure field of homosocial desire. But

such a desire is a vain one precisely because the production of the ideal

male entails the production of illegitimate lost objects within the hege-

monic male. Indeed, rhetorical theory requires the constant revisiting of

this site of loss to secure that the illegitimate is berated all over again. The

handbook's therapy fails once again, and pure masculinity remains an elu-

sive and ephemeral dream. But again the failure is a success to the extent

that the process itself has useful social consequences that are served even as

one is cheated of the ostensible goal. Thus there is a melancholy that clings

variously to the performative as one of its fundamental moments and as a

sort of engine driving the compulsive repetitions of both performance and

the theory of performance.

As has already been indicated, this general portrait of psychic life

derived from Freud can be rounded out via the writings of Jacques Lacan,

and I would here like to make my debt to Lacan somewhat clearer. Lacan

allows us to unite the focus on language and being/nonbeing from Derrida

with the psychology of Freud. Lacan's theories thus provide a clearer under-

standing of the articulation of the ego relative to the field of language. In

fact, one may consider this to be Lacan's chief aim as a theorist. Lacan's

"mirror stage" explains the constitution of the ego in the realm of what he

calls "the imaginary."38 The subject's ego comes to compose itself from out

of a body in pieces and into a coordinated whole by reference to the image

of the other that confronts him in the mirror. We will in fact see this very

scene rehearsed within the rhetorical tradition as Demosthenes is posi-

tioned before a mirror by Quintilian and brought into mastery of himself

and his meaning by reference to his own image. This is the moment of

"seeing oneself see oneself" (Lacan 1981, 83) that marks for Lacan the

point at which the subject elides the gaze whose preexistence structures his

world and his position within it (1981, 72). In the case of the orator, his

theoretical apparatus acts as the preexisting and structuring gaze that disap-

pears in a moment of self-reflection in which the speaker actually most fully

accommodates himself to the structured space regulated by that gaze, the

gaze of rhetorical theory. Furthermore, this apparatus is also fully impli-

cated in the society that produces it, and hence it fully partakes of the

symbolic in Lacan's sense of the term: rhetorical theory offers a special and

highly evocative instance of a process whereby meaning is produced within

the world as a whole.

INTRODUCTION 21

Taking this as a brief summary of Lacan's version of the ego, we can

complement this portrait of the ego by evoking as well the unconscious and

the symbolic order.39 The axis of the ego for Lacan lies along the plane of

what he calls the imaginary. On the other hand, the symbolic order persists

on a separate axis from that of the imaginary and is so illustrated in all of

Lacan's diagrams. The unconscious is, as Lacan routinely stresses, the

"discourse of the other" (e.g., 1988a, 85; 1988b, 89). The unconscious is

structured like a language precisely because the emergence of the symbolic

is the irruption of language into the world. Thus, "the human order is

characterized by the fact that the symbolic function intervenes at every

moment and at every stage of its existence" (1988b, 29). Additionally,

"(the symbolic order) isn't constituted bit by bit. As soon as the symbol

arrives, there is a universe of symbols."40 Furthermore, the ego participates

within this order only as one more symbol within this order (1988b, 38).

Hence there is no special place set aside for the ego in Lacan's world.

Lacan profoundly decenters the ego, and demolishes the statement, "I'm

the one who knows that I am" (1988b, 224).

In the example of the orator, the Lacanian schemata are arranged in a

particularly potent fashion for the orator as ego. The rhetorical tradition

and rhetorical theory assume a position homologous to the symbolic order

as a whole. They thus arrogate for themselves questions of meaning in

general. Rhetorical theory hereby becomes a part of the orator's uncon-

scious. Or, put more precisely, this theory participates in the structuration

of the orator's unconscious. In this sense, one needs to take even more

seriously the orthopedics and calisthenics of manhood that these theories

impose upon their students. It is through these very techniques that the

orator loses his ability to say that he is the one who knows who he is even as

he labors to realize himself as the "good man, experienced at speaking."

For the orator and his theories, the symbolic order is always already

given and complete. But the orator's symbolic order is lived and repro-

duced by these same theories. The ego of the orator is given to theory's

gaze, and identification with this gaze implies an active accommodation of

the ego to the symbolic order. In the chronic labor of making the ego

present to itself that comes with submission to rhetorical theory, there is a

production of the sense of authenticity and interiority as a function of the

relationship between rhetorical theory and the student. To this psychoana-

lytic tale of self-discovery one should compare the discussion of Derrida

above. The constitutive elements of Derrida's term phallologocentrism are

all key aspects of the orator: virility, authorized speech, and social control.

In short, phallologocentrism is the student's goal, and rhetorical theory

purports to be the means to this end. The labor of establishing this authen-

ticity can naturally never be completed given that its consummation would

22 STAGING MASCULINITY

require an impossible closure of the symbolic and a collapse of the symbolic

and imaginary orders. But it is this very identification that is sought within

rhetorical theory: where the unconscious of theory was, there the ego

should be.

This formulation to which ancient theory invited its adherents ought to

give us some pause. It does not differ from the recipe for therapy offered

by psychoanalysis. In particular Lacan's portrait of the goal of analysis

plays off of Freud's famous Wo es war, soll Ich werden. In Lacanian terms,

this involves the movement of the Ego (je, Ich) into the position of the Id

(Sujet, Es, or, unconscious) (Lacan 1988b, 243-47). Clearly a similar move-

ment is sought by rhetorical theory as well, but the viability of this project

seems suspect. In Lacan's and Freud's terms, there ought to be some virtue

in communing with the unconscious and the symbolic. But the orator ac-

quires his "health" at the cost of reinscribing the legitimacy of virile author-

ity. To what extent does analysis itself offer a cure only by way of a funda-

mental complicity with the very order whose dictates and prohibitions have

caused so much distress?41 The desires that structure the world of antiquity

are thoroughly complicated by issues of mastery, misogyny, and xenopho-

bia. It is not clear that the modern world can argue a contrary case.

It might be possible to conclude that Lacanian therapy is somehow

genealogically connected with a tainted rhetorical predecessor. That is, the

discursive apparatus of which psychoanalysis forms a part would on this

reading be affiliated with techniques of the self whose origins can be traced

to the Greco-Roman world. Such considerations are worth entertaining,

but any notion that psychoanalysis is a "rhetorical" gambit should not leave

us blind to the notion that the psyche is itself rhetorical. And, within the

broader context of metaphor and metonymy and other tropological views

of the psychic apparatus, we find ancient rhetorical theory as an institution

ideally accommodated to the project of acting both upon and within the

self. Again, rhetorical theory stands in the position of a quasi psychoanaly-

sis. And if an analyst might wish to describe theory as having failed to

provide a cure, this failure is nevertheless vital to theory's own working: it

is a fertile failure.

The most useful student of the fertility of power, failed or no,42 is

Michel Foucault. At first glance a use of Foucault may seem to conflict

with the discussion above, as Foucault was himself a vocal critic of psycho-

analysis. I hope to make it clear, though, that my portrait of rhetorical

theory as a failed analysis fits well with Foucault's own observations on

power. Additionally, I would like to indicate certain points in Foucault's

own thinking at which psychoanalysis is not subverted but rather becomes

a necessary supplement to Foucault's thought if we are to explain the

situation of ancient oratory. In other words, Foucault himself reaches

INTRODUCTION 23

certain theoretical impasses that are best solved by assistance derived

from outside his own work.

Foucault dedicated two of his full-length studies to ancient topics.43 I

would prefer, however, to use Foucault's work with a particular emphasis

on his techniques and observations derived from studies of other, later

periods. I hope that the present project will bear out the conclusion that

many of Foucault's ideas were actually applicable, if only in a partial sense,

to periods in which he did not himself see them as acting. Implicitly such an

approach also acts as a partial critique of Foucault's thinking regarding the

classical period as being somewhat incomplete within his own terms: for

example, panopticism should have been retained as an analytic tool in the

later volumes of the History of Sexuality even though the architectural

apotheosis of the same would have to wait for centuries. If Foucault's

account of antiquity is incomplete, this is not necessarily just a function of

his lack of technical training in classical scholarship.44 Instead ancient ora-

tory brings to light questions of the subjects's self-relation that extend

beyond the descriptive capacities of Foucault's own models. Indeed it is

precisely the failure of a text like The Care of the Self to engage with the

ironies and ambiguities of its chosen topic that renders Foucault's argument

rather bland and descriptive, whereas his earlier work is remarkable for its

bold insights. Strangely, Foucault seems to have taken antiquity at its word,

whereas students of rhetorical theory ought to always worry that the an-

cients knew the art of dissimulation as well.

But let us return to the orators. Their fertile and failed theoretical

project parallels the institutional critique leveled at psychoanalysis by Fou-

cault in the first volume of his History of Sexuality. Much as sexuality is

compelled to "speak verbally of its own silence" and is put into a triad of

power, knowledge, and pleasure,45 so also are pleasure, effeminacy, and all

illegitimacy brooded over within the rhetorical setting. The other parallels

between Foucault's portrait of modern sexuality and ancient rhetoric are

striking. Within ancient rhetoric as well, there was an "institutional in-

citement" (1990a, 18) to speak about the forbidden and excluded side of

oratory; "an effort of elimination that was always destined to fail and

always constrained to begin again" (41); a forcing of the forbidden objects

"into hiding so as to make their discovery possible" (42); and in general, a

confessional mode of sexuality. Foucault argues, though, that Rome had an

ars erotica and not a scientia sexualis (1990a, 57-90). I would assert, on the

other hand, that there is in fact a scientia sexualis enfolded into the study of

rhetoric.

Foucault's Discipline and Punish best explicates the techniques of

knowledge and power that subtend this situation. Here Foucault explicitly

informs us that "the body is also directly involved in a political field; power

24 STAGING MASCULINITY

relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it,

torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs"

(1979, 25). The same might be said of the orator's body within the political

field that it occupies. The rhetorical handbook plays the part of active

agent of production of meaning and legitimacy within this scheme, the

agent of knowledge that is the obverse face of power in Foucault's power/

knowledge dyad (see especially 1980a, 50-51). In such a context, increased

knowledge actually reflects an increase in the opportunity for the effects of

power:46 the more explicit and detailed the study of a performer's body, the

more one can detail the tracings of power upon this body. The constitution

and extraction of knowledge of the body occur in the very process of the

examination of this body. 47 In the end, knowable man appears as the prod-

uct of a process of an ever-increasing analytics that makes him both better

known and more subject to the power that knows him (Foucault 1979,

305). The man who emerges at the end of this process is the "true" man.

That is, the truth of the order of discourse structured by power has as its

effect man (Foucault 1980c, 93, 98).

Such a reading when turned toward ancient rhetoric has a couple of

important consequences. The first is that one needs to take rhetorical

theory very seriously indeed: it is a discourse of truth. But it is not true in

the simple sense of reflecting what actually happened when a speaker arose

to deliver his words. Rather, rhetorical theory is true in the sense that it

participates in a vast network of truth-producing structures within antiq-

uity. It is true to the extent that the knowledge that it produces, a knowl-

edge everywhere suffused with power, has the quality of constraining the

truths of antiquity. Second, this reading immediately invites the question of

self-reflexivity. What is the significance of rhetorical theory as a knowledge

that is produced and consumed by the same set of men? It is a knowledge of

the hegemonic male produced by him and applied to himself. What differ-

ence does this make within Foucault's schema?

The self-reflexive is actually a point of crisis within Foucault.48 At the

same time, it is a point to which his thinking seems to aim. Foucault grap-

pled with the problem in both of the later volumes of The History of Sexual-

ity, even entitling the third volume The Care of the Self Yet self-reflexivity

has emerged as an important thesis already within Discipline and Punish.

Subjection to the "ceaseless gaze" (Foucault 1979, 105) of the panopticon

produces a situation where the exercise of power becomes unnecessary,

because power has been inscribed within its bearers (201). This inscription,

though, is a self-inscription: "(the prisoner) inscribes in himself the power

relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the prin-

ciple of his own subjection" (202-3). Given this last example, the scene of

rhetorical training resembles not only the practices and the care of the self

INTRODUCTION 25

outlined in The History of Sexuality, but also the panoptic scenario. The

orator is constrained and determined by a faceless gaze that he feels always

and everywhere upon him. By way of meeting the demands of this gaze, the

orator inscribes himself within a power relation in which he becomes the

principle of his own domination. His self-mastery emerges as a response to

an imagined inspection that must be forestalled and mastered by way of a

scrupulous and complete self-inscription within its dictates.

Such a situation, however, is highly reminiscent of Lacan's tag above

about the elision of the gaze by the sense of seeing oneself seeing oneself

(1981, 83). This homology suggests that Foucault's own theories are not so

radically opposed to psychoanalysis as one might have suspected at first

glance. In fact, by complementing Lacan's symbolic with Foucault's paral-

lel notion of power, both theories are enriched: Foucault is given a struc-

ture within which his optics may be related to the ego along the axes that

bind the symbolic to the imaginary; and Lacan has attached to his symbolic

Foucault's strong emphasis on the fertility of power.49

Lacan complements Foucault in yet another useful direction: Lacan's

rigid definition of the symbolic and the real as that which resists significa-

tion would help Foucault avoid such confusing moments as occasionally

occur within the History of Sexuality. For example, in the Jouy we see

something that appears to be a moment radically outside of the structures

of power and knowledge permeating the rest of the text (Foucault 1990a,

31-32). During his account of the simpleton and his "bucolic pleasures"

who is transformed into child molester at the hands of the law Foucault

loses the ability to critique the normative by producing unconvincing por-

traits of exteriority. Jouy is given a position exterior to power and sym-

bolization even though a closer reading reveals that he is clearly participat-

ing in a variety of symbolic structures: rusticity does not imply anarchy.

Similarly Jouy's naive innocence is purchased at the price of the girl's savvy

complicity. One can also compare to this Butler's critique of Foucault's

reading of the case of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin (Butler 1990a,

94-106). In both instances, Foucault's radical others and unthinkable souls

need to be critiqued within the order that refuses them. As Butler reminds

us, the subversive possibilities for sexuality and identity need to be thought

within the terms of power itself (1990a, 30). Such will be my own approach

to reading the unlivable bodies produced within rhetorical discourse: the

outside is used to normative effect by the inside. The "unthinkable" is thus

fully within the realm of culture, only it is excluded from participation in

the dominant culture (see Butler 1990a, 77; 1993, 3).

Failed orators and other, untenable bodies may well represent opportu-

nities for an alternative or counterhegemonic reading of antiquity, but they

should not be taken as moments of authenticity falling outside the law and

26 STAGING MASCULINITY

waiting for a new, modern narrative to apply its alchemy, to transform their

discursive evaluation, and to exchange their base metal for one nobler. One

needs to exercise permanent vigilance over the question of making a no-

blest and best account of bodily truths, for such is the very end to which

rhetoric itself steers us. A mere inversion of terms is unlikely to affect the

structural conditions that orient our understanding at a more basic level,

conditions that require the interconnection of truth, the body, and virtue.

The orator participates in this whole debate of good and true bodies as

an actor whose performances have the profoundest implications for both

himself and his world. This role, though, is neither fixed nor rigid. Rather it

represents a fertile and creative moment. The orator's performance and his

training for performance offer points where power is staged and repro-

duced, but it is not for that totalized. Rhetoric needs performativity to

secure its status as a lived modality of power. The performance, though, is

never complete. Nor, in its turn, is performance even adequately or exhaus-

tively described by the theory that would encompass it. Thus the world of

performance and the descriptions of performance have between them and

within them a potential space for queer-in the fullest sense of the term-

and revolutionary consequences. Indeed, both performance and theories

of performance routinely produce their own queer obverse. Here again we

have rhetoric's failed analysis and therapeutics, again its fertile failure, but

in this case we see more clearly the extent to which it could never have

succeeded.

Judith Butler is an important theorist of these very issues. Butler

makes the notion of performativity central to her understanding of subjects

and subjectivation. Thus her work is immediately amenable to application

to the realm of ancient actio and theories of performance. In the ancient

setting, we find authors who take performance just as seriously as a found-

ing moment for the subject, and also thinkers who act upon this belief to

produce a body of knowledge that will constrain performances to certain

meanings. Thus, while for Butler performativity is an incomplete yet com-

pulsory materialization of the body through time (1993, 1-2, 9), the rhetori-

cal theorists take up a similar stance and rework it for their own ends. This

incompleteness becomes an injunction to eternal study and labor, to end-

less self-subjection within the terms of the law. The orator and his theories

are implicated in a situation that invites the endless citation of the law in

order to reground both the authority of the law and its bearers.50 The law

cited in this case is the law of power or the symbolic. Yet this notion of

citationality also entails an endlessly derivative relationship to this law; and

hence there is no law as such, only its own citations. One thinks again of

Derrida's critique of ontology. If the subject is a work always in progress,

rhetorical theory has found a way to keep it always busy and out of trouble.

INTRODUCTION 27

At the same time, though, the law and the truth of rhetoric cannot be

hypostatized as a prior essence: it is the task of rhetorical theory and

rhetorical training to produce the fiction of just such an essence. Thus my

own discussion of "rhetorical theory" as monolithic and reified could be

described as itself complicit with the rhetorical project. I intend only to

borrow what might be called an "indigenous category" and to show how

this structure itself structures the world.51 I understand rhetoric, the theory

of rhetoric, and the bodies of the orators as all part of an ongoing project

designed to produce meaning even as the truth of that meaning and the

hegemony of the good man remain incomplete and elusive.

In forestalling the perils and pitfalls of nonpresence, the orator none-

theless finds himself routinely enacting the constitutive exclusion of the

unlivable domain. Thus in the process of securing the legitimate order, the

illegitimate is chronically produced and then exiled. The performances of

the rhetorical subject are iterations that are constrained both to mark their

own authority and to banish the specter of an illegitimacy that is always

haunting the legitimate order. Butler reminds us that "since the law must

be repeated to remain an authoritative law, the law perpetually reinstates

the possibility of its own failure" (1993, 108). Yet for the orator, his hand-

book proposes that the failure lies within the student. The student need

only accede more to the law by subjecting himself to the further study of it

in order to overcome the performative failings he may evince. The orator's

self-beratement can be compared to the "tacit cruelties which sustain co-

herent identity, cruelties that include self-cruelty as well, the abasement

through which coherence is fictively produced and sustained (Butler 1993,

115). In the case of rhetoric, though, we find that the cruelty is highly

verbal, and it reproduces itself as an often explicit project of securing

identity by way of rhetorical fictions that aspire to the condition of truth.

And, to the extent that "truth" is a matter of iterated performances, actio

and the theory of performance are vital aspects of the truth of masculine

identity at Rome.

This theoretical survey has been intended to offer not only a justifica-

tion for employing certain methods when reading ancient rhetorical texts,

but also to demonstrate that a certain number of questions circulating within

contemporary theoretical debates already comprised a vital set of concerns

within antiquity. In other words, the questions that arise within ancient

rhetorical theory and that are themselves partially addressed within this

same theoretical apparatus remain pressing theoretical questions to this day:

what is the validity of a text relative to an actual performance? What is the

proper relationship between textuality and performativity? What is a perfor-

mance of or for? What is the desire lived in performance? On the other hand,

ancient rhetorical theory offers the opportunity for a close and detailed

28 STAGING MASCULINITY

examination of active interventions into this same set of questions. Rhetori-

cal theory and practice and their interrelationship thus offer an overt ex-

ample of the process of subject production. The commandment to be a good

man experienced at speaking is not one to be taken lightly: an entire technol-

ogy of subjects in the world is herein implicated.

CHAPTER 1

Reading and Writing

ANCIENT RHETORICAL THEORISTS TEND TO RECOGNIZE five branches of

study requisite to the proper study of the art. While some Greeks may have

divided the question up differently,' the Latin tradition is marked by una-

nimity.2 A student needed to learn how to discover his arguments and

argumentative stances; he had to organize his speech; he had to determine

the (appropriate) verbal expression for his arguments; he should study

memory so as to be able to say what he had decided upon when the time

came; and he had to consider the physical performance of his oration.

When it comes to performance, we find an inherited problem of termi-

nology: Latin authors use either actio or pronuntiatio, but prefer to use one

over the other. The first, actio, specifically evokes the movements of the

body during a speech, the second the modulation of the voice. Each term,

though, unless its meaning is specifically refined for a particular argument,

is used generally to express both elements. I prefer to use actio because I

am most interested in the use of the body, but likewise will employ the term

in its broader sense. It must be kept in mind, then, that the rhetorical

tradition has, to its own eyes and especially to our own, curiously fused two

very distinct qualities (sight and sound) into a single issue.3

Any thorough rhetorical handbook will eventually have to discuss the

physical presentation of speeches. But tradition has presented the author of

a handbook with a problem that extends well beyond a question of terminol-

ogy: how can a book train the body and the voice by means of its written

dictates? One might argue that the handbook never stood alone, that there

was always accompanying it the schoolhouse, and that the books' failings

would inevitably be made good in person by the teacher. This observation

should not be forgotten. It does, though, tend to gloss over questions that

the authors of handbooks asked themselves, questions whose implications

have far-reaching consequences for lived experience and its capacity to

make good on the defects of a text.

We should not let the notion of the schoolhouse obscure the fact of the

text: one of the reasons Quintilian writes is because he knows that people

29

30 STAGING MASCULINITY

are already learning from flawed "bootleg" copies of his lectures (1.pr.7).

There is a veritable hunger for texts on the part of the audience. Quintil-

ian's problem presents only the most striking case of a condition presup-

posed by the text: the author is absent; these words will have to do; one

tries to make them as good as possible. Merely attending school is not

enough, and it is easy to note among the consumers of the rhetorical

handbook students who could not hear their teacher, students who wished

to have him ever to hand, full-grown orators who no longer needed lessons,

and lastly, other scholars of oratory.4

The author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium5 assigns to delivery a promi-

nent place, on equal footing with the other four divisions in the art of

oratory. He begins his discussion by saying, "Many have said that delivery

is the most useful thing for an orator and that it lends the most to persua-

sion. We, for our part, should not have readily said that a single element

from the five parts of oratory was particularly effective."6 The author is

actually being rather ungenerous relative to many other accounts from

antiquity. This moderate declaration and the subsequent reserve about the

"marvelous" power of delivery are both at odds with the oft-repeated

anecdote about the three foremost elements of oratory according to Demos-

thenes: delivery, delivery, and delivery (see Quintilian 11.3.6; Cicero, De

oratore, 3.213).

The author offers the following justification for treating the topic in

his text:

Quare, <et> quia nemo de ea re diligenter scripsit - nam omnes vix

posse putarunt de voce et vultu et gestu dilucide scribi, cum eae res

ad sensus nostros pertinerent - et quia magnopere <ea pars> a nobis

ad dicendum conparanda est, non neglegenter videtur tota res con-

sideranda.

[Accordingly, both because nobody has written carefully on this

topic - for all thought that one could hardly write clearly concerning

the voice, facial expressions, and gestures, as these things pertain to

our physical senses - and because we must carefully provide for this

element when we speak, it seems that the whole topic ought to be

considered with some care.]

(Ad Herennium 3.19)

Delivery has presented something of a challenge to the authors of the

handbook: it is essential, yet it remains elusive. Delivery has proven a little

too "real" for many to wish to compass it with mere words. Delivery, then,

offers to rhetorical theory a sort of limit-point that might possibly lie be-

yond its own capacities. Despite our author's line of thought, he neverthe-

READING AND WRITING 31

less proceeds to make good a long-standing debt of language. He proceeds,

that is, to put delivery into words. A detailed discussion of various ele-

ments of delivery follows. The author hereupon dedicates roughly 8 of his

192 pages to this issue.7 Then he concludes thus,

Non sum nescius, quantum susceperim negotii, qui motus corporis

exprimere verbis et imitari scriptura conatus sim voces. Verum nec hoc

confisus sum posse fieri, ut de his rebus satis commode scribi posset,

nec, si id fieri non posset, hoc, quod feci, fore inutile putabam, prop-

terea quod hic admonere voluimus, quid oporteret: reliqua trademus

exercitationi. Hoc scire oportet, pronuntiationem bonam id

perficere, ut res ex animo videatur.

[I am not unaware of the extent of my undertaking when I tried to

express the movements of the body in words and to imitate the voice in

writing. But neither did I feel I could write of these things adequately,

nor, if in fact I couldn't, did I think that whatever I did achieve would

be useless. Therefore, in this place I wished to give advice on appropri-

ate delivery; the rest I will leave to actual training. Nevertheless, one

ought to know this: good delivery achieves as its effect that everything

looks as if it comes straight from the heart.]

(Ad Herennium 3.27)

This text lacks confidence in itself, and it highlights the impossibility of its

task.8 Despite repeated qualifications, the Ad Herennium eventually did

provide us with a set of prescriptions even where these might actually prove

to be useless: delivery could not be passed over in silence; this will have to

do. Perhaps we even find an echo of this ancient awkwardness surrounding

writing performance in a modern work such as Lausberg's massive hand-

book on oratory: in over six hundred pages of analysis, less than one page

is devoted to delivery (1990, 527). Martin likewise writes several hundred

pages of which just over two are dedicated to performance (1974, 353-55).

They had to mention performance, but each would apparently prefer to

spend his energies on surer subjects.

Even as the problem of writing on performance is foregrounded the

author casts doubts on the refusal of other handbooks to discuss delivery

carefully. As has been mentioned, Aristotle discussed delivery, but his

treatment is by no means systematic (Rhetoric 1403b20ff.). Aristotle's suc-

cessor Theophrastus is noted for writing explicitly on gestures (Kroll 1940,

1075; Solmsen 1941, 45-46). On the Roman side, we know from Quintilian

that Plotius Gallus and Nigidius wrote about gestures.9 Suetonius cites a

passage from a lost letter of Cicero that says that Plotius was the first to

teach in Latin and that when Cicero was a boy all of the youths were

32 STAGING MASCULINITY

flocking to Plotius (De grammaticis et rhetoribus 26). Hence, the key word

in the account the Ad Herennium makes of its own project is "carefully"

(diligenter). Hitherto people have had something to say, but theoretical

knowledge of the body nevertheless remained inadequate in his eyes. We

will see in the next chapter whether or not such knowledge could ever be

made sufficient.

A thorough analysis of oratory requires that something be said con-

cerning delivery, that delivery be investigated and described. Failing to

mention delivery would be akin to neglecting to discuss word choice or

composition. A handbook, then, has failed the body and voice of its

orator if it remains silent; but, as the author of the Ad Herennium also

makes clear, even where it is verbose, the handbook has not compassed

the problem of delivery or sufficiently instructed the student: writing

cannot adequately deal with questions of the senses. In fact, the prescrip-

tions of the Ad Herennium appear to have even been scaled down some-

what in order to offer some generally useful rules of thumb, since definite

precepts appear beyond this medium. This text may be careful, but it is

not particularly systematic, nor is it exhaustive. Even though Clarke will

repeat with some amusement and impatience the fruits of the "pedantic

method" of the author, scorning this work as a textbook (1963, 35-37),

the author sees himself as restrained and general when it comes to deliv-

ery. That is, we may read and reread this section as often as we please,

but the author does not expect that we will actually become great orators

from it. Even did he wish to provide an idiot's guide to gentlemanly

delivery, the author does not believe that such would be possible: the

book is better than nothing; it is necessary even; but it is not enough. One

can compare the tone of exasperation of Victor, who despairs of produc-

ing a man with a real savoir faire out of a student who does not already

possess a good deal of practical know-how. When it comes to explaining

the question of fitting expression (elocutio), Victor says, "But I feel that

my labor on these points must be in vain, for neither do we instruct the

man who does not know how to speak, nor is it to be hoped that he who

cannot speak good Latin is going to speak ornately, nor that he who does

not speak intelligibly is able to speak something to be admired."10 In

Bourdieu's terms one might say that the elite habitus and the finer points

of cultural consumption, production, and reproduction remain usefully

sublime and ineffable (1984, 9-98).

"But if we speak earnestly and without pause, we should use swift

movements of the arm, lively facial expressions, and a zealous counte-

nance."11 To what end are we given such detailed advice? Ultimately, the

most that will be offered is a very general point: be convincing. One's

oratory should seem heartfelt (res ex animo videatur). The audience is

READING AND WRITING 33

supposed to feel that the orator has shown them his soul. The author of the

Ad Herennium starts with the problem of writing as it relates to perfor-

mance, and he ends with an invocation of the inner man. I would like to

begin my own investigation of the problem of writing performance and the

performance of writing a rhetorical handbook by noting this nexus between

writing, performance, and the soul as the troubled point to which rhetorical

theory repeatedly returns. It is the subject who is at stake in the lacuna that

persists between the word and the deed.

The rhetorical handbook fails to capture performance, and there is a

second failure related to this first one: it fails to capture the good orator as

well. Quintilian in his preface writes:

Sit igitur orator vir talis qualis vere sapiens appelari possit, nec

moribus modo perfectus (nam id mea quidem opinione, quamquam

sunt qui dissentiant, satis non est), sed etiam scientia et omni facultate

dicendi; qualis fortasse nemo adhuc fuerit, sed non ideo minus nobis

ad summa tenendum est. . . . Nam est certe aliquid consummata elo-

quentia neque ad eam pervenire natura humani ingenii prohibet.

Quod si non contingat...

[So let the orator be such a man as can truly be called wise, not only

perfect in point of character (for this, in my opinion - though there are

those who disagree - is not enough), but also perfect in both his knowl-

edge and his capacity for every manner of speaking, a man such as

perhaps has yet to have lived. But we are not for this reason to aspire

the less toward perfection. . . . For there is surely such a thing as

consummate eloquence; and the nature of man's intellect does not

prohibit that one arrive at it. And even if this does not come to

pass... ]

(Quintilian 1.pr.18-20)

Here we have no promise of reaching true eloquence: neither Demosthe-

nes nor Cicero, it would seem, can claim to have attained to the summit of

oratory (cf. Heldman 1980, 9). Still, the labor of oratorical training, like

that of the philosophy appropriated in Quintilian's analogy, is in a way its

own reward. We are meant to be satisfied with an endless progress toward

an unreachable goal. Quintilian himself posits his orator as imagined (sit)

rather than as extant (est). The rhetorical handbook that cannot capture

performance likewise should not be expected to capture the ideal per-

former. And Quintilian is hardly the first to use the trope of impossible

oratory. Cicero had made the same argument: the consummate orator

exists only as imagined within the pages of Cicero's De oratore.12

Thus, at the furthest level of remove, at the level of the status of the

34 STAGING MASCULINITY

project of oratorical training itself, there remain a number of open ques-

tions that might strike us as points of crisis. For the handbooks, though,

these questions do little to interrupt their discourse. They even seem to

provide it with points of orientation around which their discussion crys-

tallizes. These rhetorical texts produce, reproduce, and leave unsolved

such issues as oratory as an art, the possibility of the perfect orator, or the

validity of textual inculcation of one of the key elements of oratory. Our

texts seldom provide solid answers in one direction or another. There are

bald assertions of opinion like Quintilian's mea opinione; arguments and

counterarguments are left open in Cicero's dialogue form; and the Ad

Herennium can tell us "neither. . . nor. .." without ever offering a posi-

tive precept. Likewise these works endlessly reproduce in lesser form simi-

lar ambiguities with frequent appeals to the je ne sais quoi of a quiddam or

a prope; with polar divisions spanned by an indefinite number of steps

between them; with contradictions on details when specific chapters are

compared; with impossible debates like the cantus obscurior (more subtle

rhythm) in Cicero and Quintilian; with problems of terminology (is actio or

pronuntiatio the right name for delivery?); and with other like points that

swiftly give way if pushed too hard for deep, fundamental truths that might

be hoped to lie within them. Nevertheless, the texts seem surprisingly

secure as to the very issue of their own existence in the midst of the

qualifications that they themselves raise and that they seem to have no

fundamental interest in resolving. That is, beyond the isolated crisis mo-

ment here and there, they go on their untroubled way, setting out the rules

to be followed by the good orator.

Although an analysis of these individual "failures" and the smaller

details of all of the handbooks is in its own right a rewarding task, I would

like to begin instead with the problem of the fact of the text. What sort of

text can dispense with the various forms of validation jettisoned by the

handbooks? What sort of text does not need rigorous consistency or a

definitive exploration of its own objects of inquiry? Whose interests are

being served here? What sort of reader does this text require? Better yet,

what sort of reader does it produce?

The Rhetorica ad Herennium makes the writing of delivery into a problem.

Yet performance is discussed at great length in Quintilian's eleventh book.

Similarly, in the course of Cicero's various theoretical treatments of ora-

tory, much is written on the topic of good delivery. Verbosity in these cases

does not represent an increase in the confidence we ought to have in the

writing of performance or in textuality per se; rather it represents an in-

crease in textual effects. The increase in the details of a text represents an

increase in the opportunity of a technology of bodies to lay hold of the

READING AND WRITING 35

performer's physical self.13 Similarly, the deployment of new texts and

textual forms represents the putting into the world of new bodies to the

extent that the body and the text can be confused. Hence authorship of a

rhetorical handbook is a vital sociopolitical event.

Whether it is in the case of the dialogue or the list, the Latin theoreti-

cal work on oratory depends on a certain kind of readership. In each case,

the goal is to inflect and guide the reader, to make meaningful the reader's

own appreciation of the inevitable practice of oratory after a particular

fashion. In this manner, then, one can see that the handbooks need not

promise their readers any real progress or attainment, since the indispens-

able logical core of the text is actually pitched at a different target: the

meaning that the reader will impute to his practice as orator and the prac-

tice of others as orators.

The handbook thus offers a special variety of "reading lessons" de-

signed to impart specific hermeneutic techniques. Other texts become em-

bedded in the rhetorical handbook, and the manner in which one is asked to

read these works indicates the style of interpretation required of the student

by the rhetorical treatise as a whole. Though there are a certain number of

complaints about the manner in which performance has been taken for

granted by other authors, the art of reading for bodies forms a second and

related skill that must also be imparted. The student of the body must read

for bodies, and he is even taught how to read for them. Furthermore, the

political heritage and destiny of rhetoric necessarily provokes oratorical

texts that themselves become political acts, texts that, even if they are not

overtly always and in every way practical rhetorical works, are nevertheless

always practical political ones: the bodies they produce and contain are the

bodies to which one will accord political recognition.

If imposing actio on the body is the text's primary goal, a second major

effect is the rendering of a world calibrated to appreciate this actio, a world

generating bodies after its fashion and a world reading them of its own

accord, a world that keeps histories of gestures and that insists upon restor-

ing them to where they "must" have originally been. Quintilian's Institutio

oratoria is deeply engaged with other texts and makes vital assumptions

about them. That is, one can the more thoroughly explore the paradox of

textuality by attending to the relationship of Quintilian's text to writing in

general. Where the Ad Herennium makes us cautious about writing, Quin-

tilian develops techniques of reading and readership that allow him to

evade the aporia of his predecessor.

Quintilian's reading of Vergil provides a useful point of entry into this

problem of textuality. Quintialian invokes the Aeneid so as to offer an ex-

ample of the proper punctuation of Latin, reading Vergil's epic such that one

may appreciate where to pause in speaking and for how long. Although first

36 STAGING MASCULINITY

introduced in terms of a pronunciation exercise/example, Quintilian's treat-

ment of the opening line of the Aeneid has broader implications.

secundum est, ut sit oratio distincta, id est: qui dicit, et incipiat ubi

oportet et desinat. Observandum etiam, quo loco sustinendus et quasi

suspendendus sermo sit, quod Graeci Jno&otoorov vel TooTLytiv

vocant, quo deponendus. suspenditur "arma virumque cano," quia

illud "virum" ad sequentia pertinet, ut sit, "virum Troiae qui primus ab

oris," et hic iterum.

[Second, your speaking should be distinct; that is, a speaker ought to

start and stop at the appropriate place. You must also take note of the

place to pause your speaking and, as it were, to suspend it - the Greek

terms are wO&obLoTXoio or 3TootLyi - and you must know where to

stop entirely. There is a suspension after arma virumque cano, because

the virum pertains to what follows, the sense being virum Troiae qui

primus ab oris, whereupon one pauses again.]

(Quintilian 11.3.35-36)

Like so many passages of Quintilian, this one seems innocuous enough at

first sight: Quintilian asks us to speak such that we might be understood. He

uses one of the most famous lines of Latin literature to illustrate his point.

However, upon reflection, this seems a somewhat unusual task: should it not

be more or less obvious whether or not one is comprehensible? Given that

lessons on making any sort of sense are probably less necessary than Quintil-

ian intimates, the more important feature of this passage is the effort at the

regulation and regularization of speech. The pauses have to have precise,

measured values; they must fall in the right locations. In short, mere intelligi-

bility could be obtained otherwise - a somewhat irregular set of suitably

spaced pauses would ensure this - but Quintilian is pushing for the proper

intelligibility. There is, apparently, a right and a wrong way to read Vergil;

and Vergil's poem has had inserted into it this right reading that it might be

brought out by Quintilian. Or, rather, the notion of the right reading of a text

inserts into the Aeneid the legitimate reading of the text in the same gesture

that this reading is elicited.

If all of this seems to be laboring a simple speech exercise, another

look at the use of Vergil will be helpful.

adspectus enim semper eodem vertitur quo gestus, exceptis quae aut

damnare aut concedere aut a nobis removere oportebit, ut idem illud

vultu videamur aversari, manu repellere:

di talem avertite pestem -

haud equidem tali me dignor honore.

READING AND WRITING 37

[One always looks in the same direction that one gestures. There are

exceptions when we need to condemn or concede14 something or to

drive something away from ourselves: we turn our face away and drive

it off with our hand.

Gods, avert such ruin!

Indeed, I think myself not worthy of such an honor. ]

(Quintilian 11.3.70)

Again Vergil is cited by way of illustrating a point that is extraneous to the

message of the poem's verses.15 There is, though, a convenient play be-

tween aversari in Quintilian and Vergil's avertite: an orator's averted gaze

suddenly alludes to an epic moment of divine turning. And again the

message lying beneath Quintilian's usage is that there is, in fact, a proper

way to deliver Vergil. Moreover, a performance of Vergil would be suscep-

tible to the same criticism as would be an oratorical performance. In short,

good Latin, which is always the object in rhetorical texts and is an idea

embedded in an innocuous-looking word like Latine, which in these con-

texts never just means "in Latin," is the constant concern of its legitimate

users. Speakers of Latin must reveal their legitimacy in the way they space

their words and clauses, and in the way they move their bodies. And, as

Victor said above, the choice of words, including even the proper deploy-

ment of a loaded term such a Latine itself, betrays the "goodness" of a

speaker.

When confronted with a text, one necessarily imputes to it its suitable

gestures, the gestures that must be embedded in it that the social station of

the text may emerge as well in the performance of its reading, considered

as a physical whole. When one encounters a text, immediately a speaking

subject is imputed to the text. Quintilian's speaker, though, is clearly al-

ways also a vir bonus. He bestows a good man upon the text; and the text is

brought to life by this special social entity. Indeed, the text is given not only

a voice, but even the body of a performer. There were performances of

Vergil, and I do believe that they also included gestures. One notes as well

that gestures in Roman comedy are likewise of interest to Quintilian: lan-

guage is conceived of as having gestures embedded in it at every level, and

these are themselves coded for class, place of birth, gender, and profes-

sion.16 Hence we should not be surprised that the orator would be such a

devoted student of Vergil. The orator will find in the epic's text the body

and the self that he would arrogate for himself: high art is the legitimate

provenance of the upper class and a venue wherein he continually discovers

himself as he reads (cf. Bourdieu 1984, 56-57).

Quintilian's techniques of reading have philosophical consequences

38 STAGING MASCULINITY

that extend beyond their sociological import. Quintilian reads in a manner

that evokes the ideas of Derrida on the problems of reading and writing in

Western philosophy. 17 Derrida focuses on the philosophical disparagement

of writing in the name of a metaphysics of presence that imputes being only

to logos and speech: the letter is dead and empty, whereas the voice is living

and full (see especially 1976, 11-14). In the case of Quintilian, writing and

the ontological threat that Derrida sees in writing are overcome by the giving

of a speaker to the text. This implied speaker vouches for the text and puts it

into the register of logos and speech. There is thus no text that does not have

the living body as its implied referent.

Nietzsche long ago observed that "the true prose of antiquity is an

echo of public speech and is built upon its laws" (1989, 21). He was no

doubt thinking of passages like the one in which Aristotle says that written

texts ought to be composed so that they are readily converted into speech.18

Svenbro notes that because the Greeks read aloud, "the reader is a vocal

instrument used by the written word. . . in order to give the text a body, a

sonorous reality."19 Thus Aristotle's discussion of the "written style" (kXtg

y txi) (Rhetoric 1413b4ff.) ought not to be taken as an argument for a

fundamental division between speech and writing: rather the written style

forms a special subset of the speaking voice. Quintilian will even speak of

the prose rhythm of "relaxed" varieties of speech (oratio) such as conversa-

tion (sermo) and letters (epistulae): the page is never mute.20 As Habinek

has argued, inscriptions also ask to be read aloud (1998, 109-14).

Derrida characterizes the logocentric position's relationship to writing

by way of a paired set of analogies: the soul is to the body as the logos is to

writing (1976, 35). In the rhetorical version, writing is itself bodily. But this

time writing and the body are brought together to assist the authoritative

voice of the orator and to enable him to produce a speech that seems to

emanate from his soul: res ex animo videatur. Reading for Quintilian is an

act that helps to constitute and to reconstitute a philosophy of bodies and

bodies as presence. In this philosophy, writing is not an act that is opposed

to the logos, since it is subsumed within it. Or, rather, writing has an

indexical relationship to speech: writing itself gestures toward a living,

speaking, and, of course, gesturing body. In the Ad Herennium there was

an anxiety expressed as to the text's efficacy at inscribing gestures. But such

did not approach a radical Platonic doubt covering writing as a whole; it

instead expressed a concern that things might not turn out for the best after

all. For Quintilian there are also signs of hesitation, but such will not

prevent him from impressing the text into the service of speech, and the

good man for Quintilian refuses to read without already hearing and seeing

the good man he was looking for all the time.

For Derrida "the ethic of speech is the delusion of presence mastered"

READING AND WRITING 39

(1976, 139). The rhetorical handbook participates in the further inculcation

of this illusion as the text is made to serve the project of the speech of the

orator. In fact, the text is also intended to secure speech as authorized,

hegemonic discourse and to constitute speech as both mastery and presence.

One can also note that this voice is a gendered one: the voice of the text is

male, as is the structure of worldly power in whose name this voice speaks.

Derrida would find such a use of writing to be rather ironic, since writing is

the point at which his deconstruction of Western ontology can begin. But

even as Quintilian uses writing-as-being to secure his project, fissures appear

in the relationship between the two registers, destabilizing the mastery and

presence that textuality is being asked to serve.

Quintilian cannot automatically assume the bond linking writing to

presence. Quintilian instead educates his students to be good readers of

bodily writing. His own text thus inculcates the very dispositions that are

necessary to the positing of a writing that is tied to being. To this end he again

invokes Vergil. Returning to pronunciation, he takes as his evidence a vari-

ety of Vergilian passages:

accedit enim vis et proprietas rebus tali adstipulatione, quae nisi adsit,

aliud vox, aliud animus ostendat. quid, quod eadem verba mutata

pronuntiatione indicant, adfirmant, exprobant, negant, mirantur, in-

dignantur, interrogant, inrident, elevant? aliter enim dicitur:

tu mihi quodcumque hoc regni

et cantando tu illum?

et tune ille Aeneas?

et meque timoris argue tu, Drance

et ne morer, intra se quisque vel hoc vel aliud quod volet per omnis

adfectus verset: verum esse quod dicimus sciet.

[Conformity of (idea and pronunciation) produces vigor and appropri-

ateness. Unless there is agreement, one's voice makes one point, one's

intention another. Isn't it true that the same words, with a change in

delivery, indicate, affirm, reproach, deny, marvel, are angry, question,

mock, belittle? The following are variously spoken:

You upon me this poor kingdom...

and By singing you (vanquish) him?

and Are you that Aeneas?

and And me do you accuse, Drancus, of fear?21

40 STAGING MASCULINITY

To make a long story short: turn for yourself any word you please

through the whole gamut of emotions, and you will see the truth of

what I say.]

(Quintilian 11.3.175-76)

Quintilian's point is an obvious one: there are a lot of different ways of

saying "you." However, the implications of this point are manifold. First,

we cannot know what the right delivery of each fragment of a Vergilian

line should be without knowing the whole line, the context of the line, and

the emotions of the passage as a whole where we impute emotions to these

verses in our reading of Vergil. Quintilian throws us back on an assumed

orthodoxy of interpretation, a traditional reading to which we must appeal

in order to decode the right reading of his own text. Reading has a commu-

nity and a tradition that vouch for it.22

Texts like Quintilian's, though, help to constitute these traditions and

communities that make reading into a natural act. Quintilian trains his read-

ers into the disposition required by his own text. In actual practice, Quintil-

ian's readers were almost certainly reading his work aloud to themselves or

having it read to them by one of their slaves. This structural homology that

subsists between Quintilian as reader and Quintilian's audience as readers

subtly reinforces the theme of the speaking text. Thus, the whole project is

multiply mediated: Quintilian is recovering an "original" Vergil, and Quintil-

ian's readers are trying to recover his voice rendering Vergil's. This project

can only work given an underlying assumption that there really is a fixed,

correct reading, that one does not merely attribute this (oral) reading to a

text, but one rather is genuinely engaged in getting the reading right or

wrong. One assumes, then, that different readings of the same passage are

not also different performances of it that themselves nuance differently the

text's message about performance (cf. Martindale 1993, 17-18). Instead a

singular voice of the vir bonus is invoked as the touchstone of accuracy; and

all interpretation reinvokes this persona and consolidates its authority and

presence. Ironically, it is probably safe to assume that the right delivery of

Vergil was itself a highly contested topic, and that Quintilian's confidence in

citing a performed text of Vergil actually glosses over serious practical prob-

lems felt by performers of his day.

Texts speak naturally to us; but then again they don't. There is a

chance that, without training, we will misread. Reading the page's dead

words thus is and is not a problem. In Quintilian's world texts are pre-

sented as eminently readable, or at least readable after rules of reading are

in place. Moreover, the first step toward success is knowing in advance the

sort of voice one will find within the text. Quintilian's own reader has been

positioned to read and recover (properly) Quintilian's meaning: the author

READING AND WRITING 41

is confident that such is possible and that his readers will learn from reading

him how they are to read. Quintilian thus makes reading possible in theory

but impossible in practice barring the support apparatus of his own text,

even though the text can obviously never perfectly achieve its own ends.

One needs to study it ever more closely to make sure that the lesson has in

fact been properly learned. This is in its own way just the problem of the

indispensable but impractical handbook as a whole redone in a different

register. The handbook makes no grand promises to its reader: even were it

sufficient of itself, you might misread. It only promises that you will fail

without it.

This, then, is a world into which we are being trained, but into which we

ought already to have been trained, a world of readers and a world where

some readings are better than others. Quintilian speaks from a position that

would construct the conditions and circumstances of knowability; but Quin-

tilian simultaneously calls upon his readers to know already the meanings,

the gestures, the sounds embedded in other texts in the world around them.

Thus, while possessed of an authorized and authorizing voice, in practice

Quintilian is not himself a sufficient cultural authority, despite his project of

cultivating the total man. This text cannot provide you with the full requisite

cultural training, but it can and does call upon its students to make further

divisions, subdivisions, and refinements. There is no longer any room for a

naive being-in-the world of the Roman gentlemen: the unconscious auton-

omy of the elite habitus will prove insufficient. Quintilian imposes new

burdens and new standards: reflection, self-reflection, and the whole aes-

theticization of the world of speech and movement lead beyond a normative

aspiration toward a well-delivered Vergil and into a scrupulously evaluative

world of authoritative performances in general.

These arguments can be remade, expanded, and supplemented by an

examination of further uses made of another author's texts within Quintil-

ian's own. Quintilian makes extensive appeals both to Cicero's theoretical

works on oratory and to the published texts of Cicero's orations.23 The

citations number in the hundreds.24 Quintilian is a zealous student of Cic-

ero's speeches, his theoretical works, and even letters.25 Cicero's speeches

become the models for Quintilian's precepts; and Cicero's theoretical writ-

ings are likewise subsumed within Quintilian's own theoretical apparatus.

At times Quintilian seems only to parrot the words of another authority

prior and superior to himself. Herni Bardon makes it clear that Cicero

himself was reconstructing performers and performances in the course of

his praise of older orators (1952, vol. 1.58). Thus Cicero's relationship to

much of his material is the same as is Quintilian's relationship to Cicero.

We must describe Quintilian's practice as traditional rather than as the

fevered imaginings of a man who could not do, and so taught.

42 STAGING MASCULINITY

Cicero is no mere orator, he is a prize as well. But since Cicero died

well over a century before Quintilian wrote, Cicero is not so much an

orator for Quintilian as he is a collection of texts. Quintilian's Cicero thus

resembles Cicero as we find him today. But in the course of reading Cicero,

Quintilian produces the self-present voice of the orator for which his whole

course of education strives: the absent Cicero is the point toward which the

student labors, guided there by an author who himself is not there and an

author who never himself heard Cicero. Reading the lost Cicero and bring-

ing him back to life becomes a part of the process of subject formation, and

textuality modulates being.

When Quintilian reads Cicero, he produces embedded, inevitable ges-

tures. A body is bestowed upon the page. When Quintilian describes how a

certain effect is to be achieved or how one ought to deliver a certain

moment of an oration such as the narration of facts, he will evoke passages

from the orations of Cicero. These examples are, for the most part, concen-

trated in 11.3.162-69. Quintilian begins,

narratio magis prolatam manum, amictum recedentem, gestum dis-

tinctum, vocem sermoni proximam et tantum acriorem, sonum sim-

plicem frequentissime postulabit in his dumtaxat: "Q. enim Ligarius,

cum esset in Africa nulla belli suscipio," et "A. Cluentius Habitus

pater huiusce." aliud in eadem poscent adfectus, vel concitati "nubit

genero socrus," vel flebiles "constituitur in foro Laodiceae spec-

taculum acerbum et miserum toti Asiae provinciae."

[The narration will very frequently require the hand to be extended

further, the toga to fall back, precise gestures, a vocal manner bor-

rowed from conversation, only a bit more earnest, and a uniform tone.

At least, such is required in these cases: "For Q. Ligarius, since there

was no suspicion of war in Africa," and "A. Cluentius Habitus, this

man's father." Different emotions in the same speech will require a

different delivery: excitement for "the mother-in-law marries her son-

in-law"; pathos for "a spectacle painful and piteous to the whole prov-

ince of Asia was set up in the marketplace of Laodicea."26]

Notice first how easily description has moved into prescription. A familiarity

with these segments of these speeches might convince one that, indeed, they

were narrations of a certain emotional register, but Quintilian has fixed these

registers for us. Next, Quintilian has added physical movements and vocal

modulations, elements that the texts of Cicero were not about to suggest of

themselves. At the same time, one may still distinguish here between a sense

of "this is how one ought to read this text" and "this is how the text was

READING AND WRITING 43

performed"; it is just that the space between these two ideas has been

collapsed such that one assumes that the two coincide for Quintilian.27

Later on in this same section, the fusion/confusion becomes particu-

larly pronounced. By the time Quintilian reaches 11.3.169 his advice to

orators is indeed resting upon an assertion as to the actual Ciceronian

delivery:

est his diversa vox et paene extra organum, cui Graeci nomen amari-

tudinis dederunt, super modum ac paene naturam vocis humanae

acerba: "quin conpescitis vocem istam, indicem stultitiae, testem pauci-

tatis?" sed id, quod excedere modum dixi, in illa parte prima est: "quin

conpescitis."

[There is a tone different from these and almost exceeding the capaci-

ties of the human instrument, to which the Greeks have given the

name of "bitterness." This tone is piercing in the extreme, and it lies

nearly beyond the natural capacities of the human voice: "Why don't

you stifle those cries of yours, documents of your stupidity, attesta-

tions to your isolation?" But that bit that I called "excessive" is in the

first part: "Why don't you stifle . .."]

Quintilian has illustrated his argument by adducing Cicero's Pro Rabirio

perduellionis reo 6.18. Quintilian seems not to have reproduced the exact

phrasing of the Cicero. The manuscripts of Cicero read, "Why don't you

restrain cries that testify to your stupidity. . . ?" (quin continetis vocem

indicem stultitiae.. . ?) Quintilian substitutes a more vivid expression of

roughly the same idea, giving "stifle" for "restrain." Quintilian also adds an

emphatic, even contemptuous, istam. If Quintilian's version is in fact in

error, he has stacked the deck in favor of the impassioned delivery he is

claiming to report. Quintilian is depicting a very special vocal effect, and

thus he is not indicating that Cicero probably spoke this passage in this

manner. Quintilian has phrased his argument so as to dispense with such

qualifications, and he is making a simple illustration via a concrete example.

At every turn legitimate readings, readings whose speculative quality

has been excised, recur in Quintilian. Other texts speak of themselves,

furnish witness to his points in their own voices, and require only that they

be repeated in order to corroborate Quintilian's argument. Though one

translates vox in the quote from Cicero as "cries," it is nevertheless the

same word Quintilian has just used: "voice." Thus where Cicero shouts

down a foolish voice and a scant voice, Quintilian takes this same passage,

fills it with a new voice, and makes it speak to the plenitude and wisdom of

his own teaching.

44 STAGING MASCULINITY

Following a procedure akin to his treatment of the opening of the

Aeneid as a pronunciation study guide, Quintilian furnishes his readers

with a reading of the opening of Cicero's Pro Milone as an illustration of

how to vary the tone of one's delivery within the compass of a single

passage so as to avoid the vice of iovorov a, "monotony" in its etymologi-

cal sense (11.3.47-51). In this instance, as opposed to the "you" (tu) ex-

ample above, Quintilian has to make his argument via an appeal to the

sense of the text. He begins with a rhetorical question: "Though it is always

the same face, isn't it as if the countenance had to be altered at nearly every

turn?"28 By "same face" Quintilian means the general emotional cast of the

speech's opening or exordium. The varied countenance provides lower-

level variations within this same general emotional register. Quintilian usu-

ally seeks to govern the body in terms of a rhetorical discourse; here it is

rhetoric that becomes good and intelligible in terms of the body. It is by

such double moves that Quintilian can create the impression of a natural

fusion or confusion of the two spheres. The orator, his oration, and his

body are always both linguistic and corporeal: each stands in a metaphoric

relation to the others. As far as Quintilian's rhetorical question goes, then,

it has to be answered yes: monotony is a bad thing; Cicero was not monoto-

nous. Not only has monotony been banished from the orator, it has also

been exiled from Cicero's pages, and we inevitably find Cicero's voice to be

such when we read him with Quintilian at our side.

Of course, we could be perverse and answer Quintilian that we believe

that Cicero stuck to a steady, vigorous delivery that packed a punch for its

very relentlessness. And then we could use the very techniques of Quintil-

ian against him by citing Cicero. Cicero says that he himself once employed

a delivery similar to this: "I used to deliver everything without slacking,

without variety, at full volume, and straining my whole body."29 Quintilian

would doubtless respond, "But that was the young Cicero, as Cicero him-

self says. The Pro Milone was the product of his mature genius: it would

have been delivered differently." But if we engage in this debate with

Quintilian, we accede to the game of reading, writing, inquiring, and justi-

fying that Quintilian's whole text perpetuates and exacerbates.

Moreover, as soon as delivery is called upon to account for itself in

detail, it will no longer be able to readily sustain the illusion of simple and

steady passions; instead it becomes entangled in regulation that is always

inclined to become overregulation. The task of the handbook, a genre that

may well be considered to be as old as rhetoric at Rome, is to ask the orator

to answer its stylistic questions, to train him to ask them of himself, and, in

effect, to normalize oratory and the semiotics of the orator while promising

only to be offering assistance, helpful hints, ways of avoiding embarrass-

ment and ensuring success.

READING AND WRITING 45

Quintilian proceeds into the text of the Pro Milone going clause by

clause, evoking the emotions of the text and the circumstances of the

original "performance." Thus, we are told that the whole opening is re-

strained and subdued (contractum atque summissum), but that the words

"on behalf of a most honorable man" (pro fortissimo viro) require some-

thing fuller and bolder (fortius et erectius). The critical vocabulary here is

filled with an elaborate psychology. Recovering Cicero's speech involves

reconstituting an entire sociology of bold men and bold texts. In order to

read Cicero, the text and the world must be brought into harmony: one

must speak in a manly fashion when uttering the words "on behalf of a

man." And, at the next level of abstraction, readers of Quintilian must be

able to take his writings as supplementary to a world of learned oratory.

But supplementarity here is Derridean in nature: Quintilian's text comple-

ments the world of oratory and the oratorical self-present subject in the

same gesture as it insinuates itself in the place of the subject and the world.

Quintilian's readings replace the lost world of Cicero with a new tex-

tualized version of the subject, a version where inscription is a fundamental

aspect of the lived experience of oratory. The manly boldness (fortis,

erectus) of the commentator vouches for and takes the place of the manly

delivery of Cicero. And Cicero himself was speaking on behalf of/in the

place of (pro) a most manly man (fortissimo viro); or, rather, Cicero wrote

on behalf of Milo, and then he tried to deliver his own text. The relation-

ship to the manly original is multiply mediated.

This recovery of Cicero's delivery, which we might as well call a discov-

ery or an invention instead, is riddled with other impossible difficulties:

"Now the second breath ought to grow owing both to a certain natural

impulse, whereby we speak less timidly what follows, and because the great

courage of Milo is displayed. . . . Then there is something of a reproach of

himself.... Then more invidiously.... This while, as they say, opening

up all the stops. . . . For the following is broad, even and diffuse." Quintil-

ian brings forth in a jumble natural impulses, tendencies of the subject

matter, attributed psychological effects (or at least imputed rhetorical ef-

fects designed to reveal psychology), and musical metaphors. Not all of

these are ideas from which technical advice on delivery could be derived:

pulling out the stops and letting the breath swell are useful upon some

reflection and interpretation; but Quintilian assumes we already know how

to provoke malice and the tones by which hidden thoughts are expressed.

Cicero as written needs a Quintilian to walk us through his text in

order to find the living word again. At the same time, Quintilian's own text

falls short of giving us a complete indoctrination into the vicissitudes of

lived speech. As Quintilian breathes life into Cicero, so must Quintilian's

reader bring something to Quintilian. Here we have the obverse of the

46

STAGING MASCULINITY

supplementary relation between the orator and the rhetorical handbook as

discussed above. In this case the rhetorical student learns to supplement

Quintilian from his master's relation to Cicero's text. The centered subject

inserts himself into the rhetorical handbook in order to make up for its

shortfall. And again this supplementation acts as a replacement: the reader

stands in for what is written.

Between these two supplementary relations, then, we can see a vital

trope in the gambit of being. Neither orator nor rhetorical literature lives

independently. Each helps to secure for the other an illusion of presence. In

the process both rhetorical discourse and orators are reproduced, but they

are reproduced in an always provisional and incomplete manner. Neither

party can consolidate its being because of this dependence upon the other.

Moreover, fundamental shifts in the nature of both are attendant upon

rereadings and rewritings: new texts and new orators go hand-in-hand.

Quintilian concludes this section by saying, "I have pointed this out in

order to make it clear that not only in the phrases of the case, but even in

the individual words there is a certain variety to pronunciation, without

which everything is undifferentiated."30 Quintilian has left us underneath a

dark star indeed: any given word is a possible locus of trouble: should it be

varied? how? Delivery can founder at any moment. Any word, either read

or spoken, can be a source of trouble. Quintilian's text does less to solve

these difficulties than it does to exacerbate them. But in the process of

disclosing this hazardous terrain, Quintilian installs a hermeneutics with

far-reaching implications. The student needs to read a text like Quintilian's

to begin reading oratory. He also needs Quintilian in order to speak for

himself. But he is asked to speak as he reads Quintilian reading Cicero. In

this fashion Quintilian needs his student, and the student enables Quintil-

ian just as Quintilian produces his student. The handbook, by exposing the

perils of the body in performance, allows for a perpetual bond to be forged

between writing and the soul. The two are bound together in an un-

closeable quest for being.

Of course the greatest irony of this whole passage in Quintilian is that

the Pro Milone as we know it was not actually delivered: Ausonius tells us

that Cicero became flustered and suffered a lapse when he delivered the

initial lines of his speech.31 Quintilian uses the idealized, retooled product

of Cicero's study, and thus he reveals a preference for a speech that of itself

is a sort of handbook furnishing the shape of a superlative oration. The Pro

Milone is a text that makes up for real failure of the voice of performance.

The text that has to speak well because it is Cicero's was never spoken

because it is the Pro Milone. This is a text that supplements a worldly

defect. Quintilian's own text latches onto another text that promises writ-

ing as a supplement to life.

READING AND WRITING 47

The confusion between the written word and the sounds that writing

suppresses is naturally exacerbated by the nearly inevitable oral experience

of texts. That is, every text was almost certain to be turned back into

sounds before one was to experience it, and, from the very routineness of

this process, the latent assumption creeps in that this procedure is not itself

a problem, that one has heard a text correctly (where we would say it has

been read correctly). But Quintilian, while often resting on this casual

assumption, is simultaneously putting in question the whole system: he is

enforcing the reception of the text of Cicero as often as he is merely

presenting the expression of the Ciceronian word as unproblematic. In this

crypto-prescriptive mode, though, he is reproducing a contemporary ortho-

doxy of which he is both the font and the spokesman, the legislator and the

representative. This is a project carried out, as might be expected, under

the standard of what Bourdieu would call the "doxic," or common sense.

Thus, the conflict does not even look like a conflict.

Within this very misrecognition of the trouble of the text, Quintilian

has omitted without comment another trouble that he could never have

personally had anyway, namely, the delivery of his own text. Quintilian

needs to have the largely untroubled and untroubling world of other texts

so that he may reproduce for his heirs the same misplaced confidence that

his own sounds and movement can be recovered. A further contributing

element to this misplaced confidence is the practical observation that the

handbook does not exist without the supporting apparatus of oratorical

training proper and active schooling, as the Ad Herennium would remind

us. Thus, we should automatically know of what Quintilian speaks owing to

our daily training to receive knowledge of exactly this quality. However,

the daily training itself requires an authorized theoretical and analytical

support that explains and justifies this practice and shapes the evaluation of

the exercises.

I do not use the notion of authorized theory casually: as has been

mentioned, in his preface Quintilian claimed that he had to write his own

Institutio oratoria because two books composed of notes on his lectures had

already begun circulating under his name (1.pr.7). This unauthorized dis-

semination points to a longing on the part of the students of oratory for

legitimate theoretical training. The homegrown or provincial orator who is

unreflectingly eloquent has been lost. The fantasy of the father effortlessly

passing to his son a legacy of eloquence does not correspond to the reality of

rhetoric as we find it (see Cicero, Brutus 210). And how could such a home-

spun eloquence emerge in an environment where the audience's aesthetic

critique of an orator has been informed in prescriptive detail by the authorita-

tive handbook? The unquestioned reproduction of the elite habitus within

such social structures as the family cannot be taken for granted once the

48 STAGING MASCULINITY

analytic gaze of theory has arrived upon the scene. This, though, does not

imply that theory itself will not enchant oratory or that it will not tend to

reproduce the relations of domination rather than offering equal linguistic

opportunities to all who are literate.

Just as Quintilian's reading of Vergil and Cicero produces an implied body,

so also does Quintilian find bodies in "the rhetorical tradition." This phan-

tasmatic tradition comprises a second source from which to impute the

lived word to Quintilian's writings. By invoking tradition, text and body

can be fused in a timeless outside-the-text within Quintilian's own text.

Quintilian thus presents himself as a recorder of traditional bodies, not as

an author of novel bodies.

Quintilian's exegesis of various orations routinely implies an authority

that lies beyond Quintilian himself. In one instance Quintilian merely uses

Cicero to illustrate how the division of the clauses falls and how each might

be punctuated with a gesture (11.3.108, using Pro Ligario 1.1). In another,

when Quintilian tells of the gestures suited to a richer, more luxuriant

element of a speech, he explicitly evokes only the content of the Ciceronian

passage with his "as in that passage . . ." (ut illud), while leaving implicit

an idea that the passage in question was in fact accompanied by the ges-

tures he is describing (11.3.84, evoking Cicero, Pro Archia 8.19): Quintil-

ian repeats his practice of 11.3.162 with its multiple citations of Ciceronian

narratives. Quintilian likewise depicts outstretched arms in 11.3.115, where

Pro Milone 31.85 is impressed into service. However, the following is of a

different order entirely:

est et ille verecundiae orationi aptissimus, quo, quattor primis leviter

in summum coeuntibus digitis, non procul ab ore aut pectore fertur ad

nos manus et deinde prona ac paulum prolata. Hoc modo coepisse

Demosthenen credo in illo pro Ctestiophonte timido summissoque

principio, sic formatam Ciceronis manum, cum diceret: "si
est>, iudices, ingeni mei, quod sentio quam sit exiguum."

[This gesture is most suited to reserved language: with the thumb and

first three fingers gently converging to a point, the hand is brought in

toward the body and near either the mouth or the chest; and then it is

relaxed with the palm turned downward as it is gradually advanced. I

believe that it was in this manner that Demosthenes began that timid

and restrained opening of his speech on behalf of Ctesiophon, and that

Cicero's hand was thus formed when he said: "If I have any talent,

though I know how scant it is . . ."32]

(Quintilian 11.3.96-97)

READING AND WRITING 49

After first pausing over the gesture itself, elaborate and awkward by con-

temporary standards, one ought next wonder as to who has been keeping

this history of gestures. What leads Quintilian to believe that he knows the

choreography of the openings of these speeches? As will be shown in more

detail later, the entire rhetorical tradition appears to be riddled with odd

little details of this sort, and teacher passes on to student an acquired

knowledge of lost bodies. For present purposes, take the following as

exemplary: Quintilian says that Cleon is believed to have been the first

man at Athens to smite his thigh by way of an oratorical gesture.33

If we believe these histories of gestures, histories that are centuries old

by the time Quintilian relates them, we must regard them as tokens of the

fetishization first of gestures themselves, wherein they become almost ritu-

alized, and second of the process of collecting and recounting the exem-

plary anecdotes through which these gestures are endlessly reinvoked. It is

not necessary even to accuse Quintilian of inventing the use of this gesture

of the four fingers in the context of the speeches of Demosthenes and

Quintilian. The repetition of the "I believe" (credo) here and "is believed"

(creditur) in the Cleon anecdote look like signs that Quintilian is repeating,

with a very slight hesitation, received knowledge. Rather than see new

fictions, it is preferable to imagine that the tradition insists upon having the

gestures be present and so has either preserved them or inserted them at

some point in the transmission of the "traditional" body of oratorical lore.

Quintilian is thus not radically original in his production of a knot between

text and body. Quintilian inherits from rhetorical tradition an insistence

upon binding the two.

When he redeploys this tradition, Quintilian legitimizes the use and

preservation of this gesture: performances become citational reinvocations

of the legitimate authority of departed "good men skilled at speaking." The

process makes self-conscious Butler's notion of citationality's relationship

to performativity (1993, 12, 14), and both speaker and audience ought to

recognize the authoritative bodily allusion. Furthermore, the better versed

one is in tradition and the more detailed one's knowledge of all the points

of oratory, the more likely it is that one may eventually recover the rest of

the performance that anecdote has left out. The body is always amenable to

study, reflection, and analysis.

By bridging equivalent rhetorical moments and their corresponding

gestures from Demosthenes to Cicero to Quintilian's own day, Quintilian

dehistoricizes gestures themselves and likewise adds to the sense that they

are by no means arbitrary, that there is a one-to-one relationship between

sense and movement. Quintilian even goes so far as to declare that "amid

such a diversity of language among all peoples and nations, gesture seems

50 STAGING MASCULINITY

to me to be the common speech of all mankind."34 In this apparently

timeless environment, imputing right readings to texts is wholly justified:

the general (aristocratic) economy of sounds and signs remains a shared

one. The simple application of the laws of good oratory allows for the ready

supplementation of the absent physical dimension of old texts with modern

equivalents. Quintilian is the sort of authority to teach us these laws. The

whole of Quintilian 11.3 contains gestures and vocal descriptions of unparal-

leled detail. This project of the highly differentiated body is legitimate in

that it appears to reproduce knowledge of the same kind as has been

preserved by anecdote, knowledge whose own legitimacy rests in its au-

thorlessness and in the prestige of the men of whom it treats. Here it is not

just the reader or the author as vir bonus who supplements the text, but the

whole universe of all the good men who have ever lived.

This, then, is the problem of the fact of the text on delivery, and one

particular solution to the crisis implicit in it: deny for the most part that the

problem even exists; make writing into presence and presence into writing.

The apotheosis of this theme awaits us in the final chapter of this study,

where Cicero's De oratore takes center stage. At present, though, we need

to make a survey of the variety of texts and textual stances available in the

Roman world in order to appreciate the variety of techniques by which the

body was made to and into matter. Bodies and souls are inscribed within

rhetorical theory. And, conversely, the body and soul are rendered legible

objects by this same theory. They are things to be read and read for.

Indeed, reading is a required act. A second and closely related field of

inquiry is the question of style. The format of any rhetorical discussion is

political in that it represents bids of varied direction and intensity upon the

political subjects that comprise its audience. Styles of reading and writing

on delivery participate in broader economies of the subject.

There are a variety of ways of writing on oratory. However, the most

fundamental stylistic break lies between the dialogue form of Cicero and

the methodical descriptions and prescriptions of the rest. The prescriptive

branch is subdivided in its own right: the author of the Ad Herennium uses

bald definitions. A typical snippet of his text reads thus: "The 'invention' of

an oration is comprised of six elements: the exordium, the narration, the

division of the subject matter, proofs, refutations, and the conclusion. The

exordium is the beginning of the oration, whereby the mind of the auditor

is made disposed to listening. The narration is . . ."35 Fortunatianus has a

list of questions and their answers rather than just the bare list of ideas. For

example, when it comes to defining the orator, Fortunatianus writes,

"What is an orator? A good man skillful at speaking."36 Victor strings

together his definitions and lists somewhat more fluidly, but his occasional

READING AND WRITING 51

first person is indicative of a rather insubstantial framework holding to-

gether the same old raw statements. Quintilian presents a full-blown first

person and speaks in a magisterial voice, a voice that prescribes, moralizes,

sides with Cicero and takes up arms against Seneca, while furnishing essen-

tially the same basic material as do all the other authors, sometimes present-

ing it even in the same phrases of simple definition.

Let us begin with "the rest," the authors less read and less famous than

Quintilian and Cicero. The construction of the project in terms of definitions

betrays a certain kind of interest and enforces a certain kind of reader. The

propositional format, resting essentially on an endless string of statements

having the form "a = b" (est) fundamentally elides history and contestation.

Rhetoric is left timeless, the orator subject to a list of laws that, does he wish

to retain his title, he would do best to obey. The tropes of authority rely upon

the existential use of is and uses in which identity is established. There is no

problem of presence or supplementarity a la Derrida in such formulations.

On the contrary, these expressions forestall any such crisis. Patrick Sinclair

(1993) has offered a valuable commentary of the maxims (sententiae) that

hold together the sort of speech that the author of the Ad Herennium advo-

cates. For Sinclair these precepts "appear to present an 'obvious' principle

that can be accorded 'tacit approval' among audiences who hold the Roman

aristocratic code as the ultimate authority."37 The handbook's own maxims

thus dovetail with the structure of the rhetoric to which it trains its student.

Sinclair argues that the struggles over the right to deploy such maxims in a

speech and to have them win recognition are social struggles over who will

be allowed to typologize the world. A corresponding labor takes place in the

handbook itself, where the student is forced to accept without contest the

text's propositions about the truth of propositions. Thus the author himself

says, "a sententia is a statement drawn from life that concisely illustrates

either what is or what ought to be a fact of life."38 Yet one could say the same

of his own practice and put into his mouth a statement of the following shape:

"My advice is drawn from rhetoric, and it concisely illustrates either what is

or what ought to be a fact of rhetoric." The circular citationality of life

vouching for life corresponds to a rhetoric of the rhetorical treatise vouch-

safing rhetoric in general. Furthermore these two paradoxical and self-

referential relationships each rely upon the other, as we find both a rhetoric

of life and a life lived rhetorically.

The Ad Herennium highlights the institution of rhetorical exercises,

and Sinclair argues of these exercitationes that they assist in the durable

inculcation of the shared values of the community of orators (1993, 568-

69). The theoretical text that assists in these exercises thus also becomes a

sort of theory of society. The rhetorical self-presence of the orator that the

handbook assumes is manifested in the world by way of exercise. For the

52 STAGING MASCULINITY

Ad Herennium the art of oratory is not an impossible one in itself; and

Quintilian's problem of the consummate orator does not form a part of this

author's opening thoughts. Rather, the art of oratory is asserted to be more

accessible than one might have otherwise believed.39 There is, in fact, an

"art" (ars) to be imparted, but one that the Greeks have cluttered and

obscured (see Ad Herennium 1.1). This theoretical aspect of oratory has as

its necessary complement practice (exercitatio), and this idea comes up two

sentences later:

Nunc, ne nimium longa sumatur oratio, de re dicere incipiemus, [sed]

si te unum illud monuerimus, artem sine adsiduitate dicendi non

multum iuvare, ut intellegas hanc rationem praeceptionis ad

exercitationem adcommodari oportere.

[Now, lest I enter upon a long oration, I will start addressing the

subject proper after first offering this warning: theory does little good

unless you speak all of the time; and thus you may understand that

these precepts ought to be adapted to practice.]

(Ad Herennium 1.1)

The author fears that he might get carried away and make a long oration on

oratory. He draws himself back and instead imparts a single concise maxim:

"practice makes perfect." The handbook is a guide, a regula vitae by which

one may measure oneself. The handbook prepares you for your practice,

supports it, guides it. The contents of the practice as well as practice's

precipitate in the form of bodily hexis can be accounted for only in terms of

the text. Thus, the text provides the conceptual apparatus in whose terms

the actual practice of oratory is to be described. At the same time, this

apparatus is absolute and naturalized owing to a number of rhetorical

tropes within the handbook itself, including the endless deployment of est.

Both practice and the book that guides practice are described in an idiom of

presence and being. The written text is confident in its own declarations of

what "is." Meanwhile the text implies of practice and performance that

they can and will fail, that one must train constantly in order to enact

successfully the teachings of the book. A performance will become good

only when it embodies the essential truth of the handbook. One finds in

such a vision of number of ironies of ontology and tense: the "real" body's

authoritative performances exist only as a future potentiality; the absent

text "is" authoritative regarding performance, and its presence is every-

where assumed in the training of the orator.

Though the handbook is in a sense thoroughly parasitic on the practice

of oratory - for men were, after all, eloquent before the advent of the

oratorical handbook - these works have now rendered impossible any pas-

READING AND WRITING 53

sive attainment to eloquence. In fact, such arche-eloquence was like a tree

falling in the woods without anyone there to hear it: if there is no technol-

ogy of rhetoric, eloquence is wholly other than it is after the advent of a

science of speech. Rhetorical theory does not allow for nontechnical elo-

quence. Even Homer can be called up as a rhetor, a professional teacher.

Quintilian illustrates his advice on how to behave just before speaking with

an image from Iliad 3.217:

hoc praecipit Homerus Ulixis exemplo, quem stetisse oculis in terram

defixis immotoque sceptro, priusquam illam eloquentiae procellam

effunderet, dicit.

[Homer uses the example of Ulysses to teach this. Homer says that he

stood with his eyes fixed on the ground, holding the scepter motionless

before he poured out that tempest of eloquence.]

(Quintilian 11.3.158)

For the world of the handbook and for the world the handbook would

create, the neutral fact that someone is an accomplished speaker (peritus

dicendi) is no longer sufficient. This attainment has been accounted for, a

ratio has been given. Homer teaches (praecipit): we just need to learn how

to listen to him.

Of course, the handbook will have gotten oratory right precisely to

the extent that it can succeed in convincing its readers to adopt the view

of oratory that it espouses. Furthermore, if the handbook or the over-

seers of the young orator's practice inculcate these standards, the whole

body of orators will share a scheme for self-evaluation and mutual evalua-

tion. The hermeneutic circle is tightly closed. Once Quintilian has told

you how to stand when you are about to speak, the aesthetics of pre-

elocutionary stances has been opened up as a formal topic of inquiry. One

no longer happens to stand agreeably before a speech, even if this agree-

ably was in its own right a tacit accommodation of the speaker to the

norms of the social body and the performative context. Now the tacit, the

doxical is opened up into an object of contemplation and contestation;

orthodoxies and heterodoxies can now be imposed upon it. The handbook

forces the contents of its myriad subdivisions to become the spoken and

explicit units of oratory. Furthermore, there is always the possibility of

proceeding by analogy into subdivisions and more detailed analyses. At

the same time, there is an endless competition between handbooks, a

struggle over the legitimate units of oratory, over constituting the orator

who gets his oratory right.

Although Crassus and Antonius argue in the De oratore as to the

54 STAGING MASCULINITY

existence of an art of oratory (1.92, 2.5, 2.30ff.), this is a debate that is

either passed over in silence or gotten past. This is a dispute that seems to

have little affected the idea of the study of oratory, only the grounding of

one's precepts: Cicero, Quintilian, and other authors have not been si-

lenced by it. This is to say that the text expresses an effort to constitute the

subject, and this effort participates in an always preexisting struggle over

oratory and the orator. The texts are in general very unified as to the

grounding of their discourse in the truth of est. There is such a thing as

oratory; there is such a thing as the orator. The rhetorical handbook "is"

itself both a fact and the arbiter of facticity. The handbook's prosy exis-

tence effects the modulations of the phallologocentric ontology at whose

center one finds the good man skilled at speaking with a voice that seems to

come from the soul. The handbook offers "the delusion of presence mas-

tered" by inculcating the same authoritative speech that it enfolds within

the confines of the handbook's own textuality.

The varied styles of writing about oratory diverge in a number of

internal particulars: shadings are given to the individual units; divisions are

made and not made; sides are taken. These choices represent a struggle

over the vir bonus, the (socially) good man, that is conducted by way of an

evaluation of good oratory. To become the partisan of a certain handbook

or to champion a certain style of handbook is to commit to a certain kind of

self-definition and to engage, to undertake, or to perpetuate in a different

register more general social conflicts over Roman aristocratic in-group/out-

group politics.

Quintilian, though, has gone far beyond preparing his student for a

day in the courts or a session of the senate. Quintilian has totalized his

discourse and the subject circumscribed by it so as to attempt to com-

pass the whole span of the individual's life. He wants to monitor, to shape,

and to train his pupils from cradle to grave, overseeing their education and

training, preparing them for each successive stage. Quintilian wants to

build his candidate from the ground up. He has coordinated all of the

scattered apparatuses of aristocratic life and training and set them all

under the banner of oratory. This represents the culmination of the tenden-

cies of a text like the Ad Herennium. Oratory becomes not just a trope

whereby one pleads to be taken seriously within a specific role, namely to

be respected as an orator, but oratory becomes the mechanism whereby

one understands the whole of a human life. Quintilian offers a handbook

to the self in the fullest sense of the term, a handbook that bestows a

discourse of the self as well as that self to which this discourse aims. This

identity is made to live and to breathe by way of the dead word on the page

that nevertheless promises that life itself can and should cite the written

word and the absent authority subtending it.

READING AND WRITING 55

Little of what holds for the rest of the tradition is true of Cicero. The

form, the politics of form, and tactics employed to legitimize the form are

all significantly varied from those of the rest of the texts of the tradition. In

the final chapter we will look at Cicero's De oratore, a work heralded by

the rhetorical tradition as a masterpiece of rhetorical literature. That discus-

sion will link the form of the dialogue to the various themes of self-mastery,

acting, and pleasure that are discussed in the intervening chapters. For the

present, though, let us look in general at the politics of form in Cicero and

the grounding of the rhetorical subject by way of this form.

One need not fall into the familiar vice of assuming that other hand-

books are representatives of so-called Silver Latin (or even baser metals in

the case of some of the authors discussed). Nor is their often pedantic form

also "degenerate." When Cicero was younger he wrote the De inventione,

and for it he employed the tedious style of the Ad Herennium.40 Similarly,

one may presume that Cicero's predecessors Antonius and Crassus wrote

works that were of a like structure:

hoc loco Brutus: quando quidem tu istos oratores, inquit, tanto opere

laudas, vellem aliquid Antonio praeter illum de ratione dicendi sane

exilem libellum, plura Crasso libuisset scribere; cum enim omnibus

memoriam sui tum etiam disciplinam dicendi nobis reliquissent. nam

Scaevolae dicendi elegantiam satis ex eis orationibus quas reliquit,

habemus cognitam.

[At this point Brutus said, "Since you praise so earnestly those ora-

tors, I wish that Antonius had wanted to write something beyond his

Treatise on Speaking, a meager work indeed, and that Crassus had

wanted to write more as well, as they would have left for all a memo-

rial of themselves, and for us lessons for speaking. For the elegance of

Scaevola's speaking is sufficiently known to us from the orations he

left in writing."]

(Cicero, Brutus 163)

Brutus reproduces the fallacy of the text that speaks for itself in the case of

Scaevola. But more than this, Brutus is also describing and stigmatizing the

rhetorical works of Antonius and Crassus. The real failing of these works is

not so much in their technical aspect - though it is suggested that this too

might have been elaborated - but in their failure to memorialize. That is,

such productions ought to do a double duty of general inculcation and

personal valorization. The text should reproduce the rules of rhetoric by

being filled with the spirit of its author. The text must live.

Cicero, the author of Brutus' complaint, has ensured that he will not

be held liable to such a charge. The Brutus is itself a grand work of

56 STAGING MASCULINITY

memorialization, a collection recording and preserving all of Rome's elo-

quence. It also serves as a goad to the young Brutus, eloquence's heir. In

this sense, it is memorialization with a point. The living text contains the

community of good men who call out to the reader who would become

one of their number. Furthermore, the work as a whole also acts as a

grand memorial of Cicero himself. Within this work Cicero is being con-

structed as the greatest orator Rome ever knew. Moreover, Cicero comes

to occupy the position of arbiter eloquentiae: the question of what makes

for good oratory is decided by Cicero. Cicero surveys all of the Roman

orators, praising this speaker and blaming that one.

Within the Brutus there is a good deal of technical training (disciplina)

that crops up in the illustrations of several orators' virtues and vices. This

instruction is as technical as any to be found in Quintilian's less subtle

encryption of oratorical lore. However, memorialization (memoria) has defi-

nitely won out as the Ciceronian theme of the day. Yet there is, I would

suggest, a natural connection between the two that Brutus' interjection is

right to bring forward. The learning that an orator is meant to employ is in

effect a set of legitimated practices that ought to be mastered that one may

secure recognition as a legitimate orator, as a speaker who can win a hearing,

who can use the accepted tools of the social body to address and influence

that body. Memorialization, here conceived of as self-memorialization, is a

bid at establishing a version of the history of a group or individual in a

particular and privileged relationship to the larger society to which they

belong. Thus to double one's project after the fashion recommended in and

enacted by the Brutus is to engage in a doubled and mutually reinforcing

project of operations with and on symbolic capital. As in the merely proscrip-

tive handbooks above, being here doubles for mastery: but this time "it is"

(est) is turned into "I am" (sum) or "I was" (fui). As Habinek and Svenbro

would remind us of this last case, the monument speaks that its maker might

not have always to be speaking. The real difference between a Cicero and a

Quintilian, then, is the degree to which the problem of being participates in

the grammar of the first person: Who is the "I"? How is he foregrounded or

left implied?

Cicero's reader is confronted with the same problem as was Quintil-

ian's: how may the dead words of the page be turned into proper speech?

Quintilian implies that reading is not really a problem but at the same time

problematizes reading by modulating, among other things, breathings and

inflections. That is, Quintilian builds up the idea of the legitimate reading

in the process of his readings of others. But Cicero's text has no such

devices within it. The text must be performed, but the only cues that it

furnishes within itself are the general evaluative terminology universally

deployed to speak of any orator. Thus, when we are told that someone's

READING AND WRITING 57

speaking style was grave, pleasant, manly, or the like, we already have to

have an idea of an aesthetic substance that underlies these terms. A proper

performance of the text - which is in practice demanded of any proper

(oral) reading of the text-is a performance that does not evoke the con-

demnation of the reader in any of the terms deployed within the text. And

the text itself defines the relevant terms for an analysis of delivery. Again

the hermeneutic world closes upon iself.

Cicero's text, then, by importing the dignity of oratory into discussions

of the dignity of oratory is "useless" as a recipe for ready-made rhetorical

attainment. Although Quintilian's Institutio oratoria and the Ad Heren-

nium are themselves useless in that they cannot and will not promise that

the consummate orator shall emerge as a product of their own texts, they at

the same time have overtly marked themselves as incomplete. The Cic-

eronian text can only educate those who would emulate it and those who

are already so positioned as to emulate it, namely a figure like Brutus.41

Cicero pursues a double goal, educating the already educated and memori-

alizing oratory in terms of himself. Memory, though, has to be taken as a

cipher for the presence of the author. Quintilian promises us that he is

training a new Cicero, while evoking Cicero after a wholly different and

pedantic project. Quintilian excerpts and reuses segments of the Cic-

eronian dialogues in his overtly descriptive and prescriptive accumulation

of lore and using a mode that has a fundamentally different logic and

efficacy from that of the dialogue. In so doing Quintilian is in one sense

solving this very problem of the difficulty of the Ciceronian text. But, while

making Cicero accessible, he has also both lost and reconfigured much of

what we might consider to have been the essence of the "real" Cicero.

In both cases reading and writing help to ground the illusion of oratori-

cal presence and self-presence. But in Quintilian the voice brought to life

to supplement the text is the student's. In Cicero this voice is Cicero's, and

its recovery becomes the sign of the student's own coming to mastery of his

art. Cicero's voice as uttered by his reader is the guarantor of his own text,

a text that explicitly linked the person of the author and memorializing

inscription as necessary components of good rhetorical literature. Rhetori-

cal literature makes up for the loss of its author's voice in the world. Cicero

means to cheat death with his textual monuments. But we have seen that

we must take this wish in its fullest sense: reading and writing cheat a death

that is always threatening the self-present authority of any speaker.



CHAPTER 2

Discovering the Body

AN ORATOR MUST STUDY DELIVERY.1 In order to perform effectively, the

orator needs to have a thorough knowledge of every physical aspect of

performance: vocal qualities, movements, even dress and grooming. In the

process of acquiring this knowledge, the orator takes up a special theoreti-

cal position: the oratorical student becomes a student of himself, of his own

body and voice. Mastering this knowledge will make him master of his own

body and the truths of his own flesh. Knowledge of the body thus becomes

a special case of self-mastery. No good man experienced at speaking can

hope to succeed without this knowledge.2

In this chapter, I would like to take Quintilian's Institutio oratoria as

my prime exemplar of this process of exposition and reflection and to which

the orator subjects himself. Quintilian published his massive work some-

where around the nineties C.E. In his encyclopedic survey of the depart-

ments of oratory he collects, sorts, and comments upon centuries of Greek

and Roman thought on oratory. Quintilian's discussion of performance is

the fullest extant, and it represents a crowning moment of a whole tradition

of corporeal knowledge.3 It is of the utmost interest that Quintilian has

outdone his predecessors, interesting in that this excellence leads at once to

the consideration of the question of motives: what was failing in those other

texts? Why was there a poverty of knowledge about the body? How was it

that the body should need a longer and more detailed description? Quintil-

ian's whole Institutio is constructed after a pattern whereby this author

gathers the works of others, adjudicates between diverse opinions, and

supplements these opinions where insufficient care to detail has been pro-

vided by his predecessors. In other words, Quintilian promises little nov-

elty, and certainly no innovations of "substance," only those of detail.

Quintilian acknowledges and justifies just how detailed he can get in

1.7.34-35: many great speakers have spent much labor on what would

seem to be the least details of oratory. Quintilian even praises Messala as a

man who dedicated whole books not just to individual words, but even to

single letters.4 In effect Quintilian would not mind being thought the

59

60 STAGING MASCULINITY

Messala of the body: the importance of delivery cannot be underestimated,

no discussion of it too thorough.

The social stakes of the body of the good man remain ever to the fore,

and hence Quintilian's is no neutral or disinterested learning. Knowledge

of the body is no mere knowledge; and the extension of this knowledge

represents the extension of the potentialities for the exercise of power on

the body. As Foucault would remind us, "The exercise of power perpetu-

ally creates knowledge, and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces ef-

fects of power. . . . Knowledge and power are integrated with one another,

and there is no point in dreaming of a time when knowledge will cease to

depend on power" (1980a, 52). When Quintilian looks ever more closely at

his student, he subjects the body to an analytics that leaves discipline

additional points of purchase for the operation of its power.5

Even though Quintilian's method may seem somewhat pedantic, never-

theless he is striving to consolidate an idealized male body: something

grand and splendid ought to appear before our eyes as we read these pages.

On the other hand, as Quintilian labors toward knowledge of the body, he

reveals a body that is more process than essence, more a soldier on cam-

paign than an idle aristocrat easing in his villa: this body is always and only

sustained via a hostile and negative relationship to other bodies. Quintilian

opens up a space for the possibility for the increased policing of the body,

yet the task of the more informed gendarme is never completed. Ironically,

then, while Quintilian has a vision of authentic male presence, his efforts to

find and fully know this essence only expose it as unstable and chimerical.

We must not see this failure to establish an essence of the authoritative

male body as a failure to properly apprehend some more basic truth of the

body, a failure to effectively describe the body that was "really there." Nor

is Quintilian's failure but another moment for the postmodern critic to

smile bemusedly at the naivet6 of antiquity: "Of course he didn't find the

body . .." Rather we ought to note that Quintilian's is a productive fail-

ure, a fertile practice producing illegitimate bodily selves, and a practice

that endlessly repudiates these illicit bodies in the name of an authorized

law of oratorical bodies. The cop needs the crook that he may win his own

daily bread. Foucault sensibly asks us why the infinite labor of prisons and

criminology is never completed and what the interests are that must be

served by this same failure.6 Or, as that Cassius was fond of asking, "Who

stood to gain?" (cui bono).7 In this case, the answer is orators themselves.

In order to appreciate the stakes in the game of the deployment of the body

in public oratorical performance, we first have to take seriously the idea

that the orator is a good man, a vir bonus. As was discussed in the introduc-

tion, Cato lays down the definition that the orator is the good man skilled

DISCOVERING THE BODY 61

at speaking, and the social morality of his definition persists throughout

Latin literature. The positing of a prior and virtuous presence to the orator

has profound consequences for the orator's body: this body must represent

the virtue of the character who bears it. Appearances must always corre-

spond to some socially sanctioned vision of reality. This body is not so

much a material substance, as a social one.

Not only the bodies of good men, but all bodies in general are subject

to this primary acculturation. The body therefore cannot be seen as raw

material upon which some fully present and conscious agent acts, giving

order to the chaos of his corporeal aspect. There is no fundamental facticity

to the body, a body before the law or a body that enters into a relationship

with the symbolic order as an equal partner. The body is not raw biological

material that is given its particular meaning by the unique, individual per-

sonality of its bearer: instead the body is just another symbol in a world of

symbols over which the subject cannot be master (see Butler 1993, 32-55).

Returning to the rhetorical theory of the body, we can reformulate

these reflections in a Roman idiom. The body of the orator must be the

body of the good man. This body is good to the extent that it betrays itself

to be a mere vessel, given its virtue and value by the soul of the good man

of which it is the bearer. Bodily excellence cites and performs the authority

of the good man: Quintilian does not want to train an actor, but a man who

is genuinely good; and the orator's body will be good precisely as it reveals

the goodness of the orator himself.8

Quintilian would argue from this position. He does not wish to con-

sider the forces that constitute the good man as a legible social entity. He

does not wish to consider the body as a symbol whose radical possibilities

include misperformance and illicit allusion. Quintilian recognizes that there

is a sociology of rhetoric and that meanings can be treacherous, but he

struggles against these possibilities. Quintilian applies himself to regulating

the body; he proliferates the sites of bodily knowledge. In this prolifera-

tion, though, there spring up new, unforeseen crises of the body. The

application of power to the body that it would master reveals a protean

slave who refuses ready domination.9 The masterful soul of both theorist

and student discovers in this auto-affective relationship of lordship and

bondage that the bondsman is not a good slave. The body is a wily subject,

a servus callidus. The body is in need of constant vigilance, in need, then,

of the exercise of more mastery on the master's part. The soul that would

govern the body discovers itself as masterful precisely in the context of such

a labor. The master needs his slave.

We must, then, pause to consider the social constitution of the soul

before considering any qualifying adjectives such as good that may be

made to adhere to it. Both the body and soul share a conjoint ficticity, both

62 STAGING MASCULINITY

produced elsewhere yet used to substantiate one another. Yet the body is

itself one of the key sites at which this inscription and this reading of the

soul takes place. And, significantly, one of the vital moments in the emer-

gence of each is its relationship to the other, a relationship marked by

hierarchies of the dominant and subordinate, the inner and the outer, the

true and the seeming.

In seeking to secure a special social status for the orator's body as

exclusively a good and virile body, Roman rhetorical theorists such as

Quintilian make new and special appeals to and readings of the truth of the

body. The ancient theorists want to take the body of their student and

secure for it a distinct and exclusive reading. The rhetorical theorist secures

for the good man his goodness and his masculinity and protects the speaker

from a potential collapse into illegitimate effeminacy (see, e.g., Quintilian

11.3.180-84). The rhetorical theorists are forced to return to the scene of

investment of the body and to make new and special appeals to and read-

ings of the truth of the body. In the process of doing so, though, the theorist

reveals the lines of power that trace the surface of the body, giving it its

legible contours.

While theory may wish to derive the meaning of its body from the ante-

rior principle of the good soul, by ourselves reading this reading of the body,

we can see instead a body that is shot through with the effects of the matrix of

knowledge/power, a matrix that allows for the transcription of the meanings

onto bodily surfaces. And this same knowledge/power that delineates the

body also delineates a soul for the body, a bodily soul set off against other

possible and possibly corrupt souls. Theoretical speculation upon the body

thus serves as part of a strategic production and reproduction of the subject

as a whole, a subject read in both his physical and metaphysical aspects. The

orator is asked to recognize himself in these telling descriptions: he is met

with a hailing such as Althusser describes as the inaugural moment of sub-

jectivation, the moment of interpellation. The theory of the body thus be-

comes a hailing of both a body and a soul that inaugurates the two within a

sociality that was always waiting to catch them up (Althusser 1971).

In the theoretical depiction of the body, a discovery of the body takes

place. This is a discovery in two senses. First, the body is disclosed:

"truths" are revealed about the body. Of course, these truths are vital

fictions, products that themselves produce a social reality with real material

consequences. This is the second sense in which discovery can be used: the

revelation is an innovation. In this sense the theorist is making up the body

as he goes. The body revealed is revealed as specifically thus or so. The

body that the theorist beholds is a body that has been constituted as legible,

a body made for reading. The shapes that have been discovered are arbi-

trary to the extent that other knowledges of the body could be imagined,0

DISCOVERING THE BODY 63

but they are specific and specifically efficacious to the extent that these

readings of the body have real and worldly effects.

The social stakes of the orator's body, not surprisingly, involve it in a

variety of efforts aimed at forcing the body to live up to all of its promise.

The body needs to be fused to the soul. Additionally, the messages of the

body need to be naturalized and shown as authentic expressions of a sub-

ject rather than arbitrary cultural artifacts. The consequences of the text

itself, though, need to be taken into account. Reading and writing are

activities designed to reveal, to act upon, and to supplement the logos of

the soul. The rules of this textualism produce a condition where descrip-

tions take on a legislative effect. These textual legislations participate in a

disciplining of bodies. At the same time they also regulate bad bodies,

bodies that are brought to light only to be subsequently refused.

Quintilian's discussion of performance yokes the body to the soul.

Quintilian hopes to secure the validity of his enterprise by assuring that the

soul remains both the prison and the jailer of the body. Quintilian routinely

asserts that the "inside" of the orator is reflected in the appearances he

produces, that good oratory is a matter of true appearances.1' The meta-

phor of diagnosis is employed to get at the inner man:

lam enim tempus est dicendi quae sit apta pronuntiatio: quae certe ea

est quae iis de quibus dicimus accommodatur. Quod quidem maxima

ex parte praestant ipsi motus animorum, sonatque uox ut feritur.

[Now it is time to define suitable delivery. It is surely that which is

accommodated to those things about which we speak. For the most

part this is produced by the very movements of our souls; the voice

rings as it is struck.]

(Quintilian 11.3.61)

The voice is the musical instrument; the soul the player. A radical reading

of this advice would obviate the need for Quintilian's own text, as one

would need only to feel a thing in order to speak it. This is in fact the

position of some of Quintilian's nameless theoretical enemies: "If they

think it is enough to be born for a man to be an orator, they are entitled to

their opinion. I hope they will pardon my efforts, though, as I think that

nothing is perfect where nature is not supplemented by labor."12 However,

the next sentences of 11.3.61 forestall any commitment to automatic, unre-

flective performance by asserting that some passions are genuine but need

art to shape them. Conversely, fictions suffer from the lack of passions to

inspire them. In the latter case, Quintilian's advice is to begin imagining for

onself thoughts that would inspire the passions one would feign and so to

64 STAGING MASCULINITY

be moved by one's own fictions.13 Thus even in the case of assumed pas-

sions, if they are to be done well, they should have a kernel of truth to

them. We should always weep heartfelt tears, crying for some other loss if

we cannot truly weep for a vicious client's lost honor.

The structure of Quintilian's arguments here and elsewhere has an

important consequence for his student: the contest between affectation and

belief can never be decided. Quintilian has preempted the reading of his

orator for affectation with has natura and cura formulation whereby he

insists that "nothing is perfect where nature is not supplemented by labor."

Belief is now always also a matter of affectation rewritten as cura. That is,

one can really believe only after first learning, investigating, and knowing

his own body. This discipline supplements the nature it discovers and com-

plements it, but discipline also insinuates itself in the place of nature. Once

again we find our handbooks acting according to the logic of Derrida's

"dangerous supplement."14 The rhetorical handbook then becomes a neces-

sary prop for subjectivity and a tool without which the orator is lost to

himself. The text insures that there will be no body without the text, and

accordingly, that there will be no soul without the theorization of the soul.

A preliminary requirement of both text and body is legibility. As was

discussed in the preceding chapter, Quintilian requires the ready conver-

sion of textual precepts into bodily effects. Conversely, the physical world

is itself easily read and interpreted. The process of decipherment of a body

qua visual text is itself nearly automatic. Quintilian argues to this effect in

11.3.65-67. In the case of paintings, sometimes the image says more than

words could. Brute beasts are readily understood because of their move-

ments alone. A dancer may tell a story without using a single word.'5

Quintilian is shoring up any gaps between the body and the soul.

Quintilan makes gestures coincide in spirit with the voice, and both move-

ment and sound are servants of the soul: "[A gesture] both itself harmo-

nizes with the voice and along with it yields to the soul (animus)."16 As a

soldier yields to his general, so do voice and gesture serve the bidding of

the soul that governs them. On the one side the orator's soul is evinced by

his delivery; but, on the other, this delivery will affect the audience in the

same vital organ, namely their inmost passions, their own souls. Quintilian

claims of paintings that their images "penetrate into our inmost passions

(adfectus)."17 We have here a fantasy of pure and efficacious signs, a denial

of language or the need for language, and both of these conceits tending

toward the direct interaction of souls. This efficacy of performance illumi-

nates why pleasure in general and acting in particular produce a crisis: if

the game is played at the level of the soul, imitators or panderers are

serious moral threats.18 One fears lewd psychic intercourse.

Quintilian next extends still further the scope of the psychic mecha-

DISCOVERING THE BODY 65

nism of oratory. Against this vision of natural and efficacious expression

Quintilian introduces the possibility of discord, of voices and faces that do

not go with the words of a speech. Quintilian gives, then, a contrary case as

centered not around the soul, but the words. Thus, in the first part of the

paragraph, Quintilian is resolutely spiritual, in the conclusion, verbal. The

effect of this slide in the argument is first to render the authentic bodily

performance one that is a performance of the soul, but then in the next part

of the argument the words of the speech are silently yoked into the service

of the soul, just as the voice and gestures had been before. Everything

about oratory, then, is always supposedly tending to the same end, the

presentation and representation of the soul of a good man. The orator is

both his text and his body.19 A gesture that dissents from the text of a

speech is in discord as well with the soul of the speaker. And we have seen

how Quintilian's own text mistakes itself for a bodily text. Where text,

body, and soul form a nexus in Quintilian's discussion of gesture, so also

does Quintilian's own text participate in a similar performance targeted at

the level of the soul.

Quintilian's descriptions have a legislative effect. When he examines

the orator, Quintilian finds an authorized body and soul only where certain

given conditions are met. And the "giving" of these conditions is one of the

fundamental aspects of Quintilian's work. By giving I do not mean to imply

that Quintilian needs to be radically original in his impositions. Even where

he only reproduces the sentiments of other and earlier authors, the signifi-

cance of Quintilian's argument and the genre of the rhetorical handbook as

a whole lies in postulating the very object that one is discovering, the

production of the object of inquiry at a specific textual moment within a

specific author. An appeal to "tradition" on our part would not explain

Quintilian's process; it would only reify the rhetorical body as produced in

other theories. This traditional body of the good man would "explain"

Quintilian's text away. That is, there would be a bodily truth subsisting

beneath his pages and validating their contents. Such an interpretive move

grants to Quintilian his key premise: even as it seems to render him deriva-

tive, the point of derivation is the same as Quintilian's and as theoretically

suspect.

While Quintilian exhorts his student to perform well by exhibiting his

good soul, Quintilian is himself engaged in a project of discovery. He is

engaged in the production and reproduction of that same soul.20 Althusser

(1971) notes that the reproduction of the relations of production are vital

for the securing of a social and political order and that the ideological state

apparatus is the key site for the securing of this reproduction in the person

of the subject inaugurated into this order by ideology. In hailing this good

soul and commanding it to present itself to the world, Quintilian first gets

66 STAGING MASCULINITY

his student to say, "Yes, it's me; that is my soul." In doing so the student

takes up the burden of this soul, its truths, its constituent exclusions, its

denials, and makes them his own.

Judith Butler has recently offered a critical rereading of Althusser that

takes account of the difficulties, ambiguities, excesses of meaning, and sup-

plementations entailed by such a process. She seeks to accommodate

Althusser's trope of the turning toward assujettissement without reinscribing

his divine performative as the model of domination (Butler 1997b, 106-31).

This revised version of the interpellation allows us to reread Quintilian

without ourselves becoming fixated by a legalism of description. Quintilian's

educative apparatus does not have the constative force of the law; it is not a

unique, privileged authority; it does not produce a performative utterance, a

"You are Peter" that would miraculously sculpt an orator from the raw stone

of the material body. Quintilian does, though, speak from a position that

would arrogate for itself many of the powers and privileges of the divine

position. Thus the hail he sends out to his student participates in the same

structures as does the more general hailing of the law. But Quintilian's

citation of this law allows for our own reevaluation of him as doubly deriva-

tive. Quintilian would teach his student how to become the principle of his

own subjection and to set up in himself a superego whose voice is that of

Quintilian citing the law in the name of subjecting the bodily ego. The

student has been asked to live the moment of Althusserian subjection; the

stage has been set; the stakes have been laid out; and the rewards have been

made explicit. The orator is taught to perform his own subjection, to adopt a

certain soul and a specific body, and thereby to become a good man. The text

mediates this process, but in so doing it also serves as a metaphor for the

mediation the body itself provides relative to the truth of the soul.

Despite promises to the contrary, texts and bodies are fallible. In

11.3.67 Quintilian makes clear the costs of failures of performance: per-

formative failure destroys authority (auctoritas) and confidence (fides).

Where the text does not match intention, Quintilian finds contradiction.

He could have spoken of lesser lapses, of happy men who looked too

happy, or the like. Instead the text represents discord only in the guise of

total failure: sorrow seems joy. These failures are presented as ridiculous.

But even were they less egregious, the orator would still have to watch out

for his authority and the confidence that he inspires. Indeed the very last

words of Quintilian's eleventh book are actually a threat laid against the

principle of authority conceived of as the good virility of the orator:21

Sed iam recepta est actio paulo agitatior et exigitur et quibusdam

partibus conuenit, ita tamen temperanda ne, dum actoris captamus

elegantiam, perdamus uiri boni et grauis auctoritatem.

DISCOVERING THE BODY 67

[But contemporary taste has adopted and demands a rather more ex-

cited delivery, and in some instances this is suitable. Still, it must be kept

in check lest while we seek the elegance of the actor, we lose the author-

ity of the good and serious man.]

(Quintilian 11.3.184)

In other words, the sanctity of the vir bonus is always at stake in every

performance. And the foundation for his authority rests in the relationship

of harmonized subordination that his voice, body, and text bear to his soul.

The motions of the body and the modulations of the voice serve as

their own sort of language, a sermo corporis.22 Accordingly the body itself

is opened up to the full critical vocabulary of the rhetorical tradition. All

concerns and regulations that may have been directed at the orator's verbal

style can potentially be rethought with regard to the physical aspect of

performance as well. Textual authority and bodily authority are homolo-

gous, and the fetishism of the language in which oratory participates thus

becomes a fetishism of bodies. As is the case with any fetish, this new

"linguistic" body is invested with mystical potency. Yet the source of this

power is ultimately disavowed and deferred. Bourdieu and Boltanski say

the following of linguistic fetishism:

Si l'on ajoute que, de toutes les especes de capital incorpor6, le capital

linguistique est, avec l'hexis corporelle, celle qui a le plus de chances

d'apparaitre comme constitutive de la personne meme de son porteur,

de sa nature, bref comme un "don" de la personne, on comprend que

les d6bats en apparence les plus futiles sur la langue mobilisent tant

d'6nergies et de passions. (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1975, 12)

Extending this notion of the fetishism of language to the eloquent body,

Bourdieu's observation helps to underscore the process of naturalization of

the social truth of the body and the relations of domination that the orator's

body incorporates. Similarly Bourdieu exposes why the body might be

looked at with such intensity and vigor: the stakes of a misdeployed eye-

brow extend far beyond the disruptions of a moment in a speech. The

cultural capital that is deposited in the orator's speech and body is always

on the brink of suffering a loss. Furthermore, for the ancient orator there is

no disjunction between his linguistic, his symbolic, and his bodily capitals.

The orator's high social standing arises from the mystification of his

cultural capital as a "gift" that naturally adheres to his person, to his inmost

self. And the technical manual participates in the bestowing of this gift

while ostensibly only discovering truths about performance, a natura that

cura supplements: we are being taught how to become ourselves, not how

68 STAGING MASCULINITY

to pretend to be good men. It is by the text's cura that the student's body

becomes naturalized and acquires that prestige for which it was destined.

At the same time this cura or discipline revolves back on the question of the

gift as a whole, exposing the basic ficticity of the soul that animates the

capital-rich performer.

If the authority of the body devolves upon the soul, it must be remem-

bered that this soul is itself qualified, being necessarily a good and manly

soul. Against this soul and its body stand other and unwanted souls. The

sociology of these illegitimate bodies is itself a major project of Quintilian's

text. He is routinely discovering in the orator a nascent tendency to

misperform, to present oneself as ignorant, feminine, rustic, or otherwise

illegitimate. The discovery of the body and the tale it tells is thus also a

discovery of the perils of the body, of potential truths about the body that

have to be first unearthed, if only to be more securely reinterred. Again

Bourdieu can help us see the method and stakes in this process of descrip-

tion and definition by way of opposition and exclusion:

The vision of the social world, and most especially the perception of

others, of their bodily hexis, the shape and size of their bodies, particu-

larly the face, and also the voice, pronunciation and vocabulary, is in

fact organized according to interconnected and partially independent

oppositions which one can begin to grasp by examining the expressive

resources deposited and preserved in language, especially in the sys-

tem of paired adjectives employed by the users of the legitimate lan-

guage to classify others and to judge their quality, and in which the

term designating the properties ascribed to the dominant always re-

ceives a positive value. (1991, 92)

Quintilian's texts codify those sets of exclusions that usually remain implicit

cultural categories in need of the exposition of a sociologist like Bourdieu.

In the act of making explicit the implied logic of the world, Quintilian

invites his readers to identify with the structures of domination presented,

to say, "Yes, that is right." Furthermore Quintilian's text offers itself as a

model whereby the logic of domination and its operations can be imbibed

as a consciously held principle. The student can offer a rational account of

the privileges that his voice and body enact.

Useful as Bourdieu's observations are, they will not enable us to under-

stand fully the implications of the specific antagonisms and hostile pairings.

In other words, an explanation of the process of domination and its mystifica-

tion has been offered, but not an account of its specificity in the orator's case.

Most importantly, we need to examine the question of the anxiety of the text:

the text shows that bodily hexis cannot be taken for granted. The body has to

be noted, observed, analyzed, corrected, approved, and trained. The body

DISCOVERING THE BODY 69

to which this orthopedics has been applied then returns to the status of a

fetish and imperceptibly enacts the structures of domination that one seeks

as the body's possession. This orthopedic project thus aspires to the condi-

tion of Bourdieu's habitus, but we would be wise to avoid according it a

success it neither deserves nor has earned.

Even with the corrective assistance of the handbook the body is always

on the verge of failing; it needs a prop and training. The theoretician's gaze

catches within its scopic field a body that is always in need of reworking

within the terms of that same vision. In this sense, Quintilian is a producer

of knowledge/power, and he stands against the nameless others of 11.3.11

who thought it enough to be born in order to be a good orator. These

authentic orators are able to participate in Bourdieu's schema without

feeling any pangs of anxiety. They would seek a symbolic domination that

"goes without saying." Quintilian balks at this. Quintilian always needs to

supplement nature with effort. In so doing he exposes the body to a differ-

ent regime of truth, one of discipline and surveillance, even if discipline's

ultimate goal is the salvation of the authentic good man. The irony of

Quintilian's process, then, is that the endless process of training and threats

of failure make the category vir bonus fundamentally unstable. But Quintil-

ian's loss is also his gain: by making the body a problem, he can enjoin his

orator to a conscious regime of bodily and performative iteration and

enactment of the principles of domination of which the orator's body is

representative and bearer.

Judith Butler has explored the possible space for a subversive politics

that emerges within the normative performances of the dominant discourse

(1990a, 1993). Quintilian, though, stands directly opposite Butler's queer

performances. Quintilian trains the body to thwart its own queer possibili-

ties: he saves us from ourselves. On the other hand, Quintilian's instruction

also explicitly opens up a space of contestation. He offers to train the

bodies of men that they might be more themselves. In so doing Quintilian

also exposes a latent crisis in the authoritative man: the vir bonus cannot

automatically assume that he will successfully be himself without Quintil-

ian's aid. In this sense Quintilian would agree with Butler: drag queens

really do matter since the political stakes of bodily performances are always

high, and so too are they also a question of the manliness of men.

If we take seriously the proposition that the body has a language and that

its message is of vital social interest, then it should not be surprising to find

that the body becomes a site of so much interest and observation. Observa-

tion of the body will allow the student to modulate his own physical self-

presentation. But then the text that teaches this observation also teaches a

technique of self-knowledge. The text inscribes a truth of the body that is a

70 STAGING MASCULINITY

political truth. And the investment of this good body requires the simulta-

neous disinvestment of other bodies. As observation and self-knowledge

collapse, Quintilian ensures that spectatorship is a socially significant act.

In fact, it is a cruel one, an activity always implicated not just in evaluation,

but in hostile evaluation.

The orator's body is open to constant observation. In discussing meth-

ods of constructing arguments, Quintilian shows that the body's surface is

readily legible for evidence of character:

Personis autem non quidquid accidit exsequendum mihi est, ut plerique

fecerunt, sed unde argumenta sumi possunt. Ea porro sunt:... habitus

corporis, ducitur enim frequenter in argumentum species libidinis,

robur petulantiae, his contraria in diuersum...

[I have no need of rehearsing, as many authors do, the varied fortunes

of characters and characterization, but only from whence one may

adduce pieces of evidence. These are, moreover: . . . the bearing of

the body (habitus corporis), for often beauty is taken as evidence of

lust, strength as a token of impudence; and the opposites of these

qualities are taken as evidence in the opposite direction ...]

(Quintilian 5.10.23-25)

Quintilian refuses to make a catalog of personal qualities.23 Instead he

decides to examine these qualities as they may be used to draw conclusions

about a person's character. Each quality offers a foothold for the student of

character, a point from which a more profound truth may be opened up. It

should be noted in Quintilian's account of the body that seemingly innocu-

ous or even desirable qualities, beauty and strength, are taken as evidence

for vices. In other words, this example of the reading of the body has latent

within itself hostility. The body can and will be read against its bearer. A

body that consists of mere appearances, even if these appearances might be

pleasing, is exposed to attack. There is something cruel or at least poten-

tially cruel in the act of observation.

The orator needs to bear in mind that he is watched with more atten-

tion than are others. The orator's body is a public object, the object of

close public scrutiny. Care must be taken to make sure that appearances

are kept up. As far as his clothing is concerned, the orator should keep the

following in mind:

Cultus non est proprius oratoris aliquis, sed magis in oratore con-

spicitur. Quare sit, ut in omnibus honestis debet esse, splendidus et

uirilis: nam et toga et calceus et capillus tam nimia cura quam negle-

gentia sunt reprendenda.

DISCOVERING THE BODY 71

[There is no particular dress for an orator, but in the orator's case it

attracts more attention. Accordingly it should be - as is proper in the

case of all well-bred persons - resplendent and manly: for when it

comes to one's toga and shoes and hair excessive care as well as negli-

gence are equally blamable.]

(Quintilian 11.3.137)

Quintilian follows these words with a detailed description of personal

grooming and its varied significations. But in this introduction to the topic

he points out a crucial dilemma. First, people watch the orator carefully,

examining him from head to toe. Accordingly, the orator ought to look

good. But in looking good, he should look like a good man: this is our vir

bonus again. He must look neither disheveled nor like a dandy. Splendidus,

translated as "resplendent," means bright and attractive, gleaming, spot-

less, even showy. This Latin adjective is therefore somewhat unsure ground

upon which to stand. It is only by the intervention of the virile adjective

and the qualifying clause that follows that Quintilian's meaning can be

secured as unthreatening.

In this passage, the orator learns both that he is watched, and then

that he is to present himself to be watched. He is to present himself to be

watched both as a spectacular or arresting figure (splendidus) but also as a

figure that is securely masculine. Likewise this virility consists neither in a

coarse nor a refined relationship to one's attire and grooming. In short,

this attractive virility is an art that conceals itself and that must conceal

itself, a discipline that evanesces into a natural appearance. If observation

is aggressive, then one ought to offer an appearance that is an essence,

one that offers no purchase for the critical eye: how can one find fault

with reality?

When a good performance is seen, the body that is presented is mysti-

fied. The proper performance and the character it presents, the vir bonus,

somehow eludes simple and positive description. Claims to the potency of a

proper performance can only be debunked; positive precepts cannot be

offered. So, at any rate, does Quintilian round out his discussion of perfor-

mance. After giving many and detailed pieces of advice, threats, and behav-

iors to avoid, Quintilian concludes his precepts with a disavowal of the

possibility of a truly positive efficacy for his text. His discussion apparently

is valid only in its diagnosis of disease and disorder:

Vnum iam his adiciendum est: cum praecipue in actione spectetur

decorum, saepe aliud alios decere. Est enim latens quaedam in hoc

ratio et inenarrabilis, et ut uere hoc dictum est, caput esse artis decere

quod facias, ita id neque sine arte esse neque totum arte tradi potest.

72 STAGING MASCULINITY

[I have one thing to add: though one pays particular attention to

decorousness (decorum) in performance, often different things suit

(decere) different speakers. For there is a certain latent and inexpress-

ible logic to performance; and, just as this maxim is true, namely that

the principle point of study is to be becoming (decere) in whatever you

may do, so also is it true that this cannot happen without study, nor can

the whole of it be transmitted via study.]

(Quintilian 11.3.177)

The orator is commanded to be seemly and becoming (decorum, decere).24

He is observed for this quality. Indeed, his entire labor tends toward allow-

ing him to project such an air. At the same time, his labor does not secure

his goal. The oratorical project is always incomplete, and the orator's

existence is "a kind of permanent exercise" (Foucault 1988a, 49). The

consummate student will only have assured himself that he has a chance of

not failing, not that he has actually succeeded. What is becoming always

remains elusive.

On the other hand, there are certain advantages to the mythology of

decorum: the common man can never expect a formula or recipe that

would allow him to transform himself into a man of substance. Ineffability

hence can serve as a guarantor against unregulated social mobility. Ken-

nedy and Habinek have argued that the expulsion of the Latin rhetoricians

in 92 B.C.E. was partially motivated by political concern in the face of

rhetorical training that was too accessible and too easy (Kennedy 1972, 90-

95; Habinek 1998, 60-61). Restricing access to rhetoric offers one means of

ensuring the noble art's nobility. Yet the state apparatuses are not only

limited to the repressive sort. So too can we find an ideology of the natural

speaker. One cannot make a critique of proper performances because they

succeed along the ways indicated by Bourdieu: the physical bearing in

these cases seems to be a gift of the person, a natural and inalienable

possession that confirms the legitimacy of the domination of his station.25

Of course, Quintilian intervenes to qualify the autonomy of this notion of

natural grace: it is natural only by way of being acculturated through the

discursive apparatus of the institution of rhetorical training.

The orator is always on the straight and narrow, traversing a perilous

path between illegitimate morphologies. Even in the cut of the toga, failure

will lead to deformity and hence to catastrophe.26 One associates deformity

with illegitimacy, and this link is about as old a one as we can find. In the

Iliad Thersites is a shameful, ugly, and disorderly speaker whose body is as

foul as his words (2.212-69). Thersites does not fare well at the hands of

the good men who surround him: the noble Odysseus scowls at him

(2.245), gives a speech of rebuke, and then beats Thersites to a bloody pulp

DISCOVERING THE BODY 73

with the speakers' staff (oxitxQov). So much for telling an aristocrat some-

thing he does not want to hear. Homer literalizes the metaphorical domina-

tion and violence of the orator and his oratory.27 In Quintilian and other

authors, though, this same fundamental social violence persists in a euphe-

mised form. And given that Quintilian sees Homer's stagings of Odysseus

as fodder for rhetorical precepts at 11.3.158, perhaps the situation is not so

entirely euphemistic after all.

Bourdieu helps explain why society takes the unsightly body so

seriously:

socialization instills a sense of the equivalences between physical

space and social space and between movements (rising, falling, etc.)

in the two spaces and thereby roots the most fundamental structures

of the group in the primary experiences of the body which, as is

clearly seen in emotion, takes metaphors seriously. For example, the

opposition between the straight and the bent, whose function in the

incorporated division of labor between the sexes has been indicated,

is central to most of the marks of respect or contempt that politeness

uses in many societies to symbolize relations of domination. (1990,

71-72)

The body is thus a lived experience of social truths, and in the bearing of the

body one can always descry meanings that are referable to incontrovertible

social meaning: "The body believes what it plays at: it weeps if it mimes grief.

It does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it

enacts the past, bringing it back to life. What is 'learned by the body' is not

something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but some-

thing that one is" (Bourdieu 1990, 73). The orator brandishes his body in the

social field, convinced both of the validity and legitimacy of the hegemony of

viri boni and of the hopelessness of other bodies.

In the same gesture that the dominant fractions learn of the sublime

status of their own decorum, they learn other lessons as well. First, this

decorum can be secured only by study and labor: it is not a truly arbitrary

trait. The mere fact of having been born does not make a person a good

speaker. But the orator has also learned a science of unauthorized bodies.

The student has been taught to look at the body for the indecorous and the

illegitimate, to force the body to answer up in all of its details and divisions

to the demand to not be inappropriate. This establishes a relationship to

knowledge that produces a specific relationship to one's own body. And

this relationship is a suspicious and hostile one.

I would like to take this opportunity to expatiate somewhat on the body as

observed and made subject to a knowledge and power that watches ever

74 STAGING MASCULINITY

more carefully and critically. I would like, that is, to spend some time on

Quintilian's catalog of the body and the voice in order to show in detail that

the body as figured within his text is a body that has been made the object

of a careful sort of knowledge. In subsequent portions of this chapter, we

will take up the question of the excisions and exclusions that this process

also entails, but here we will first examine the layers of analysis.

The general situation of observation and self-observation reaches a

sort of logical extreme in the case of the analysis of the body. The prolifera-

tion of the body parts observed produces more knowledge of the speaking

body, but it also leaves that body the more liable to the same questions of

legitimacy and illegitimacy that have dogged it all along. That is, now the

general impression or tenor of a performance is not enough; even the eye-

brows must be observed, evaluated, and found acceptable. Thus the prolif-

eration of body parts examined by no means serves as a promise of author-

ity for the student as he crosses off items on his to-do list. Instead, the more

his body is known in detail, the more it is liable to failures and in need of

prohibitions and regulations. The expanded analysis of the body is less

helpful than it is monitory.

Quintilian's detailed discussion of the body of the orator has two

extended passages. First he describes the face and its elements (11.3.72ff.),

and he later moves from the head downward (11.3.82ff.). In addition to

these two sections, the proper use of the hands is a constant bodily theme.

It is this last portion of the anatomy that I would like to take up first. The

observation due the hands serves as a case study for the regard due all of

the body's elements.

The hands are a locus of such keen interest owing to their amazing

expressive capacities. "One can hardly describe how many movements the

hands have. Without our hands delivery would be maimed and debilitated,

since they nearly equal the very wealth of our words."28 In other words, the

more invested a site is with meaning or potential meaning, the more knowl-

edge and discipline come to surround it. The supposed eloquence of the

hands necessitates special concern and attention to the hands. If the hands

can all but speak of themselves,29 then the rhetorical theorist is duty bound

to speak of and for them, and to speak exhaustively if at all possible.

Quintilian recounts over a dozen specific hand gestures between

11.3.92 and 11.3.104.30 Each gesture is defined, delimited, regulated, and

often moralized. Knowledge and obligation proceed in tandem (cf. Fou-

cault 1979, 180). Take, for example, the use of the hand described at

11.3.100: "Admiration is appropriately expressed by that gesture in which

one turns the hand lightly upward, folds in the fingers one after the other

starting from the smallest, and then in a reverse movement, simultaneously

unfolds them and turns the hand back over."31 This would be a case of both

DISCOVERING THE BODY 75

definition and regulation: the master tells us to note what the hand does

when it expresses admiration; such a movement at other times would be

inappropriate. Quintilian is not only defining and delimiting, he is also

instructing both actor and audience. The language of the body is being

taught and reproduced for both parties alike. And while the language of

the body has been described as universal and easily intelligible in passages

like 11.3.65-67, the vocabulary of bodily speech actually finds its reproduc-

tion and inculcation in passages such as this.

More than taxonomy is at stake in this detailed examination of the body.

A social morality is immediately attached to the speculative project. Quintil-

ian does not provide a systematic theory of gestures with the hands; he

instead offers a laundry list of gestures. Yet Quintilian has more to say of the

hands than just listing some of their gestures: the hands must be restrained

from illicit social allusions. The moral definition and legislation of these

specific and specified gestures can be seen in 11.3.103: "There is also that

gesture where the hand is held cupped and spread-fingered and lifted above

the height of the shoulder with a certain movement: this has a hortatory air.

Such a use of the hands is more accepted by foreign schools; it is tremulous,

and stagy."32 The hands may have their own language, but this language can

be "unspeakable" for a good man. This passage consolidates the notion that

foreigners, effeminates, and actors are parodic and despised agents whose

movements the Roman orator specifically does not reproduce.

It is not enough to make a few choice hand movements; the hands

must also be carefully coordinated with the rest of the speech. Indeed all

elements of oratory are bound by a law of homology that insists that every

part be consonant with the whole. As the body had to be in accord with the

text (11.3.67), so also should the hands move along with the sense, accom-

panying the meaning of the verbal aspect of the performance. The regula-

tion of the hand also extends to having it perform differently in the differ-

ent logical sections of a speech. The hand begins an oration with one set of

movements, and it ends with another (see, e.g., 11.3.158, 11.3.159,

11.3.161-62). Within an individual sentence, one needs keep to the follow-

ing rule: "The hand should begin and end its movements along with the

sense: otherwise there will be a gesture either before or after there is a

sound, both of which occurrences are unsightly."33 At the same time, the

hand should not be subject to the rigid rule of one gesture per three

words.34 This proposition, called "too subtle" (nimia subtilitate) by Quintil-

ian, is rejected first because it is declared impossible. The three-word rule

is, however, well-intended as it avoids the two failings of a lazy hand

(otiosa) or endless movement.

Instead of obeying some ready mathematical formula the orator's ges-

tures need to observe the "lurking beats of speech" (latentes sermonis

76 STAGING MASCULINITY

percussiones).35 Such an argument reinstalls gestures into a natural and

naturally harmonized role vis-h-vis language. The language itself dictates

the movements of the hands, and the gesture that follows the sense is

actually the one closest to nature. The orator sets himself to the study and

reproduction of signs given by nature. Labor again is a process designed to

complement nature and fulfill a teleology latent within it. If the orator lives

up to the nature of language, the problem of a lazy or overly busy hand

need no longer be considered. Those who would impose decisive rules will

only impose an apparatus divorced from nature and one that will endlessly

clash with it. Thus Quintilian's project, while producing and reproducing

knowledge and self-knowledge at every turn, pushes the source of its own

legitimacy back into an unassailable register. And the apotheosis of the

project of submission to Quintilian's dictates is presented not as a mastery

of the laws of oratory but as a fulfillment of the dictates of nature. In other

words, good gestures have a natural authenticity and efficacy that is put out

of reach of critique, revision, and revolution. The consummate student is

not only a good man but is a "natural" one as well.

The rest of the body receives a treatment much akin to that of the hands.

As no one element of the body is quite as invested with meaning as the hands

are, it is only as an ensemble or collection of prescriptions that the injunc-

tions made to the rest of the body fully resemble those given to the hands.

Nonetheless, the logic that regulated the hands holds true for the rest of the

body, and this body is equally susceptible to ever finer degrees of analysis,

description, and prescription.

Quintilian's examination of the body starts with the head: "As with the

body, so with delivery: the head is most important; it plays a principal part

with respect both to that decorum I have discussed and also to the convey-

ance of meaning."36 From the head Quintilian moves to the face as the

head's dominant feature. The face is itself subdivided into the eyes, which

are its most important feature, the eyebrows, and lastly the lips and the

nostrils. Leaving the face and head, Quintilian continues downward, dis-

cussing the neck and then the shoulders. Moving out now rather than

continuing down, Quintilian passes on to the arms and then gets into the

hands in some detail as discussed above. The perusal of the body is thus

fairly orderly (11.3.72-84).

In the course of this survey, Quintilian stops at each feature long

enough to describe its potency and its dangers. The face is almost as good

as words (11.3.72). The spirit shines forth from the eyes (11.3.75). Misus-

ing the eyes and showing them filled with pleasure is a failing that is

beneath even an idiot (11.3.76). The eyebrows must not become comic and

dissent from what is spoken (11.3.78). Hardly anything good can come of

the lips and nostrils; here restraint is the best course of action (11.3.80).

DISCOVERING THE BODY 77

The neck ought to be straight, and poor use of the neck lends an impression

of servility (11.3.82).

Each time Quintilian turns his eyes upon the body it is invested with

both significance and risk. The body is first defined as telling, and then it

threatens to misspeak and ruin its bearer. The more of the body that is

given to be seen, the more labor is required of the student. With each

division come new and increased obligations. Clearly the logic of analysis

could be taken further, and still more minute elements picked out. The

earliest preserved rhetorical handbook in Latin, the Rhetorica Ad Heren-

nium, makes relatively simple injunctions to the body, and in contempo-

rary editions of the work the Ad Herennium requires only a few pages to

makes its survey of performance. On the other hand, the discussion of

delivery in an edition of Quintilian today covers scores of pages each of

which is filled with the most minute bodily details. By the same token,

if the increased knowledge derived from Quintilian is not enough to guar-

antee security, might not further analysis be in order? The proliferation of

body parts has not given more security, but only opened up more pros-

pects for failure, more sites to examine and find wanting, more parts that

must be harmonized with a whole, and more telling elements whose tale

must be kept under watch. More nature (natura), that is, requires more la-

bor (cura). And not even Quintilian's massive tome is sufficient to live up

either to nature or to discipline.

Not only is the body carefully articulated in its parts, it is also coordi-

nated and organized such that its elements will be orchestrated into a

harmonized whole. So the body is first broken into pieces, and then it is

reassembled into an ensemble that must give a unified performance. We

have already seen that the hands must match up with the passage delivered.

This is the harmony of movement and text. But the body should also

correspond to itself, its parts moving together and harmoniously. For ex-

ample, one's flanks have this task imposed upon them: they ought to be in

concord with the other gesturing taking place (11.3.122). A more elaborate

package of movements can be seen in the following: "A restrained voice,

moderate gestures, a toga resting on the shoulder, and a slight motion of

the trunk from side to side while the eyes turn to face in the same direction

will often be becoming."37 This whole passage contains collections of other

coordinated movements, looks, voices, and gestures: a variety of little

scenes have been staged,38 offering not only examples of good bodies but

also consolidating the principle of careful coordination of all of the body's

lately discovered parts.

To this carefully orchestrated harmony of this body, Quintilian opposes

a variety of bodily failings. At 11.3.160 Quintilian enumerates a number of

errors of excess. In these instances, the speaker apparently seeks to be a

78 STAGING MASCULINITY

good and serious man, but instead comes off as too severe and takes himself

too seriously. The stance and face become hardened and harsh. The care-

fully poised body becomes bent out of its proper shape. The well-placed feet

drift apart. These affectations are all intended to make the spectator take the

orator and his passions seriously, but they dispel the "easy" and "natural"

gravity that Quintilian recommends. The ideal oratorical body, a body that is

taken seriously by an audience, thus conforms to Bourdieu's schema

wherein the body is "something that one is." This presence should appear

neither artificial nor intemperate, neither sterile and contrived nor wild and

undisciplined.

The practice of rhetorical theory compromises this goal of naturalism:

nature is always supplemented by labor. However, some supplements defy

nature and dispel the illusion of presence: the vir bonus disappears, and a

fidgeting Greek or a terrifying ogre appears in his place (11.3.160). Proper

supplements, though, allow for the improvement of nature and the realiza-

tion of one's destiny. In this sense, more knowledge of the body is easily

joined to the goal of a more natural and true body. Since this true body is

always a socially true body, a body is true precisely to the extent that its

investment in the social space is and can be taken seriously. This knowl-

edge produces more effects of power in the same gesture that it effaces the

traces of power from the surface of the body. This effacement renders the

effects of power as part of the register of the natural and true. Put differ-

ently, this is the production of natura in the space of discipline's cura. This

time we have more labor producing more nature and the obverse of the

situation described above.

Several of the preceding examples from Quintilian open up the theme

of space in general. The movement of the orator's body through space is a

carefully regulated affair. His gestures should have boundaries; his steps

should be kept within certain limits; his left and right halves must be

carefully regulated. It is not enough, then, to successfully control one's

voice and face or use the fingers on one hand skillfully. These expressive

motions must themselves be deployed within delineated spatial boundaries.

Keeping in mind the notion that the space of the body is an enactment

of social categories, we can see that bounding and limiting the movement

of the orator is another version of keeping the orator in character and

ensuring that his use of the social space is in accordance with his social

station and gravity. We have already seen above the problems surrounding

the hands. The hand must keep within certain clearly defined spatial bound-

aries. Traversing these lines ruins good oratory. The same will be true of

other parts of the body. Everywhere the orator's body is bounded by lines

of decorum, defining, constraining, and restraining him. Does he overstep

his spatial boundary, he fails to be a good man. In order to become more

DISCOVERING THE BODY 79

fully the master of both himself and the space in which he deploys his body,

the orator turns to the supplement of the text.

A great deal of labor is expended on the task of seeing to it that the left

and right sides of the body behave appropriately. 39 The stakes accordingly

must be rather high. In fact, if we examine Greek medical writings, it

would appear that the left/right problem is one that participates in the

division of sexes. Bourdieu has already prepared us to see homologies and

parallels imposed upon and between such paradigms and divisions as left/

right, up/down and male/female. In the medical tradition, the male child is

the product of the right side of the womb, and the female the product of the

left side. In one passage, several elements of the body are set against one

another along a rigid correspondence between left and female and right

and male:

1va Luv JtXELo'tv EXEL TLtObg, OpOacbg& 6iog, tavtcL tov xitw,

xac Ott E !tE VXE tOLOL &E LOLL tL LQOEVa.

[The right breast and eye, and it is the same with the lower parts of

the body; moreover male children are sown in the right part of the

body.]

(Hippocrates, Epidemics 2.6.15)

The association of the female with the left side fits in nicely with the careful

regulation of the left side by the orator. If the orator is consigned to always

being male, then he accordingly must take precautions when performing to

use this side of his body properly.

The place of the left foot in one's posture is an important affair. Putting

one's weight on the wrong foot or putting the wrong foot forward is not

tolerated. The left foot may be put slightly forward, but parallel feet are

preferred (11.3.159). If you put your right foot forward, do not gesture with

your right hand (11.3.125). Of course, since gestures with the left hand

alone have been forbidden (11.3.114), anyone standing with his right foot

forward has boxed himself into something of a corner. Putting weight on the

right foot is occasionally acceptable, but this is a rather comic movement

(11.3.125). And if your weight is on your left foot, do not raise up your right

foot or stand on your toes (11.3.125). And once the feet have been properly

planted, it is important not to rock back and forth upon them, vacillating

before your audience (11.3.128), as this is indecorous (indecora).

In general the body as a whole should maintain an even and erect

posture such as the use of the adjective rectus has recommended. Most

deviations from a stationary position held on a line perpendicular to the

ground are condemned: as with the vacillation described above, tossing the

80 STAGING MASCULINITY

shoulders around must be prevented at all costs, even at the price of self-

mortification (11.3.130). Walking around is only permitted where there are

many judges and you wish to put some fire into each of them individually

(11.3.130). Bending away to talk to friends or assistants is improper and

makes one appear more as a patron than an orator (11.3.131). Inclining

toward a judge is acceptable only where one gives instruction on an ob-

scure point, while bending toward an opposing advocate is overly hostile

(11.3.132). And it is precious to fall into the arms of attendants unless truly

exhausted (11.3.132). These affectations will all be received like a dash of

cold water by the judges (11.3.133).

Quintilian's explanation of the situation provides only prohibitions

and threatened consequences while omitting any governing logic. In all of

these instances, though, it would appear that the proper body occupies for

the most part a carefully circumscribed space and follows a stable and

upright line. Deviations from this line can dispel the efficacy of the stage

presence of the orator as vir bonus.40 Only by knowing his body and its

parts and then carefully bounding them can the orator become and remain

what he must be. Within these lines he is a good man and beyond them he

is nothing or worse.

Many entries are excluded from the orator's bodily lexicon, or if they are

allowed, it is with the implied tag, vulg. or colloq. As Bourdieu says of so-

called popular language, "The notion of 'popular speech' is one of the

products of the application of dualistic taxonomies which structure the

social world according to the categories of high and low" (1991, 93). In

other words, these vulgar or illegitimate gestures are admitted only so that

they may then be made to bear the trace of the principle and structure of

domination that excludes them from the register of the proper. One of the

primary actions of Quintilian's text is the reinscription of the body as a

terrain divided, a space populated by authorized or unauthorized and ac-

cordingly abjected sounds and movements. For example, we learn that gait

reveals station (11.3.112); drawing in one's neck is servile (11.3.83); the

head must not be barbarously inclined (11.3.69); and the movements as a

whole should seem martial, not taken from the stage (1.11.18). The task of

Quintilian's student is to examine his own body after these same principles,

to cleanse from his person these unauthorized traces of other and illegiti-

mate selves. This situation produces an obsession with the meaning of the

body as social meaning and concomitantly an obsession with securing one's

own body as meaning what it must mean. The student of oratory, the

student who is assumed to be a vir bonus yet who is also always in the

process of laboring to produce and reproduce for himself and others this

being, looks into himself, discovers a body that is not necessarily either

DISCOVERING THE BODY 81

good or manly, and sets to work disciplining his body and excising from it

these illegitimate elements.

The orator's voice is a virtual microcosm of the social world.41 The

training of the voice, accordingly, is the disciplining of this aspect of the

body such that the voice rings out with the tones of a vir bonus and no

others. If one plays on the passage cited above where the voice rings as it is

struck, then the training of the voice contributes to the socially recognized

illusion that there is a manly essence striking the vocal chords and lending

them its tones.

The care of the voice begins with good eating habits: observing and

watching one's diet is important, because one has need of a voice that is

fortis (11.3.23). The positive description of the voice is centered around

virility and manliness. Fortis means healthy, strong, or brave. When ap-

plied to a man as a whole, a virfortis, the adjective forms a collocation with

the noun that means "war hero." The adjective, then, can be translated as

simply referring to the physical health or vigor of the voice, but this would

be an undertranslation. The term is readily used to make the voice the

voice of a good and manly man. This voice is going to be the voice of a

rugged and hardy performer and not that of a prissy voice professional, a

phonascius. The phonascius has a soft and tender voice (molli teneraque),

while the orator is a man of hard study and hard labor, a man who toughs it

out and breaks a sweat (in sudata veste durandum). The voice is fortis once

again at 11.3.64, where it is used in exhortations or calls to action

(adhortationibus). The function of exhortation is a hegemonic one, and the

adjective fortis in its more martial or virile associations "naturally" adheres

to the situation.

Not surprisingly, then, the negative description of the voice is con-

structed around failures of manliness and authority. Already in 11.3.23 we

have seen that the fortis voice was opposed to a soft and delicate one. This

softness is the softness of effeminacy, and mollis when applied to another

man is intended to be as hostile and unflattering as the use of the term fairy

is today. Quintilian concludes in 11.3.24 from his arguments of 11.3.23 that

"accordingly we should not soften our voice with delicacies nor let it be-

come steeped in those habits it might desire. No, its training should be like

its use. . . . it should be made sturdy by practice."42 It requires an act of

will to train the body: it would like to go soft; one must get it used to hard

labor. As with the parts, so does Quintilian argue of the whole: the adjec-

tive mollis makes another appearance when the sum of performance is

discussed: "One must flee like the plague a mollis delivery, such as Cicero

says Titius had. Because of it a certain sort of dance was even called the

Titius."43

This advice is practical for being first ethical. The delights that would

82 STAGING MASCULINITY

not be part of the public life of a vir bonus are forbidden his voice as well.

In other words, he is always in character, even when he is offstage.

Moreover, this character is predicated on renunciation, renunciation of

pleasure and the feminine. And this renunciation extends not just to his

personal habits and practices, but also to his treatment of individual ele-

ments of his body.

The voice needs constant protection against the gender troubles that

assail it. The orator, in order to ensure the good care of his voice (vocis

bona cura) needs "a solid body lest our voice be attenuated down to the

meagerness of eunuchs, women, and the infirm."44 This solid body "is

provided by walks, rubdowns, sexual abstinence, ready digestion, in other

words, frugality."45 If the voice strays from its manly ideal there ensues a

corresponding corruption of the body. The threat is specifically sexual:

castration and effeminacy must be avoided. And then another term is

added, illness. Now we can see another trope of authority: the orators are

good men and good speakers because they are healthy, they are not defec-

tive like women or eunuchs. The path to securing this good health and

manliness, though, requires "frugality." This observation and modulation

of the whole of one's life again has sexuality introduced into it: sexual

abstinence secures for the man a manly voice. By refusing carnal love, the

orator gains sublime pleasures from his fellow men: he has the satisfaction

of properly gratifying them.

A regime of discipline is again invoked as a safeguard to a fallible

nature. Without discipline, a man may lose even his gender. Quintilian

describes good pronunciation and the proper use of the voice in some detail

in 11.3.30-32. This passage is a veritable fugue on the sociology of the

voice and the sociological dangers that adhere to it. All of the threats and

dangers are piled on at once, and we see that not only gender, but even

one's place within the city of Rome is always in jeopardy. Only discipline

will prevent such a catastrophe, and this discipline is explicitly predicated

on self-denial: pleasure and indulgence threaten one's being, while regula-

tion and abstinence offer by way of pain and refusal the legitimate joys of

being a good man. Sexuality keeps recurring in this scene, but it is always

hustled offstage. Still, in the process the vir bonus has been sexualized even

if his is a love that dare not speak its name.

Much as was the case for the orator's voice, Quintilian restricts his

expression of approval for the body as a whole to a limited set of terms,

terms that themselves closely parallel those of the voice. And we again find

that these terms are opposed to a set of socially exclusionary ones. The

semblance of autonomous aesthetic purity in the first case should not oc-

clude the fact that this independence is predicated upon a prior act of

vigorous erasure made in the social register.

DISCOVERING THE BODY 83

The evaluation of performance returns again and again to the trope of

deauthorization and silencing. There are legitimate bodies and then those

that fall short of the status required to receive a hearing in the political

space. Not surprisingly, the deauthorization of gestures extends to rival

authors and orators. Attacks on their teachings are necessarily attacks on

the bodies they recommend. And the substance of the attack remains the

threat of political impotence produced by a failure to manifest the body

borne by those who belong to the hegemonic classes:

Vitia quoque earum subicienda sunt, quae quidem accidere etiam

exercitatis actoribus solent. Nam gestum poculum poscentis aut

uerbera minantis aut numerum quingentorum flexo pollice efficientis,

quae sunt a quibusdam scriptoribus notata, ne in rusticis quidem uidi.

[Failed uses of the hands must also be given. These failures can even

befall practiced pleaders. For I have never even seen a bumpkin make

the gesture of a man demanding a cup or threatening a beating or

making the number five hundred by bending the thumb, although

these gestures have been described by certain writers.]

(Quintilian 11.3.117)

The orator is never free from the threat of bodily failure. Even practiced

hands may go astray. Furthermore, the authority of other handbooks and

other authors cannot be trusted: their gestures may be worse than gauche

and rustic; the technical literature teems with gestures of its own fancy;

don't believe everything you read. We ought to entertain some of the same

considerations when reading this practiced authority as well.

One likewise sees here an issue that will later be explored in more

detail: these gestures described in 11.3.117 all seem to be very explicit or

vivid, miming the very thing that they represent. In other words, not even a

rube would pantomime his meaning with his gestures. This argument will

be redeployed with as much spleen and more elsewhere in Quintilian's text

when he is discussing the relationship between the actor and the orator.

Set against these effetes and boors is the man of the city, the good

Roman. Yet urbanity is not merely a neutral nor even a positive quality. In

these same passages we have been discussing, the use of the term urbanus

and its derivatives occurs only in hostile contexts. Thus the good man in his

charmed circle is also always a man on the attack, actively protecting his

exclusive territory. Quintilian's text marks out the space of the urbane as a

place where one man assaults another, cutting at his opponents' perfor-

mance, authenticity, and authority. 46

The two occurrences of the adverb urbane in Quintilian's discussion of

84 STAGING MASCULINITY

delivery are both found in contexts where Quintilian lauds a witticism of

one Roman made at the expense of another.47 Thus in 11.3.126 Verginius

Flavos asks an opponent who is moving around too much, how many miles

he had declaimed that day. Here we find the punitive side of the regulation

of space from above: too much movement leaves you ridiculous. At the

same time, the man who punishes the transgressor and launches the barb

that reveals the offense for all to see wins his own title: he is urbane. He

wins his claims to recognition when someone else loses theirs. Similarly in

11.3.133 space is violated, a man is ridiculed, and another is praised. The

rule of not crossing over toward the opposing counsel's bench is being laid

down. Quintilian illustrates his law with an anecdote wherein Cassius

Severus urbanely demands that boundary lines be put down on the ground

to ward off an opponent's advances. The barb makes the adversary's meta-

phorical assault on his space into a literal one. It also shows the fellow

boorish in that he needs a physical line to point out to him the proper

spatial bounding of the Roman orator.

The man of the city is always hostile, sneering and jabbing at his

opponents. The vir bonus may be socially good, but this goodness is se-

cured via constant aggression. Likewise, Quintilian's own text with its

eternal attacks on failed bearing and movement constructs the vir bonus via

this same aggression. Quintilian assaults his readers' bodies, beating them

into manly shape and threatening transgressors with castration and exile: if

I speak without following Quintilian's dictates, I might not be urbane or I

might appear soft. For the orator the aggression by which he forcibly

distinguishes himself from ordinary men always leads back to himself, as

the next chapter will argue explicitly. The orator is enjoined to turn his

aggression outward in order to confront the rest of the world with it. For

example, in the preceding passage, the rules of space that the orator im-

poses upon himself must also be forced upon the rest of the world. Those

who cross the lines that are invisibly or visibly laid down thereby reveal

themselves impotent and illegitimate.

The more the body is discovered, the more footholds there are for this

kind of thinking and this kind of assault. The knowledge of the body that is

herein produced is a knowledge that is used to provide an orthopedics and

correction. Yet with this correction there comes pruning and excision. The

self is taken as the principle of its own domination. The body is invested

with a soul and populated with it. But only by strict and rigid disciplining of

this same body can the validity of the soul be secured. This body thus

becomes the prison of the soul, though this same soul is charged with

policing its own prison.48 We will never get to a first principle by following

these logical gyrations. Instead one should note the relationships in gen-

DISCOVERING THE BODY 85

eral. There is an injunction to more knowledge of the body and closer

observation, yet this knowledge produces more insecurity than confidence.

So much, then, for the orator's body. The manual on training has no

simple or direct value. After reading Quintilian, one does not walk away a

consummate orator, a Cicero or a Demosthenes. A vocabulary of the body

is learned, but this new language is not one of simple analysis and descrip-

tion, nor is it even a vocabulary comprised of precepts aimed at helping an

orator be more clear in his movements or his pronunciation of words such

that whatever meaning might be conveyed, it is conveyed more effectively.

Instead the description and analysis of the body are at once and inseparably

fused with a social morality and invested with profound ontological conse-

quences. The social stakes invested in the body result in a body that is

always in a state of negotiation. The body cannot be left alone to mean

what it may. Instead the body and its relationship to the self and world

needs to be constantly thought and rethought: Is that speaker a good man?

Is he acting like one? Does he have the hands of a good man? Do his words

match his gestures? Does his voice or his stance reveal him to be a woman

or a rustic? One asks these aggressive questions not only of others but also

of oneself: Am I a good man?

Quintilian's text relies heavily on the imputation of being to the soul of

the good man, and Quintilian uses this soul as the agent that gives form to

the unruly mass of the body. Yet Quintilian's own arguments destabilize the

centered subject. By opening up logical paradoxes, the cura/natura formula-

tion compromises the vision of a subject who is the author of his own

meanings. Nature requires labor and labor fulfills nature. This is straight

out of Aristotle: TExv helps 1patg achieve itself fully. But labor and

labor's observation have a way of producing more or different natures,

particularly when illegitimate morphologies are discovered within the ora-

tor's own body. The problem of labor makes nature an open and un-

closeable category. The vir bonus can never fully consolidate his being

because of the infinite quality of his labor.

Quintilian cannot be read as a simple guide to good voice and gestures.

Quintilian's descriptions always act as prescriptions. In the course of his

discussion, Quintilian is creating a body and legislating its bearing and mean-

ings. This technology of the self serves not to describe but to create and

control a masculine body and a relationship to that body. The instructions he

offers serve to help construct the orator as a certain sort of social agent as set

against and above other members of society. The social place of the orator in

the Roman world is secured as part of a thoroughgoing corporeal project.

With the consolidation of his gender, so also does the orator find in the same

moment the sanctity of his station. Moreover, the truth of the gendered body

86 STAGING MASCULINITY

cannot be dissociated from these other truths, as the station of a man be-

comes conflated with the virility of station per se. The labor of this discovery

of the body, accordingly, is more than a theoretical one; it is also immanently

practical and has important worldly consequences.

With his arguments on labor, Quintilian points toward Butler's theses

on the body. Butler has insisted on a performativity that acts as a process

that is necessarily enacted over time. And the performative subject is an

accretion formed via these iterations. Furthermore, the possibility and

consequences of performative failure are the same for both Butler and

Quintilian: the subject's very being is at stake. Quintilian, though, sets

himself up as a guardian against the queerness that Butler is glad to see

ever waiting in the wings.

Quintilian's panopticism, his observation and discipline, have done

nothing to render impossible the bodies and souls he fears. His scopic

mechanism acts to reproduce the secure male, but in so doing it also

constantly reproduces the possibility of its failure and points out sites of

and for contestation. Quintilian's technology of the self and the truth

games of the body that he teaches are not decisive ones: there is not an end

to study and a good man who thereupon emerges. Instead this whole

process is successful only in reproducing itself and its anxieties. This analyt-

ics becomes the site of a labor designed to secure being, but a labor that is

always ready to fail, a labor that can never be completed, and a labor that

could always be queered.

In subsequent chapters we will explore some of the critical avenues

down which thought on the body travels. The orator's relationship to actors

is used to consolidate his own impossible presence. The problem of plea-

sure and the excitement that the speaker's body provokes and arouses is in

its own way the retelling of the problem of unwanted sociology from the

standpoint of a morality of desire. And finally there is the question of good

society and good pleasures, the construction of the secure space into which

this contested body may at last and after infinite labor be fitted. The

orator's body is no product of nature but instead a project and a process.

There is no fact of the body. The body is always a body seen and evaluated,

a body performing profound truths. And this body cannot be left to per-

form these vital truths on its own.

CHAPTER 3

Self-Mastery

QUINTILIAN OPENS HIS INSTITUTIO ORATORIA with a confession that his

work does not aspire to novelty. Indeed, many of the finest minds of both

Greece and Rome have already treated oratory in great detail (1.pr.1).

And while Quintilian despairs of being able to contribute much of original-

ity, he does propose to offer his own judgment when various authors have

written variously on the same topic (1.pr.2).1 Where the basic contents are

concerned, then, Quintilian has made very restricted claims. Yet, so far as

the scope of his discussion is concerned, Quintilian will pretend to original-

ity: his predecessors too readily assume that their readers are already ac-

complished in every other variety of learning and are now only putting the

finishing touches upon their education. Furthermore, these authors either

scorn the pursuit of these lesser studies as falling beneath the level of their

own pursuits, or, as Quintilian thinks is the more likely case, they shun

describing activities that, though necessary, are far removed from ostenta-

tion and the favor that they hope to win for themselves (1.pr.4). Quintilian

aims to lead the prospective orator from both his own swaddling clothes

and those of the art all the way to the summit of oratory (1.pr.7): nothing

will be omitted. The orator will not just need to have a mastery of rhetori-

cal techniques and tropes, he will also have to be a good man, or vir bonus,

and to possess every virtue of the soul (1.pr.9).

Oratory is first and foremost a moral virtue, not a mere technique of

speaking. After expatiating upon the moral and philosophical demands

made upon the orator, Quintilian concludes with the following somewhat

striking remark:

Sit igitur orator uir talis qualis uere sapiens appellari possit, nec mori-

bus modo perfectus (nam id mea quidem opinione, quamquam sunt

qui dissentiant, satis non est), sed etiam scientia et omni facultate

dicendi; qualis fortasse nemo adhuc fuerit, sed non ideo minus nobis

ad summa tendendum est: . . . Nam est certe aliquid consummata

eloquentia neque ad eam peruenire natura humani ingenii prohibet.

87

88 STAGING MASCULINITY

Quod si non contingat, altius tamen ibunt qui ad summa nitentur

quam qui praesumpta desperatione quo uelint euadendi protinus circa

ima substiterint.

[Thus, let the orator be such a man as can truly be called wise, not only

perfect in point of character (for this, in my opinion - though there are

those who disagree - is not enough), but also perfect in both his knowl-

edge and his capacity for every manner of speaking, a man such as

perhaps has yet to have lived. But we are not for this reason to aspire

the less toward this summit. . . . For there is surely such a thing as

consummate eloquence; and the nature of man's intellect does not

prohibit that one arrive at it. And even if this does not come to pass,

nevertheless they go higher who labor toward the summit than those

who, in despair of arriving where they wish, stop at once at the foot of

the mountain.]

(Quintilian 1.pr.18-20)

Two difficulties arise here. First, a rift between the relationship between

character (mores) and training has been exposed. Thus, even though Quin-

tilian makes the former a necessary but not sufficient quality, a quality that

the orator must possess in order that he may be a "perfect" orator, others

seem to think that a good character is itself the only important quality to

possess.2 That is, the performance of a good character - in the sense of a

performance made by such a character and a performance that is likewise a

revelation and manifestation of a good character - is all that such men

would demand of the orator. Second, though Quintilian will prescribe the

regimen to be imposed upon and subsequently assumed by the orator from

his earliest childhood all the way through to his dotage, none of these

injunctions guarantee ultimate success. Indeed, it would seem that there

has yet to have been an orator as good as one is commanded to become.

It is precisely at this moment of difficulty that I would like to take up

the problem of authenticity in Quintilian. Or, rather, I would like to exam-

ine how this text describes and prescribes a regime that will produce an

authentic and efficacious subject who will be able to lay exclusive claim to

the title of orator.3 Moreover, by assigning the highest military, religious,

and political roles to the orator, Quintilian ensures that this already prized

social category is recognized as an exhaustive category in the sense that it

tends to appropriate to itself all of the other hegemonic social functions

(see, e.g., Quintilian 12.1.25ff.). In other words, the good orator is merged

with the socially good man. At the same time, though, this positive content

is founded upon a number of exclusionary injunctions.

Although these issues extend throughout the tradition of rhetorical

literature and throughout the text of Quintilian himself, I would like to

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89

here focus on them in relation to performance. It is in performance that

one acts out this authentic essence, that one performs the vir bonus; here it

is exposed and evaluated, appreciated or derided. This performance,

though, will require the most thorough attention to detail and the most

thorough self-regulation. Here Quintilian often appeals to Demosthenes as

his example of successful self-mastery. Quintilian deploys the example of

Demosthenes in these sections to transform the Greek pleader into the

ideal image of self-domination. We will see that this is a domination that

has both paranoid and masochistic qualities, yet a domination that is never-

theless a necessary precondition of the assumption of the persona of the

elite Roman male. Even in the notion of a persona, though, we already

find an image saturated with the themes of performance: in Latin persona is

not just personal "character" but also the mask that a character on the

stage wears, a mask that is stylized and revelatory of character. Becoming a

good man implies learning to assume one's own face as a mask. We ought

to look closely into the psychic life of the rhetorical theater.

Oratorical performance is ideally the performance of the vir bonus. This

performance is not merely the donning of a mask or semblance, but a

performance that ought to lend credence to the notion of a truth, of an

essence underlying appearances. Thus one is in a sense making manifest

to the world a soul, a fact of the person. Similarly, this soul needs to be

seen and appreciated by other souls, by other Romans. One assumes of

this audience as well that they are who they seem to be, that they are not

mere masks, but are instead "real," authentic people. The orator requires

of his audience an existence in relation to which he can establish his own

being. The existential qualities of the "I" in any statement of the form "I

am ..." is mediated by considerations of an other or others, consider-

ations of "you."

The problem of the soul and its relation to presentations and per-

formances is a tangled one in Quintilian. Let us, then, examine some of the

more relevant points of his treatment of the relationship between perfor-

mance and being. First, Quintilian makes this communion of affective

experiences relatively transparent provided that one's performance is satis-

factory. Good performance naturally penetrates into the inner man. In

fact, Quintilian seems to endorse a psychology in which external representa-

tions impinge upon the psychic realm automatically.:

Cum sit autem omnis actio, ut dixi, in duas diuisa partis, uocem

gestumque, quorum alter oculos, altera aures mouet, per quos duos

sensus omnis ad animum penetrat adfectus, prius est de uoce dicere,

cui etiam gestus accommodatur.

90 STAGING MASCULINITY

[All performance is, as I have said, divided into two parts, voice and

gesture: the one moves the eyes, while the other moves the ears; and it

is through these two senses that every affect (adfectus) penetrates into

the soul. It is our first task to speak of the voice, to which the gestures

are also accommodated.]

(Quintilian 11.3.14)

Adfectus is a complex word. It is used abstractly to describe a mental or

emotional state or cast of mind where one could render the term in English

with "emotions" or "passions." Quintilian, though, is speaking broadly: the

senses are the royal road down which travel mental conditions on their way

to the soul. Quintilian posits a progress into the psyche of external images:

the world of semblances animates our own mental life. The politics of

forms and the legislation of appearances accordingly shape our internal

experience.

Whose affects are we talking about here? The performer's body stirs

the senses, and then this motion itself stirs up the journey of affect into the

soul. Clearly the sentiment the spectator feels is in a sense given to him by

the performance. A poor performance will interrupt this communication,

but a fitting one will effect a sort of emotional mastery upon the auditor/

spectator:

Habet autem res ipsa (pronuntiatio) miram quandam in orationibus

uim ac potestatem: neque enim tam refert qualia sint quae intra

nosmet ipsos composuimus quam quo modo efferantur: nam ita

quisque ut audit mouetur.

[Yet the matter itself (pronuntiatio) has a certain marvelous force and

potency in orations; and what sort of things we compose within our-

selves matters little relative to the manner in which these things are

brought forth: for as each hears, so is he moved.]

(Quintilian 11.3.2)

Proofs avail naught if they are not attended by vehement assertion on the

part of the speaker.4 A man composes thoughts within himself, but his per-

formance must also arouse the senses of his audience. The images that stir

within have to be so shaped as to appear without and thereby to penetrate

into the heart and mind of another. Where the senses are unmoved, the

affects do not move toward the spectator's soul. The precise mechanism of

communication does not preoccupy Quintilian, and the problems entailed

by this movement of meaning from one psyche to another are seldom much

to the fore. Quintilian routinely represents communication as a problem of

delivery alone: "The voice, like an intermediary, will give to the souls of

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91

judges that disposition it receives from us" (sic uelut media uox, quem

habitum a nostris acceperit, hunc iudicum animis dabit) (11.3.62).

In a similar observation, Quintilian proceeds to document the affective

force of this passion on the part of the speaker, but he also withdraws a bit

from the simple maxim of "as each hears, so is he moved" as championed

at 11.3.2. Instead, he restates his position in terms of a fallible (positive)

transmission of passions. Moreover, leaving a listener cold is always easy:

adfectus omnes languescant necesse est, nisi uoce, uultu, totius prope

habitu corporis inardescunt. Nam cum haec omnia fecerimus, felices

tamen si nostrum illum ignem iudex conceperit, nedum eum supini

securique moueamus ac non et ipse nostra oscitatione soluatur.

[The entire emotional content will necessarily languish unless it is

ablaze in the voice, the visage, in nearly the entire bearing of the body.

For though we have seen to all of this, we are nevertheless fortunate if

the judge takes up that fire of ours; and it's still less likely that we shall

move him if we are laid back and carefree, and our yawning will have a

soporific effect on the judge too.]

(Quintilian 11.3.2-3)

Even if the judge may not be kindled by the same flame that burns within

the speaker, the point to be noted here is that oratorical communication is

not merely one of compelling arguments and proofs, but also of inner

passions (adfectus). Before we were occupied with the audience's affects;

here we see that these are a function of emotions felt first by the speaker

himself. The emotions need to blaze in his physical bearing and voice.5

When these adfectus are clearly seen and heard, then they can move the

judge. If we make this passage and 11.3.2 coincide, then we are to imagine

the following series of events: first the speaker's soul conceives of an

adfectus. This feeling is next communicated to his body and voice. The

speaker delivers himself of his thoughts. Then the physical performance of

the speaker impinges upon the senses of the auditor. The auditor's sensory

experience produces an adfectus that corresponds to the original sentiment

as conceived by the speaker. This adfectus then makes its way into the

spectator's soul.

Such, then, is the ideal version of the interaction between the orator

and his audience. But there are many complexities within this portrait.

What about simulation or dissimulation? More importantly, what sort of

self-knowledge is required to coordinate the soul with the body, even

where a speaker is earnest? And what are the various social inflections that

must be evinced by a performance, and hence must also be resident within

92 STAGING MASCULINITY

the soul? Correspondingly, what must be seen in a performance of the soul

in order for us to recognize and give heed to the speaker?

Let us take up the problem of inauthentic performances first. Later we

will find Quintilian asserting that the surest way to represent a quality is to

actually possess it. And, in its own way, this notion underlies the entire

argument of Quintilian's twelfth and final book. In other words, authentic-

ity makes for the strongest argument. Even though authenticity may be the

surest way to moving the audience, simulation is not for that reason to be

discounted as a potentially effective tool. Take, for example, the case of

stage acting:

Quod si in rebus quas fictas esse scimus et inanes tantum pronuntiatio

potest ut iram lacrimas sollicitudinem adferat, quanto plus ualeat

necesse est ubi et credimus? Equidem uel mediocrem orationem com-

mendatam uiribus actionis adfirmarim plus habituram esse momenti

quam optimam eadem illa destitutam.

[If delivery has such an effect in matters that we know to be idle and

fictive that it provokes rage, tears, and anxiety, how much more must

its force be where we also believe? Indeed, I would assert that even a

mediocre speech recommended by the vigor of its delivery will have

more effect than a superlative one whose delivery has left it in the

lurch.]

(Quintilian 11.3.5)

Here Quintilian repeats an anecdote concerning Demosthenes, an anec-

dote that seems almost obligatory in a rhetorical treatise: Demosthenes is

asked what aspect of speaking was most important. He answers, "Deliv-

ery" (pronuntiatio). He gave as well the second and third prizes to delivery,

until he was no longer asked to assign rankings, such that he seems to have

judged delivery to be, not the most important quality, but the only one.6

The stakes involved in a discussion of delivery, then, are unambiguous.

No sentiment and no speech, no matter how well crafted, can hope to travel

from orator to audience without delivery. Furthermore, the affective con-

tent of the performance impinges upon the audience naturally in accordance

with the constitution of the human senses. Yet there is a twofold danger here.

First, an orator may fail to make the delivery of his speech equal to

the contents of his own soul. Second, and more significantly in its ultimate

consequences, the surface of the delivery may outstrip the contents of both

the sentiments and the character of the performer. It may fail to represent

what the orator is, presenting instead some unintended content that is like a

performative slip of the tongue, a peek into the unconscious. Such a reading

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93

follows from the arguments of the preceding chapter, provided that we now

read from the perspective of the inner man.

Quintilian's text will not grow too anxious over the question of vice

until the final book, where he vehemently, repeatedly, and hence uncon-

vincingly rejects the possibility of a bad man who is a good orator. Never-

theless, a moralized regulation of the contents and qualities of performance

follows immediately from Quintilian's construction of the situation: perfor-

mance engages questions of the soul, of the orator's and of his audience's.

The qualities manifested by a performance must be comprehended within a

certain regulated moral sphere that they may fill the audience with the

proper sentiments. Additionally, these proper sentiments will be appropri-

ately provoked only where the orator is manifesting himself as a vir bonus.7

Where we ourselves lack these sentiments that we aspire to provoke in

others, the most effective fiction will proceed from first propagating within

ourselves the appropriate mental images and then producing them at the

level of the body via voice and gestures:

lam enim tempus est dicendi quae sit apta pronuntiatio: quae certe ea

est quae iis de quibus dicimus accommodatur. Quod quidem maxima

ex parte praestant ipsi motus animorum, sonatque uox ut feritur: sed

cum sint alii ueri adfectus, alii ficti et imitati, ueri naturaliter erum-

punt, ut dolentium irascentium indignantium, sed carent arte ideoque

sunt disciplina et ratione formandi. Contra qui effinguntur imitatione,

artem habent; sed hi carent natura, ideoque in iis primum est bene

adfici et concipere imagines rerum et tamquam ueris moueri.

[It is now time for me to say what a fitting delivery is: a fitting delivery is

certainly that which is adapted to those things of which we are speaking.

For the most part this is produced by the very movements of our souls;

the voice rings as it is struck.8 But while some feelings are true and

others are fictive and imitated, the true ones burst forth naturally (for

example, those of men sorrowing, raging, or indignant), but they lack

art; and for this reason they need to be shaped by rational discipline and

training. On the other hand, the products of imitation, well, they have

art, but they lack nature; and for this reason in their case the first order

of business is to actually feel them, to conceive mental images of the

issues, and to be moved as if they were true.]

(Quintilian 11.3.61-62)

Notice that regardless of the direction from which one proceeds, starting

from either passion or indifference, artifice and sincerity must meet up for

a successful performance. The impassioned man needs to apply "disci-

pline" (disciplina) and "reason" (ratio) to his feelings, while the unengaged

94 STAGING MASCULINITY

speaker needs to agitate himself internally with affecting images of the

proper emotions. There is no radical distinction, then, between authentic-

ity and self-observation. For a man to communicate his true feelings, he

must discover and shape them. One cannot merely be what one is; a study

of the soul is required to coordinate our performances with our psyche.

Moreover, only a student of the mechanics of the soul can manipulate his

internal affects with the proper images such that he performs as he ought

to. And here one notes a clear affinity between the way the spectator is

meant to be influenced by watching the orator and the way in which an

orator stages an internal spectacle for himself that bestirs his soul: images

instruct the passions in both cases. A psychic spectacle precedes the exter-

nal one. It is perhaps not a good idea to ask precisely how the mental

apparatus must be divided up and compartmentalized such that all of this

can happen. Indeed, the construction of the Latin sentence is resolutely

unhelpful and impersonal. But this ambiguity of the mental apparatus is a

useful one even where it is not convincing: calculation and sentiment can-

not be ultimately disengaged.

Quintilian, as opposed to other authors of whom he is himself aware,

has mooted the question of authenticity. The "authentic" and perfect ora-

tor is a hybrid of nature and culture, or in his own words a hybrid of natura

and cura:

Sunt tamen qui rudem illam et qualem impetus cuiusque animi tulit

actionem iudicent fortiorem et solam uiris dignam, sed non alii fere

quam qui etiam in dicendo curam et artem et nitorem et quidquid

studio paratur ut adfectata et parum naturalia solent improbare, uel

qui uerborum atque ipsius etiam soni rusticitate, ut L. Cottam dicit

Cicero fecisse, imitationem antiquitatis adfectant. Verum illi persua-

sione sua fruantur, qui hominibus ut sint oratores satis putant nasci:

nostro labori dent ueniam, qui nihil credimus esse perfectum nisi ubi

natura cura iuuetur.

[Nevertheless, there are those who judge as more forceful and alone

worthy of a real man an artless delivery and one such as the impulse of

the individual's soul has produced. But these men are usually none

other than those who are wont to reproach in oratory care, art, splen-

dor, and whatever is procured via study, as being affected and not

natural enough; or else these fellows are the ones who strive to imitate

antiquity via the rusticity of their words and even of their very pronun-

ciation, as Cicero says Lucius Cotta did. If they think it is enough to be

born for a man to be an orator, they are entitled to their opinion. I

hope they will pardon my efforts, though, as I think that nothing is

perfect where nature is not supplemented by labor (cura).]

(Quintilian 11.3.10-11)

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95

Quintilian's presentation and critique of the other camp reproduces on

their side the very confusion of natura and cura that is an enabling condi-

tion for his own argument. These others, introduced by Quintilian's for-

mula of anonymity that expresses only existence (sunt qui. . .), appear to

be devotees of pure authenticity: they follow only the autonomous pulsions

of the spirit as a guide to expression. Yet these same men can often be

caught affecting antiquity by modulating their vocabulary and expression

so as to make it appear removed from common parlance. Quintilian's

characterization contains the barb that this remoteness is merely spatial

(rusticity) and not temporal (antiquity), where the former complaint in

aesthetic criticism is a traditional and devastating rejoinder to any aspira-

tions toward the latter quality: the rustic is a hick, whereas the ancients

have been hallowed.9 Quintilian's sarcasm is palpable as he states, "I hope

they will pardon my efforts." In the opposite camp we find such necessary

and desirable qualities as sanctity, authority, and virility, but no acknowl-

edgment of a cura that Quintilian nevertheless sees haunting their acts.

According to Quintilian, these others have a theory of oratory, and it

would be more honest to offer a systematic account of the art, such as he

provides.

Even as the question of sincerity becomes a vexed issue, those perfor-

mances that dispel the gravity of the oratorical moment must be avoided at

all costs. An example of this latter difficulty is seen in 11.3.58, where

Quintilian forbids a singing delivery:

Quid uero mouendis adfectibus contrarium magis quam, cum dolen-

dum irascendum indignandum commiserandum sit, non solum ab his

adfectibus, in quos inducendus est iudex, recedere, sed ipsam fori

sanctitatem tludorum talarium licentia soluere?

[What is less likely to stir emotions than when sorrow, rage, indigna-

tion, or pity are called for, not only to retreat from these emotions into

which the judge must be led, but even to dissolve the very sanctity of

the forum with the license of the (textual crux).1°]

Like all of Quintilian's violent prohibitions that are laden with sarcasm and

socially charged terms, one can assume that there were many who prided

themselves upon performing in precisely this "flawed" manner. For Quintil-

ian, though, while the place of speaking is a venue of emotion and passion,

it is also a circumscribed field that does not admit of foreign sentiments.

The orator is therefore an actor who is enjoined to play one, and only one,

part. We will explore this specific proposition in more detail in the next

chapter. The forum, then, is the stage upon which the orator plays out his

role; but this stage admits of only one kind of theater. In the preceding

96 STAGING MASCULINITY

chapter we saw that the orator's body was constrained to always be itself, a

manly and authoritative corporeality. Here this body meets its proper

venue. But more importantly, this venue, the forum and its stage pieces,

will become also the point to which the body from that chapter is always

aiming. The specter of the forum constrains the orator, both body and

soul-or, rather, as a bodily soul in the psychoanalytic sense-with its

imagined sanctity even when the orator is alone with himself. If he is to

be who he truly is, if he is to live his authoritative and manly essence, then

he also lives it as a man of the forum even when he is away from it. Thus

while Roman oratory teems with slurs made against opponents' private

peccadilloes, more "private" literature such as the letters of Pliny also

frequently mentions the necessity of living a serious and literary life when

away from the forum's public stage."11 The maxim that all the world is a

stage finds two crucial modifications in the case of the orator: for him this

stage is the forum, and so too is the very notion of this forum bound up

with the ordering of his psychic life.

Both authenticity and its compromised standing as an interpretive category

serve as structurally useful points to support the whole project of oratory

and the oratorical handbook. The gulf instituted between the soul of the

speaker and the soul of the audience, though traversable, can only be

bridged by an attention to the concrete aspects of the orator's public pres-

ence. Yet this imperative to attend to performance acts as an imperative to

a self-observation. Additionally, this self-observation depends upon living

up to the exigencies of an imagined audience. That is, in order to produce

the successful regime of self-presentation, the orator has to impose upon

himself a sort of inner guard that regulates the movement of the inner

affects toward the physical presentation. And the orator's "perfection" is a

function of the degree of success in the subjection of nature to study,

although Quintilian will call this same relationship an alliance rather than

mastery.

In any event, Quintilian's position echoes Beauvoir's famous maxim:

one is not born a man, one becomes one. Nature is in need of supplementa-

tion that the gulf between a socially prescribed destiny and an inadequate

natural dispensation may be closed. Notice that this labor is crucial and

explicit only in Quintilian's project: the partisans of the "natural" orator,

so far as their own professions are concerned, have a self-grounded, vigor-

ous, masculine subject (vir) who need only speak in order to manifest

himself as being just what he was born. This sort of subject defends the

notion of habitus as a mystified possession. But one does so in explicit

rejection of the sort of analysis that a critic like Quintilian brings to bear on

the body. Thus we once again find that the naive self-relation favored by

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97

Bourdieu so that he may read the habitus for its unacknowledged structur-

ings does not represent the state of affairs at Rome: one can only be

ignorant in the face of a competing discourse promising knowledge.

Quintilian has made a fatal observation against his opponents' position

on the grounds that it evinces an unacknowledged study and affectation.

Shifting our own critical vocabulary somewhat, though, we might consider

the distinction between the position of these men and that offered by

Quintilian as a difference between a group who presuppose an effortless

interpellation elsewhere and before and a critic who proposes a constant

and worried labor of hailings and self-addresses nevertheless designed to

secure the same ultimate subject. The dispute thus turns around the time

and the place of the names orator and man: is one always already a man,

living in a present guaranteed by an efficacious and divinely performative

prior hailing? Or is the relationship to the name man rather asymptotic, a

relationship of repeated efforts at self-naming?12 Here we would have a

sort of tragedy of the oratorical subject: he can only become who he must

be by embarking on a project that ensures that he can never actually exist.

Quintilian's orator needs to perform a self that is true to its gender,

class, privilege, and authority. So too must this orator explore himself in

order to perform himself. And the orator's fidelity to this self that he both

discovers and enacts comes at the price of rejecting or even abjecting

others who cannot presume to the perfect convergence of these traits. As

was discussed in the preceding chapter, the essence of the orator's status as

Roman, as man, as aristocrat, et cetera, is produced and performed at the

level of the body. The body matters and is made material, but the process

of bodily inscription and legibility has associated with it an elaborate tech-

nology of the inner man.

The engine driving this technology is cruelty. An orator's status is

under constant attack from his peers; and the precise grounding of this

status, its cultivation, and its defense are therefore vital issues to which the

orator as subject and self-subjected must attend. Quintilian assures his

reader that he can expect at any moment mockery and abuse from the

audience of his peers. The choice is either to torment oneself or submit to

tortures at the hands of others. Ultimately, of course, we will find Quintil-

ian to be the cruelest and most biting critic; and we will likewise find that

only by assuming this same cruelly critical perspective in relation to himself

will the orator be able to emend sufficiently his performance of the self.

Self-cruelty is the guarantor of the effective performance of impeccable

masculine authority.

Quintilian is happy to record some of the more memorable barbs in

the tradition of rhetorical handbooks that he might promote his own argu-

ments. But, by way of a brief external example, let me cite a recollection of

98 STAGING MASCULINITY

Seneca the Elder. Cassius Severus once told Seneca how he lost his pa-

tience with one Cestius, who was all the rage with the students of the day:

Memini me intrare scholam eius cum recitaturus esset in Milonem;

Cestius ex consuetudine sua miratus dicebat: si Thraex essem, Fusius

essem; si pantomimus essem, Bathyllus essem, si equus, Melissio. Non

continui bilem et exclamavi: si cloaca esses, maxima esses. Risus

omnium ingens; scholastici intueri me, quis essem qui tam crassas

cervices haberem. Cestius Ciceroni responsurus mihi quod responderet

non invenit, sed negavit se executurum nisi exissem de domo. Ego

negavi me de balneo publico exiturum nisi lotus essem.

[I recall that I entered his school when he was going to make a reading

against (Cicero's) Milo. As usual, Cestius was full of himself; he was

saying: "If I were a gladiator, I would be Fusius; if I were a panto-

mime, I would be Bathyllus, if I were a horse, I would be Melissio." I

didn't restrain my gall, and I cried out, "If you were a sewer, you

would be the city's central." Everyone laughed loudly. The rhetoric

students looked at me to find out who was this fellow who was such a

boor. Cestius, who was going to make a response to Cicero, did not

find an answer for me; he said he would not continue unless I left his

house. I said that I would not leave a public bathhouse unless I were

washed.]

(Seneca Maior, Controversiae 3.pr.16)

This is all happening after Cicero's death. Cestius attracts followers with

his replies to the published speeches of Cicero. Severus has just com-

plained that students will not even read Cicero's speeches except those to

which Cestius had replied. The well-timed interruption made by Severus is

formulated as an attack on the speaker's performance such that this perfor-

mance is desanctified and looses its patina of authority. It is not so much

that Cestius will not continue with his performance; rather, he cannot

continue while the man who makes him into a laughable sewer is standing

in front of him. The slur dispels the illusion of manly, aristocratic, emo-

tional presence and instead reinscribes the performance in the register of

the ridiculous and subpolitical.13 Some in the audience may think the inter-

ruption somewhat thick-headed, but this does not keep it from being effec-

tive. Severus has ensured that there will be no oratory or orators in this

salon become bathhouse. The air of sanctity borrowed from the forum has

been dispelled.

In order to deploy his own prescriptive tenets, Quintilian evokes anec-

dotes containing similar charges being leveled against various orators. But

in this case Quintilian is not a precocious young man who deflates a pomp-

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99

ous windbag and his turgid rhetorical figures. Quintilian speaks as a master

to his students. He threatens and ridicules their bodies in the name of good

rhetoric and the forum's gravity:

Procursio oportuna breuis moderata rara conueniet: iam et ambulatio

quaedam propter immodicas laudationum moras, quamquam Cicero

rarum incessum neque ita longum probat. Discursare uero et, quod

Domitius Afer de Sura Manlio dixit, "satagere" ineptissimum: ur-

baneque Flauus Verginius interrogauit de quodam suo antisophiste

quot milia passum declamasset.

[Stepping forward will be appropriate, but only if it is well-timed, a

short, measured distance, and infrequent; and sometimes one walks to

and fro because the audience's applause can produce lengthy delays,

even though Cicero says that one should do this rarely and not traverse

much space. But it is totally incompetent to run around and about or,

as Domitius Afer said of Manilius Sura, "to bustle." And Flavus

Verginius cleverly asked of a certain opposing speaker how many miles

he had declaimed.]

(Quintilian 11.3.126)

The invocation of bustling by Domitius Afer changes the scene from the

political arena to the comic stage by using a verb (satagere) associated with

farce. Flavus Verginius in his turn transforms his opponent's performance

into a pompous hike, thus converting the delivery into a ridiculous spec-

tacle and a mere rhetorical showpiece (declamare) rather than a vehicle of

affective communion between performer and audience. What one snide

Roman once said of another's body Quintilian now repeats as universal

prohibitions applicable to all bodies that would aspire to excellence. Of

similar spirit are the following jabs:

Reprehendenda et illa frequens et concitata in utramque partem

nutatio, quam in Curione patre inrisit et lulius, quaerens quis in luntre

loqueretur, et Sicinius: nam cum adsidente collega, qui erat propter

ualetudinem et deligatus et plurimis medicamentis delibutus, multum

se Curio ex more iactasset, "numquam," inquit, "Octaui, collegae tuo

gratiam referes, qui nisi fuisset, hodie te istic muscae comedissent."

[One must reproach as well that constant and agitated bobbing from

side to side that Julius derided in the elder Curio, asking who was

speaking in a skiff. Sicinius mocked it as well: Curio's colleague sat at

his side, and the man was bandaged up and smeared with a good

number of medicines owing to ill health. Meanwhile Curio was as

usual throwing himself around a great deal. Accordingly Sicinius

100 STAGING MASCULINITY

said, "Octavius, you will never be able to thank your colleague

enough: if he weren't here, today the flies would have devoured you

where you sat."]

(Quintilian 11.3.129)

The plight of Curio puts further twists on the problems Quintilian has

been addressing. Suppose an orator is ardent, and the images have kindled

up his own soul, but his performance errs. It need not even fail outright;

rather, it only has to be susceptible to a successful ridiculous redefinition by

another performer. The orator needs to be able to foresee every potential

attack. He needs to adopt a self-reflective stance if only to anticipate and

thus to eliminate any assailable points of his delivery. The authenticity of

his ardor is not sufficient, and another blow has been struck against those

theorists who would have a man only be born to be an orator. Thus, if one's

passions lead to an overly agitated performance, this same performance

can be reread by hostile members of the audience in such a way as to

expose the performance as not having been one of an aristocratic and

manly essence, but to have been instead the comic ravings of some

boatsman or the like.

Thus, one is assured, it is only by a thorough and continuous self-

mastery that one can succeed in being what one is. In order to consolidate

this point, recourse is often made to Demosthenes, a man declared to have

been one of the two greatest orators to have ever lived. In fact Demosthenes

himself was once afflicted with the agitated performative style of a Curio.

Demosthenes is said to have corrected this fault in his own delivery by

menacing himself with a spear while practicing, such that only by keeping his

movements moderated would he avoid its prick (Quintilian 11.3.120).

While Cicero, his precepts, and his speeches all serve as an invaluable

store for Quintilian, Demosthenes is in his own way a more useful figure.

There are no technical works preserved under Demosthenes' name; and

Quintilian only has Demosthenes' speeches and certain anecdotes that have

the orator's name attached to them. While a study of Quintilian's use of

the speeches of Demosthenes would be interesting in its own right,14 let

us take up instead the problem of Quintilian's use of anecdotes about Demos-

thenes. We are dealing not with a real Demosthenes but with an exemplary

Demosthenes. These anecdotes are deployed as emblems of the proper

discipline to be observed that one might equal and eventually surpass this

orator who is at one point called "the leader by far and almost the law of

orating" at Athens (longe princeps. . . ac paene lex orandi) (10.1.76).

Of course, one does not easily attain to the condition of the law. First,

Quintilian's generosity to Demosthenes should not be seen as obligatory.

Plutarch's biography of the orator includes some critical remarks on De-

SELF-MASTERY

101

mosthenes' style of delivery attributed to Eratosthenes and to Demetrius of

Phaleron. This master of delivery was accused of frenzied, Bacchic perfor-

mances and performances that appealed to the vulgar masses rather than

the better sort of citizen (Plutarch, Demosthenes 9.4, 11.3). Obviously the

politics of delivery remains remarkably consistent in discussions of rhetoric

from every period: is the performance noble? Is it vulgar? Quintilian,

though, does not wish to admit any of the ambiguous descriptions of De-

mosthenes into his own discussion. Instead he selects from the traditional

stories told about Demosthenes so as to describe a superlative figure whose

perfection requires of us that we aspire to it even as we despair that we

shall ever equal it. This Demosthenes is a master of discipline.

Demosthenes is repeatedly represented as training himself vigorously

off in the wilderness. This solitary toil leaves the orator alone to himself

and the self-imposed dictates of his discipline. In order to train himself

to maintain his composure and to stick to his text when speaking amid

the tumult of the assembly and the courts, Demosthenes practices before the

waves crashing into the shore (Quintilian 10.3.30). In order to expand the

capacity of his lungs and accordingly to augment his ability to deliver long

rhetorical periods in a single breath, Demosthenes practices by reciting as

many verses as possible while running uphill (11.3.54). Always either train-

ing or performing, the orator cuts himself off from human society only that

he may return to it a greater master of its rules. And Demosthenes shows

that even nature can be impressed into the service of the orator's cura:

geography is made to reproduce a society from which one retreats in order

to return more fully its master.

Of the anecdotes recounted, Quintilian passes over the traditional

description of Demosthenes as a man who, very unusually for someone of

that age, drank only water and no wine. If one aligns drunkenness with a

loss of self-control, then the import of the practice becomes clear. Simi-

larly, if we suppose that Demosthenes sought to spare his voice the debilitat-

ing influence of alcohol, we again find a man ever and always thinking

about his oratory and his body as his oratorical instrument even at the

expense of other social roles such as the affable bon vivant.

Quintilian neglects to offer the juiciest version of Demosthenes' cave:

Demosthenes, having shaved half of his head so as to make public appear-

ance impossible, imprisons himself in a subterranean chamber to practice

his craft to perfection. For this see Plutarch, Demosthenes 7.6 (cf. also

[Plutarch], Lives of the Ten Orators 844d):

6E Tx iOUTOV xUTayeLov Ev oLxobo loaL [EXETr11WLOV, 6 oil e-

ouero xaL xaO' fl~otg, vcav0a 6b ntavtcwg sEv ExaLoIg i@tacG

xanorvLa O k
102 STAGING MASCULINITY

XQXL; be xc t trvcL gj 6UO xcL tQELO1I oVWTT&eV, I~o5~evov ri1;

x~cpcXi1; OarEQov LEQo; {iJt tots tri6E ovXoninvq rrcvv rrQOXOEiv

Ev&EXEoaL8 t' LLOXlJVT1V.

[For this reason they say that he built a subterranean study that has

been preserved up to our own day, and he descended there every day

to fashion his delivery and to labor over his voice. He often spent two

and three months straight down there, having shaved half of his head

so that he would be too ashamed to go out even if he really wanted to.]

Quintilian offers his take on this anecdote when discussing the necessity of

avoiding distractions.

Demosthenes melius, qui se in locum ex quo nulla exaudiri uox et ex

quo nihil prospici posset recondebat, ne aliud agere mentem cogerent

oculi.

[Demosthenes did it better: he tucked himself away in a place where

no voice could be heard and where nothing outside could be seen lest

his eyes should force his mind to busy itself with a different task.]

(Quintilian 10.3.25)

Note again how susceptible the mind is to external stimuli: beware what

you see if you wish to retain your thoughts as your own. Quintilian looks in

upon a Demosthenes restraining his senses and training his mind. Quintil-

ian then reveals this Demosthenes to our own senses: our proper discipline

itself consists of blotting out distracting arguments. We need to stick to the

task of contemplating this image of rhetorical purity that Demosthenes

cultivated for himself. Our discipline consists in watching his self-discipline.

Demosthenes' self-imposed imprisonment becomes an emblem of

the sort of regime that any rhetorical student has to impose upon himself.

One must not underestimate the theory effect of Quintilian's own text and

the long line of texts like his that lay behind it. As has been argued in prior

chapters, the body is a literary product and project, and the student of a

text like Quintilian's acquiesces to become a student of a specific sort of

textualized body. The student sees himself training himself with the very

eyes Quintilian turns upon Demosthenes. If reading and writing oratory

merged for Quintilian, so too can we argue for similar ambiguities of the

spirit in the student of Quintilian: we read, we experience the text, our

affects are moved. The text about the psyche acts upon the very psychic

apparatus it stages for us.

The story of the eye, then, is not one of turning the organ of sight upon

an object, of perceiving with a neutral instrument the truth of the thing

SELF-MASTERY

103

seen. Instead the eye is a psychic instrument, entangled with questions of

the soul. As such, the rules of optics also become enmeshed in rhetorical

rules covering the self-relation when the "nature" of optics meets up with

the care any orator ought to evince relative to such an important question.

Quintilian argues for special techniques of self-observation and self-

reflection: the truth of rhetoric and the rhetoric of truth require as much.

The most provocative and masterful staging of Demosthenes by Quin-

tilian occurs in 11.3.68, where the famous Greek orator is training before a

mirror:15

Decor quoque a gestu atque motu uenit. Ideoque Demosthenes

grande quoddam intuens speculum componere actionem solebat:

adeo, quamuis fulgor ille sinistras imagines reddat, suis demum oculis

credidit quod efficeret.

[Seemliness also comes from gestures and motions. And so Demosthe-

nes used to compose his delivery while looking into a certain large

mirror; that's how much he trusted his own eyes alone on the question

of his effectiveness even though that silvered surface renders images

backward.]

The ultimate arbiter of Demosthenes' performance becomes Demosthenes

himself: no other (suis demum) eyes can be entrusted with the duty of

keeping watch. Demosthenes becomes for himself his own ideal audience;

he takes up the labor of judgment and beratement more vigorously than

would even the audience for which he prepares himself. The performance

that might otherwise have been seen as one destined only for others has

become a performance of the self to the self, a performance that is never

complete and never perfect. And where the mirror is acknowledged to be a

faulty witness, an unsatisfactory tool in this project of self-recognition,

Demosthenes mentally corrects for the inversion of its images.

Quintilian's point is almost certainly that an image in the mirror will

seem to be making a certain gesture with the left hand when the performer is

actually using his own right hand. Since there is strict regulation of the use of

the left hand, the mirror is always showing the orator as in error. Of course,

one can apply this theme much more broadly than this: the bodily image that

the text reflects back to the student is one to which he must accommodate

himself. It is his own body, and the text offers a reflection through which he

gains mastery over this body. Yet the body of the handbook's mirror is also

always a mistaken image of the body: it is not actually a body, just a repre-

sentation of a body. One does not even find an image of a perfect body,

instead there is a body in pieces, a corps morceld, scattered throughout the

text; and a good many of these pieces are elements reflecting bodily error,

104 STAGING MASCULINITY

not performative triumph. Nevertheless one must behold oneself, one must

use this mirror. And in so reading, one takes up the cruel eyes of a Demos-

thenes, the only eyes that can be trusted.

The scene of the orator in training and the knowledges to which he

subjects himself have many homologies and parallels in the modern litera-

ture of subjection. Demosthenes' mirror cries out to be given a Lacanian

reading.16 Like the Lacanian symbolic with its impossible law, oratory is

constructed by Quintilian as a manifold set of demands made upon the

subject that he will always be failing to meet. Even the pronoun he is a

moment of crisis: a speaker is always a male and must always reveal himself

as male, yet the voice and its nature are so constituted that a speaker is

always on the brink of proving a traitor to his (performed) gender where he

is not detected in "outright" failure.

But if we pursue the Lacanian parallels a bit further, even more of

the themes of this chapter can be brought together. In his Second Semi-

nar, Lacan closes out his year's lectures in a chapter entitled "A, m, a, S"

(1988b, 309-26). This section in many ways is a retelling of Lacan's

earlier "Mirror Stage" essay (1977, 1-7) but done from the perspective of

the whole psychic structure with both the imaginary and the symbolic axes

represented. So also does this chapter answer the promise of addressing

the problem of the ego, the ostensible trajectory of the year's seminar.

Lacan's portrait of the psychic apparatus in this session offers several

illuminating points of convergence with the rhetorical scenario and the

orator's own mirror.

In figure 1,17 the ego's relationship to the image of the other lies

along the axis passing between m and a, the "I" and the "other." The

inaugural moment of this relationship, though, is the scene of the infant

before the mirror and the coordination of the body in pieces by reference

to the image of the reflected self (Lacan 1977, 4). In this seminar, Lacan

puts the situation thus: "Then, here you have m, the ego, and a, the other

which isn't an other at all, since it is essentially coupled with the ego, in a

relation which is always reflexive, interchangeable - the ego is always an

alter-ego" (1988b, 321).

S(ujet)

--,, -

-

a(utre)

(Es/Id)

img

m(oi)

(Ich/ego)

symb

A(autre)

SELF-MASTERY

105

This same relationship is faced by our orator: when Demosthenes stands

before the mirror, he sees a body in pieces, a body in need of coordination.

Yet this body is in pieces because of the very discourse of bodily analysis to

which training subjects the student. The body is broken up by the technol-

ogy of the rhetorical handbook, and then a moment of rebirth and reinstal-

lation into the world of the ego is staged for the student. The image that

one discovers in this mirror, though, is always sinister, is always a reflection

of sinistras imagines. It is not a "real" or "true" body, but a body whose

pieces and whose whole are formed within the discipline of oratorical

training. This body arises only within a specific disciplinary matrix. More-

over, this discipline even names itself as discipline. So too does the disci-

pline of oratory expressly promise to produce a subject effect. Indeed this

discipline argues that the only subject worth being is the well-disciplined

subject: all other bodies are disempowered, ridiculous, even monstrous, as

has been argued at length above and in the preceding chapter.

The image that one discovers and that serves as the bodily ego's guide

is the image of an autre, of another vir bonus. The ego can always switch

places with this other figure: I look to the image of the other to become a

good man; I look to my image to see that it is the image of a good man.

Indeed this principle of interchange is already in play with the deployment

of the name Demosthenes. When Demosthenes looks in the mirror, one

expects him to see himself. But, ideally, the rhetorical student will look into

the mirror and also see the body of a Demosthenes, the man who must be

his alter ego. Yet we have seen consistently that the image toward which

one aspires is impossible: Quintilian promises us that there was only one

Demosthenes, and that even he was not the perfect orator. Similarly, the

regime of a Demosthenes is filled with grueling ordeals: one cannot merely

behold the spectacle of the body, it must be disciplined into its proper form.

Masculinity is an achieved state for the ancient orator, as Gleason would

remind us (1995, 59). Most significantly, though, for the student of oratory

the glass into which one looks is not a real silvered surface; instead it is the

rhetorical handbook.

Self-mastery remains at a premium. The imaginary relationship be-

tween the ego and the other persists but only as an aggressive and hostile

act. The tensions that subsist beneath this ego are mentioned by Lacan, but

perhaps in the following he does not go far enough into the problems of the

symbolic relation. Commenting on another element of his illustration,

Lacan says, "Here you have S, which is simultaneously the subject, the

symbol, and also the Es. The symbolic realization of the subject, which is

always a symbolic creation, is the relation between A and S. It is subjacent,

unconscious, essential to every subjective relation" (1988b, 21). Along the

symbolic axis we find language and the idea of signification itself. Thus the

106 STAGING MASCULINITY

symbolic in its fashion represents the ideal dimension toward which rhetori-

cal theory strives. Rhetorical theory hopes to offer an account of meaning

and meaningfulness in general.

Rhetoric even finds in the body a necessary medium through which

specific meanings are produced. Lacan himself argues that the generic

version of the symbolic axis passing between A and S is coordinated with

the imaginary: "[T]he human being has a special relation with his own

image - a relation of gap, of alienating tension. That is where the possibil-

ity of the order of presence and absence, that is of the symbolic order

comes in. . . . For all existing human subjects, the relation between A and

S will always pass via the intermediary of these imaginary substrates, the

ego and the other, which constitute the imaginary foundation of the

object -A, m, a, S" (1988b, 323).

Lacan's version shows us how the play between these other elements,

the Sujet and the Autre, work through the ego and its imaginary relation-

ship. At the same time, Lacan does not explore just how these other two

entities would or should interact. In fact, Lacan's identification of A with

death leaves the situation in a position where he need not argue more than

the most generic relationship between being and nonbeing.18 Yet the Ro-

man Id is fully implicated in a variety of problems whose obverse may be

something like death, but whose front face is virility and manly authority.

The refused elements are familiar: effeminacy, servility, and castration, to

name just a few.

Here then we have an important sociology that cannot be neglected in

the name of purely existential questions. Indeed, being in its own way

requires as its inevitable attendant a certain kind of being, a being for some

as against others. Here one thinks more of Kristeva and the abject, of

the labor of refusal that goes into the establishment of the symbolic.19 The

orator's imaginary self-relationship is coordinated by the bodily discourse

presented by a rhetorical theory that aspires to the condition of the law of

the symbolic.

At the same time, one cannot neglect the fact that these themes are

not themselves absolute facts, changeless substances set against a structur-

ing void. Instead this discourse of self-discovery also participates in the

rehearsal and reworking of the lived experience of these categories of the

livable and the unlivable. Silverman is right to insist upon a reading of

Lacan that engages questions such as ideology and the so-called dominant

fiction.20 The labor of self-mastery is the production through and in time of

durable dispositions calibrated to the dominant fiction or, put differently,

of a habitus a la Bourdieu. The process of self-subjection produces a guilty

subject, trembling before the law of oratory, embodied in its profoundest

sense by Demosthenes. This punitive relationship to the self forges an

SELF-MASTERY

107

unhappy consciousness and a preservation of the body as a locus of labor

and of subjection.21

Butler says of the relationship of gender to subjectivation, "Subjected

to gender, but subjectivated by gender, the 'I' neither precedes nor follows

the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of

gender relations themselves" (1993, 7). Quintilian stages a Demosthenes

who enacts this process out of which the performatic ego emerges. His

subjection and subjectivation proceed in tandem; he becomes a man and

himself by engaging in a durable process whereby the very ego to which he

aspires is trained as it is produced. The theater of rhetorical theory fur-

nishes the matrix within which we ourselves observe this paradoxical mo-

ment of the production of "that which must have already been there." This

theater is not a "real" place; rather it is a convergence of textual tropes and

psychic mechanisms such that each party vouches for the validity of the

other: mental images are legible and textual; texts impinge upon psyches;

bodies are the media through which spiritual truths are conveyed and in

which they are lived. The text performs the truths of performance in a

manner homologous to that of a body that performs the truth of its own

rhetorical text. Watching over this process is the eye of the master: Quintil-

ian gazes upon Demosthenes and instructs his own student as to the neces-

sity of possessing a gaze such as Demosthenes turned upon himself. The

handbook observes observation and praises it.

This gaze that would look in at the body has important psychoanalytic

implications. The gaze exists from without the orator and constitutes him at

his most profound level, constitutes him as a subject, as a thing that is of

and for the world. As Lacan would put it:

I must, to begin with, insist on the following: in the scopic field, the

gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture.

This is the function that is found at the heart of the institution of the

subject in the visible. What determines me, at the most profound

level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze

that I enter the light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects.

(1981, 106)

The gaze produces a showing of the orator, a giving of him to be seen (le

donner-d-voir). In other words, the orator is not and cannot be master of

himself as seen or perceived. He is produced as seen by forces that are

never his to master, and he is in no position to mount a convincing metaphys-

ics of presence. One exists only because one is seen, and one exists only as a

thing to be seen. One of our earliest portraits of the orator is the most vivid

on the theme of optics. In Hesiod, Theogony 81-94, the eloquent king

108 STAGING MASCULINITY

exists because the Muses saw his birth; and the king's eloquence is meant

for watching by his people. The politics and theology of hegemony in He-

siod's formulation remain latent throughout the history of ancient rhetoric:

eloquence is an authoritative spectacle. The rhetorical theorist mimics the

function of the gaze and arrogates to itself its constative authority. This

divine efficacy bestowed upon masterful oratory acts to counter the death

of the sovereign subject found in Lacan's godless version of optics. Meaning

is not derivative from the symbolic; the orator is not an effect of the gaze:

instead rhetorical theory stages both itself and its ideal student as masters of

the visible world, as skillful producers of worldly signification, as owners of

their own meanings.

Vision and visibility are everything, and the rhetorical theorist not

surprisingly desires a mastery of the realm of the visible. The ancient

orator, though, does not complain about an existential crisis. He may worry

about his appearance, but we know already that a soul that governs these

appearances has been assumed from the start. Lacan, though, has already

sketched out the structure of such a resistance to the loss of the ego as a

point of origin. Lacan makes much of the statement, "I saw myself seeing

myself" in his essay "Anamorphosis."22 One of the chief consequences of

this sensation is that "the privilege of the subject seems established here

from that bipolar reflexive relation by which, as soon as I perceive, my

representations belong to me" (Lacan 1981, 81). The basis that founds this

illusion, though, is an elision of the gaze, a misrecognition of the structure

of the gaze in favor of the self-reflexive (Lacan 1981, 83). In other words,

by watching himself the orator comes to believe that he owns those sinister

images that come back to him. Yet these images are themselves governed

by the logic of the theoretical gaze that has staged this self-staging within

the rhetorical handbook. Moreover, even the author of the handbook can-

not be said to own the gaze: it too merely mimics the position and function

of a gaze that precedes and exceeds the text's own mastery and authority.

Lacan's subject of vision hence bears more than a passing resemblance

to the student of oratory. The student cannot be master of his appearances,

yet he is a creature who is given to the senses. By seeing himself being seen,

the orator hopes to gain possession over himself and his meaning. He

installs the self-reflexive in order to attain a sense of mastery: "I am not

within the gaze; the gaze is mine." In response to observation on the part of

the world, the orator reacts by observing himself, by being the first and

harshest critic of his own body. The truths that arise from this auto-

theorization are thereupon used to posit a subject who is in fact and after

all what he sees himself to be. Thus the relationship of self-observation that

is installed at the foundation of the relationship to the body is also a

relationship that will be used to produce the illusion of a presence and of a

SELF-MASTERY

109

valid subject.23 At the same time, this observation operates as a parody of

the function of the gaze. The orator presents an image of himself to an

imagined scopic field, photo-graphing his body and movements in this

imagined space (cf. Lacan 1981, 106; Rose 1986, 190-94).

In practical terms, though, it is only through real, worldly iterations that

the gaze as the abstracted origin of meaning can be reproduced with its

historically contingent aspects: performances of both orators and their theo-

retical texts cite a law that they also bring into being (see Butler 1993, 12-

16). One should not imagine, though, a beyond or a before relative to the

law. Meaning and the law are inevitable consequences of subjectivity as we

know and understand it; the specific performances and their various contin-

gencies are the significant variables. Resistance to rhetorical theory and the

world of good men to which it belongs can only come by way of skewed

performances and perverse acts,24 not by a shattering of the mirror's glass

and a return to a world where it is enough to have been born to subsequently

become a man.

The constitution of this essential orator, this man who reveals his manli-

ness, his passion, his authority, his good faith,25 is on the one hand a pursuit

of essence or authenticity via a supplementing of nature with care; but it is

also routinely a negative project. Don't be a eunuch, don't be a woman,

don't be a provincial, don't be a barbarian, don't be an animal.26 The orator

emerges as a subject who will be strategically confused with the legitimate

speaking subject tout court and the sole political subject worthy of hege-

mony. In order to consolidate his position as a legitimate oratorical subject

the speaker has to jettison a vast freight of cultural cargo, heaving it over-

board like a man desperate to save a sinking ship. But this ship, to distend the

image, is always sinking. Indeed, one could even say that it was built leaking,

built to be always in crisis and always in need of being saved. The cruelty of

this regime of refusal must be accepted and adopted as legitimate.

The acceptance of this regime is the price of entry to the hierarchical

system within which one desires to ascend and attain to mastery of others.

This mastery of others begins with a mastery of oneself, with an injunction

to hunt out and overcome within the body and the voice those very social

categories that one is assumed to have already overcome in the world: the

sick, the effeminate, et cetera. Before one can successfully perform for

others, before one can transmit masterfully the contents of one's own soul

authoritatively to the audience of one's peers, one has to master one's

performance in an internal theater where the gaze that coordinates the

visibility of all oratorical presentations has been installed in an internal

garrison.

The assumption of the name orator, then, is the assumption of a spe-

cial kind of wounding. This is not an enabling wound in the sense that the

110 STAGING MASCULINITY

tag faggot might lead to a fertile cycle of self-judgment, self-beratement,

self-reflection, and eventual self-overcoming, as in contemporary queer

politics. Rather, this wounding is more like that ritual scarification that

betokens initiation, acceptance, and division.27 It is a wounding that is not

meant to heal over so easily, though. Instead, the orator needs to be always

bustling - no, rather he needs to be always pacing to and fro, busy with his

wound, staving off danger while never truly escaping the threat.

The case of the orator is a particularly complicated one. The orator is

subjected to a regime within which one can find no beneficiary better

rewarded than himself and members of his class. Furthermore, his subjec-

tion is not only self-subjection in the sense that he is the subject of a

discourse whose constellation of power is so constituted as to reward most

and best himself and those like him. This self-subjection is also more spe-

cific: the orator has presented to him an elaborate hermeneutics of the self;

he, more than any other member of the society, is commanded to partici-

pate in a regime of intense inspection and introspection. Thus, the orator

becomes a special and extreme case of a subject effect. He is endowed with

a subjectivity that is anxious about the very question of the subject. He is

endowed with a subjectivity that must be always regrounding itself and

looking closer and deeper into itself in the hopes that further self-mastery

will win further security.

If the technology of oratory takes its place as a sort of persecutory

superego within the individual, then the oratorical handbook occupies a

similar position vis-a-vis the student. The handbook serves as a model of

and for the internalized regime. And while the contents of the handbook

are not identical to the full contents of the self-beratements of the orator,

they nevertheless serve as an explicit codification of an art of self-

beratement. Students will even disseminate imperfect teachings of Quintil-

ian in order that they may begin to acquire for themselves a version of the

authoritative Quintilianic code. Quintilian is driven to publication of his

work partly because two books derived from notes taken by students dur-

ing his lectures have been hastily thrown together and are already making

the rounds (1.pr.7). In their own way, unauthorized books of Quintilian are

just as good as the full text: the handbook is never complete; it always

needs to be longer and more explicit. Or, to look at the question from the

other direction, the student always has to be complicit, and the first and

most necessary lesson to be conveyed by the handbook is that an infinite

task of self-mastery must begin.

CHAPTER 4

Actors

Quid fuit in Graccho, quem tu melius, Catule, meministi, quod me puero

tanto opere ferretur? "Quo me miser conferam? Quo vertam? In Capi-

toliumne? At fratris sanguine madet. An domum? Matremne ut miseram

lamentantem videam et abiectam?" Quae sic ab illo esse acta constabat

oculis, voce, gestu, inimici ut lacrimas tenere non possent. Haec ideo dico

pluribus, quod genus hoc totum oratores, qui sunt veritatis ipsius actores,

reliquerunt; imitatores autem veritatis, histriones, occupaverunt.

[What was it in Gracchus - you remember him better, Catulus - that was

so talked of in my youth? "Poor me, where will I go? Where will I turn?

Toward the Capitoline? But it drips with my brother's blood. Toward

home? So I can see my mother, wretched, weeping, and downtrodden?"

Everyone agreed that he used his eyes, voice, and gestures to perform

these lines so movingly that his enemies could not restrain their tears. I

am going on about this because orators, the performers of truth itself,

have abandoned this entire genre of speaking. Yet the imitators of truth,

the actors, have seized it as their own.]

(Cicero, De oratore 3.214)

IN THE RHETORICAL TRADITION THE ACTOR is a vexed character.1 Some-

times he serves as a point of comparison when discussing the orator's own

performance; elsewhere he is an example of behavior to be avoided.2 This

doubling of the actor makes him a figure who is always brought next to the

orator and then cast away. Much as Romulus slew his twin brother Remus,

so is the actor assailed by the orator, dying that the latter may give his name

to an entire empire.3 The two crimes even share their motive: Remus

overleapt Romulus' walls, mocking the boundaries that were to delimit

Rome. We will find the orator similarly unable to keep his brother the actor

away from his own realm; and we will find the orator resorting to equally

desperate measures.

I would like to examine the patterns of this movement of rejection and

the arguments that accompany it. Once this preliminary work has been

done, we will be in a position to examine those passages where the orator is

explicitly called an actor and weigh the full implications of this appellation.

That is, when the orator is explicitly recognized as an actor, he will still bear

with him the marks of the exclusionary practices that surround the person

of the actor, but they will have been somehow temporarily overcome.4 I

111

112 STAGING MASCULINITY

hope to show that this overcoming is always provisional and to be seen as

an iterated action taking place in a hypothetically eternal present. Thus,

the orator is always in the process of transcending his histrionic aspect. This

same movement, however, will be found to be one in which the orator's

body and its truth are caught up in an effort to fix and ground the authority

of the speaker, a process that can never be final, even if an imagined

stability is a requirement of his authority.

The orator is associated with truth and the spirit; the actor with fiction

and the body. The turning away from the merely corporeal reveals a

troubled moment in a search for essence. At this moment we will see that

the oratorical subject is secured through a set of strategic renunciations and

rejections that extend beyond the expulsion of the simple dramaturgical

epithet. This rejection refuses the troubles of gender and pleasure in the

name of an authorized power wielded by elite and decisively masculine

figures. With the crisis of acting settled here and for the time being, we will

make our own provisional movement away from the theater and into ques-

tions of rhetorical gender and pleasure per se in the next chapter. The actor

offers only one image among many of a crisis of masculine authority. In the

final chapter, though, we will hopefully be able to better consolidate our

portrait of the rhetorical subjects as seen in his positive aspect. Thus,

having surveyed for two chapters the hinterland of abjection, we will be in

a more suitable position to look into the "positive" presence whose constitu-

tion is the chronic labor of rhetorical theory.

Before treating the actors as seen in ancient literature it will be helpful

to take up the theoretical issue of performativity. Performance and the

stakes of performances cannot be overstated. While common usage may

readily align performance with rhetoric under the sign of the false and

merely seeming, performance when examined closely can be seen as a

critical site of subject constitution.

Modern discussions have advanced the question of the subject in many

provocative directions. However, the work of Judith Butler stands out both

for its perceptiveness and for its clarity. Furthermore, her discussion of

performativity in Bodies That Matter provides a compelling and sophisti-

cated set of tools for discussing the subject as a performer in a vocabulary

that is informed by deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and Foucauldianism. I

would like to take and to adapt to my own uses Butler's discussion of

problems of gender, its assumption, and performance. In order to round

out some of the particulars of my own interests, though, I will also make

appeals to Kaja Silverman's Male Subjectivity at the Margins. This work is

of interest to the student of ancient oratory in two crucial respects. First, it

focuses on the male subject and the specific problems surrounding its consti-

tution. And second, this text is acutely aware of the problems of vision and

ACTORS

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ideology, elaborating these twin issues via a modified Althusserian para-

digm and a committed Lacanian interpretive apparatus.5

Butler refuses to collapse performativity into performance. Her use of

the term instead designates performativity as the critical site for the as-

sumption, production, and reproduction of the subject. Butler's discussion

might at first seem reminiscent of Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, or the

bearing of a social performer in a social field, yet Butler's discussion is of a

much more philosophical nature, and it radically destabilizes notions of the

performer and the field of performance. Her definition of performativity is

formulated as follows: "Performativity must be understood not as a singu-

lar or deliberate 'act,' but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice

by which discourse produces the effects that it names" (1993, 2). These

performances are the materialization of discourse and the scenes of its lived

experience and expression. The material is the product of the power ex-

pressed in this discourse, and the effects of power are here not to be

conceived of as repressive, but as instead fertile and expressive. In this

Butler is keeping fast to the Foucauldian tradition.

Performativity is related to citationality in the sense that the perfor-

mance is a citation of a law (Butler 1993, 12-16). The act is thus a dis-

simulated reference to a latent law. Yet this law cannot and must not be

thought of as radically prior and anterior to its own citations, nor the vis-

ible world a mere reflex of its rules. Butler opens up the Lacanian notion of

the law of sex by deploying her notion of citationality: "What Lacan calls

the 'assumption' or 'accession' to the symbolic law can be read as a kind of

citing of the law, and so offers an opportunity to link the question of the

materialization of 'sex' with the reworking of performativity as citation-

ality" (1993, 14). After making this critical move, she shortly continues,

"The law is no longer given in a fixed form prior to its citation, but is

produced through citation as that which precedes and exceeds the mortal

approximations enacted by the subject" (14). Furthermore, the subject

both cites the law in performance and is produced as a subject by that same

performance: "The paradox of subjectivation (assujectissement) is precisely

that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not pro-

duced, by such norms. Although this constitutive constraint does not fore-

close the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as a reiterative or

rearticulatory practice, immanent to power and not a relation of external

opposition to power" (15).

The rhetorical theorists have a troubled relationship to citationality

and to a law that they themselves always inscribe as the law of the father.

Naturally they understand their own position in terms far different from

Butler's, yet they nevertheless evince symptoms of a latent awareness of

the troubles of performance. The theorists have taken up a speculative

114 STAGING MASCULINITY

relationship to the issue of performance and find themselves engaged with

the problems of the subject. In the rhetorical discussion, the crisis re-

volves around performances that are not performances of the self, perfor-

mances that are not done in one's own character, in propria persona. This

crisis encompasses those performances that fail to cite a law grounding the

authority of the masculine subject and those performances that are errone-

ous citations, performances whereby an improper subject or an "illegiti-

mate" status is suggested. One might note, then, that law and legitimacy

are related not just etymologically through the Latin lex, but so too are

they as two eminently practical questions.

The ideal rhetorical performance, then, cites a law that subtends the

rhetorical self and enables this self as normal and normative. Such a perfor-

mance produces the law even as it invokes it, and this citation participates

in the mechanism of reproduction and articulation of power. Furthermore,

by examining bad performances, we discover the details of the articulations

of the law. The law that guarantees the viability of the rhetorical subject

will do so at the expense of other possible selves. At the same time we will

also discover that in the process of uncovering these enabling and expres-

sive performances of power for themselves, the theorists construct a set of

alternate performances and performers. Theory compels the citation of

the law, and it even offers itself as a sort of materialized and codified

instance of the law. Theory hopes to enable the rhetorical subject as a

subject of the law. Even so, in the process of theoretical exegesis, other and

disruptive performances emerge as a necessary precondition of the ground-

ing of the law as a fixed point of reference.

Theoretical discourse disenables these illicit actions and actors. The

contents of these performances, then, represent a constitutive set of repu-

diations for the students of oratory. They purchase their subjectivity at the

cost of this refusal. In fact, this refusal serves as the domain of "unthink-

able, abject, unlivable bodies," a domain that is not the opposite of the

lived bodies, but instead "the excluded and illegitimate domain that haunts

the former domain as the specter of its own impossibility, the very limit to

intelligibility, its constitutive outside" (Butler 1993, xi). Accordingly, the

law is doubly punitive in the rhetorical citation: it punishes the forbidden

bodies as exiled, but it also punishes the rhetoricians themselves, command-

ing them to a specific self-performance.

Butler notes that "since the law must be repeated to remain an authori-

tative law, the law perpetually reinstitutes the possibility of its own failure"

(1993, 108). The texts we are about to examine can be seen as a sort of

recognition of the possibility of the failure of good men to be themselves.

These works attempt via their textual interventions to shore up the threat

of failures of the law in bodily performance and to forestall the catastrophe

ACTORS

115

for the hegemonic male subject that would necessarily ensue. Not surpris-

ingly, this effort to supplement the law produces further articulations of

the techniques of power. The production of more knowledge of perfor-

mance can be seen as an attempt to improve or consolidate performance.

To the extent that this new and circumspect knowledge produces more

possibilities for care, attention, and obedience to the perceived norms, it is

a successful project of supporting the law. And this law is lived precisely as

a law that orators cite in an asymptotic effort to approximate its idealized

behests. With more knowledge inevitably comes more power and effects of

power when the two are seen in the Foucauldian dyad power/knowledge.

The rhetorical treatise offers a point of purchase from which to explore the

intricacies of the laws of the performative self.

These chronic restagings of the fallible nature of the performance also

signify an insuperable difficulty in segregating the orator from the possibil-

ity of a failure of being. If one sees the text as an intervention on the side of

a potentially fallible law, the scapegoating of the actor then becomes the

textual reiteration of the problem of performative failure as found in the

mere bodily citation of the law. For Butler the subject cites the law as if it

were something beyond and prior to his own performance. In the rhetorical

theorists the actor offers only a semblance or reflection of this beyond,

where the orator should provide the thing itself. Thus the orator needs to

be the actor of truth, to enact the truth of the law. The failure of the body

to adequately cite the law, though, is repeated in the textual failure to

produce a decisive description of oratory and the road to oratory. One

learns only of the necessity of authentic performance, and the text thus

cites the truth of bodily citation even as it recognizes the danger of "mere"

citationality. Furthermore, the rhetorical theory of performance yokes

both body and soul. Performative failures are not limited in scope, being

bodily lapses where the spirit was willing but the flesh weak. Instead the

spiritual truth of bodily performance opens up questions as to the state of

the one when there are problems with the other.

The orator whose being is commanded by his teachers cannot be segre-

gated from the actor whose speciousness is assumed. The actor becomes

the site at which the orator deposits his lack.6 In other words, as woman is

to man, so is actor to orator: each is a parodic, castrated double whose

failures of being support an ontology of authentic masculinity. Yet this lack

can never be fully overcome by the vir bonus or simply fobbed off upon

another. The lack that defines the actors keeps returning back to the per-

son of the orators, and the imitators of truth (imitatores veritatis) cannot be

radically distinguished from the performers of truth itself (veritatis ipsius

actores).7 This ambiguity lies at the heart of the noun actor and the verb

agere: is one playing a part, pleading a case, or doing a deed? The orator

116 STAGING MASCULINITY

cannot be radically segregated from the stage metaphor.8 In Latin, only

"context" lets one decide the correct translation. And an appeal to context

implies complicity with the social logic of the text.9

At stake in the discussion of performance, then, is the subject. The

aspect of the subject most at jeopardy, though, is the ego, or, as Kaja

Silverman usefully translates it to preserve a Lacanian reading, the moi.

"The moi is the psychic 'precipitate' of external images, ranging from the

subject's mirror image and the parental imagoes to the whole plethora of

textually based representations which each of us imbibes daily. What the

subject takes to be its 'self' is thus both other and fictive" (1992, 3). Of

particular interest for the rhetorical theory of performance is Freud's no-

tion of the bodily ego. "Part of what it means to pursue the relation of

fantasy to the ego is to grasp that the subject's own bodily image is the first

and the most important of all the objects through which it attempts to

compensate for symbolic castration - to understand that the moi is most

profoundly that through which it attempts to recover 'being.' "10 Such an

ego is always predicated upon lack and can never be described as complete

and fully present. The orators are at pains to control the meaning of the

body and its relation to the subject who both bears and is revealed by that

body. In other words, they are engaged in a labor of recognition, legisla-

tion, and consolidation of the body such that it maintains a controlled

relationship to the ego conceived of as a bodily ego. The truth of perfor-

mance must be made to coincide with truths of the subject. In fact, the

beratement and punishing of stigmatized performance can be seen as a

labor designed to secure being for the ego even as the castrated actor

subsists as an uneasy double for orators who would find truth and being in

their own bodies.

When Silverman maintains that "belief is granted not at the level of

consciousness, but rather at that of fantasy and the ego or moi, and that it

consequently comes into play at the most profound sites of the subject's

formation" (1992, 16), she also shows us the stakes in controlling the mean-

ing of the body and ensuring the fusion of the body's meanings with the

presence of an ego. This is a gambit aimed at the production and reproduc-

tion of a secure belief in the unified and unitary speaking subject. The

audience "believes" in the speaker's performance. But so too does the

speaker believe in himself, he believes that there is a self, that it can

be revealed, and that the body is the point at which to discover and reveal

this moi. And, lastly, the rhetorical theorist shares this belief in the body and

invests the body with the capacity for manifesting the truth of the subject. It

does so even at the expense of a certain self-beratement whereby the text

becomes mere text, an imitator of the truth rather than its performer, and as

ACTORS

117

such it is unable to capture the ultimate sublimity of performance. Yet, as

was argued at the outset of this study, the text's relationship to the body

is never quite so humble: the text is bodily, the body textual.

Butler points out the revolutionary possibilities of the ego's relation-

ship to power as played out via the body: "[I]f prohibitions in some sense

constitute projected morphologies, then reworking the terms of those prohi-

bitions suggests the possibility of variable projections, variable modes of

delineating and theatricalizing body surfaces. These would be 'ideas' of the

body without which there could be no ego, no temporary centering of

experience. To the extent that such supporting 'ideas' are regulated by

prohibition and pain, they can be understood as the forcible and material-

ized effects of regulatory power" (1993, 64). The rhetorical theorists stage

the possibilities of differently theatricalized bodily surfaces, evaluate, and

critique them in the process of constructing a version of the authorized

body and its appearance. In this sense they attempt to forestall the revolu-

tionary possibilities of a critique such as Butler's own text represents. In

fact, the whole genre of the handbook is designed to forestall errant itera-

tions. The handbooks arrive on the scene long after the birth of the art, and

even in the course of their description one can always see prescriptions.

Butler also uses the observation that the site of prohibition is open to

eroticization to start to open up a space that will eventually lead her to the

notion of the "Critically Queer," since in that moment of erotic investment

the law opens itself up to the installation of a desire that can represent its

own subversion." Our rhetorical texts are again cunningly reactionary in

this regard. The actor is invested as a prohibited and explicitly sexualized

locus. Yet the orator will be discovered to be the consummate actor and the

best actor a model of the orator. Thus, the theorists have forged a legiti-

mate erotic investment in parallel to the illegitimate. But this legitimate

Eros is one predicated upon full submission to the law. Indeed it is a

masochistic and berating submission. This submission is also homosexual in

the sense that it represents a desire for the father in his most punitive guise.

But this desire fails to be queer in any radical sense as it serves to consoli-

date the law as a punishing law, subjectivity as subjection, and homosexual

desire as a homosocial bond predicated on innumerable repudiations and

exclusions from the social body. The enemies of the revolution are no fools:

they know both the game and the stakes.

The stakes in any performance are very high, and the legitimacy of one's

performance is a vital concern. Orators may derive a useful example from

observing their brethren the actors. Indeed, in the tradition of theoretical

rhetorical literature, there are many passing references to the art of the

118 STAGING MASCULINITY

actor as one that is both parallel to and a model for the orator's own

pursuits.12 In either case, however, the citations are uniform in asserting

that the comparison is of the lesser pursuit with the greater.

When introducing a comparison between the two fields in the De ora-

tore, Crassus begins with the words, "Now consider in a craft most trivial

and insubstantial . . ." (atqui vide inquit in artificio perquam tenui et levi)

(1.129). The thought and diction of De oratore 1.18 provide a close parallel:

"The stage and the insubstantial art of the actors declare the importance

delivery alone and of itself has" (quae [actio] sola per se ipsa quanta sit,

histrionum levis ars et scaena declarat). In order to mention acting in connec-

tion to the sublime art of oratory, we have to accept a number of premises.

First, we are like actors but more important. Consequently, care that actors

show for performance should be our own care. Indeed we might even

consider being more attentive than they are. Clark summarizes the ancient

attitude concisely: "All who discuss oratorical delivery from Aristotle on

are given to referring to its similarity to acting. The public speaker should

observe and imitate the technic of a good actor but should avoid a delivery

that smacks too obviously of the stage" (1957, 100).

In the first quote the status of acting is carefully restricted by the use of

the limiting adverb perquam. It is not just "trivial" and "insubstantial," it is

thoroughly so. In the second quote the adjective "insubstantial" may seem

at first glance innocuous, but its kindred passage reveals that the frivolity of

the stage is a point to be emphasized whenever speaking of it. The injunc-

tion to care and discipline that is found by reference to the actor is nearly

an embarrassment. The orator should exude an aura of seriousness or

gravity (gravitas) that is antithetical to the insubstantiality (levitas) with

which the actor is branded. At the same time, if an orator does fail to be at

least the equal of the actor, he will have failed miserably: our consummate

orator Demosthenes ranked delivery's significance as the first, second, and

third most important aspects of oratory.

The uneasy distance imposed between the actor and the orator in the

above comparisons finds good company in the deployment of the figure of

the actor as an examplar of the seductions of performance. While the

opposition between the insubstantial and the weighty kept the actor close

enough but still at arm's length, so also does the problem of beauty open

itself up to questions of relative positioning. We shall soon enough find that

there are plenty of citations decrying the visual pleasures of the actor's art,

but we will first examine those references that seem untroubled by these

appealing appearances, references that even seem to recommend to the

orator the beauty of the actor's performance.

As far as Roman rhetorical literature is concerned, Roscius can be

considered to have been virtually the only good actor. That is, if the proper

ACTORS

119

name Roscius is attached to an example of performance, one can be as-

sured that the lesson to be drawn is a positive one. The example cited

above where Crassus begins discussing performance is worth reading in full

for a portrait of good acting and the good actor Roscius:

Tum Crassus "atqui vide" inquit "in artificio perquam tenui et levi

quanto plus adhibeatur diligentiae, quam in hac re, quam constat esse

maximam: saepe enim soleo audire Roscium, cum ita dicat, se adhuc

reperire discipulum, quem quidem probaret, potuisse neminem, non

quo non essent quidam probabiles, sed quia, si aliquid modo esset viti,

id ferre ipse non posset; nihil est enim tam insigne nec tam ad

diuturnitatem memoriae stabile quam id, in quo aliquid offenderis.

Itaque ut ad hanc similitudinem huius histrionis oratoriam laudem

dirigamus, videtisne quam nihil ab eo nisi perfecte, nihil nisi cum

summa venustate fiat, nisi ita, ut deceat et uti omnis moveat atque

delectet? Itaque hoc iam diu est consecutus, ut, in quo quisque

artificio excelleret, is in suo genere Roscius diceretur."

[Then Crassus said, "Now consider in a craft most trivial and insubstan-

tial how much more diligence is applied than in this matter (i.e.,

oratory) agreed to be the most important. I often hear that Roscius -

this is the way he puts it - claims that he has been as yet unable to find

a student of whom he actually approved - not because there were not

certain capable prospects, but because if there were only the least

failing in them, he found it unbearable. Nothing is so prominent nor so

sure a guarantor of lasting memory as are your blunders. If I may use

comparison with this actor to guide oratorical praise, do you see how

he does nothing except perfectly and with consummate grace, nothing

inappropriate and nothing that does not move and delight all? And so

in this way he has long since achieved the honor that anyone who

excels in any craft is called the Roscius of his type.]

(Cicero, De oratore 1.129-30)

Roscius is the good actor in the moment in which he serves as the guarantor

of displeasure as opposed to pleasure. He is diligent, not remiss. He is

pained by error and can only endure perfection. He himself embodies

perfection; his performances are always fitting. It is in this context that he

moves and delights and that his performance is attractive, or even "fetch-

ing" (venustus). Notice how Crassus intervenes to put his own maxim into

his anecdote: Roscius claims that he cannot find a student. Crassus rounds

off this assertion with the rather chilling maxim that "nothing is so promi-

nent nor so sure a guarantor of lasting memory as are your blunders." Once

this truth has been uttered, Crassus can proceed in his praise of Roscius.

Roscius is praised for not transgressing, and this avoidance is itself the

120 STAGING MASCULINITY

obverse face of acting appropriately (ut deceat). Roscius ironically becomes

memorable for doing nothing that would invoke the scourges of irritated

memory. Or, if we consider the cruelty of the injunction to perfection and

its impossibility, we see that Roscius is memorable for offending and caus-

ing injury to the doomed student who would follow his lead. In other

words, the rhetorical students' own suffering and inadequacy subtends

Roscius' fame: the master is perfect, we are merely promising.

It is only after perfection is given the name Roscius, much as Demos-

thenes is called the law of oratory, that pleasure can be attached to his

name in the words "delights" (delectat) and "attractively" (venustate).

These same words are often uttered as slurs or reproaches, and we will get

to these uses shortly, but here they are positive virtues.13 They become so,

however, only after they have themselves become the products of a regime

of discipline and self-mastery. One gains pleasure only after finding infinite

pain in imperfection, an imperfection that Roscius finds in his potential

students, but one that the aspiring orator is sure to find in himself, since we

all know that the perfect orator has never lived. Crassus speaks of him as

only a hypothetical creature in passages such as De oratore 3.85. Quintilian

repeats this trope and assures us that neither Cicero nor Demosthenes was

a perfect orator (1.pr.18-20).

Roscius provides the model of the good actor. His exemplary status

depends upon the lesson he taught, a lesson that privileged discipline over

pleasure. This same logic is reproduced in Plutarch's biography of Demos-

thenes. In Demosthenes' case, though, we are given a double view of the

great orator's success as a performer. One anecdote is written in the famil-

iar vocabulary of discipline, while another incident recorded later in the

Life shows a different and hostile reading of Demosthenes' performances.

This malign interpretation foregrounds the pleasure of the spectacle and

omits the discipline praised in the other scene.

In Plutarch's Life of Demosthenes the orator receives direct and ex-

plicit inspiration from an actor. In fact, if it were not for an actor, Demos-

thenes might never have descended into the subterranean study mentioned

in the preceding chapter. Demosthenes' career languishes as low-class

speakers thrive. He is able to overcome the bad taste of the masses by

applying himself to the theatrical arts.

HIaXLtvE no qLOLV ExnEoovtOg aIvo xca ctovogT Olxane ovyXe-

xy4Uvov xaI, X pcL gg pEQovog, ncaxoXov 0louLt cl ateOV TOV v To-

XQLT V EIntLT11btov 5vT xaL ovveloc kOetyV. 6ivoILxvov fTo A Lo-

o0vov t Oo avTov, Ot nTCavt0V pLXonovtaLTog Wv TWv XEyo6vTmwv

xa kLxQov SEmv xcavacLXwxvat xTIv Toy Qo0taCtog X Avlv ESg TOITo,

""tov ox xtt To tg rov 8'Iiov, l &XXt& aAa1vtTcTg iv6o9not vail-

ACTORS

121

Tat xa caa6ELg cxoVovraL xaL xatoTOL TO I3jta, nTQoQaaTL

8' na6og, "Xrieri X4yStg c Ar6ooOEveg" CavaL tov CLaTQov, " XX'-

cy to aC'tLOV LtaOOat TaxgEg, (aV OL TOWv EotQL3tiov ttvaL iOov

ji XopoxXkovi EOEs1oi; CJtELV WTO oToxio." E£LJtOVTo; 8E Tov

A ptooOivovlg, eTXaka3ovTa Tov XIIvQov ofiTo i tXoat xa Lt-

e£tOLv ' v E Ot r~itnovtt xa 8taCOEsG TLv a irav QvoLV, oT'

0bg oA0wg ETCQav TO AltooEVeLt pavivaL. tEtLOOVT 6 8' oov x

TTig lIoxQLoc0g tp O 6Xoyq x6oov aL XaQLptog T 06oTL, txpQov

ilyTloaoOat xal X'toC( i n evat Tlv Cox1otLV CLeXobvt Ltig uto pooag

xaL 8taOEos TOv kXEyoIEV0v. Cx beV E TOUITOV xTayLEtov Pv oixobo-

[HI]o L [£XsT1TrQLOV, .. .

[People tell of another occasion when Demosthenes had suffered a

defeat and was returning home, troubled and chafing at his misfor-

tune. The actor Satyrus, a close friend of his, accompanied him back to

his house. Demosthenes was lamenting to Satyrus that though he

was the most diligent of the speakers and had nearly exhausted his

good health to this end, he had no favor with the public. Instead

debauched sailors and uneducated rubes were given a hearing, and

they occupied the speakers' platform while he himself was overlooked.

"That's true, Demosthenes," said Satyrus, "but I will swiftly cure the

cause of this, if you will only be willing to deliver for me one of the

speeches of Euripides or Sophocles." After Demosthenes' recitation,

Satyrus took the same speech up and with apt characterization and

delivery so formed and went through the passage that Demosthenes

felt the piece had been wholly transformed. Demosthenes was now

convinced of how much order and grace delivery gives a speech, and

he decided that discipline counted for little or nothing if a man ne-

glected the pronunciation and delivery14 of what was said. For this

reason he built a subterranean study . ..]

(Plutarch, Demosthenes 7.1-6)

Despite its valorization of delivery, this passage also raises questions

about the status of delivery and the efforts expended on it. First, if bad men

are favored, may not the audience itself be bad? This, of course, is nowhere

in the text, but it is a suspicion that the passage raises and then makes no

effort to address. Next, is oratory an affair that favors "bad men inexperi-

enced at speaking"? Are the sailors and idiots passing themselves off as

better men, or does their delivery recommend them in spite of their social

and intellectual worth? Is rhetoric mere specious sophism? Again, the text

will not answer this question, but it is important to note that it raises

suspicion that presence, essence, truth, or station may mean little when it

comes to delivering a good speech.

Certainly station is called into question by the invocation of sailors.

122 STAGING MASCULINITY

Sailors ought to represent the enfranchised Athenian lower classes and the

political power wielded by traditionally dominated factions of a Greek city-

state. The prominence of the Athenian navy and its need for citizen sailors

had created a whole new class of person with claims to political rights and

privileges. In other words, the sailor is opposed to the blueblood, and

giving him ear is a turning away from the hegemony of the traditional elite.

In the Roman idiom, Demosthenes is complaining because "respectable

gentlemen" (viri boni) are not in charge of public discourse. As far as

"mere appearances" are concerned, Satyrus gives us no comfort: his re-

working of the text Demosthenes had delivered does nothing other than to

change its semblance in the latter's eyes (6Xw;g TQav T~ AlpooOvEL

<pavqvat). Thus, the orator's new passion springs from nothing but this

enthusiasm over appearances.

The closing moments of the anecdote and the moments to which it

builds, though, transfer the narrative into a different register: discipline.

Discipline is called into question when Demosthenes realizes that his other

rhetorical studies may have been vitiated by bad delivery. Similarly, the

ignorant have gained the upper hand. However, it is precisely study that

comes to save the day. Constructing his subterranean retreat, Demosthenes

proceeds to subject himself to a singularly rigorous course of training. He

withdraws completely from society and ensures this exile by shaving his

head so that he cannot return to it. There he composes his delivery for

himself, not for the eyes of the masses. Study and learning are made the

arbiters and guarantors of delivery, and the self and self-inspection the

guarantors of the meaning of the bodily performance. The public and

theatrical aspects of oratory that provoke this reasoning have been entirely

subverted, literally buried inside study.

The questions that are raised by the public quality of rhetoric -

namely, is the sanctioned speaker a (socially) good man? - are made moot.

Demosthenes makes his performance into a by-himself and for-himself

affair, a matter of discipline and self-surveillance. Demosthenes' course

eschews the vicissitudes of public and democratic life. Demosthenes' action

is a theoretical gesture in the etymological sense. If we furnish a Greek

vocabulary for the analysis of this scene, we can say that Demosthenes

translates the spectacle (Ocia{a) of his performance from the public space

of the theater (OarQov) and into his cave. Here he watches himself for

himself, doubling the grammar of the middle voice of the Greek verb

OFaot. And this moment then itself becomes a classic scene for theoreti-

cal literature.

The scene offers a complete set of Greek puns on the verbal stem from

which the English word theory is derived, and it strongly recalls the discus-

sion of self-mastery in the preceding chapter. Demosthenes in his cave

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represents one of the basic movements of rhetorical theory, a turning away

from oratory as a social event conceived of in its broadest sense and a turn

instead toward the individual and his mastery of the elements of oratorical

theory, of the five branches of the art, the subbranches of these branches,

et cetera. Rhetorical theory and the history of rhetoric brood obsessively

on these acts of self-construction, self-mastery, and self-grounding that

structure, elaborate, and authorize a certain notion of the subject. More-

over, this rhetorical subject has been abstracted from the immanence of

social existence and the automatic operations of habitus and made to

reckon with itself in a matrix of power/knowledge that has caught up the

practice of performance.

Later on in Plutarch's biography, though, we get to see another view of

Demosthenes' performances. While the opening portion of section 11 of

the biography is dedicated to recounting the orator's self-mastery when it

came to overcoming defects in his vocal delivery, a subsequent anecdote

reveals a more hostile biographical tradition:

XyEaLt 8' &vOQ6rnov rQoosk60vrog a1Ty) beo evov ovvrjyoQcLag xa

8tet6ovTog Ag S oovoo kTaOXLot nkqyCg, "UkaX Ol YE", avaLt ov

Ai oo0 v1v, "o avT Wv AEycLg o1bOv nrE3ovOag." E ntLTElvavTog 8

i]V q cpviv roi AvOo6onov xac 3ocWvog " Ay Aflto~vEg obbv

rr rovOa;" "vi) Aix" (pava, "vuv &xoi w p ywvv L86Lxov Evol xau

nretov06og." o{ wg 3Ero uEya Qog tLo6TLV eLvat TOv 6vov xactL iTv

n6OXQLoL v ktV XEyovtwv. Totg osEv oiVy nokkotg vr oxQ tvo Evog q9oXE

O6vtao %g, oL O a VTgsg n tEtvov U lyoVvTo XaW JyevvTg aTrov TO

rktor a xct akaxov, dv xct A luptLog 6 ockLXpQEg EotLv.

[It is said that once a man came to him seeking his advocacy, and he

recounted how he had been beaten by someone. Demosthenes said,

"But you have suffered none of this." When he strained his voice and

shouted, "I, Demosthenes, suffered nothing?" Demosthenes said,

"There, now I hear the voice of a man wronged and who has suf-

fered." This was how much Demosthenes thought the tone and deliv-

ery of what is said is conducive to belief. Now to the masses he was

tremendously pleasing when he performed, but men of taste thought

his presentation lowly, ill-bred, and effeminate (ikcLx6v). Demetrius

of Phaleron is one of these critics.]

(Plutarch, Demosthenes 11.2-4)

When Demosthenes returns from his cave, he is a convert to the virtues of

performance, but he still cannot escape the reproaches attendant upon

delivery. The performance of truth will be discussed later in this chapter.

Here we will only examine the attack made on Demosthenes himself. While

124 STAGING MASCULINITY

the rhetorical tradition usually does its best to present Demosthenes as the

consummate speaker, the very fact of his success leaves him open to attack

from critics within this same tradition. In other words, you can always

criticize a speaker's performance, and no performance is unambiguously

unimpeacahable. When one looks to the heart of the speaker, that is, when

one catches him anxious and in training, disciplined and a scholar, there is

no problem. But when he makes his appearance and performs, if this perfor-

mance is well received, it is also immediately suspect. In fact, this passage

has used an unusual word for delivery that highlights this crisis: tkrr6a is a

technical term for "intonation" or for presentation more generally (Liddell

and Scott 1968, s.v. X o tca 111.2). Otherwise the word can mean fiction or

counterfeit. The critique of Demosthenes' performance thus contains within

itself the notion of inauthenticity. But one notes also the positive use of

tkXtoat and 3TX&TELVt in section 7 of the biography and the vindication of

plasticity and fabrication as means for finding good performance. What sort

of license is to be given to art, and who is to have the authority to forge

legitimate rather than debased representations?

The pleasure performance gives to the audience immediately provokes

suspicion, and the means used to evoke this pleasure are quickly branded

with socially debasing adjectives that taint the spectacle and turn totally

away from the issue of training. Attacks of this sort are insuperable: any

performance can be subjected to a later critical intervention that questions

it anew and from a different angle. The critical and theoretical perspective

on performance has as its ironic consequence the hiding away of perfor-

mance. The pleasure of the mass audience compromises the status of the

performer.

It should be noted that the adjective "theatrical," scaenicus, has two

associations in Latin: theater and license (Edwards 1993). Thus it really

was only by special dispensation that we could speak of actors positively

above. Many passages in rhetorical works make it clear that even a casual

association with the theatrical in its familiar sense is to be eschewed. For

example, after recounting various errors of vocal modulation Quintilian

reaches the following nasty crescendo:

Sed quodcumque ex his uitium magis tulerim quam, quo nunc maxime

laboratur in causis omnibus scholisque, cantandi, quod inutilius sit an

foedius nescio. Quid enim minus oratori conuenit quam modulatio

scaenica et nonnumquam ebriorum aut comisantium licentiae similis?

[But I could put up with any of these vices sooner than I could endure

that one with which all the courts and schools are particularly afflicted,

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namely singing. I don't know whether singing is more useless or more

foul. For what is less suited to an orator than a theatrical modulation

and one that often recalls the dissipation of drunkards or revelers?]

(Quintilian Institutio oratoria, 11.3.57)

It is telling that the theater is claimed to be as naturally repulsive to the

orator's dignity as the debauch. Quintilian in his wrath is not lashing out

randomly at dissipated practices, but he instead attacks his own colleagues

and peers. To trust his own testimony, it would even seem that he holds the

minority opinion in these matters. Thus, in the effort to exile theater from

oratory, we again find that the gesture comes too late. The orator is already

theatrical, even wantonly so. The theorists of oratory, though, take as one

of their strategies the conversion of all theater into vice, and then they

launch an attack upon their own number in order to clean out the Augean

stables of performance, divorcing it from theatricality. The orator must not

be an actor.

On the other hand, the comparison between orator and actor seems

inevitable: orators bring it upon themselves. Histrionic perversions mark a

passage of Quintilian in which he reproaches the speakers of his day with

exaggerated performance and then brands them as worse even than actors:

Neque id in manibus solum sed in omni gestu ac uoce seruandum est.

Non enim aut in illa perihodo "stetit soleatus praetor populi Romani"

inclinatio incumbentis in mulierculam Verris effingenda est, aut in illa

"caedebatur in medio foro Messanae" motus laterum qualis esse ad

uerbera solet torquendus aut uox qualis dolori exprimitur eruenda,

cum mihi comoedi quoque pessime facere uideantur quod, etiam si

iuuenem agant, cum tamen in expositione aut senis sermo, ut in Hy-

driae prologo, aut mulieris, ut in Georgo, incidit, tremula uel effemi-

nata uoce pronuntiant: adeo in illis quoque est aliqua uitiosa imitatio

quorum ars omnis constat imitatione.

[You must watch out for (imitation) not just in your hands, but in

every gesture and in the voice. For one must not enact the posture of

Verres bending to lean on his mistress in that rhetorical period "the

praetor of the Roman people stood wearing sandals" (Cicero, In Ver-

rem 5.33.86); nor may one writhe as if lashed during the phrase "he

was being beaten in the middle of Massanae's forum" (In Verrem

5.62.162); nor may one tear out a cry of pain. I think comic actors also

ruin things when they are playing a young man and they get to a

descriptive passage where they report the speech of an old man, as in

the prologue of the Hydria, or the speech of a woman, as in the

Georgus, and then they make their delivery in a tremulous or feminine

126 STAGING MASCULINITY

voice. That's how true it is that there also exists a certain vicious

imitation in the case of people whose entire art consists of imitation.]

(Quintilian 11.3.90-91)

I think it safe to assume that Quintilian refers to actual misdeliveries of

Cicero's speech by students. We have seen Quintilian denounce singing and

then say that it was a common practice, as well as denounce explicit gestures

and then say that many actually used them. Furthermore, the illustration

from drama is premised upon examples of genuine aesthetic transgressions.

Cicero has become a textbook, and in order to read him, one also has to

perform him. We have already examined during the first chapter how Quintil-

ian the schoolmaster operates in this regard.

The failing of a performance of Cicero's speeches, though, is not a

failure to apprehend the spirit of the text, a hermeneutic shortfall: it is an

error in entirely the opposite direction. The rhetorical reproduction enacts

all of the sentiments of the original: where Verres is slandered as effemi-

nate, the performer actually alters his performance so as to behave in an

effeminate manner. When the speech recounts the beating in the forum,

the speaker starts writhing as if he were being beaten. The critique is then

doubled: failed actors and failed speakers are brought to task, while good

acting and good oratory are pitted against them. In both cases the principle

used against the offending parties is the degree of explicitness in their

imitation. Explicitness produces lapses of character on the orator's own

part. That is, the orator's performance ceases to be a performance of his

own character, and it takes on the mannerisms of the characters he dis-

cusses. The failure to perform himself exclusively transforms him into a

mere actor, and hence a bad actor.

There is an important exception to the prohibition on acting: the tech-

nique of prosopopoeia, literally, the donning of a mask. A well-known rhe-

torical technique, prosopopoeia involves giving a speech in another char-

acter, staging a bit of theater for the audience. Perhaps the most famous

example of this occurs in Cicero's speech on behalf of Caelius: Appius

Claudius Caecus is summoned from the dead in order to scold his dissipated

descendant Clodia (Pro Caelio 33-34). Austin's note on this passage con-

tains a wealth of useful references, including the relevant passages in Quintil-

ian where Cicero's dramaturgy and performance are praised (1960, 90-91).

A quick survey of this list reveals a pronounced tendency: the orator prefers

to perform in the character of another authorized figure. He can be the

censorious old Caecus, or he can even put words in the mouth of the father-

land itself, speaking directly in the name of society and the law. The good

man chooses his parts carefully. 15

Explicitness and theater are not just d6class6 or gauche; the stage also

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poses problems of pleasure. The Rhetorica ad Herennium defines the ora-

tor and his performance by bracketing him between two other forbidden

figures: the actor and the worker.

De figura vocis satis dictum est: nunc de corporis motu dicendum

videtur. Motus est corporis gestus et vultus moderatio quaedam, quae

probabiliora reddit ea, quae pronuntiantur. Convenit igitur in vultu

pudorem et acrimoniam esse, in gestu nec venustatem conspiciendam

nec turpitudinem esse, ne aut histriones aut operarii videamur esse.

[Enough has been said of the character of the voice, and now it seems

time to speak of the movement of the body. Movement of the body is a

certain regulation of gesture and countenance that makes those things

we speak more plausible. Accordingly it is proper that there be a sense

of modesty and zeal in one's countenance, and in our gestures one

must observe neither beauty (venustas) nor baseness, lest we should

appear to be either actors or laborers.]

(Ad Herennium 3.25-26)

Here we have a steadfast refusal to accept beauty as part of the orator's

performance. The orator is set between beauty and baseness in the aes-

thetic realm, while socially segregated from the actor and the laborer.

Pudor, the sense of shame, has a sexual connotation. Pudor in this sense is

sexuality kept within bounds, the modesty of virtue, the emblem of a

controlled relationship to pleasures. In its nonsexual uses, pudor and the

modesty it represents could be best described as a sense of shame before

the law that structures social life.16

While the orator may not be beautiful, neither may he be foul. Base-

ness in his appearance would cast him out of the arena of legitimacy in

another direction. Again we have the paradox: the orator cannot be superfi-

cial and a creature of appearances, but at the same time his appearance is

vital. He may not be beautiful, but he must not be ugly. Thus, he must in

fact possess some version of beauty, just not the wrong kind. This beauty is

of course his virility, as seen in Crassus' commandments. The beauty of this

body is only recognized and extolled via a praise for the virile, the martial,

and other tokens of masculine authority. Thus its beauty is the beauty of

the dominant and the dominating.

These same sexual motifs are replayed in a pair of anecdotes related by

Aulus Gellius in his Noctes Atticae. This time the sexual scandal is brought

to the fore.

Demosthenen traditum est uestitu ceteroque cultu corporis nitido

uenustoque nimisque accurato fuisse. Et hinc ei TQ xop p illa x ca-

128 STAGING MASCULINITY

vkoxIta et raXaxoL XToiVoxoLt ab aemulis aduersariisque probro data,

hinc etiam turpibus indignisque in eum uerbis non temperatum, quin

parum uir et ore quoque polluto diceretur. Ad eundem modum Q. Hor-

tensius omnibus ferme oratoribus aetatis suae, nisi M. Tullio, clarior,

quod multa munditia et circumspecte compositeque indutus et amictus

esset manusque eius inter agendum forent argutae admodum et gestuo-

sae, maledictis compellationibusque probris iactatus est, multaque in

eum, quasi in histrionem, in ipsis causis atque iudiciis dicta sunt. Sed

cum L. Torquatus, subagresti homo ingenio et infestiuo, grauius acer-

biusque apud consilium iudicum, cum de causa Sullae quaereretur, non

iam histrionem eum esse diceret, sed gesticulariam Dionysiamque eum

notissimae saltatriculae nomine appellaret, tum uoce molli atque de-

missa Hortensius "Dionysia," inquit "Dionysia malo equidem esse

quam quod tu, Torquate, Aotovog, avaQppo6t og, &aQooto6vvoog."

[It is said that Demosthenes in his dress and the rest of his care for his

body was too splendid, attractive, and polished. This brought him re-

proaches from his rivals and adversaries, who spoke of his "elegant little

cloaklets" and "soft frocks." This too meant that he was not spared foul

and unworthy names. Indeed he was even called too little a man and "of

polluted mouth" (i.e. a cocksucker). It was the same with Q. Horten-

sius. He was more illustrious than almost all of the orators of his day

except Cicero. He was a very elegant man who arranged his toga care-

fully and precisely, and his hands were quite explicit and full of gestures

during his performance. Because of this he was harassed by insults and

offensive jeers; and during the very cases and judgments in which he

participated he was frequently taunted for being an actor. At a meeting

of the judges when the case of Sulla was being investigated, Lucius

Torquatus, a fellow of boorish and graceless wit, was harshly and bit-

terly telling the tribunal that Hortensius was not now an actor but a

mime performer, and he was calling Hortensius Dionysia after the name

of a notorious dancing girl. Then Hortensius said in a soft and low voice,

"I would certainly rather be Dionysia than what you are, Torquatus,

uncultivated, charmless, a man unloved by Dionysus."]

(Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 1.5.1-3.)

Two famous orators, and accordingly two orators whose virility ought to be

unimpeachable, are here defended by their rhetorical and biographical

posterity. The focus of the contemporary attacks they suffered was their

physical presentation. In Demosthenes' case, it was not his performance

that won him abuse but his manner of dressing. The splendor and charm of

this dress, however, is treated much as we have seen other offerings of

visual pleasure: it effeminizes. Thus Demosthenes' detractors attack him

with accusations of performing oral sex on other men. In other words, he is

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129

the debased giver of pleasure to others, and he allows his body to be

penetrated. He is too little a man.17

Hortensius' abuses are clearly meant to be read in parallel with those

launched at Demosthenes.18 In the Roman's case, however, we have histri-

onics added to the m61ange of abuses. Hortensius is in clear violation of

other precepts we have seen: his hands are "explicit," and the argutae of

this passage should be referred to Quintilian's use of the same word above

in a prohibition. And like Demosthenes, Hortensius' attention to his dress

is taken as a token of effeminacy, of giving pleasure. When Hortensius tries

to deliver his speeches, he is treated like an actor, and he is interrupted and

assailed with epithets.

Gellius is not amused. Gellius abuses Torquatus, clearly labeling him

with Latin terms that roughly match up to the Greek ones by which

Hortensius will defend himself. Torquatus' failing, then, is numbness to all

charm. He is rustic, instead of urbane. He does not participate in the

culture of Rome, and accordingly he can be expected to make a boorish

attack upon it. Torquatus' assault on Hortensius consists, though, not just

of calling out at the latter and saying he was an actor; instead he changes

Hortensius' name during the conduct of a judicial inquiry and starts refer-

ring to the orator by the name of a dancing girl.

Hortensius' defense is not a retreat to hypervirility. Instead he be-

comes hypereffeminate, modulating his voice and assuming the persona of

the very person he is charged with being. Choosing to answer in Greek, his

final word contains as a rejoinder the very syllables of the original charge:

Dionysus. Hortensius' retort cuts doubly. First, by becoming that with

which he is charged, Hortensius shows that formerly he was not in fact a

dancing girl. At the same time he recovers a space for pleasure by assailing

his opponent for being boorish, harsh, and offensive. The ironic and self-

conscious turn by Hortensius reveals that his relationship to performance

and pleasure can and has been calculated, that, in short, he is not the

passive provocateur, but instead the savvy student. Hortensius reinscribes

this line that bounds the pleasures of performance, and then he crosses

over and back: he plays with it. Hortensius ensures that he is, after all, truly

the one qualified to speak, and that the discourse on and of pleasure will

have to follow the rules of which he is the master.

Momentarily becoming the one whom he must not be, Hortensius says,

"I would certainly rather be Dionysia than what you are, Torquatus, unculti-

vated, charmless, a man unloved by Dionysus" (4tovoog, cvcpQo &tog,

ArQoot6ovvoog). If we read this answer etymologically, Hortensius is argu-

ing that Torquatus' insult can only work in a world where one had abandoned

the Muses, Aphrodite, and Dionysus. Torquatus requires a world without

culture and thus can only speak from a position that is itself not authorized to

130 STAGING MASCULINITY

comment on the society of Hortensian letters that Torquatus would critique.

Additionally, this society is not just a world of oratory, but a world of letters

and performances in general. Hortensius makes his answer in Greek, the

language of culture par excellence, but also the language from which

Dionysia's name is derived. It is only by always participating in a discourse

structured by the copresence of a dancing girl that manly speech remains

possible. Hortensius asks us then, how can we have nothing to do with

Dionysia?

Hortensius takes up the mask in order to show both that it had yet to

be assumed and that once it was assumed it could also be put down.

Hortensius' act stages an actor. But Hortensius' retort assures us that the

orator is always an actor of sorts, a man who has traffic with the Muses,

Aphrodite, and Dionysus. Stylistic and bodily performances are telling;

and the tale to which they give witness moves fluidly between the corporeal

and the abstract: a critique about one informs the domain of the other. The

orator is a literary and dramatic persona. There are no fundamental truths

and unambiguous stances in such performances, only highly mobile inter-

pretations and reinterpretations of the drama. On the other hand, the

constitution of the field of criticism does serve to reify its terms as valid

truths even where individual cases are left open to doubt. One plays with

these relationships - indeed playing within them is necessary and itself the

sign of the culture and authority toward which one strives - but such catego-

ries are never radically overturned in the course of the sport, and the game

itself wins every time. The orator will always be held accountable for

playing himself, the authentic male. Life is a true literature.

Perhaps this defense of Hortensius as portrayed in this passage may

seem to exceed the most literal reading of the text: one could just conclude

that Hortensius was a bit effeminate and leave it at that. He was just one of

many Roman orators, and so much the better for our purposes if he was

interested in drag. But the key issue here is the resistance expressed by his

champions to any such reading. Cicero offers a thoroughly "proper" recu-

peration of Hortensius as a serious speaker in the last movement of his

Brutus, a text that purports to have been occasioned by Hortensius' death.

Conspicuously absent in Cicero's account of Hortensius is the least indica-

tion of a theatrical quality. In Cicero's description of the older orator,

Hortensius is first asserted to be the most studious youth of his age: "His

ardor was so great that I never saw a more blazing earnestness in anybody"

(ardebat autem cupiditate sic, ut in nullo umquam flagrantius studium

viderim) (Brutus 302). Hortensius' earnestness, his studium, may also be

read as diligence.19 The source of his diligent study is ardor, or, more

specifically, desire (cupiditas). Reading back a bit in the text of the Brutus,

one can perhaps assert that the proper antecedent of this desire is fame

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131

(gloria). But that link is weak, and desire stands rather nakedly here,

coupled most closely with study. In fact, for our purposes desire/mastery

emerge again as a fixed pair. One desires mastery and masters desire.

Desire needs mastery. Mastery provokes desire. One acknowledges beauty

in a performance only when the mark of mastery is upon it. Life, then, is a

studied literature of truth.

The orator as actor is a special case. Acting produces effeminate pleasure

and illegitimacy, but an orator's acting produces virile pleasure and author-

ity. The orator plays a man better even than an actor does. The orator is

expressing a fundamental truth, while the actor merely dons a mask. The

necessarily mediated quality of the enactment of virility by the orator,

though, must be noted. An orator is not simply himself. He acts and enacts

himself. Performance is an essential element of truth even as it points to a

lacuna between truth and life and a dependence of the essence on its own

representation. This subversion of ontology by the letter forms the point of

crisis to which the orator always returns.

When Cicero in the Brutus gets to the description of Hortensius' ora-

tory in technical terms, relating his mastery of the five major branches of

oratory, there is only the vaguest hint of the histrionic. Cicero's Hortensius

is free of the social and sexual crisis that surrounded him before.

adtuleratque minime volgare genus dicendi... erat in verborum splen-

dore elegans, compositione aptus, facultate copiosus; eaque erat cum

stimmo ingenio tum exercitationibus maxumis consecutus. rem com-

plectebatur memoriter, dividebat acute, nec praetermittebat fere quic-

quam, quod esset in causa aut ad confirmandum aut ad refellendum.

vox canora et suavis, motus et gestus etiam plus artis habebat quam

erat oratori satis.

[He offered the least vulgar variety of speaking . . . His brilliant vo-

cabulary gave him polish; his arrangement of words was harmonious;

his ready command of language made him highly articulate. He

achieved all of this both because he had a consummate intelligence and

because he practiced constantly. He had a solid memory of his mate-

rial; he would divide up the subject cleverly; he would omit scarcely

anything that needed to be either proved or disproved in the case. His

voice was melodious and pleasant; his movement and gesture had even

more art to them than was required of an orator.]

(Cicero, Brutus 302-3)

Though it avoids using the coarsest technical vocabulary, this description

nevertheless covers the five branches of oratory, inventio, dispositio, elo-

132 STAGING MASCULINITY

cutio, actio, and memoria. Hortensius is a model rhetorical citizen in each

case: aristocratic while being pleasing. His gestures exceeded the necessary

measure, but in this case the excess makes him seem only genteel and not

sexually wanton. The raw facts of Hortensius' delivery remain roughly the

same, but there is no Torquatus in sight to hurl a slur. Cicero indicates that

there was something unusual about Hortensius' delivery. And while a

Torquatus might think it was excessive for an orator (nimis), Cicero instead

politely asserts that Hortensius had more art than one needed (plus quam

satis).20 As soon as the name actor disappears, so as well do all of our

troubles: there can be pleasure without effeminacy and performance without

loss of status. The vulgar Venus is replaced by the heavenly.

Cicero's De oratore provides a similar defense of the performative

masculine subject. When Crassus discusses the significance of performance

in book 3 of the De oratore, he illustrates his precepts on vocal delivery

(pronuntiatio) by a long series of citations from Roman dramatists such as

Accius and Ennius. After a couple of pages of illustrations one is entitled to

suspect that the orator should in fact perform like an actor, but Crassus

quickly cuts off this conclusion in his final remarks on physical performance

(actio):

Omnis autem hos motus subsequi debet gestus, non hic verba expri-

mens scaenicus, sed universam rem et sententiam non demonstra-

tione, sed significatione declarans, laterum inflexione hac forti ac

virili, non ab scaena et histrionibus, sed ab armis aut etiam a palaestra;

manus autem minus arguta, digitis subsequens verba, non exprimens;

bracchium procerius proiectum quasi quoddam telum orationis; sup-

plosio pedis in contentionibus aut incipiendis aut finiendis.

[One's gestures, though, ought to conform to all these (emotions); yet

one should not use gestures that imitate the words and are theatrical,

but instead gestures illustrating the general issue and one's thought not

via demonstration but via indication. One should employ a bold and

manly bending of the trunk that has not been taken from the stage and

actors, but rather from the soldier or even the wrestling school. The

hand should be less explicit; it ought to accompany the words with

the fingers but not translate them. The arm should be well extended

like some oratorical spear. Stamp your foot in excited passages or at

beginnings or endings.]

(Cicero, De oratore 3.220)

When Crassus forbids the histrionic in motion after having just illus-

trated vocal delivery with almost exclusively theatrical examples, his inter-

vention comes a day late and a dollar short. In fact, these injunctions are

ACTORS

133

already clearly too late not just logically but historically: the hand is com-

manded to be less expressive, as if it had already in oratorical practice often

exceeded its proper boundaries. This is a significant factor in all readings of

these descriptions of legitimate delivery: even where our authors do not

explicitly speak of transgression or where they claim that only a mad man

would act other than they recommend, there were speakers who violated

all of their rules and willfully.21

The prescribed oratorical delivery is significantly dependent upon the

notion of the theatrical. Without the theatrical, there would be no bound-

ary by which to compass the authorized delivery. Just as the actor serves as

the constitutive outside for the person of the orator, the actor's art does

similar duty relative to the orator's own. One of the key distinctions be-

tween the two realms is the degree of explicitness: the rhetorical gesture is

general, the theatrical explicit. Thus the orator is commanded to not be

"showy" in the two English senses of the words, as he can neither remind

one of a spectacle nor exactly show off his meaning.

The contents of the show, however, are left by no means neutral. In-

stead they are strongly gendered. The orator's "trunk" must move in a bold

and manly manner, as opposed to a theatrical fashion. The adjectives fortis

and virilis, which are unambiguously masculine, are set up as virtual anto-

nyms to the stage and its actors. We can complement this dyad by setting

beside it some other related Latin words. "Insubstantial- theatrical" can be

rewritten as "insubstantial- dainty" or as "insubstantial- effeminate." In

Latin the associations would be levis -scaenica, levis -mollis, and levis -

effeminatus. All of these pairs can then be opposed to "manly - hard" and

"weighty-(socially) good," virilis-durus, and gravis-bonus. This whole

field of pairs and oppositions reinscribes the orator and his legitimate author-

ity within a particular body set against other, unauthorized bodies. Hard,

manly, and penetrating, the orator is not theatrical, soft, or feminine, even if

these terms eternally come back to haunt him. But this haunting serves as the

occasion for his self-recognition in contradistinction to a constitutive out-

side, the actor. The actor inhabits the illegitimate body the handbook discov-

ers for its student.

As if the insistence upon virility were not enough in his first formula-

tion, Crassus immediately follows his first pair of opposites by imposing a

direct contrast between the theater and the military setting or the wrestling

school. These regulations attached to the torso are perhaps less surprising

if one considers that the latera are a sexually invested site in Latin.22 Ac-

cordingly one strives to retain a critical site of the body within a carefully

controlled semantic field and to prevent it from recalling other activities

associated with this corporeal locus. But such insistence can never effect a

total erasure of the other meanings. Instead it commands that a particular

134 STAGING MASCULINITY

sense be given in contradistinction to the others, that when one sees the

trunk one is in effect actively not seeing it with pleasure. The hand ceases

to be explicit, thereby apparently ceasing to be theatrical and insufficiently

manly. The arm becomes a martial extension, oratory's spear. The move-

ment to the body parts thus coincides with the prescriptions about the

torso. The explicit is replaced with the manly.

This constellation of terms leads us to the conclusion that the explicit is

feminine, for the manly has this as its more usual antonym. Explictness can

be aligned with the feminine by the following set of associations: the ex-

plicit is servile, and it panders to meaning much as a woman is subordi-

nated to the man. But the threat expressed most generally would be that

when one is seen performing, the spectators feel pleasure. That is, the

performance might make the spectator desire you as a woman, desire to

possess you. Instead the performance must be one of masculinity. If the

spectacle of masculinity provokes any desire, it ought to be a desire to

submit to this masculinity.

In other words, the orator insists that his penis be mistaken for the

phallus. That the orator is supposed to be the master of other mens hearts

and passions is a commonplace of rhetorical theory, and here it finds its

bodily expression. This hypermasculinity serves to ward off the threat of

symbolic castration contained in an illegitimate performance. Silverman

emphasizes in her reading of Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psy-

choanalysis that castration implicates both the masculine and the feminine

subject according to the logic of the gaze (1992, 155) where the gaze is "the

'unapprehensible' agency through which we are socially ratified or negated

as spectacle."23 Thus castration is not a female "problem." In fact, the male

subject uses the notion of female castration to occlude his own castrated

condition (cf. Silverman 1992, 172). The actor is made to play woman to

the orator's man in this instance as well. By castrating the actor, the orator

secures the fantasy of his own essential virility.

The good men seek to identity their position with that of the condi-

tions of truth of the world, that is, they wish their look to be homologous

with the truth of the visible world. The good man wishes to claim as his own

the phallic coordination of meaning within the gaze. Obviously, though,

such an identification of positions can itself be only a rhetorical trope, a

contestable claim. The orator can never escape the fact that he too is an

element of the visible world over which he desires mastery. Thus he too

could be an object given to be seen, a pure object and not a masterful

subject. The good men restage within the dramatic space of theoretical

discourse the actor as pure spectacle and as castrated masquerade. They

gaze out at the actor, master him, and control the meanings of the spectacle

of bodies in general. Conversely, when one looks at the orator, the orator

ACTORS

135

claims that the audience's looking is passive. The eye of the beholder of

oratory is not accorded the same insight as the gaze of theory itself: instead

the observer is meant to see only the spectacle of manliness-as-meaning

that theory has accorded in advance to the master of its precepts.

Such is theory's implied argument, but one cannot grant its claims.

Butler reminds us that "castration could not be feared if the phallus were

not already detachable, already elsewhere, already dispossessed; it is not

simply the specter that it will become lost that constitutes the obsessive

preoccupation of castration anxiety" (1993, 101). By depositing his lack in

these other bodies and assuring the virility and potency of all cathexes to

his own body, the orator defends against that notion that the phallus has

already been lost. The orator uses the actor to dispel the specter of his own

castration. But the orator is not only already castrated, he is also unable to

free himself of his resemblance to the actor. Thus the figure that should

comfort him, the abject actor, always also puts the orator ill at ease. The

orator also simultaneously invests his own body as a potential site of eroti-

cism in his gesture of sanctioning and sexualizing the actor. When he

frames the crisis of identities in these terms, desire and pleasure necessarily

remain fixed at the heart of the crisis and adhere to the body even after the

moment of refusal. The orator's Eros, though, is reconverted into an enco-

mium of subjection and discipline. Pleasure is embraced once it has been

reconfigured as part of mastery.

I would like to take one last look at the orators watching the actors. This time

we will read more closely their readings of drama in order to explore the

subtext of the rhetoric of theater as it relates to the self-staging of rhetorical

theory. We find an emphasis on the relationship of the performer to his text:

true texts, true readings, and true performances are all valorized. Thus the

rhetorical handbook prizes theatrical moments that indicate the power of the

written word within its reader's spirit. Will theory's own script enable perfor-

mances of the same caliber? Even as the rhetorical master rejects the actors,

he frequently picks scenes that reveal the staginess and theatricality of rheto-

ric itself. Thus theater becomes a protean and many-faced subtext within his

own text on the singleness of manly excellence.

To begin, then, let us take the very end of Quintilian's eleventh book.

In this extended excerpt all of the major themes are rehearsed. And in this

passage one can clearly see the fundamental principle that the orator is the

performer who is not an actor. That is, it is only by reference to the actor

that one can "define" the orator by way of a negation of the first term. And

define here takes on its etymological sense: the actor serves as the border-

land of the realm of oratory. Legitimate authority holds sway within this

range, while lawlessness is the hallmark of the exiled margin.24

136 STAGING MASCULINITY

Quare norit se quisque, nec tantum ex communibus praeceptis sed

etiam ex natura sua capiat consilium formandae actionis. Neque illud

tamen est nefas, ut aliquem uel omnia uel plura deceant. Huius quoque

loci clausula sit eadem necesse est quae ceterorum est, regnare maxime

modum: non enim comoedum esse, sed oratorem uolo. Quare neque in

gestu persequemur omnis argutias nec in loquendo distinctionibus

temporibus adfectionibus moleste utemur. Vt si sit in scaena dicendum:

quid igitur faciam? non eam ne nunc quidem,

cum arcessor ultro? an potius ita me comparem,

non perpeti meretricum contumelias?

Hic enim dubitationis moras, uocis flexus, uarias manus, diuersos

nutus actor adhibebit. Aliud oratio sapit nec uult nimium esse condita:

actione enim constat, non imitatione. Quare non inmerito reprenditur

pronuntiatio uultuosa et gesticulationibus molesta et uocis mutationi-

bus resultans. Nec inutiliter ex Graecis ueteres transtulerunt, quod ab

iis sumptum Laenas Popilius posuit, esse hanc tmocosamt actionem.

Optime igitur idem qui omnia Cicero praeceperat quae supra ex Ora-

tore posui: quibus similia in Bruto de M. Antonio dicit. Sed iam

recepta est actio paulo agitatior et exigitur et quibusdam partibus

conuenit, ita tamen temperanda ne, dum actoris captamus elegantiam,

perdamus uiri boni et grauis auctoritatem.

[Accordingly let each know himself. Let him take counsel on how to

construct his performance not just from commonplace precepts but

even from his own nature. Nor is it forbidden that either all or most of

a man's attributes be becoming.

The close to this section should be the same as the one I have given

to others: the mean rules supreme. For I do not want a comic actor, I

want an orator. Accordingly neither in our gestures will we pursue

every last expressive detail, nor in speaking will we make annoying use

of pauses, beats, and emotions, as if one has to deliver the following

lines on the stage:

So what am I to do? Will I not go even now

when she herself invites me? Or should I instead set myself

against enduring the reproaches of prostitutes?

Here the actor will make use of hesitant pauses, modulations of his

voice, various hand-movements, and conflicting turns of the head. An

oration has a different flavor, and it does not wish to be excessively

seasoned: it consists of action (actio) not of imitation. And so one

justly reproaches a delivery full of facial expressions, bothersome with

its gesticulation, and leaping about with shifting vocal effects. Ancient

ACTORS

137

authorities usefully took from the Greek that term which Popilius

Laena defined, namely that this is a tmocosamt (mimicked?) deliv-

ery.25 Here as usual the best advice was given by Cicero. I mentioned

this advice in my citation from the Orator, he says similar things in the

Brutus regarding Antonius.26 But contemporary taste has adopted and

demands a rather more excited delivery, and in some instances this is

suitable. Still, it must be kept in check lest while we seek the elegance

of the actor we lose the authority of the good and serious man.]

(Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 11.3.180-84)

These are the closing paragraphs of the long section on delivery. Quintilian

finishes off his advice on performance with a final return to the actor, who

must be banned from oratorical performance. Quintilian begins this pas-

sage with a maxim borrowed from the founding moments of philosophy,

"Know thyself," yvwL0t oLit6v. Self-knowledge itself implies a knowledge

of the body, and this knowledge meets its limit point in a rejection of

actors. To the question "Who am I?" one answers, "I am not an actor."

A man should know himself, a condition that I have argued is the

product of the actions of Quintilian's own text. This knowledge of the oratori-

cal self will allow for the recognition of one's "nature." One consults one's

own nature over and above the rhetorical handbook: the book on oratory

tells us to forget books and to turn to nature. Nature thus offers a truth

supplementary to that of mere precepts. Nature supports and replaces the

textual representation of the body.

Quintilian's invocation of nature is positioned next to a second maxim:

submit to the mean. This too is readily recognizable as a basic philosophical

thesis. Thus if we translate "submit to the mean" as "nothing in excess" or

tu'8v ycav we have here in Quintilian the two famous Delphic injunc-

tions.27 Quintilian's discourse on the body borrows the building blocks of

philosophy in order to argue for a theory of the rhetorical body. Self-

knowledge and knowledge of the mean should go together. The knowledge

of the self is a knowledge of a secure and stable center from which the

actors have been banished. I learn what I am, what is appropriate to me,

and also, where to draw the line. The questions that once guided man the

philosopher have been made into questions of performing the good man.

Should moderation rule supreme, the desire of Quintilian (volo) is

satisfied: he has his orator, not an actor. Naturally, this desire is predicated

upon an eternal lack: Quintilian has already assured us that the perfect

orator and hence the perfect not-actor has not existed. In fact, Quintilian

will shortly repeat this notion in book 12. What exactly does Quintilian

want, though; and what does he mean?

Submitting to the mean proves an insufficient piece of instruction:

138 STAGING MASCULINITY

Quintilian immediately moves on from this advice and returns to the stage

to give more precepts. He produces the opening scene from Terence's

Eunuch, complete with stage directions. The lines he quotes are the first to

be spoken after the prologue; and, ironically, the end of the prologue itself

can be adduced as a sort of guide to our reading of Quintilian. The pro-

logue finishes with the speaker saying, "Pay attention and listen quietly so

that you can know what the Eunuch means" (date operam, cum silentio

animum attendite, / ut pernoscatis quid sibi Eunuchus vult) (44-45). The

Latin is filled with fertile ambiguities: date operam is an idiom for "pay

attention," but, more literally, it means "expend labor." We are not just

listening quietly but rather "directing our minds." And the question we

seek to answer is, indeed, "What the Eunuch means," but a ruthlessly

literal version of the phrase might go, "What the Eunuch wants for him-

self." Our rhetorical labors require of us that we pay attention, that we

steer our minds, and that we even learn something of the mind's opera-

tions. Good students will discover both the meaning of the Eunuch and

what the Eunuch wants. The student of oratory learns about castration and

the theater. One learns both meaning and the signification of castration as

being meaningless histrionics. A Eunuch wants to have what he has lost,

his meaning, his truth. The Eunuch, he who does not mean anything real or

true, is thus "The Eunuch" or The Eunuch: a fictional character, the text of

a fiction, or, more radically, a fiction of a fiction. That is, Quintilian himself

desires something for himself (volo) and signifies. To the extent that Quin-

tilian is "real" and "true," he relates the meaninglessness of theater in

contradistinction to oratory. Quintilian wants to mean a great deal to his

reader. On the other hand, Quintilian is also always just a narrative voice

embedded in a text that aspires to speak of speech from its silent pages.

The performance extracted from the text of The Eunuch informs the

orator by way of a negative example: an actor would deliver these lines

thus; an orator would avoid doing anything of the sort. Never mind, then,

that the proper reading of Quintilian's instruction necessitates that the

student produce for himself this illegitimate performance so that he may

then cast a line of erasure through it. In other words, we must forget that

the orator knows how to make illegitimate performances and is in some

measure to do this surreptitiously in the course of these prescriptive texts.

We must forget that the orator knows what the Eunuch means because he

understands full well how to be a player in the play The Eunuch.

Yet even as a purely negative example the example is not so simple as all

that; one notes similarities even where Quintilian is arguing for differences.

A young man hesitates, uncertain as to whether he will approach his courte-

san mistress. He hesitates on the threshold of pleasure, reproach, and abuse.

The dramatic scene parallels the scenario for the prospective orator. Should

ACTORS

139

he give in to the stage, he submits to pleasure and its reproaches. If he listens

to Quintilian, he goes over to the camp of the good Roman past, the veteres.

He becomes a follower of Quintilian, Popilius Laena, Cicero, and Antonius.

He will take a stand against modernity and its excessive histrionics wherein

he may lose his authority and manly authenticity.

The founding moment of this transmutation rests in the strange dis-

junction from section 183: actio is there pitted against imitatio. In my

translation I rendered this passage as saying that the orator's art is derived

from action and not imitation, but this was a somewhat desperate course.

Actio has hitherto signified performance. The word is, of course, one of the

technical terms for rhetorical delivery. Imitatio means imitation. When

Quintilian sets these two terms against one another, his contrast cannot be

allowed to pass by in silence. Apparently the orator's performance is not an

imitation of a thing. Accordingly it must be seen as a performance of a

thing itself rather than a representation thereof. That is, the orator's art is

defined as the one that is the presentation of an essence, of a character that

one really is. This same line of thought is paralleled at the opening of the

section on performance, where the orator is contrasted to the actor in a

proof about the power of performance: "If in matters that we know to be

idle and fictive, performance can go so far as to produce rage, tears, and

anxiety, how much greater must its power be where we believe as well"

(quod si in rebus quas fictas esse scimus et inanes tantum pronuntiatio potest

ut iram lacrimas sollicitudinem adferat, quanto plus ualeat necesse est ubi et

credimus) (Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 11.3.5). The orator is here axio-

matically the actor who believes his part. Furthermore, the orator is the

actor with one and only one part: himself. And this self is the vir bonus et

gravis, the good and serious man.

At any moment wherein the orator is accused of a performance that

does not reflect his essence, he is suddenly subjected to the criticism that he

is effeminate, too little a man, histrionic, and vulgar. These qualities are

balanced against "goodness" and "seriousness," and any failure in this

respect spells instant ruin and exile to the realm of the illegitimate. How-

ever, it must be stressed again that the rhetorical texts that generate such

descriptions have as one of their effects the production of their version of

this good and serious man. Quintilian is accordingly constructing a moni-

tory passage whose lesson is the punishment and the price of a failure to be

his thoroughgoing student.

The text may produce subjectivity, but it first requires subjection and

a trembling before the law. This image is borrowed from Butler's account

of the sexed body and the law: "The symbolic marks the body by sex

through threatening that body, through the deployment/production of an

imaginary threat, a castration, a privation of some bodily part: this must be

140 STAGING MASCULINITY

the masculine body that will lose the member it refuses to submit to the

symbolic inscription. . . . There must be a body trembling before the law, a

law that produces the trembling body prepared for its inscription, a law that

marks the body first with fear only then to mark it again with the symbolic

stamp of sex" (1993, 101). The pleasure the handbook offers is the pleasure

of acceding to the name of the law and the pleasure of entry into the

homosocial and purified realm of older elite males. This is a formulation of

an injunction to the negative Oedipus complex and its impossible desire for

the father. As Silverman notes, "the prototypical male subject oscillates

endlessly between the mutually exclusive commands of the (male) ego-

ideal and the super-ego, wanting both to love the father and to be the

father, but prevented from doing either."28 The same might be said of the

orator as a subject depicted in and constrained by rhetorical theory, oscillat-

ing in an impossible circuit of desire.

Like the comic youth, the orator asks himself, "So what am I to do?"

(quid igiturfaciam?). The question and its answer, though, are most serious

indeed. We read the Eunuch in order to avoid our own castration. If we

choose wrongly, like Hortensius we will be reproached not by prostitutes

but as prostitutes. The orator's love is a performative one; and his desire is

for the vir bonus. The orator wants to love and to be a good man. In order

to be a good man, a threat of castration is required: "Don't act like a

woman or you will become one. Act like a man. Be and become a vir

bonus." Yet no performance is ever complete, and no performance ever

attains to a state of being. Performances always partake of inauthenticity,

and in so doing they also inevitably allude to illegitimate performances and

desires.

Actors meet with approval when they voice the virtues of discipline,

or, in other words, when they voice the virtues of the same discipline as

inhabits rhetorical training. Similarly, where the orator is praised for being

the performer of truth, so also will heartfelt performances by actors be

praised as exemplary. For example, Aulus Gellius records one such exem-

plary performance:

Histrio in terra Graecia fuit fama celebri, qui gestus et uocis claritudine

et uenustate ceteris antistabat: nomen fuisse aiunt Polum, tragoedias

poetarum nobilium scite atque asseuerate actitauit. Is Polus unice

amatum filium morte amisit. Eum luctum quoniam satis uisus (est)

eluxisse, rediit ad quaestum artis. In eo tempore Athenis Electram

Sophoclis acturus gestare urnam quasi cum Oresti ossibus debebat. Ita

compositum fabulae argumentum est, ut ueluti fratris reliquias ferens

Electra comploret commissereaturque interitum eius existimatum. Igi-

tur Polus lugubri habitu Electrae indutus ossa atque urnam e sepulcro

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141

tulit filii et quasi Oresti amplexus oppleuit omnia non simulacris neque

imitamentis, sed luctu atque lamentis ueris et spirantibus. Itaque cum

agi fabula uideretur, dolor actus est.

[There was a famous actor in Greece who stood out from the rest for

the distinction and beauty of his voice and gestures. They say his name

was Polus and that he performed the tragedies of the great poets with

skill and passion. This Polus lost to death a son whom he singularly

adored. Once Polus thought he had sufficiently mourned this loss, he

returned to the pursuit of his profession. He was going to perform

Sophocles' Electra in Athens, and he would need to carry about an urn

as if it were for the bones of Orestes. The plot of the play is contrived

such that Electra carries what are allegedly the remains of her brother

while she laments and bewails his supposed death. Accordingly Polus

put on the mournful garments of Electra and carried the bones and urn

of his son from their tomb. Embracing them as if they were those of

Orestes, he suffused the theater not with likenesses and imitations, but

with true and living grief and lamentation. Thus, though it seemed a

play was performed, sorrow was enacted.]

(Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 6.5.1-8)

Notice that Polus is beautiful and charming in both voice and movement.

This is precisely the sort of talk that can lead to reproaches in this sort of

literature. Yet Polus' tale has a much happier ending than this. His perfor-

mance of the truth of his sorrow has rendered him exemplary. Polus has

outstripped even the author whose text he performs. His performance is

exemplary precisely for not being a performance: he is lamenting a real

death and the urn is not empty. At the same time, the verbal stem that is at

the heart of this entire discussion, agere/actio, is chosen here to express

Polus' performance: "sorrow was enacted." Thus Polus is a model for

oratory at the verbal level as well. And so also do we have the recuperated

pleasures of the physicality of the performer and his performance found

here where the performance is a true one. It is not a performance for the

pleasure of others, not a cocksucker's antics, but instead the performance

of truth.

While Polus may be a happy example for performing a true sorrow, a

more explicitly rhetorical example of similar import may be found in Plu-

tarch's Life of Cicero. When Plutarch is discussing Cicero's training and

delivery, he strays momentarily off course and into the story of another

tragic actor.

XEyCEiLL&MC Q QaTO OibEV f ov vocr1o]Q tou A tooO vol nT'EQL

T1]V JtXQLLVov, To Vto Ev 'PWcQXu t ×x0opw, Tovo {' A ator q -

142 STAGING MASCULINITY

tQaycq& aQooetELV E TLEIwXg. toyv 6' A'iocnov TroVTov LTOQOUotLV

JtnoxQtvoievov Ev OEarQp TOv nEQt tig tLpcoQLa;tg oo- Ovu or f3ovov-

Xev6evov'AtQEa, TWv n~T1ETOv tLvog (pvo) naQba6Qapvtog, ow

Tcv cwavto Xoyto pcv 6t a to naOog OvTaC TC oiXptTQc ntaCaatCc xat

cLVEXELV.

[It is said that (Cicero) in his delivery was no less afflicted than was

Demosthenes. He was a diligent student of both Roscius the comic

actor and Aesopus the tragic actor. They say that this Aesopus when

he was on stage performing the part of Atreus as he deliberates regard-

ing his vengeance on Thyestes struck and killed with his staff one of

the servants who suddenly rushed across the scene. Aesopus had lost

his mind owing to the passion of the performance.]

(Plutarch, Cicero 5.4-5)

The use of the metaphor of disease is rather striking: the two great orators

were once "afflicted," their delivery "languished." Actors were the cure.

The same metaphor of disease and cure is used above in the passage from

Plutarch's Life of Demosthenes (7.1-6). There Satyrus says, "I will cure

you" (kLooptat). Notice that the name of the actor-physician has changed,

but that the morbid physical metaphor remains the same. In the case of

Antonius, we have already seen what sort of diagnosis and cure Roscius

can be said to have provided: he is the man who cannot bear transgression

and the one for whom transgression is fatal. Aesopus' salutary method is

his total absorption into the character he plays. He suffers the passions of

his persona to the point of experiencing a murderous frenzy. This is the

man sought out as a therapist. As Polus was a model for his suffering, so is

the mad Aesopus a positive example. Authenticity of experience makes

this actor memorable to the rhetorical tradition. If he is remembered as a

killer, it is as a killer remembered with the fondness a student feels for his

teacher.

The actors reappear in another passage about reading texts, and one

very much concerned with the manner in which the spirit of an author and

of his text may inhabit his student. In Cicero's De oratore, the abjected

figure of the actor is once again drawn back into the circle of light just long

enough to tell another truth to the orator. In this instance the actor is used

to sanction the authority of a performance by way of appeal to the text

performed. In this manner, of course, even actors may be discovered to

have a sort of borrowed virtue. Antonius is discussing the emotions that the

orator feels. He first assures his auditors that his own speech is authentic:

nunc ego, quid tibi, Crasse, quid ceteris accidat, nescio; de me autem

causa nulla est cur apud homines prudentissimos atque amicissimos

ACTORS

143

mentiar: non me hercule umquam apud iudices [aut] dolorem aut

misericordiam aut invidiam aut odium dicendo excitare volui quin ipse

in commovendis iudicibus eis ipsis sensibus, ad quos illos adducere

vellem, permoverer.

[Now I don't know what happens to you, Crassus, or to the others, but

there is no reason why I should lie as to my own case in the presence of

such sage men and dear friends. I certainly never in court wanted to

excite sorrow, pity, ill-will, or hatred with my speeches except if in the

course of rousing the judges I were myself utterly moved by those very

same emotions toward which I wished to lead them.]

(Cicero, De oratore 2.189)

The obsessive use of the first person stands out: in addition to the verbs,

note ego, de me autem, me hercule, and ipse. Notice as well that this

elaborately marked ego has to promise his peers that this statement is a

true one, and that its truth is the guarantor of the veracity of a whole host

of earlier statements. Antonius thus begins his discussion of sincerity with a

promise of his own sincerity before the present company, a sincerity that

comes suddenly and for the first time into question simply because of its

here being asserted. This slip, the intervention of Antonius in the perfor-

mance of his own advice, undercuts the argument at its inception and is in

its own way an ideal introduction to the question of the orator's authentic

performance as a whole: it must always and obsessively be solicited, prom-

ised, and affirmed. This is partly owing to the necessarily duplicitous possi-

bilities inherent in any notion of performance, even if the excision of these

possibilities is an eventual goal of descriptions of the good man. However,

in the movement of always closing this gap between performer, text, and

meaning, we will also see the repeated expulsion of unwanted personae

from this scene. Thus, the labor of authentication is simultaneously a proj-

ect of cleaning up the orator, keeping him from falling into the histrionic,

the effeminate, the inauthentic, or whatever other abyss may be threatened

as the rhetorical subject's punishment.

After his promissory statements that stand as surety for his theories of

the sentiments, Antonius shortly invokes the example of the actors in order

to disclose and delineate the passions inhering in the text performed:

quid potest esse tam fictum quam versus, quam scaena, quam fabulae?

Tamen in hoc genere saepe ipse vidi, ut ex persona mihi ardere oculi

hominis histrionis viderentur tspondalli illa dicentis:

segregare abs te ausu's aut sine illo Salamina ingredi?

neque paternum aspectum es veritus?

144 STAGING MASCULINITY

Numquam ilium aspectum dicebat, quin mihi Telamo iratus furere

luctu fili videretur; at idem inflexa ad miserabilem sonum voce,

cum aetate exacta indigem

liberum lacerasti, orbasti, exstinxti; neque fratris necis,

neque eius gnati parvi, qui tibi in tutelam est traditus,

flens ac lugens dicere videbatur; quae si ille histrio, cotidie cum ageret,

tamen [recte] agere sine dolore non poterat, quid Pacuvium putatis in

scribendo leni animo ac remisso fuisse? Fieri nullo modo potuit. Saepe

enim audivi poetam bonum neminem id quod a Democrito et Platone in

scriptis relictum esse dicunt sine inflammatione animorum exsistere

posse et sine quodam adflatu quasi furoris.

[What can be so fictive as poetry, as the stage, as plays? Nevertheless

in these I have often myself observed how the eyes of the man acting

seem to me to blaze forth from behind his mask when he delivers the

lines:

Did you dare part from him or without him enter Salamis?

And did you not fear the paternal gaze?

He never used to say that "gaze" without my thinking that Telamon

raved as a madman with the grief of his son; but the same man would

bend his voice to an affecting tone, and then he seemed to weep and

grieve when he said,

A man, old age upon him, destitute, childless

you wrecked, bereaved, snuffed out; nor for a brother's death

nor for his small son who was entrusted to you...

Now if that actor, though he performed these lines daily, still could not

perform them without sorrow, how can you believe that Pacuvius as he

was writing was calm and carefree in his heart? There was no way this

could happen. Indeed I have often heard that nobody can be a good

poet - supposedly this idea comes from the writings of Democritus

and Plato - without being aflame with passion and without some

nearly mad inspiration.]

(Cicero, De oratore, 2.193-94)

The guarantor of the actor's tears, then, is the passion of the original

author, Pacuvius. Pacuvius absolutely must have felt this passion: Anto-

nius' statement to this effect is terse and emphatic. In contrast to this

certainty, however, Antonius' own speech is strikingly cluttered with state-

ments of subjective impressions, employing the phrases mihi viderentur,

ACTORS

145

mihi videretur, and videbatur, with one instance falling in each of the three

segments of the observations that bracket his citations. Between the poles

of Antonius' certitude and his impressions one can trace a singular course:

as Pacuvius inspired his play with his passion, so did this passion of the

original author shine forth from behind the actor. This moment is homolo-

gous with and coincidental to Antonius' seeing the actor's eyes behind the

mask, a mask that one might note was already tragic and hence already

fashioned as weeping on its surface without need of the actor's own dewy

eyes lying behind it. One could here plausibly hypothesize three different

logical or psychic registers. First there would be the thoughts of the author

as he wrote. Then there would be thoughts of the actor as he performed.

Additionally, there are the images of the mask or of the performance in

general. None of these need coincide in spirit, intent, or whatever, yet

Antonius has made them coincide.

Suspicious as Antonius' line of thought may be logically, it has allowed

him to make an important claim about the orator. The good and weeping

actor is made into our model orator. The same compression of registers

that fuses author, performer, and performance in the former case becomes

exemplary in the latter. In fact, it is always easier to make the claim for the

orator, as he is almost certain to be the author, the performer, and the

performance, with his own face serving as the mask. We find here a labor of

remystification whereby the gap between the performer and his text that

has been opened up by rhetorical theory per se is again closed up in the

lived practice of the orator. The presence of the author, of the words

spoken, of his intentionality and his hypostatized sentiments serves to guar-

antee the validity of the presence of the performer and the meaning of his

bodily text. These two putative presences serve to guarantee one another.

There is an elaborate theatrics to this passage. The actor stages

Pacuvius' text as Antonius looks on. But Antonius also himself produces

the spectacle of this actor for his own audience. This theatrical enterprise,

though, is meant to be a theoretical one, and puns upon the Greek verb

OcaoOat can be invoked once again. The spectacle stages a truth of authen-

tic authors, true texts, and sincere bodies. It even stages a knowing audi-

ence, an audience that sees past bodies and into souls.

Strikingly, what confirms Antonius' look is the actor's utterance of the

word "gaze." At this moment, the performance becomes most satisfying.

Lacan asks, "Is there no satisfaction in being under that gaze of which,

following Merleau-Ponty, I spoke just now, that gaze that circumscribes us,

and which in the first instance makes us beings who are looked at, but

without showing this?" (1981, 75). At this moment Antonius is looking into

the actor's eyes behind the hollow eyes of the mask. These eyes with their

look act as guarantors of the gaze, much as the penis offers the promise of

146 STAGING MASCULINITY

the phallus. The actor speaks the words "paternal gaze," and Antonius'

own eyes light up.

Antonius feels a satisfaction in the recognition of the paternal gaze

that gazes upon the character, then the actor, and finally Antonius himself,

guaranteeing not just that they are all seen but also how they are seen. In

the performance, the performer shows the pleasure of being in the gaze and

being of the gaze, the pleasure of being articulated by the gaze. In the

actor's performance of these lines we see an example of what Silverman,

following Lacan, would call mimicry, mimicry that "signifies not assimila-

tion to space, or the loss of individuation, but rather a visual articulation"

(1992, 149). And looking into these eyes that light up with the borrowed

passion of the paternal gaze, Antonius finds the promise of adequate and

authentic performance of a fixed subject secured in the visual field.

In the original, authoritative text, in the text to which the actor gives

voice and body, there is a structuring truth. This originary truth charges the

word "gaze" and shines forth for Antonius. Antonius in turn makes it

visible all over again for his auditors. The spectacle Antonius stages looks

back at him: the "paternal gaze" of Pacuvius acts like a Lacanian gaze. This

gaze articulates the theoretical space. The truth discovered in this theoreti-

cal spectacle does not just inform our knowledge of actors, but also reveals

the orators who watch them. By imputing textual truth and a living author

to ideal performances, the orator's own texts and life are invested with

meaning. Antonius is articulated as a socially visible entity by the paternal

gaze that he sees looking back out at him from behind the actor's mask.

Rhetorical theory once again relishes a moment wherein it experiences

the sensation of seeing itself seeing itself: the gaze and a true text lie on the

other side of the mask; a true text, a true author, and true observations lie

on this side of it.

When we gather together Roscius, Polus, Aesopus, and the man who

played Telamon, we find that our good actors are punishingly hypercritical,

suffering bitter sorrows and going homicidally mad. Even the unusual

choice of theatrical passages for citation might be brought in at this point:

not only are the actors frightening, but so too are their scripts. The theo-

retical enterprise has a deeply troubled relationship with the theater. By

troubled I mean that these references to theater are the positive ones:

madness and sorrow are our favorite scenes. When the actor offers plea-

sure or seems to represent something other than the authentic, centered

hegemonic male, the actor is scorned, abused, and reviled. The actor is cast

out and away in these cases.29

The actor is embraced and welcomed when he seems to guarantee the

legitimate status of rhetorical performer and performance. The actor offers

such a guarantee in moments of anguish. These sufferings are embraced in

ACTORS

147

a perverse gesture of cathexis to trauma. The self-wounding that goes with

the assumption of the good and virile persona becomes an event toward

which one expresses fondness or attachment. What has been lost is excori-

ated and the cost of the sacrifice transmuted into a sort of gain. The

presence that is thus constituted by these losses, though, is one that is also

routinely haunted by them. This is not the first time we have noted the

obsessive iteration of these exiled presences.

Again the negative Oedipus complex can be invoked. The orator turns

away from all that is not paternal and basks in the paternal gaze. The orator

is willing to undertake any punishments required to assume the paternal

locus, while at the same time recognizing that the orator is in a sense always

the younger male and hence always only a lesser version of the original of

masculine authority. Rhetorical theory offers the student an opportunity to

look at a screen wherein he can see a world ordered by the paternal gaze.

The student's look is propped up by both the function of the gaze and

the operation of ordering effected by the cultural screen onto which the

discourse of oratory presents the image of the self and the world. Presence as

authorized in this world, though, is bought at the price of considerable

losses. These losses are betokened by the endless iterations of the moment of

rejection and excision.

Following Butler, we should expect this iteration as part of the per-

formativity that constitutes subjectivity. The oratorical position is premised

upon an impossible assurance that by hyperbolically acceding to the law of

the father and being punished by it the orator will be able to assume for

himself some of its potency. The others are all castrated, and their wounds

are used to harrow the rhetoricians. The orator takes another and parodic

version of himself and uses it to consolidate his own origin and subjection.

When observing himself in the mirror of the theoretical discussions of

rhetoric, the orator not only sees his own reflection but also fancies that he

sees the image of an actor standing now in his own place and now away

from his place. In this image there is invested all of the desire that is

refused in the case of pleasure, or, alternately, one sees in the image a

version of the desire to accede to the law and to be punished by it.

The actor's image thus acts as the double for the orator's own in a

doubled sense: the actor is the orator/not-orator and embodies the legiti-

mate/eradicated, yet the figure that can embody these contradictions is

only an acknowledged paradox behind which lies an identical one that

enfolds the orator himself. He is himself always also the not-orator and

the illegitimate subject, always finding these things in himself only to

rid himself of them. He is obsessed with mere appearances and the plea-

sure they give even if this is only to ensure that the appearance coincides

with a reality of legitimate presence. Pleasure here is the pleasure of the

148 STAGING MASCULINITY

revelation of this presence as grounded. The orator's pleasure comes in

being seen as being in fact that which one seems. Rhetorical theory allows

the orator to jubilantly recognize himself in a body coordinated by its

reflective surface (cf. Lacan 1977, 1-2).

This is our orator. Rhetorical theory takes this creature and stages it,

watching and evaluating the performance. As the theorists look in on their

own spectacle, they attempt to construct their own version of scopic author-

ity. This authority attempts to bring into being that which it sees and to

exile from being that which it would make unseen. In this theater, the

orator plays himself and is hence always also an actor. But it is hoped that

in being seen by the theorist he will gain the chance at presence and self-

identity that his partner on the stage, the actor "proper" has only on loan.

And even so, the ever improper actor is always about to depart the scene,

leaving a consolidated orator to monopolize the light.

CHAPTER 5

Pleasure

IN SEVERAL OF THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS, the orator has constructed

himself via an aggressive relationship to his own body and soul and to the

bodies and souls of others. This relationship allows him to establish himself

as himself in vigorous contradistinction to a number of other unlivable

subjects. We need to explore directly the problem of pleasure, or, more

precisely, the problem of pleasure seen specifically as a rhetorical problem.

Furthermore, as we have seen with the actors, performance particularly

bedevils oratory as a site invested with pleasure. Only after we have

squarely confronted this issue can we proceed to the final chapter of this

study, where a sublime homosocial erotics pervades the scene of perfor-

mance. This final abreaction against the flesh will help to set out more

clearly the refusals upon which the sublime is predicated.

Lucian's Praeceptor rhetorum (The orators' teacher) provides a paro-

dic treatment of rhetorical education and its dangerous relationship with

the pleasures of the performative body. The comic or satirical quality of

Lucian offers a ready view onto the lay of oratory's psychic landscape.

Where other texts participate in the dialogue of bodies, souls, and plea-

sures at a metaphorical level, Lucian literalizes for us all of these themes.

Lucian makes real, lived bodies out of rhetorical styles and likewise makes

the choice of one's educational pursuits into the literal pursuit of a concrete

path down a physical road. Lucian's wit is thus like Aristophanes' in the

Clouds: there too educational styles are personified and made corporeal.

One cannot, therefore, accuse Lucian of vulgarity or a crass misunderstand-

ing of the noble project of education. His racy essay has an impeccable

intellectual pedigree. For more than seven hundred years the metaphors of

ancient education have pointed to these physical forms.1

I will begin, then, at a point that is for us somewhat near the end.

Lucian was born around 120 C.E. in Samosata,2 and hence he occupies the

extremes in both space and time of this study. Lucian's native tongue was

perhaps Aramaic rather than Greek. In any case, the Attic Greek of his

own literary prose is far removed from the common usage of the average

149

150 STAGING MASCULINITY

Greek-speaker of the age.3 Lucian provides an example of a man born in

the provinces who successfully won for himself a prominent social position

as an intellectual by way of a very traditional sort of training in the "clas-

sics" of high culture.4 In many ways, then, Lucian could be seen as an ideal

student of the essay that we shall shortly examine; and hence the essay

itself is a sort of comic rehearsal of the inaugural scene for Lucian's own

intellectual life. While Branham sees Lucian's essay as autobiographic

(1989, 29), I would like to identify the narrator and the author more

cautiously. I would say instead that the narrative voice makes claims for

the intellectual world that have unavoidable consequences for Lucian as

the author of those same statements. But this scene depicting the foun-

dation of intellectual life also portrays a moment of refusal. Lucian indi-

cates that a profound choice is made as one sets out to assume the title of an

educated man. Lucian also makes it clear that this choice is made at the

level of the body, and it is a choice of a whole economy of bodily pleasures

with vast implications for the psychic life of rhetorical power.

In this chapter I would like to discuss a number of key themes sur-

rounding the speaker's body. The issues, though, are confused and confus-

ing: each element routinely impinges upon, alludes to, or complicates all of

the others. Briefly, I want to examine the following: what kind of pleasure

is found in the orator's body? what are the possible sources from which this

pleasure is derived? what is the proper relationship between the speaker,

the pleasure that is inscribed in his body, and the sources of this pleasure?

what is the relationship between the pleasure found in the body and the

pleasure that originates from the orator's language?5 The answers to these

questions will become clearer if we carefully pick our way through Lucian's

essay and offer a sort of running commentary on the text.

According to the passage that opens the Praeceptor rhetorum, the field

of oratory would seem to be necessarily martial and agonistic: the youth

apparently seeks some force (bvc tv) in speaking. As a natural result of

this, he will be unassailable and unsurpassable.6

'EQc g, ()0 LQcxtov, 0ncg av Q'tWQ yVoto xaU To o Evo Tov

tovto xaI Jtav ovTov Ovola o(p Lto g ELvcat 8oaLg' & a 3WTya&Q Elva'l

oot ( ig, EL [0T otaOLaqvl TLva Tv vatV LVTE[L&aoto v toLg X6yotg

0g taxov LvataL xa &vvJtooatov xal 0avatEo0at tpo0g rtavitv

xa ctookXE3tEo0at, JTEQLotoobatoTov iaxovo atc Log "Ekkot boxo-

vvta' XaCL 61 Tag EJT t Torto tyoloagL 66oig attIveg note e LoLv 0eotg

xp LOeiv.

[You ask, my young friend, how you might become a rhtOr and seem

to be that most august and universally honored name sophist s. For

PLEASURE

151

you say that your life is not worth living unless you should embrace so

great a power of speaking that you will be invincible and unsurpassable

and admired and looked upon by all, seemingly the Greeks' hottest

news item. Accordingly you wish to acquire a thorough knowledge of

whatever roads lead to this end.]

(Lucian, Praeceptor 1)

Lucian's rhetor corresponds to the Latin orator, that is, the professional

speaker or advocate. The sophistes is the professor of rhetoric and a per-

former of rhetorical showpieces. A gross oversimplification would be to say

that one speaks as part of his job, while the other's job is wholly concerned

with speaking.7 But this rough-and-ready distinction, obviously, does not

give enough credit to the self-awareness of the orator. In any case, the

narrator has merged the two sorts of speakers into a single idea: "So, you

want to be a star?"

The young man's desire originates from without this text. Or, at any

rate, the desire of this youthful character, who is never seen but always

addressed, is figured as anterior to our pages. The (older) man here ad-

dressing him claims to respond to a request that provokes his discourse.8 In

short, this is not the place to ask the question as to whether one should

become an orator at all. That question has already been answered for the

youth, and perhaps for us as well. Or, to phrase the issue differently, one

has already passed the moment of hailing of the youth that Althusser would

also describe as the moment of subjectivation of that youth.

The time has come for doing something specific toward becoming the

name orator. There is something profound in the narrator's phrasing: one

becomes the name sophistes and not the thing itself. But, in the preceding

clause, one becomes the person named rhetor. The subject is thus not

simply himself, nor is he identical with his own office or function. He is

always also someone adequated to his own name. To the question "Am I

that name?" one answers, "Yes, it's me."

The honor of the name of sophistes from the first sentence is picked up

and explained in this description of the results: all will behold him with

amazement and admiration (Oa t lEOccat Qog tmvt0v xactd to3kXeJe-

oOat). The relationship of mastery over one's opponents within the oratori-

cal realm is expected to translate into a mastery over the sentiments of the

common people. While the people serve as necessary guarantors of honor

and station, they are represented as naturally bestowing and acknowledg-

ing an exalted position; and the text of the passage has eclipsed any mo-

ment of evaluation and any considerations other than force immanent in

language, both in the spoken word (Fv toLg X6yotg) and in the mystified

power of a name or title (Tb opvoTcTov ToVto xa Jtnvrttov 6volta

152 STAGING MASCULINITY

oopto lrg). Indeed, the final result of a mastery of language is one's own

sublimation into language: the orator turns into the subject of whispers,

gossip, and everyday talk. Most literally, he becomes that which one hears

about, an fixovo1a in a process that parallels his trajectory of becoming a

name or 6vota.

While the text will shortly make styles into bodies, here the person

becomes language. The order of language and the order of the body inter-

penetrate. My words are bodily, and my bodily being is a word: I am the

name sophistes.9 This formulation is truly a canny one. Being becomes a

state dependent upon language. Since Saussure, language has for us signi-

fied only lack: lack of origin, lack of presence. Here, honor, power, and

being vouch for language even as it vouches for them. Lucian knows that

more than mere words is at stake. But it is only by questioning both the

word and presence that we his readers can hope to avoid the bodily politics

of language and the closed linguistic determinism of the body to which he

would condemn us.

The language of sublimation continues apace on into the next sen-

tences, and the whole opening is genteel, general, and abstract. The narra-

tor gives freely of his store of knowledge; the youth is striving for "the

best"; this is all advice, a holy sort of thing. Still, the program will be

rigorous: the student must stick to his lessons; he must love the toil atten-

dant upon keeping to them; he must be eager to see his journey to its end.

Thus far, at least, we are in the familiar territory of rhetoric on rhetoric,

hearing the commonplaces of discipline, labor, and self-mastery. Indeed,

the whole of the next sentence is laden with similar vocabulary: the quarry

is no small thing, requiring no small amount of zeal; rather it is something

for which one would rightly put up with many toils, lose sleep, and endure

anything whatsoever.10

Lucian, though, has some surprises in store for us. Oratory and the

social power of language cannot be passed by unquestioned. Like any

power, rhetorical authority is open to abuse.

oxOJ6nELt yovv 6r6oot TEWg fv OvTSeg SEvbogot xa TXOootLo xca vi1

Aa EvyEVE ioaotL Eb oav Wato TWv o6ycwv. oScwg; 8!

8E80tL, t8

ltpog TO i ey0og tv kJtL o EvcWv (atonvei(Joig, up'Long tvag

tog t6vovg 3TQOtovoatl o cqOeig. ov yaQ oE taQL Lva oTL e

596tov xa't 586)og teLlv wlto it g '

OQOLoV xca LQ SO E TVTC

ov, g x ExpoEg abril va-

~ILV , fl SX LEQ1S W t1 UV4?

otQE aLt xaovTa, EJCE obfv bE v &EpEQoLEV TWv akk V 0oot d]V

ovil0i EXELV]v rlYOlVrat, axpav xaL AvaVT11xX xcapat~tipav xaL g

To toXk n tyvwo~tivv.

[Well, consider how many men who were once nobodies seemed repu-

table, wealthy, and by God true bluebloods owing to their oratory.

PLEASURE

153

Have no fear, nor quit from impatience before the grand figure of your

expectations in the belief that as a preliminary you first have to slog

through some myriad toils. I will lead you on no rough, steep, or

sweat-laden road: you will not turn back exhausted in midcourse. If

you did, I would be no different than those many others who lead one

along that familiar route, long, arduous, toilsome, and, for the most

part, utterly hopeless.]

(Lucian, Praeceptor 2-3)

This argument is familiar from the opening of Quintilian's Institutio orato-

ria with its metaphor of the impossible summit: "And even if this does not

come to pass, nevertheless they go higher who labor toward the summit

than those who, in despair of arriving where they wish, stop at once at the

foot of the mountain."1 This narrator, then, is playing off of the same

notions that have been with us from the beginning of this study. The social

truth in oratory, namely the wonder and admiration it evokes, here cuts

against other social verities: birth and wealth. For the first time we can see

that the Praeceptor will be no ordinary tale: nobodies are transformed into

aristocrats. The next sentence thwarts our expectations as to the nature of

the labor involved in becoming a good orator. Lucian has made a humorous

mess of the question of toil: the narrator commands his young auditor to

diligence over his precepts, but then shows that this zeal will consist of the

attentive pursuit of the easy. In fact, the catalog of ease that follows this

passage is quite extensive.

Oratory as the end or goal will remain our own steadfast concern in this

examination of Lucian's text, but we will be particularly interested in the

invocations of the body in general and the particular relations of these

corporeal specters to an elaborate matrix of gender, power, and pleasure.

Representations - both the represented and the representable - shall come

into play in relation to the contested domain of the orator's physical pres-

ence. Similarly, the orator's body will be made to stand in relation to a host

of other truths and statuses that extend beyond gender or oratory in the

abstract. The broader scope of hegemony and legitimacy will be called into

play.

Let us explore the outlines of this pleasure and its corresponding desire as it

is played out in Lucian's Praeceptor rhetorum. Lucian's essay routinely

conflates rhetorical style, rhetorical performance, and a certain sexual poli-

tics. Ultimately, the student of the Teacher of Rhetoric has to choose

between two performative styles: a flamboyant, shameless sexual pander-

ing and a hardy, virile style. But this second alternative, the virile one,

requires a sexual politics of its own, a sexual politics in which the very

structure of authority and identity is implicated.

154 STAGING MASCULINITY

Obviously my reading is a bit perverse. In fact, I am going to com-

pound the problem by reading the text backward. But first let us lay out a

sort of table of contents to Lucian's essay as originally written. In other

words, we will begin with the "straight" version.

As we have already seen, a narrator accosts a hypothetical youthful

addressee along the following lines: "So you want to be an orator? Well,

listen to me as I speak from experience." The tone of the whole essay is one

of mock disaffection: our narrator learned one brand of oratory, but he

advocates another. In the end, though, the portrait of the road not taken is

so horrific that we know just where our energies ought really be directed.

After a description of a fair woman on a hilltop named Rhetoric, this

narrator then points out for his student two paths to reaching her. At the

end of the student's journey, he will marry Rhetoric and win her rich dowry

of wealth and praise.

The first road is arduous and little traveled. One can see the old and

faint traces of footsteps like those of Plato and Demosthenes here. Unfortu-

nately it is unlikely that the student who travels down this road will ever see

its end. In fact, the rough and burly guide who stands at the foot of this

path promises to lead the student traveler on a journey that will bring toils

that will last for years; and even then, this guide offers little hope of

ultimate success. With the second path comes a second guide. This one is

flashy, flamboyant, and effeminate. He promises to educate his student and

turn him into an orator in no time at all and without any trouble.

Since this guide himself assures us that his is the easy route, let us take

a look at him first as a point of entry into our own reading. This guide has a

bad body. To this body corresponds a bad pleasure and a bad politics. This

easy road, then, is one that must not be taken. By looking more carefully at

this nexus of a forbidden style, sexuality, and politics we will better appreci-

ate the normative pleasure and politics that scorn this oratory.

The second guide emerges thus from the teeming crowd camped at the

foot of the easy path to Rhetoric:

IQog 6 iv EtEQav cv 0eIvoUElg nEOXXOVg xaL X OkJog, v TiOvotgO

8 xa 3rtavooO6v tLVt xa MI tayxakov v6QQa, cLaeoakc evevov To

3X6toWa, cntxExXao[V ov ov axEva,, yvvatxELov To 3kppa, pXL-

xQov to vpwpa, UQW0v cnonvEovta, tq) baxrtuX) OXQ) TTv xEpa-

Xiv xv6~evov, 6X&yag tv ETt, ovXkag xcPctaLtvOvag cag TQl>g

EOBEt6 ovta, Ava3Q6v TLva aQ&avancaXkkov i1 Ktvgav i a lTov

'Aya cwva, tov Tg tQcTaybLag EJtQaoTov EXELvov 3otOLrT1v. Xyw 6

g a to oTv ymvcW otg arov, o 8 or omrw Or n rotov x~ ia xaL

ptpov'ApQohilr xc Xai QLOL taXcOoL. xatoL T pt; x&v E L VovtL

y 0 Tot rook6)v ETOtL TL, to "YrYtrttov Exeivo &voag oto 6a, xact

yriv ovrl O1o pwvv EL, aOotg &v 6g o ' TWv xa0' flcag fOrtV, oT

PLEASURE

155

5QO a Qo XcLQJtooEo V, cLXXc TL ivov (pas a 5QoOp i5 1 ooQ

TQEpoLevov.

Going toward the other road, you will find many others, and among

them a certain all-wise and all-beautiful man, a man with a shimmy in

his walk, a bend in his neck, a womanly look in his eye, sweet of voice,

exuding the scent of perfume, scratching his head with the tip of his

finger, setting to good effect his now scant but still curly and hya-

cinthine locks, some all-soft Sardanapalus or Cinuras or Agathon him-

self, that lovely poet who wrote tragedy. I am telling you this so that

you can know him from these signs and so that you won't fail to note

such a divine creature and one so dear to Aphrodite and the Graces.

But what am I saying? Even if your eyes were closed and he were to

come up and talk to you, opening up that honeyed mouth and letting

loose his usual voice, you would learn that he is not one of our sort, we

who eat the harvest of the field, but he is some new apparition, reared

on dew or ambrosia.]

(Lucian, Praeceptor 11)

The narrative jumps straight to the physicality of the guide. The easy road's

guide is at first hard to spot: this course is crowded with a number of

people, one of whom needs to be picked out from the rest. Yet the visual

tokens that distinguish this guide are abundant. He is all-wise and all-

beautiful. The adjective formations are as precious in the Greek as they are

awkward in English. We will also find that the all of the all-beautiful has to

be taken in its fullest sense and extended to include illegitimate kinds of

attraction.12 He walks with a shimmy, an agitated mincing, if we need to

find a more contemporary word for a sexualized step. It should be noted

that the dictionary does not translate &tacoQ XEv c evov thus. Citing this

passage as their only example, Liddell and Scott say "negligent, easy" even

though the primary meaning for this word and indeed its meaning in other

extended senses is based upon the notion of agitation. Yet the lexicogra-

phers almost certainly do understand what this guide is all about. In that

case, they have turned him into an Oscar Wilde, the invert of their own

day. This mincing walk is the gait of a cinaedus, as the Romans might call

him. Such a man shakes his genitals and buttocks, drawing attention to

them, attracting desire, promising pleasure. Proper Romans despise cin-

aedi (Richlin 1993; Parker 1997). They brand their enemies with this tag,

and the Latin language itself has not even graced this figure a name formed

from an indigenous stem: the cinaedus is, by way of linguistic allegation, a

Greek perversion. For Lucian, such a man is an "Asian" abomination:

perverts always come from somewhere else.

The man's neck is bent. I would like to digress and expatiate on this

156 STAGING MASCULINITY

point so that it might be seen how even the slightest details of this body are

implicated in the matrix of pleasure and authority that both produces and

discredits it. Our usual authority Quintilian has much to say about the

neck. In 11.3.82, during his discussion of the body during delivery, he says

simply: the neck ought to be straight, not stiff or upturned (ceruicem rectam

oportet esse, non rigidam aut supinam). This simple commandment is a

resumption of the ideas given much earlier about the head as a whole:

Obseruandum erit etiam ut recta sit facies dicentis, ne labra detor-

queantur, ne inmodicus hiatus rictum distendat, ne supinus uultus, ne

deiecti in terram oculi, ne inclinata utrolibet ceruix. Nam frons pluri-

bus generibus peccat.

[One will also have to see the following: the speaker must face his

audience; and one must not twist the lips back, gape immoderately

when opening the mouth, turn the face up, cast the eyes down, or

bend the neck in either direction. For many are the varieties in which

one's countenance transgresses.]

(Quintilian 1.11.9)

The face should be directed forward; it should be kept straight; only then

will it be appropriate. Here we find recta in three senses. In 11.3.82 the

word means "straight," but here it has also taken on its metaphorical

meaning of "proper." Perhaps "legitimate" would be another good transla-

tion of the term: the body transgresses, it sins (peccat) when it is bent.

Furthermore, straight is understood negatively: it is a conformity to a set of

prohibitions, it is the adherence to a bodily hexis that has scrupulously

eschewed the illegitimate. Straight, proper, and legitimate: the speaker's

body is all of these things at one and the same time. Most importantly for

present purposes, though, this illegitimacy has as one of its vital aspects

pleasure.

At nunc uelut campum nacti expositionis hic potissimum et uocem

flectunt et ceruicem reponunt et bracchium in latus iactant totoque et

rerum et uerborum et compositionis genere lasciuiunt: deinde, quod

sit monstro simile, placet actio, causa non intellegitur.

[Instead, like men who have come upon a sports-field, here particularly

in their exposition (i.e. in the narratio) they distort their voice, throw

back their necks, hurl their arms to their side, and run riot in their

material, vocabulary, and style. Then - and it's a monstrous thing - the

delivery pleases, but the case is not understood.]

(Quintilian 4.2.39)

PLEASURE

157

The voice is bent, not straight, not right. The same is true of the neck. The

arms are thrown to the latus, the "side." This part of the body is often a

sexually invested site. Here I take it the primary gesture is to the "wild-

ness" of the delivery. But we will see that this want of control actually

aspires to an illegitimate kind of pleasure. In the abstracted realm, in the

matter of their speech, these speakers run riot (lasciviunt). But they do

more, for this word, from which our own lascivious is derived, already can

be used in erotic contexts in Latin (Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. lascivio

3b). The terse final clause acknowledges the pleasure of this performance

and then rejects it. This is the way people speak now; in the past when men

followed the large and laborious footsteps of Demosthenes, things were

otherwise.

Quintilian has been polite. Here he has not sexually discredited these

speakers. There is a diffused eroticism to these scenes: the sexuality of

words like rectus, supinus, latus, lascivius, and even placet has to be read

into the text by the hypersensitive modern hermeneut. Although we will

be able to find plenty of overtly sexualized scenes in Quintilian, he is, on

the whole, rather genteel. But then again, so is the sexuality of the legiti-

mate speaker. This is not the case with Lucian and the description of this

new guide. We know that this guide is sexualized, that his illegitimate

oratory is written all over his body. Now we know, by way of appeal to

Quintilian, more about the trouble with his neck. And, on the other side,

we know more about the latent sexuality of Quintilian.

The guide's bent neck is succeeded by a sexually decisive detail: he has

an effeminate look in his eye (yvvcatxetiov o p 3 atc). This point stands in

precise contrast to the manliness of the other guide's gaze (&QQevcwnog to

p3XFiptla). An equally unambiguous sexual detail is the way in which the

guide scratches his head with his finger: to do so is womanish and wanton.

The gesture is recorded in Plutarch's Life of Pompey 48 as an insult leveled

against Pompey. Clodius arranged that Pompey be jeered with chants that

included this insult when the latter entered the courthouse for Milo's trial.

Plutarch's On Deriving Profit from One's Enemies repeats the anecdote,

but expatiates on the gesture itself in the course of defending Pompey

against the slander implicit in it.13

Effeminacy and wantonness: this is a disagreeable association, but one

that subtends the whole of our chosen text. The effeminate and the uncon-

trolled are the antithesis of the manly discipline we seek. When this guide is

associated with Sardanapalus, Cinuras, and Agathon, we find him amid a

rogues' gallery of effeminate males. Here as elsewhere the best reader of

Lucian is one who already has the legitimate and well-grounded education

with whose principles this essay plays. A true student of the bad guide

could never understand the elaborate web of allusions that is woven

158 STAGING MASCULINITY

throughout the Praeceptor: Cinuras was the mythical Cretan king who

founded the cult of Aphrodite there. Sardanapalus was an effeminate king

of Assyria, killed out of contempt when a solder saw him carding wool

among the women.14 Contemptuousness is the appropriate response to the

sight of an effeminate man in a position of authority. Certainly, this is the

stance taken both in Aristotle and in our Praeceptor rhetorum.

Finally, we find Agathon, the unmanly poet lampooned for effeminacy

in Aristophanes. Aritophanes' Thesmophoriazousai is a particularly appo-

site text for our purposes, especially verses 130-45, where Mnesilochus tries

to figure out whom he has just seen. The final lines of this inquiry read thus:

a3 - cdt,-6;, b rct, tLoTEQov 6 &ViJ TQc pEL;

Ka ov rrog;; ov xXciva; lot Aaxoxvixct;

AXE' (g yuv 1 8-'; EltoJ tovi t -'L0a;

T cpr) g; Ti otyqg; "A , ,a or ' E×x ov [ ovs

fl TW 0', E3T8L&Iy ' t o0 j3o1JXEL (pQcoaL;

[Son, who are you? Are you raised as a man?

Then where's your prick? Your cloak? Your boots?

Or is it as a woman then? So where're your tits?

What do you say? Why're you silent? Then from your verse

Shall I inquire, seeing that you yourself don't want to say?

The body and the contents of the verse again coincide. The cloak is just

another version of the prick, and the style is just another referent to that

same universal signifier. Agathon's androgyny causes confusion: the exclu-

sive binarism of the question Mnesilochus asks (t6r~EQov. . . tXX'..

8r'-'.. .) cannot be properly answered. Mnesilochus will appeal to style to

know the man.

We find similar confusion, androgyny, and bisexuality in our rhetorical

guide. In his case we will see that he has assumed and incorporated the

feminine, rather than compassed and excluded it, like the first guide and

our narrator, his pupil. And much as Agathon must declare his own gen-

der, choose tits or a prick, so must the orator either confess a gender or

have it read out of him: his words will be scoured for their gendered truth.

Of course, the relationship is circular, and words give you your gender

affiliation in their own turn: oratorical style serves as a secondary sexual

characteristic.

The voice of this second guide is honeyed in the double sense: the

sound is honey-sweet (LEXLpXQov to pwvt ta), but the speaker's own mouth

exudes the scent of honey. This is more than the "he smells of perfume"

that comes next on the list (in@u3v RnonvEovt). I am instead thinking of

the phrase "opening that Hymettic mouth" (r Y tiltTov xtvo cvoLag

PLEASURE

159

o6Ita), where Mt. Hymettus is an Athenian mountain famed for its honey.

The metaphorical pleasure that the guide's voice gives is converted into

literal honey. The qualities used to describe the body become actual attri-

butes of that body. And in this case the attribute is picked up and turned

into a snide comment: he is some other sort of being who is fed on dew and

ambrosia.

This, then, is our corporeal introduction to the second guide. We have

a guide who is relentlessly bodily. This guide even appears to embrace such

a reduction to physicality. He has a self-conscious and cynical relationship

to his own body. He is a student of the body and pleasure whose goal is

manifest imbecility, affectation, deception, and sensual gratification.

The narrator of the text tells the young man that as the student of this

guide, he will at once and effortlessly become a conspicuous orator or " 'a

king of discourse,' as the guide himself would say" (1g Ovotet fa6og,

I3aoXebg ev ToLg X6yotg).15 Although he is about to make some further

remark about this guide's program of study, the narrator breaks off:

T JtaQOYrta odv xELva - aXkov aiw~rog Etcica rtgQ o yEXkoLov y aq

t3TOoto1rov Q1oog Q nELJoteL6Oat Log Xoyovg, q pukov vto-

XQLT 1V oWg TOv totovaT)VC xLTXLxktxoJaT)v, t ] XacL ovvtQLOpm Tov

mteo6v TOv fiOma 6v toxLvo at.

Ial totycaQoVv &v tQog o E~ 6W Ctg u ttocLtao&atevog 6rooov Ct

XonTov irg 6sxoilg XCa toLettQocug to y. TO uIpOv Q x evo xa &nuakXOv

oiov E mOEV, AfroOuba a uilv XWtLXTv j MakXO6axV j FXvxav tLva

qoeatevog Tp OgQooTjVEL otc pO y1carovg' ayQotLxov yU QTo QQE-

vW3tov xaL o 3tog Q0apol, xca aoLo iQoog. qpiloJELt 8' ov Avv

IETQL Wv i3TEQ avo ...

[These first items - no, let the man himself address you. For it is

laughable for me to speak on behalf of such a great orator. Being, as I

am, an unaccomplished performer of matters so great and so grand

alike, I worry lest I should even fall somewhere and smash to bits the

hero whom I perform.

Accordingly, he would address you in some manner such as this

after he first draws back what remains of his hair, flashes that polished

and delicate little smile he uses, and then imitates with the mildness of

his voice the comic stage's Autothais, or Malthake or some Glycera.

For manliness is rustic and has no place in the delicate and desirable

orator. So, putting things very moderately, he will say on behalf of

himself...]

(Lucian, Praeceptor 12-13)

The narrator refuses to go on in his own voice. He might smash this "hero."

The narrator alludes to an imagined theatrical mask that might be damaged.

160 STAGING MASCULINITY

But the Greek is more pointed and paradoxical than this: it is the hero

himself who is in danger. Of course, despite this protestation, the bad guide

actually is performed, and he is destroyed along with all of his heroic quali-

ties. While it might at first appear that the depraved master is really brought

forward and that the narrator withdraws by way of a literary fiction, this is

not the case. Instead, the narrator really does don the mask of the guide. As

was mentioned in the previous chapter, the rhetorical figure is called

prosopopoeia; and the name for the figure contains the dramaturgical mask-

ing metaphor. The voice of authority knows how to camp it up when he needs

to make a mockery of his opponents. The bad guide does not speak here:

the potential optative "he would say" (ptai) and indefinite phrasing of the

introduction to the second paragraph (b6 nrg) make it clear that the

narrator has disavowed his mimetic capacities only at once to invoke them

again: the narrator himself gives voice to the illegitimate.

Despite his pretense of refusal, the narrator speaks in the voice of the

effeminate guide. In other words, the feminine is fully colonized, and the

labor of its purgation proceeds from a point of consolidated authority that

has already subsumed the female. Men need this feminine masquerade and

femininity as masquerade in order to stage their own authenticity. Remem-

ber that our narrator took the other road, that he is himself the product of

the masculine guide's discipline. Yet in the course of this discipline, one

acquires a thorough knowledge of the pleasure one refuses: it is an unspeak-

able pleasure to which one nevertheless can always give a voice. In fact,

one must voice it in a mandatory gesture of refusal and abjection. The

rhetorical tropes of rhetorical criticism, including the sexing of the Asian-

ism debate, can be read as a compulsory repetition of this act of incorpora-

tion and exclusion.

The guide cannot begin speaking, though, without further gestures

being made to his body by our narrator. Each time one looks to this guide's

body, it is revealed as parodic or a failure. But this failed body is also made

into the substance of the guide's style. In fact, his body and style are always

condemned to failure even in his own superficial terms. The guide draws

back his hair, which is again described as thinning, and gives a fetching

smile. Thus he cannot resist gesturing to his own body even when such a

gesture serves only to point out the ridiculousness and shortcomings of his

own physical presence. His hyperawareness of his body in no way prevents

him from constantly offering ridiculous performances that accent their own

deficiencies. The guide then casts his voice into a feminine register. By

making this voice also be one from a woman of the comic stage, he again

discredits himself: the comic actor is precisely the creature to be avoided in

delivery. One avoids the comic actor, though, precisely because of the

pleasure he gives and the credibility he lacks.

PLEASURE

161

When speaking to his will to oratorical power, the effeminate guide

addresses the prospective student as "my sweet" (J XtEl ca). This is an

erotic hailing, appropriate to lyric poetry and not to rhetorical prose. The

narrator hailed this subject as "my young fellow" (d eLtaqxLov). In that case

we were given a catalog of desire on the youth's part that consisted in being

beheld with awe by all and in having unsurpassable power. In this instance

the guide is already playing the passive, effeminate lover to his charge. And

the promises he makes are calibrated to the field of power as (giving) plea-

sure rather than power as mastery and domination. One is meant to be

disgusted: the active/passive distinction was essential to ancient thought on

sexuality, and male passivity was considered vile.16

Even though this erotic guide again calls upon the prospective student

to show determination and resolve in carrying out his behest, we find that

the pupil needs no preliminary education and need not even know his

letters: "for an orator is something other than this" (XXkko y&Q T JaQa

tavra 6 iq Q) (Praeceptor 14). What then, does the orator need to bring

with him?

K6o tE TOL'VV TO C ,toov [Ev Til V LaV E, stra 0Q8oog, Enr

TOroLtg o 6To kav xaL AvaoXVVT Lav. acba w6 l JntLELxtcav Q et -

QLOTflrc EQvO 1]La oixot JkTnoe cXQELca yaQ XCaI EnevawVta T)

tCy aLt. aXXa xact 3oilv Ot [W YLo vc xct Xog &vaLoavvrov xa

f3 tota o ov To t6ov. TWaVTa & AvayxCta ntV av xat ovaC EotyLV 6tE

Lxav6. cxai l ~ofig &e o Eo evavOlg k xil, 5yov 1 ig TaQav Tv1g

EQyaolag, og SctaLpctlvcoat tO6 owctca, xati i xQltg 'ATTIXi yVv-

atLxELta, To noXVoXtaLg,1] 8 E [LIAf g XtLx1V iL YoL Xotg kv0Xxoig jnt-

atQnovoa, xad &6xoov6o nokXoI xcad 3L(3Xov 66.

[First and foremost bring ignorance, then boldness, and in addition to

these daring and shamelessness. Modesty, seemliness, moderation, or

a blush, leave these at home. They are useless and contrary to the

business at hand. But shout as loud as possible and sing a shameless

melody and walk like me: these things are quite necessary and some-

times of themselves sufficient. And let your clothing be colorful or

white, the product of the Tarentine workshop, so that your body is

seen through it. You should have either the woman's Attic boot, the

kind with lots of straps, or wear a Sicyonian shoe set off with white

pieces of felt. And have many attendants, and always a book.]

(Lucian, Praeceptor 15)

The student needs to assimilate himself to a woman, but not to just any

woman. He needs to become a harlot, to tart himself up and trick him-

self out. A blushing or modest femininity is resolutely rejected.17 The

162 STAGING MASCULINITY

commandments to self-observance and self-mastery of Quintilian are here

converted into a primary sexualized self-awareness that will be cashed in

when the spectators become aroused at the sight of the speaker's body. The

diaphanous clothing is chosen to expose the body, not to hide it or set it off

or selectively reveal it. This is the gross version of Quintilian and the

spectacle of the speaker's toga (Quintilian 11.3.144-49). The gait is sex-

ualized; and the voice draws attention to itself in coarse and forbidden

ways: Quintilian and Cicero forbid singing and mere shouting.18 This kind

of orator is a student of appearances and perceptions, but we will find that

this kind of oratory is only appearances and perceptions. This sort of orator

does not perform an essence or manifest a state of being. He instead

produces a mere image, an image designed with no other end than the

gratification of pleasure. Governing this pageantry are ignorance, bold-

ness, and a host of other vices. All of this is a far cry from the canonical

rhetorical project that presents itself as education, winning over, and stir-

ring the audience (docere, conciliare, movere).19

Willful inauthenticity is also the hallmark of the word choice (lectio,

Xktg) of this kind of orator. One is commanded to pick out from some-

where fifteen - twenty at the most - Attic words (Praeceptor 16). These

will be sprinkled in as a sweetener to one's speech (xuOa
Forget it if they are inappropriately used; just make sure that the purple

stripe on one's garment is fair and bright, even if it's a coarse goat-hair

cloak. Thus language, apart from being amenable to trumpery, is itself

bolstered by immediate appeal to actual appearances: the purple stripe that

indicates the political authority of its wearer substitutes for the authorita-

tive use of language. And even this purple, provided that it is speciously

bright and fair, is a sufficient marker to eclipse the boorishness of a coarse

cloak. Much as one needs only fifteen Attic words to sound like a classi-

cally trained and authorized speaker, so one needs only the stripe: no one

will notice the scandalous condition of the rest. Language and appearances

are usually fused into an authentic whole; here they are paired in their

speciousness with one fraudulent authority bolstering another.

This argument does more than collapse under its own ridiculous

weight, though. It also brings down with it the legitimate orator. To what

extent is he not just a man with fifteen hundred or even fifteen thousand

Attic words, a man with a purple stripe and a good cloak too? Taking the

hard road to oratory means never having to ask such questions: there is a

qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference between the two kinds

of speaker. I am; he merely seems.

The tale of the good guide is much the same as that of the bad one. In his

case all of the terms of appraisal are inverted toward the positive. But this

PLEASURE

163

inversion bespeaks a fundamental structural similarity between the two

bodies and styles. They are yoked as necessary structural antipodes upon

which a knowledge of oratory and the oratorical subject depends. Yet this

parallelism between the two poles undermines our ability to declare that

there is a radical dissimilarity here as well, that one orator is true, the other

false. The perfect body is no more real and untroubled than was the illusion

of the body it refuses.

As was the case before with the bad guide, the text immediately gives

a body to the good guide standing before the difficult path:

Ei0vog ov oot gOQELtoL xaQTE QOg Lt;g cvrl, EooXXQ , 8v9c6 lg

Torb fuatoa, noXvy v jXov it -[q ociiart bELXVUCWV, xQQEVwrsog rTo

[XE L, yYlQyo S, T1] S TQaQXCc 65ov EXEvrW ijys {uv, i1Qotg

tvaog 6 ratog 8ttELWV otg oC. EJ nEoat yLa oL nac taxEkevoEvog,

)JnoLstxvbg at ArlooO6voSg 'xv xacd lHXaLTWvog xa ,aXXwv tvwv,

Ey ka tv xaL 3,tE tog vvv, &avwa8 j fib8 ci xa oaQPl rat noaX

Jo -rov xQ6vov, q plost eL tova oc oso xai vopp 7atlostV -riv

PlQOtxlv, Et L xa a TO TO)V0 68EoEtcag one oit ni L T v xctXwv

Palvovreg.

[At once a sturdy man will approach you. He is a rather hard fellow,

masculine in his gait, deeply tanned, with a manly look to his eye, and

alert. He is the guide along that harsh route; and the fool will recount

for you some sort of nonsense. For he will bid you to follow him,

pointing out the tracks of Demosthenes and Plato and certain others,

big tracks, indeed, and beyond those of present day men, but in-

distinct now and mostly unclear owing to the passage of time. He will

say that you will be blessed and you will lawfully marry Rhetoric if you

will travel along these steps as if you were walking a tightrope.]

(Lucian, Praeceptor 9)

The guide's body is made to accord to the path down which he leads the

student: each is harsh, and, likewise, each is virile. As Anderson has ar-

gued, the imagery here is associated with philosophy for Lucian, and thus

we are looking at a "philosophical" rhetoric (1976, 68). This body also

corresponds to the style of rhetoric for which the student will be trained.

The text presents the goal of the journey, Lady Rhetoric, as monolithic.

But this is in fact a sleight of hand that defers the stylistic question of

"Asianism" as against "Atticism" - to give the traditional names to the

debate - into a question of the nature of the guides and their training, not

the nature of Rhetoric herself.

The Asianism debate is about as old as critical thought on oratory, and

the commentary on the debate is roughly as old as modern philology. 20 The

164 STAGING MASCULINITY

Asianists are outlandish, radical, feminine, and generally ridiculous, while

the Atticists are pure, conservative, and manly. In other words, spatiali-

zation (read: xenophobia) is the inaugurating move in the choice of appella-

tion, and other binarisms follow in the train of this play between the here/

not here. The figure of the Asiatic is always used as the margin haunting

the legitimate order. Cicero, though, recognizes that even "Attic" is itself a

meaningless category: the canonical Athenian orators were too dissimilar

to be compassed by a single term (cf. Heldmann 1980, 4). Thus, the

distinction between the two is always a strategy or ploy of inclusion, exclu-

sion, self-definition, and self-constraint. Kennedy, a particularly faithful

student of authors like Quintilian, does them one better: he describes

Asianism as subtheoretical (1972, 98): for Kennedy this style falls entirely

outside of the realm of science and the handbook. An argument that aligns

knowledge and reason with (masculine) Atticism is clearly one to which

ancient thinkers would invite us; but this is also an invitation we ought to

decline.21

Rhetoric is a fixed term; the only real question is what sort of man will

wield its power: a good old Athenian gentleman (xakoox&yaO6g) like

Demosthenes or Plato, or a foreign freak. This keeps the performer in the

position of the authoritative representative of Rhetoric. The image the text

chooses is that of Rhetoric's husband. The question becomes one of the

legitimacy of his person, the quality of his claim to occupy his role. In the

ancient version of marriage, the husband takes his wife from one x×Qtog so

as to himself become her X1QLog, where xQLtog designates a man in charge,

a person in authority. In this sense the new spouse becomes the old father.

So also does a text like Lucian's make sense according to the logic of

Rubin's "traffic in women" (Rubin 1975): a male community is forged and

consolidated as one man hands a woman to another.

This virile guide is a good Atticist, and hence just the sort of father

figure with whom one might hope to have dealings. The telling token of his

party affiliation is his invocation of Demosthenes and Plato. In a few

sentences we will also find an allusion to the very starchy Aeschines: the

guide "thinks that you should emulate the son of a sword-maker (Demos-

thenes) and another who is the son of some Atrometan schoolmaster

(Aeschines)."22 Obscure birth does not necessarily prevent one from elitist

and legitimate intellectual attainment. Again one can compare Lucian's

own biography: hardworking young men can "marry" above their station.

There is a corporeal substance that is made to subtend this question of

style, a hard, manly body that is its emblem. It must be noted that the

question of style and the body is reiterated in the musty examples that

this leader proposes as models for imitation. The Greek that introduces

this section is sarcastic, and the narrator pretends to mock traditional elite

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165

education: "He offers you stale old rhetorical examples" (X kc ncta-

bEycaca naa3tQLEL'tg iov 6ycv). The guide was also described when

he was first introduced as a fool (p irtiog) who raved (ilgoovg Ltvag). The

narrator's "advocacy" of the easy path gives the negative terms for the

conservative rhetorical program. At the same time, his deprecations of this

leader ought also to be quietly making him attractive to us; we will be asked

to respond to this rough man's rough treatment in the same moment we

become revolted at desiring the hypererotic second guide.

The chief objection against the examples that this guide proposes lies

in the phrase o 5ict iataoeloat: they are "not easy to imitate." The

invocation of imitation ought to put us on our guard. Not only is it some-

thing of a buzzword for Lucian's own practice, but it also recalls acting and

actors. It recalls men who merely imitate. Thus there arises the whole

problem of being and seeming again, but this time in a passing gesture.

Lucian's essay rests on the implication that there is a harder, manly

imitation-presumably imitation of the truth-and an easier, effeminate

imitation of wanton falsity.

These paradigmatic examples offered by the manly guide are them-

selves invested with bodies in the simile that follows: "Such are the prod-

ucts of the ancient handiwork, of Hegesias and the students of Critius and

Nesiotes, close-packed and sinewy, hard with precise and taut lines."23 This

manly teacher of rhetoric was put into flesh by the narrative, and next the

narrator gives a corporeal likeness to his teaching. The corporeality of

rhetorical teaching is like unto a likeness; it is akin to a carved representa-

tion of bodies.24 This is only fitting: oratory involves the assumption of a

kind of body, a bodily relation and hexis, and the products of one's oratory

are appropriately likened to statues, images of a departed but recoupable

original. The teacher, a style made into a body, offers other bodily styles

and stylistic bodies to his student. In the assumption of either body or style,

though, the student does not so much become himself or live his own body

as he strives for the likeness of a likeness. He strives for an ideal style-body

whose exemplar is another product of careful craft and not raw corporeal-

ity or untrained verbal expression.

Desmouliez explains things differently: "Nous d6couvrons ainsi l'ori-

gine des m6taphores entre le corps humain et le style, et, en meme temps,

leur signification esth6tique. L'art grec, au dela de sa volont6 de r6alisme,

a d6fini un id6al de beaut6. Et de meme que la m6rite du peintre ou

du sculpteur se mesurera a la fid61it6 dans la reproduction de cet id6al,

de meme l'orateur sera d'autant plus proche de la perfection que son style

m6ritera davantage d'etre compar6 au corps humain, dans la pl6nitude

de la vie et de la force" (1955, 59). If we recall that the body is a

social product invested with a variety of arbitrary yet potent meanings,

166 STAGING MASCULINITY

we cannot casually accept Desmouliez' version. Good styles and good

bodies are alike because they both participate in the maintenance of

aristocratic male authority. Neither is "true" or "accurate," though the

naturalization of both is a vital fiction. Once again the space between cura

and natura closes up, a bridging movement that lies at the foundation of

the oratorical tradition. Such a trope falsifies the issue of falsity, of "mere

rhetoric," and instead shifts us into a register where there is a truth in

discipline, where discipline is a necessary assumption, a truth in and of

itself.

This simile that likens words to statues is troubling not just for the

aforementioned paradox of derivative modeling:25 it is hardly even a simile.

Although the vocabulary is appropriate to the visual arts, portions of it are

really more appropriate to descriptions of literary style: "close-packed"

(&n~eop1tytvu) and "precisely stretched tight" (&xptt3w;g ntotetava)

are better suited to literary criticism. Moreover, one can actually find three

relatively old Asiatic orators with the same names: Critius and Nesiotes were

painters in one generation and speakers in another. On this rereading

the simile can fail to be about the visual arts at all. Even the last words

"in their lines" (trag yQa aLg) are vaguely ambiguous: "lines" could also be

translated as "letters."26 The simile would then compare literature with

itself. It also would compare the good guide's good style-body with the

wrong sort of speakers. This is the sort of return of the repressed and collapse

of critical registers that keeps cropping up in this essay even at unexpected

times. And, as will be discussed shortly, the riddle of the bad guide's name is

the most important example of this phenomenon.

However, the three proper names are almost certainly meant to be

those of three pre-Phidean sculptors. These would be sculptors who ante-

date the golden-age sculptor Phidias, who flourished during the days of

Pericles and the putative acme of Athenian democracy.27 Critius and

Nesiotes were credited with producing the statues of the tyrannicides

Harmodius and Aristogiton, the aristocratic lovers whose images were

erected in the heart of the democracy as a remembrance of its inaugura-

tion. These two figures of idealized homosexual desire and of elitist mas-

tery are fitting bodies to call upon here.28

The third sculptor, Hegesias, was famed for statues of the Dioskouroi,

Castor and Pollux. Yet this very pair are the answer to the riddle of the

name of the other guide, the disgusting Pollux. We keep finding surprising

allusions when we track down Lucian's references. The name of Pollux

stands in permanent erasure throughout this essay. The bad guide gives his

name only in oblique form: "I am no longer called Potheinus, but have

become like-named to the children of Zeus and Leda" (o1xirt HoOELtvog

ovotoat, iXX' fib1 TOtg Atog xa Ailag nUtoLQv 6ttxvtiog yyv tcat)

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167

(Praeceptor 24). The original name, Potheinus, remains quite legible de-

spite its effacement. This old name is actually more legible than the new

one. Potheinus, which could almost be translated as Mr. Sexy, once again

draws attention to the corrupt sexual essence of this brand of oratory. Not

only is it a name derived from the notion of desire, but it is also formed

from a passive root, "desired, desirable." Thus, the bad guide was already

about to be himself before the assumption of oratory and his new name.

This is a convenient attribution of prior essence to ground a truth about

style and practice.

Even as the return of the illicit name Potheinus effaces the name

Pollux, the riddle of the sons of Zeus and Leda is itself a point of fertile

ambiguity. It is always possible to be mistaken because there are two chil-

dren of Zeus and hence two equally valid names to choose from: Castor

and Pollux. Traditionally one assumes that the narrator means to indicate

someone named Pollux.29 But Castor is also a good specter to retain in the

allusion: the twin of Pollux has the same name as the beaver, an animal

famed for self-castration (see Juvenal 12.34). Sexual passivity and emascula-

tion endlessly recur in the story of this guide.

The name cannot be given; it can only be riddled. It is interesting, then,

to see how this unnamable name, which is itself a deferral of a name of

desire, Potheinus, haunts proleptically the simile that is intended to ground

the masculine Atticist orthodoxy. The bad guide's body, style, and name

infect the mythical allusion. The good guide's precepts are meant to be like

Hegesias' Pollux. But this name that goes unnamed even here is a crux of a

persistent crisis for our texts: the good guide's precepts will never be able to

radically separate themselves from that other Pollux in the offing. We get, if

we are lucky, the lovely bodies of Harmodius and Aristogiton, but the text is

faltering at the very moment where it seeks to consolidate the surety of the

claims of the male body. Pollux - or should he be designated Pollux? - is

stalking about the margins. His name is always a name with which legitimate

bodies, pleasures, and styles might be addressed.

Reading again momentarily with the text instead of against it, we find

another register in which the manly guide should be analyzed. He has an

unusual relationship to time. First, the most painful of all the requirements

(o 8Etavt cv &vLaQ6nraov) imposed upon his disciple is the expenditure of

time. The many years he demands of his student are far more objectionable

than the toil, wakefulness, abstention from wine, and earnestness that he

also commands. These last unwelcome injunctions can all be found in other

texts as specific attributes of Demosthenes. That is, we are asked to submit

to a specifically Demosthenic regime. Or, it is Demosthenic after the fash-

ion we have already seen in Quintilian's advice on self-mastery: Demosthe-

nes' name stands at the head of a tradition of punishing, manly discipline.

168 STAGING MASCULINITY

And, as we well know, one can labor endlessly and nevertheless only ap-

proximate the excellence of Demosthenes.

This guide is not just out to waste our time, though; he is himself a man

from another time. He is a braggart, truly archaic, a mortal from the time of

Kronos (?Xatlv xct Q aQXaog bg 6&XOwg xca KQovtLxog iv0Qwnog) (Prae-

ceptor 10). His temporal displacement leaves him in ignorance of the new

and easy route that has been cut to oratory. The days of Kronos represent a

radically different time against which our own age has been constituted. That

is, the age of Kronos is segregated from the time of Zeus, our own era, by a

gulf of revolution: the son revolted against and imprisoned the father in the

nether world. For the gods, the time of Kronos may have been troubled, but

it was the time of the golden race of men, men who lived like gods, far from

toil and strife, ageless. These men did not have to reap or sow, but the earth

supplied of its own all their wants. Such, at any rate, is the portrait of this age

in Hesiod (Works and Days 109-19). And we know that we should be

reading Hesiod because Lucian has repeatedly alluded to him.

When Lucian's narrator speaks of reaping unsown, our first asso-

ciation will be with the freedom from toil of the easier route. But let us

force him to have a second meaning: namely, imagine that the orator toils;

he succeeds in his craft; he wins Rhetoric as his bride. Furthermore, in the

terminology of earlier chapters, he also becomes what he actually is and

had to be. In this state, the student takes the place of his teacher, the man

from the days of Kronos. Then, with his fecund and Nilotic bride at his

side, the successful orator will experience a life filled with pleasure. This

pleasure is the product of a mystified hegemony over awe-inspired masses.

This pleasure is derived from mastery and set against carnality. Thus, by

pushing the text in the right directions, one can say that in order to have it

as good as things were under Kronos (nt tov KQ6vov) (Praeceptor 8) one

ought to in fact become a man from the time of Kronos (KQovtxog

iv0QuCnog) (10).

Hesiod himself is implicated in the ambiguous problem of difficulty,

ease, and authority. "Taking up a few leaves from Mt. Helicon, [Hesiod]

immediately became a poet instead of a shepherd" (6kXyca pXXa x tov

eExi.xwvog X Xa3v cLatLxac 1i a nt oLTllg i x noivog xatEotr) (Prae-

ceptor 4). The description in the Praeceptor rhetorum is misleading. In the

text of Hesiod, we see that the poet is invested with a scepter and a leafy

crown by the Muses, who are explicitly said to have taught him (&i&la5cv)

(Hesiod, Works and Days 22). Thus, in the original passage, legitimate

authority and education are in no way compromised. The student is in-

vested with a quasi-regal authority, and the powers that confer the honor

are unimpeachable: they are daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus (Works and

Days 24). And when Hesiod promises to sing to them first and last (34), he

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169

is guaranteeing to always bracket his own discourse with the markers of its

ultimate authorship and authorization. Thus, although the narrator in Lu-

cian seems to be advocating ease, tracking down his reference reveals a

gesture toward learning and legitimate authority. Indeed, the sort of mystic

investiture of authority found in Hesiod is, I would argue, a good analog

for the mystified legitimacy of the masculine body as represented by the

harsh guide's physicality and as it is assumed by a speaker who participates

in this branch of the rhetorical tradition.

But let us make a final return to time. The position of the guide as a

corporeal representative of a style of training is to be assumed by the

student himself. That is, the student of this path differs from its guide only

in question of time. This is the same distinction that pertains between the

narrator and the young man. One can compare a parallel constellation

played out in the realm of male homosexuality: the idealized relationship

between erastes and eromenos follows the same generational pattern. The

younger homosexual love object is passive until he is older, at which point

he becomes the active partner with still another young man.

In this characterization of the erotic relationship, I do not intend to

indicate "what actually happened." I am confident that a whole host of

liaisons and configurations occurred in practice even if they were thereby

subject to a hostile discourse labeling them perverse.30 I wish here to deal

only with the dominant narrative of homosexual desire in polite Greek

literature.31 This hierarchical and generational arrangement is allegedly

meant to educate: the young man satisfies the older man's physical desire;

the older man offers his wisdom and teaching in exchange. The erastes as a

figure of sexualized masculine hegemony has important associations with

our present project. First, the erastes is an erotic figure in whom sexuality is

recognized while simultaneously denied. His is a virility that is acknowl-

edged without being desired. In order to desire him, one becomes him. He

is not ever himself an object of desire: even Greek grammar forecloses this

possibility. Instead, one is meant to feel a desire of identification, not one

of possession. This idealized schema of male homoerotics helps us read the

problem of the sexuality inscribed in the guide. Indeed, this same schema

will help us when we take our final look at the relationship between the

narrator and his young addressee.

What is the end toward which the student strives? The answer to this

question is an invaluable one if we are to correctly appraise the desire of

the orator. The narrator's opening words to his student at once addressed

oratory as an object of desire. When the narrator gets into his own account

of rhetoric's rewards, he paints a picture of oratory that is consonant with

that original desire imputed to the student. Indeed, we could scarcely hope

170 STAGING MASCULINITY

for a more vivid supplement to those original images. In the end, though,

this version of the desire for rhetoric is even more compromised than was

the rhetoric of the opening passage.

Rhetoric is personified as PrroQtLxil, and her portrait as she sits at the

summit of the two paths of life is given in fine detail:

fl tv p' ~vpXob xaOiloOow navv xacLX1 xaLc snQ6oonog, TO pg

'AXak06eLag xciag iExovoa v t cEtLq c tavrooL;og xanJtog ;EQPgQov

tL 0a6aQq 8 tot rov tXoiov 8 OxL na7eor6rTTa 6aOv, xQVoouv

koaov xaL Q uotov. xacL 80oa xaL iLx,;g naqowocar v, xactL o

Ecatvot nQL naoav ailyv 'EQwoL Q tLXQOLtg oLxoTc;tg nokXoLc nav-

TaxOOEV nEQut cxoOcwocv ExJneTroEvot. 'E not tbv Neiov e6g

yQcLap I E aLvov, aiTOv Ev xeIlEvov E3L XQOXObELXO TLVO;

LTnno TVo noOraLoV, otoL nokoXXoL v avi, tLXQO &6 TLva ntECLbLa

nao' abtov natcLovTa-nilXesg 6 aTo g o, Ay 1yv ot xakooOLt,-

otLOot OLxa L 3t QL tiV Protx lyV o L E3atcvot.

Let her sit on high, very lovely and fair to behold, holding in her right

hand the horn of plenty brimming over with every sort of fruit. I think I

see Wealth standing at her other side, all gold and desirable. Good

Repute and Power stand beside her. Numerous praises flutter in a

swarm all around her like so many Cupids. If perhaps you have seen the

Nile represented in a painting where the river itself lies upon one of the

many crocodiles or hippopotami that are found in it while certain small

youths frolic about him-the Egyptians call them rrixELg32- such, in-

deed, are the praises surrounding Rhetoric.]

(Lucian, Praeceptor 6)

Much as the Nile is painted as surrounded and supported by its own prod-

ucts, so is Rhetoric, herself a surpassingly beautiful figure, encompassed by

her own fruits: opulence, wealth, fame, power, and praise. She is en-

shrouded in desire, for such is the required translation of praises that are

like so many little iEpwtE;g.

The identification of praise and desire, though, at once sets us on an

unstable footing. The orator's desire is always necessarily the desire of the

other in this formulation. Praises are external to the subject, and they

emerge from a space wherein one finds a nonspecific godlike voice that is

heard praising, as a faceless mass utters praise with one voice. The desire

that props up the subject labeled orator originates from without, and it is

only by acquiring Rhetoric that his needs are secured. This can be seen as

the auditory counterpart of a specular relationship of (mis)identification.

One meets with and accedes to a desire suffusing the social field specifically

as an orator: I become bodily as an orator performing rhetoric. The world

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171

praises me as a beloved object, the good speaker. In exchange the world

offers me Rhetoric as a bride. It is through rhetoric that one negotiates

these pleasures and one's own identity.

As Lacan would remind us, "What I seek in speech is the response of

the other. . . . I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it

like an object" (1977, 86). Kaja Silverman's gloss on this passage not only

facilitates the acoustic rereading of Lacan, but also shows that language is

here not the agent of plenitude for the subject: it castrates, ensures that

there will ever be something lacking in his self-sufficiency (1988, 42-44).

What the orator lacks, though, he will get from his bride:

L-QOOEL 6 l cw 6 voQaOT] STLOVl v 1 iOt LXLQoTa yEVEoat EJ L

tri;acx ac,6yu oELi; TE avi'v avEXOchv xcL i TcavTcLExELvcLa o;

r v 3Xovrxo i v 6boav robg rna'lvovg' vo6~p ycq tnavca yLyvEtaL

Tov yEyaiTxoto;.

[You, the lover, will approach her desiring, of course, to get to the

summit as soon as possible so that once you are up there you will

marry her and have all of those things, the wealth, the reputation, the

praises. For by law everything becomes the property of the husband.]

(Lucian, Praeceptor 6)

This is not the most straightforward of marriage scenes. Although the

narrative does not appear at first glance to be confused or abrupt, I would

like to open up a troubled space at this juncture. The emphatic first expres-

sion o 6 ovaoig has not been satisfactorily translated. "Lover" will do in

a pinch, but it must be noted that this word means one who is desirous,

desirous of something. It is not, though, a word for "suitor," not the sort of

word that would well describe the young man who shows up at a father's

house and contracts with him to secure a marriage with his daughter. Polite

society usually segregates wooing (to tvaooat) from lusting (To 'Qav): one

is supposed to marry in order to unite two patrifocal families by way of a

woman, not just to get laid. The ancients had prostitutes and dancing girls

for that kind of thing.

Desire should not in itself be a guarantor of a successful acquisition of

a bride. The scene of evaluation and approval of the youth has been elided.

Perhaps we should see him as a rapist. Another option is to see Rhetoric as

a slut who takes all comers, or at least the one who gets there first. Thus

Rhetoric becomes ambiguous, like Helen of Troy, a figure in whose case

wooing and lusting coincided to disastrous effect. In the narrator's portrait

of her we find that Rhetoric has no x1Ltog with her, no man in charge of

her, no overseer, and no guarantor. This situation introduces a moment of

172 STAGING MASCULINITY

confusion. Women ought to have a xUQLog: juridically there are no two

ways about this question. Yet it is as useful as it is troubling that the

personified Rhetoric sits in a position that would be described as "illegiti-

mate" (atcig v6oov) for a real woman at the very moment before she is to

be acquired and her goods yielded over to the man "by law" (vo6gp).

It is pointless to brand either the lover as rapist or Rhetoric as whore;

let us only say that there is something unsavory lurking in the scenography,

but that these shady dealings never become apparent since the text shifts at

once into the joys of this miracle marriage: the youth gets all of his bride's

stuff. To the extent that he is yoked to Rhetoric at all, this is a marriage of

convenience and not one of passion: the passion lies elsewhere, to the side

of (rctqi) Rhetoric.33 Rhetoric is herself fair, but her beauty seems to be

largely derivative from her possessions. The youth can be expected to

acquire for himself as part of her dowry even her personal epithets, her

beauty and fair visage. That is, the groom wins aspects of the bride's body

as part of his own.

This moment of potential androgyny opens up some gender troubles

that echo those discussed above. The sensuality of the description of

Rhetoric - its all-encompassing quality, the wealth, the influence, and

the praise - these could all have been fit into the description of the bad

guide were they expressed a little more snidely. One may desire the female

abstraction Rhetoric, but one may not desire an effeminate rhetorician.

The politics of pleasurable performance then turn upon this key deferral

into the third party. One desires the woman passed between men, the

abstraction on the hilltop and not the body lying in wait for you at the foot

of the road.

This description bridges the gulf between the evaluative metaphors I

have been using. Earlier, the relationship to the good guide was described

as homosexual, and a relationship between erast&s and eromenos. In the

nuptial version, though, the student is no longer the passive partner. He is

himself an erastus. Student and guide now relate to one another as peers, as

erast&s to erastes, as active lover to active lover. Through Rhetoric they may

exchange pleasure with one another without compromising their virile au-

thority, a situation vital to the reading of Cicero's De oratore in the next

chapter. Nevertheless, to my tastes, a strange thing is happening: we are

losing sight of legitimate performance. Good oratory and bad oratory are

beginning to seem rather too alike, and our pleasures have started to get

compromised. The bad teacher is too much like a man who has changed his

name to Rhetoric, and Rhetoric is not distinct enough from this vile figure.

One last observation helps to unpack this crisis: why is Rhetoric like

the Nile? That is, why is the image of the culturally central, established,

and elitist practice of oratory likened to a foreign river surrounded by

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173

strange animals and odd little "cubits"? The Nile is a foreign element in a

context that advocates Atticism.34 Moreover the only other mention of the

Nile in this essay comes as part of a slur against the birth and station of the

bad teacher. But there are some key parallels between the Asiatic Nile and

the Asianist Pollux. Even if the unnameable Pollux of the subsequent text

is revolting, he is himself indisputably a figure of desire and pleasure.

Likewise he is inscribed as feminine, as playing the woman's role. In that

case, the female as the not-male is usefully aligned with the foreign.35

Both woman and the foreign are figures that resist signification within

the legitimate order, yet they are likewise figures whose exclusion enables

the same order that constitutes them as, and at, their margins.36 The female

and the foreign require appropriation and colonization to the extent that

they serve as loci of potential inruption into the order that uses them as

their boundary. Thus, the other whose figuration is either to be resisted or

only offered with horror must nevertheless be expressed in such a way as to

be fixed as a stable margin lest the repressed return in an unwanted fashion.

In the case of the female in particular, it will be seen that phallicized forms

ideally reproduce themselves in this female medium without being of this

medium (Butler 1993, 53-55). That is, legitimate oratory is done under the

sign of a male homosociality where Rhetoric is the figure passed "between

men" (Sedgwick 1985).

How it is that this Asiatic bride is the Atticist's ideal wife? The image

of Rhetoric as Nile confesses to a sort of requisite labor of colonization and

appropriation of the margins by the center. One takes possession of that

illicit space as a necessary move in constructing the center. At the same

time, the desire of the orator for oratory always participates in a dialogue

with this repressed, owned, and mastered foreign femininity. In the ancient

metaphors of marriage we even find more parallels here. The wife remains

a sort of stranger in the husband's house, a person from whom one begets

legitimate children yet one who is not kin. Instead she is always the daugh-

ter of another man. Furthermore, when one takes a wife, one masters or

breaks her, one tames her like a horse. The Greek verb is aa~1tlyv. In

each scene from a marriage we find an echo of the structure of the orator's

betrothal to oratory.

As is the body, so are the man and his oratory. Let us resume this thread and

pursue it to the end. The repulsive oratory of the bad guide is typified by the

inappropriate and the out of place, defects that are not at all inadvertent, but

are instead sought out. And, accordingly, they are even proclaimed virtues

rather than vices. One is to disregard what should be said first, second and

third: instead one speaks just as the words come (18). One should make

constant mention of the battle of Marathon, the yoking of the Hellespont

174 STAGING MASCULINITY

and other famous historical episodes (18). Speeches should begin with the

events of the Iliad or with events of even earlier times, and descend to the

present day (20). The only rule is to not be silent, to press onward (18).

Foreign examples, mythic examples, historical examples, these should be

thickly applied along with a layer of those fifteen or so Attic words, even if

there is no need for them: "for they are fair even when spoken at random"

(xcaX& 'yaQt otL xca lcx Xey6 tva). One is told that if it seems opportune to

sing, sing (19). Of course, the classical handbooks tell us that one never

sings, one seeks to employ a "rather subtle melody" (cantus obscurior).

Thus, the rhythms of the legitimate orator are there, yes, but they are hidden

and tease the ear. They are not gross, garish, and obvious affectations.

Bourdieu (1984) has examined the relationship to music and to the

discourse on music of the dominant and dominated social fractions. The

"vulgar" sort enjoy the obvious. In doing so they participate in a dis-

course of cultural consumption that condemns them to their gaucheries.

This obscure versus obvious distinction is mobilized to generate the distinc-

tion between the authorized and the illegitimate, or, as we saw in the last

chapter, to separate the orator from the actor. Here we find in the injunc-

tion to sing a commandment to obvious and hence debased pleasures. This,

then, is a specific case of the more general order to show no shame.

"Accompany the song with tragic outbursts" (Tob 6 oELtot Tyv xaxLcv

ToXkXaxtg). "Gargle and spit your phrases." This particular commandment

is an intervention from a different register of the narrative: such a delivery

is not only wrong, but is even revolting, and accordingly is not even part of

the dainty and eroticized program of Pollux. The mask of our narrator is

slipping a bit that he might more directly trample upon his hero rather than

allow the persona to discredit itself. "Walk shaking your ass to and fro"

( t acp Qiv v rily vyilv). Rendering this advice etymologically, we could

translate it, "Make your ass a metaphor for your oratory." "If praise is not

forthcoming, make a stink and abuse your auditors." Thus the orator is

ordered to impose by force the scene of praise and wonderment that is

properly the end and goal of this gross performance.

The politics of bad style here comes to the fore: the reign of bad

speech is a reign of terror. If people rise and are on the verge of leaving,

order them to sit. The final words of this section are well chosen: "And

make an utter tyranny of the thing" (xad k0wg wtoavvSg To aQaya EaYTw).

The effeminate orator plays the tyrant where he must. The tyrant is of

course the cipher for illegitimate authority; but it also represents a sort of

authority that plays the other to legitimate hegemony. Accordingly, where

the program of pleasure breaks down, a violent and objectionable political

regime steps in to shore up the trouble.

The parallel with the genealogy of tyranny in Plato is pronounced

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though not surprising. In the Republic we find democracy typified by a

situation where the democratic state "praises and honors, privately and

publicly, rulers who are like subjects and subjects who are like rulers."37 This

is our vulgar oratory. In fact, if we substitute lover and beloved for the ruler

and subjects of Plato's formulation, we get the inverted erotic scenario of

bad oratory and its guide. The (inevitable) failure of democracy in Plato, just

as for our effeminate orator, produces as its successor tyranny. The demo-

cratic pandering of this oratory is always on the verge of falling into tyr-

anny.38 Perhaps, then, on the other side our narrator should be seen as an

Aristogiton, as both a tyrannicide and legitimate (active) lover (erasts).

The political crisis is not just the bad speaker's fault. Instead there is

something suspect about the public that responds to his base appeal. The

speaker is to seek out recherch6 and garish circumlocutions and neolo-

gisms, phrases eschewed by the speakers of old (17). Firing these off at the

crowd, they will marvel at the speaker's education that surpasses their own.

Mistakes have only one remedy: shamelessness. One invents authorities

and precedents for any chance solecism or barbarism. This is not to say that

one reads old authors, for this is prohibited. Rather, the authors of choice

are recent ones. In this section we have a parody of the "education as

mastery" motif. The new education causes the same marveling that was our

goal at the opening of this text, but here there is no foundation for the

sentiment. The "learning" that people admire is premised upon a prior and

fundamental ignorance to which the student was commanded. This situa-

tion and scene of amazement, however, is constituted out of a fascinating

contempt. The audience responds to authority: they see the virtue of educa-

tion; they respond to appeals to the names of historians and poets. Yet

these people are to be fed the names of nonexistent authorities, or else one

draws from the store of recent orators and eschews the works of the canoni-

cal Athenian masters.

In configuring the situation after this fashion, recent oratorical history

is necessarily cast on the side of shamelessness, ignorance, and effeminacy.

And joining in this revolting enterprise are the spectators themselves.

Thus, while the audience does know how to respond to claims of legiti-

macy, they are unable to distinguish the true legitimacy of the old disci-

pline. It should be recalled that at the opening of the Praeceptor rhetorum

we found only a semimystical causal chain: via self-discipline one reached

oratory, married her, and got her goods, the praises and amazement that

surrounded her. Thus, self-mastery led to mastery of the art, which in turn

led to mastery of the sentiments of spectators. The inevitability of this

scenario has been lost. Instead a space has opened up where the audience

of the day is waiting and eager to be mastered, but cannot recognize its

proper lord.

176 STAGING MASCULINITY

The audience of the orator consists of men who are, in the main,

cretins. The contempt of the guide for his auditors serves as the starting

point for his cynical calculations. The wonder and amazed onlooking that

our text is constantly invoking as the orator's proper goals here come from

impressing a fundamentally naive audience (see especially Praeceptor 20).

The play of surfaces that obsesses the guide is motivated and justified by

an identical superficiality on the part of the audience he imagines. They

are the ones who look at the clothing, the shoes, and the walk. They are the

ones who are fooled by an Attic &Tta thrown in anywhere. At the same

time, they subscribe to the same basic structure of oratorical power that

we have seen all along: the agonistic, competitive metaphor put in the

youth's mouth at the opening of the Praeceptor rhetorum is reiterated in the

ayWvtoTlV of section 20. The spectators greet a specious spectacle with the

amazement that is the orator's desire. The people are taken in by many

trumped-up shows: one is supposed go about veiled and with an honor

guard (21). A conspicuous entry as the last speaker is also necessary (22).

Thus, the whole life of the orator is annexable to his project: his time spent

on stage is merely the most conspicuous of his performances. The people

are expected to be watching him everywhere.

On the other hand, the orator constantly watches the people. He is

especially concerned with watching himself being watched by them.39 Fur-

thermore, the people are venal. The guide instructs us to see to it that our

friends are always rushing about distributing food money to the spectators

when they see us about to fail, thereby giving us the chance to find some-

thing to say in the space afforded by the audience's praises.40 The orator is

supposed not just to be an "all-fearsome" (nayvtv6ov) competitor, but also

a nasty one: he must sabotage any advances made by other speakers. One

is commanded to deride (xuray Xa) all speakers. If someone says some-

thing nice, see to it that it appears the work of someone else. Thus, the

people's pleasure is to be monopolized by oneself; and the speaker greedily

attends to his store of public favor, with any means justifying this end. The

orator will be watched when he is himself a spectator: sour the favorable

impressions of others for the most part, smile faintly, and be clearly dissatis-

fied with what is said.41 In this passage Pollux also inserts a couple of

traditional handbook injunctions: "Don't shake your hand often, for that is

cheap. Don't stand up except once, or twice at most." Such a reappropri-

ation of the style and phrasing of traditional learning can be used to trouble

the serene field of decency, dignity, and appropriateness in which injunc-

tions like these are traditionally made to oratorical students. Maybe the

good men are just scam artists as well, charlatans, masters of a collection of

performative tricks. This is not the conclusion we are supposed to draw:

instead we are meant to believe that in the case of the good man, there is a

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177

"there" there. As far as everyone else goes, they merely seem while male

authority "is."

The guide concludes this section on the management of public opinion

with a catalog of trusty tools for the student to employ:

T~i 8' iXXcL XQ]OcLQQELV I tOX~ictyaLQ 2{cL ] cLcLXVVtkc( XUL VE~Og

rtQoXElQov L 09x0 Ert' axXQoL WF- tonXELXEQL xcd w6vo; Jtpb

cutavtag XcLI iOOg XcL 3XaJcp 1LO XUl b1QfpOXQl JTL&OvL - Ta OT E

&otSLiov EV IQc~xcL L TCQLI3XE3TTOV WocpctvEL.

[For the rest you must be confident: daring, shamelessness, a ready

lie, an oath always on the tip of the lips, spite toward all, hatred,

defamation, and persuasive slanders -these things will in no time

make you sung of and admired by all.]

(Lucian, Praeceptor 22)

One wins favor both by provoking naive and superficial pleasure and by

stirring up discontent and hate. Such are the orator's public acts.42 His

private ones are kindred to them and certainly no better. The scorn shown

the people has as its counterpart a shameless and wanton private life. In

previous chapters, I have described how the orator's public self-presentation

in the political field is related to a truth of his person. Lucian's bad guide

insists on relating the public to the private man as well. The bad orator is bad

through and through, bad both indoors and out in the public space.

iLoa rrtovrcL rEay~i toLliv 001 6c&5X0w, X~v 3EVL 60xE0cL

XcYVE VELLOXE q Ti WLVxELV y~q x q % JtoL1fl, xc 7t Q0 SJT VT~L

X~yEv xd yQa4jtELacL{ooEixvvva {vetoyuvatxwv oiqOcV yQca-

(pEVicL. xctXO;yc E cvat OEXE xctt OLt I1EEtc) iiru6 wv y1VQaLXWV

orv&a OoL bOOXELV EigTfV Q11TOQLX11V 7yLQ xcLiTOUTO cLVOLOOV(OLV

OL EOXXOL, (0 b LcX TOVTO OV xaL a~XQL t S yUVULXWVLtL6Og cv6o-

xL~O1JvtoS. XaLL TO 6ELVcLSE, i cL&EO6 fl, E L XM JT3rp6 v6QCwv n r

ETE E doOu L oxo;, xcd TcVUTcL EvEI, it "Tl ijxai v' 1 ADLpcL caxQ6

rjor 4v. ctXX' EauoW L OL LEJTL TTp c O1JVOVTEg ijv of i~1 dXJiv,

OLXETc L XUVOL. JTOXXcL ycLQ xctEx TOll TOLO1JTO1 t1g0 T]V Q1TOQLxflV

XQT10L~~L JncQcyLyVEica1.

[Privately, you should be willing to do anything, to play dice, to get

drunk, to copulate, to cuckold, or at least to boast that you do, even if

you don't; and be ready to tell it before all and to show letters purport-

edly written by women. Aspire to beauty and make it seem like the

ladies chase you. The public will attribute this too to your oratory,

figuring that it guarantees your popularity all the way to the women's

178 STAGING MASCULINITY

be loved in turn even by men, even though you already have your

beard or are even by God already going bald. But let men who are

there for this reason accompany you. If there aren't any of these, your

domestics will do. For many useful things accrue to oratory from such

activity.]

(Lucian, Praeceptor 23)

Sex is indissociable from oratory. A bad orator, accordingly, is sexually

scandalous. This line of thought makes certain other passages in ancient

literature seem more like inevitable gestures than scandalous bits of gossip.

For example, we have seen Aulus Gellius report that Demosthenes' attrac-

tive and studied dress became the occasion for slurs by his rivals and

opponents that he was a cocksucker (Noctes Atticae 1.5.1). One orator

always attacks the body of another. He attacks it as sexually illegitimate

and hence as politically illegitimate. The scandal is in giving pleasure, in

pandering, in betraying the orator's destiny as a "manly" man.

Lucian rings all of the changes as he describes a collapse of oratory

into sex. In the end, the body's organs are necessarily both sexual and

rhetorical: language and the body are inseparable, and each territorializes

the other.

xci flV XML JTtTolo0J XQ1 [, W

ECEiva. xa aubo

0X10Ta IEv TQ z xJcLVTc, E6 111, 3TtcvTW

0oot tbo ortoa JQOg EavrLa 6vtowg xe xrvTr,

xa 'q ykwTTa nvQETELTO xaL JTog To g kXoyovg xa aog Ta ka

rroca Av bvat. Tvaat E oE ooo otx tEv t6vov xat a3acQI3aQ tEv

ob ~Xi lky v ij IntoQXELV iotboOLo6atc 1taic4 AkXxtv c p 6b -

o0at, XaX xaLt vUXTCoQ t (1LXo JoteXELv, xaL tiXLtota v o tQg ot1)

Jnokkobg To0Vg EQOTag 1 8Lta xEog. JVTa aciT yE Intorto60T0 xa

yovL 0TE Qa 7Ltyv Eo0o xat ]bv TnootQEp E o0ow.

[Indeed it's even necessary to depilate, at best everything, otherwise,

at least those parts. And your very mouth, let it gape after all things

alike. Let your tongue serve for speeches and for everything else it

can. It can not only solecize and barbarize; it can do more than rave or

perjure or abuse or slander and lie: at night it can do some other

service, particularly if you are not up to so many loves. Let it be versed

in everything and let it be more fertile and let it turn away from

nothing.]

(Lucian, Praeceptor 23)

The oratorical project has completely collapsed into a sexual one. The

ignorant masses know that oratory is sexualized, that the orator's language,

at least, is erotically charged. They will automatically experience an erotic

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179

response in the face of the power and amazement that surround an orator,

much as praises fluttered about his bride, fair Oratory. The cynical student

of oratory, though, will seek to reverse the equation, use the effects to win

an opinion as to the nature of the causes: he will make sexual prowess

appear to betoken rhetorical prowess. It is in this last inversion alone that

our guide innovates, not in the fundamental eroticized cathexis to ora-

tory. In his relations to other men, the orator plays the passive partner

( QcioOat) even if his age means that he is no longer the youth who is the

proper object of male desire. When an adult man "allows" himself to

become a passive erotic object, it is a disgraceful act for him. Thus, it is

fitting that the command was phrased, "Don't feel any shame about your

thing." The "thing" is, of course, his penis. Here it stands for his sexual

behavior as a whole since the sentence makes it clear that we should expect

passivity of the speaker, not any literal "use" of his member. Where actual

shameful relations are wanting, the guide recommends yet again that we

vigorously pursue our own disgrace: we should let our domestics pretend to

be our homosexual admirers. This scenario, of course, disguises a serious

social inversion: the slaves are staged as would-be penetrators of the mas-

ter. Still, "Many useful things accrue to oratory from such activity."

So far, all we have is histrionics. The orator need not even actually

perform any of the recommended acts, but he must certainly declare that

he does and also act as if he does. Not surprisingly, however, the narrator

proceeds into a sexually explicit finale. His final injunctions to the student

are that he use a pitch plaster and depilate himself. The orator thus be-

comes soft, hairless, and effeminate. The Latin for soft, mollis, is always a

sort of sexual reproach when leveled at a male. Again we can compare

Gellius and the attack on Demosthenes. His soft and dainty garments

(~tkaxo 1 trwv'oxoLt) become tokens of sexual passivity for his foes. The

adult male should be hard, durus, just as should be the course of life he

pursues, the discipline he submits himself to, and the authority he wields

over others. The speaker is told to pluck everything, and if not everything,

at least those parts - namely his anus - that are expected to be soft for the

active male partner.43

Moving from one compromised orifice to another, we next get a set of

instructions regarding the mouth. It should be ready to move toward every-

thing alike. This is more than a little suggestive. The wordplay is redone in

the next clause: it should do its duty vis-h-vis speeches and as much else as

it might be able. It is hard to miss the point by now. The crescendo,

however, is in the third version. This starts negatively: one can not only

make revolting verbal transgressions with one's mouth, those auditory

vices that we have been told to see as virtues, but the tongue can also make

up for the body's own shortcomings. That is, if your anus gives out from so

180 STAGING MASCULINITY

much penetration, oral sex should be employed to make up the deficit. This

is the sexualized version of the earlier injunction to be never silent, to press

always on in speaking. There is a restless groveling to meet the desires of

others in manners that are never sufficient and always reprehensible.

The tongue should know all and turn from nothing. Only when it is

grotesque do we find from the bad teacher an injunction directing us

toward knowledge and labor. More interestingly, however, the tongue

should be "more fertile" (yovttwTQcLa ytyve Ow). It should produce more

than it now does; it should not just produce the pleasure of words but

instead produce as well the actual pleasure of oral-genital stimulation. But

this striking word choice is suggestive of still more. This "more produc-

tive" tongue can be made to stand for the penetrated mouth as a whole.

In this case the orifice begins to double for the female womb, and we

have yet another transferal of this body into the female register. The

penetrated mouth and anus of this kind of orator are graphic and explicit

literalizations of a panic over masculine oratorical hegemony and legiti-

macy. When you fail to look out for your "thing," passive female organs

begin to suffuse your anatomy.44 Or, in other words, you might as well not

have a penis at all. These are precisely the sort of specters that are used to

ground the Lacanian psyche via the play of loss and possession of the

phallus.

Clearly there is an erotic attachment to the person of the orator. The

repulsive caricature of Pollux is premised upon such an attachment. Yet

there is a similar sexualized attachment to the other sort of oratory, to the

good kind. An eroticism of oratory has been forced into the bodies of both

its idealized representative, Pollux, and the nameless manly figure who

embodies the education once undertaken by our own narrator. We are now

in a position to read critically the narrative voice speaking to us from these

pages. What kind of man is he?

I would like to compare the bodily politics of the Praeceptor rhetorum

with Xenophon's Memorabilia 2.1. The comparison is not so much appo-

site as it is necessary, for it can be demonstrated in short order that Lucian

was thinking of this section of Xenophon when he was composing the

Praeceptor.45 The narrator declares in section 8 that the poet was right to

say that "out of toils the good grows forth" (ex TWVv To6vv (pleoOLt Ti

cycaOa). He refers ultimately to Epicharmus, but a citation of this verse can

be found at Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.20. Immediately before this point

in Xenophon, we can find a reference to Hesiod and the road to virtue: the

same reference we saw earlier in Lucian's own work. And, to cap things

off, Xenophon's narrative proceeds at once to give a reminiscence of Socra-

tes about a story told by Prodicus about the young Heracles, who is about

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181

to choose the kind of future life he wants to lead: two women, Virtue

('AQc-n~) and a second figure, approach him and solicit his attentions, each

praising her own course. The name of the second woman is in doubt: she is

Happiness (EiM~uitovtcu), as her friends call her, or Baseness (Kax'La), as

her detractors would say. 46

In making literal his metaphor, Xenophon dwells upon the bodies of

each guide in a manner that clearly serves as a precedent for Lucian's own

tropes:

MIcPcLVTvas avid Svno yvvcmuca; JTQOoLcVcu t~cycL cL;, iijv Ev ETE LV

E TEtITE L&ELV XcLI EXEVOEQLOV (VUEL, XEXOOII LEV11V TO UEV (O4C(

XcLOcL ofV1TL, TU bC O6aiacL doiT 8r6 ax oOW q~ooUV E68^ iL 8

,I

TTXxfl, TTjV 8' CTCQQV TEO~cL LEVflV EV Etc JTOX1I~cQXLQV TE xaI.

acacXotflTc, xEXXXwJtLO LE V1V 8E TO LEV )XQO41 L(OTE XEVUXOTE QcV TE

xcd EQUOQo-rEpaV T-o6vto; SoxELiv pcdvEOOcL, To 8E oviiia OXYTE

SoxEiV 6QOoTEQcxv Tflg (p1JEO) ELvaLL, AT8E & O 4UTcLEXELV QVaJtE-

aTi4LEVcL, co6flL 6E E fl ctv I4CtLoTa (OQa LacL ctoL xaLic(XoJTEL-

oOca &8Octiiu EWJirJV, C3tLQXO7tE V 8E XaLEL itLscXXo cL1JTfV OE&UUL,

toXXcLxig S& xadELSTlV Lc Ta XV WToI3XEnELV.

[(Heracles) thought he saw two tall women approach him, the one

dressed in white, fair to behold and free born in her nature, her body

adorned with purity, her eyes with modesty, her bearing with self-

control. The second was fleshy and soft, done up with cosmetics to

make her appear artificially whiter and more blushing. She held her-

self straighter than she really was. She had roving eyes. She dressed to

show off her body to best effect. She looked frequently at herself; she

looked about to see if anyone else was gazing at her; she often even

looked down at her own shadow.]

(Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.22)

These are familiar bodies, and they obey a familiar morality. The first is

lovely, pure, and modest. Good oratory can be described with similar

vocabulary. And the first guide could even be thus described, with only

slight modification to suit the manliness he exudes. Vice and Pollux,

though, are virtual twins. Softness and artifice, shamelessness and superfici-

ality, narcissism and pageantry characterize the two of them.

Virtue later castigates Vice with a telling list of her perversions that

closes thus:

is 8' cpQO6LcJ~cL rEQO TOU &LcOcLL cLvayxcLELg, JTcLVTa ixacwwEv

MIL y1VUaL~l TOL; cav6QOAJI XQO4EVfl OUTW ya(Q r3TaL&1EL; T01J OEWJT1]

(pLXOv;, T1] ,EV vvxtog 1J3Q~O1Jc(a, i;K 6' fl LE Oc TO XQ1QLWOTQaTOV

182 STAGING MASCULINITY

[You compel unnecessary sexual acts, employing all sorts of machina-

tions and using men as women. For thus do you educate your own

friends, at night violating them and putting them to bed for the best

part of the day.]

(Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.30)

Again sexual inversion is invoked as the acme of vice. Pleasure leads

straight to social, sexual, even temporal chaos. The program of virtue,

though, has explicitly eschewed pleasure, setting in its place truth. She

begins her description of her path thus: "I will not deceive you with pre-

ambles about pleasure, but in which way the gods did actually dispense,

this will I recount for you with truth."47 Her next words come straight from

the manly guide's hymnal: nothing good comes without toil (rt6vog). The

long list of fair ends she recounts all have toil as their chief means. And

when one gets to the body, one learns that the way to get anything out of it

is to make it serve the will (yvdth1) and to train it with toils and sweat

(Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.28).

The erotic attachment to the first and truly beautiful guide can and

must be purchased with a submission to toil. Her body, just like the manly

guide's body, is inscribed with a set of virtues that are remote and hard-

won. Indeed, their whole message is to win the student into engaging in

their project rather than immediately assuming their kind of body. They

propose an iterative, toilsome project familiar to us from our examination

of Demosthenes a la Quintilian. The body that is the product of this toil is

lovely without being the object of base desire. One admires it for its being;

it does not condescend to reach out and please its audience. On the con-

trary, its gesture is, if anything, punishing, the act of a master.

With pleasure now so thoroughly discredited, I would like to take one

last look at the youthful addressee of the Praeceptor rhetorum. There are

two good approximate names we might give him: Hercules and Lucian. As

a Heracles the youth stands at the crossroads to oratory, choosing bodies

and choosing paths of life. He decides in what manner to use his prodigious

talents, whether to pursue pleasure and to give pleasure, or instead to

submit to a regime of self-mastery, to become unambiguously masculine.

This is how Xenophon read Socrates reading Prodicus speculating about

Heracles. And let us add to this literary list Lucian reading Xenophon and

making the philosophical musing into a rhetorical one. Moreover, Lucian's

reader is likewise invited to participate in the chain, to see the allusion, to

savor the fruits of his own difficult education.

"Lucian" is also an appropriate name to affix to the youthful addressee

of the Praeceptor. The narrator can thus be seen as the object of his own

address. He instructs a temporally displaced version of himself as to the

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validity of his own being and likewise gives tokens to himself of the process

of his own constitution. The young man is a sort of hero about to embark

on a fateful course. At the same time, he represents the past of the narrator

himself. There are accordingly numerous investments in the youth on the

part of the adviser. The tale he tells to the youth is part a tale told to

himself. The irregularities and lacunae in this narrative, though, point

toward serious conflicts and contestations within the structure of assuming

the title of orator and accepting the hailing of the discipline and punish-

ment that governs it.

The narrator behaves toward the young man as an erastus treats an

eromenos, as a sexually interested elder male treats a younger male in need

of guidance. There is an erotic exchange, then, proceeding in the inverse

direction from the one represented by Pollux. The authorized and authorial

voice of the manly sort of oratory decries the overt pleasure-giving rhetoric

of a Pollux. But the manly orator has his pleasures. He is an eroticized,

bodily creature. His pleasures, though, consist in taking. His is the pleasure

of domination: self-domination, domination of the student, domination of

the masses.

Another literary parallel should be adduced here. Lucian's Somnium

(Dream), which has as its alternate title The Life of Lucian, has a strikingly

familiar structure. Beyond structural parallels, though, the themes of that

essay unpack the bodily politics of the Praeceptor. The virility of oratory is

once again established, but it is also more clearly predicated upon an initial

violence.

I do not like the alternate title offered for the Somnium since it seems to

require a strict identification of Lucian with the narrator of the text. Even if

Lucian were to speak in propria persona, nevertheless this would still be just

another persona, a mask of himself in contrast to a "real" Lucian.48 We are

dealing in the Somnium and in the Praeceptor with rhetorical fantasies of the

subject, dreamy imaginings of the metaphorical shape of the self. We are

presented not with real people but rather with rhetorical claims as to the

reality and validity of various subjects. Given that one can read identity as

itself an iterated performance of rhetorical claims as to identity, textual

repetitions of the same stamp should be retained as rhetorical and not bio-

graphical. We should not set a rigid boundary fixing a boarder between life

and literature. We must safeguard rhetoric against ontology.

In the Somnium, a young boy has just finished learning his ABCs.49

His father and some friends deliberate on what course of life would be best

for the boy to pursue. Toil, time, and cost are weighed against consider-

ations of speed and ease. The boy is sent to be a statue carver, because

some of his youthful wax models had shown promise. For these nonschol-

arly works his teachers had beaten him, but his father had conceived some

184 STAGING MASCULINITY

hopes for a future career.5O The boy is transferred to a workshop run by an

uncle; the family has prior generations of sculptors. The sculptor uncle

hands the boy a chisel and bids him to start in on a piece. From inexperi-

ence the boy's strike is very poor. The uncle picks up a club and beats the

child. The youth flees the workshop, sobbing and weeping, covered with

bruises. At home he falls asleep, still in tears and thinking of the club.51

The dream the narrator recounts was remarkably vivid (owT oacpTl

JTnavT l v) (Somnium 5). Two women took his hands and started hauling at

him in a competition for possession of the youth. He is nearly torn apart by

their zealous struggle. The two women turn out to be Craft and Education,

ThXv1 and HcatLeLa. They are, naturally, both put into different bodies and

compared. Even though the body of Craft is called manly (&vQtxL) in

Somnium 6, its gender is compromised later. Meanwhile the description of

Education contains nothing effete in it: she is "very fair of face and becom-

ing in her bearing, and orderly in her dress."52 While there are many

detailed and doubtless controversial points that should be discussed at

greater length, I would like to be brief and accordingly leave undiscussed

the full scope of the terms of this debate between the two pursuits. Instead

we will focus on what education entails.

In a long passage of section 13 filled with references to the body the

craftsman is scorned for "having his head bent down to his work, being a

lover of the lowly, a devotee of the lowly, in every manner low, never lifting

his head and never considering a manly or nonservile thought."53 Thus

manliness reemerges as the legitimate principle of domination. And in this

case it is used to sanction the mastery of the orator, who again is looked at

and marveled at from all quarters. The orator is manly, free, and in charge.

He won't be beaten; he won't have to cry. Section 12 of the Somnium is

lexically almost identical to the passages of the Praeceptor that discuss the

social awe with which the orator expects to be greeted. The orator occupies

the position of the true man and the central position of social desire: don't

be a grubby laborer, be a sublime speaker.

The narrator of the Somnium wants youths to take his biography as an

example, to follow in his footsteps, and to be better, at least, than any

stonecutter. If we impute a subsequent history to this narrator by comparing

him with the narrator of the Praeceptor, and if we accept his claims that he

chose the hard path to rhetoric, then our composite narrative voice fled one

sort of drubbing only to encounter another. Physical violence has been

replaced by psychic abuse. The resentment that drips from the Somnium

against the brutal uncle and the violence of his trade is replaced by the mock

resentment of the Praeceptor against the folly of taking the hard road to

rhetoric. And even when easy, sensual oratory has been discredited, the

sorrows of discipline have not so much evanesced as they have been justified

PLEASURE

185

as inevitable. One must submit. The young man of the Somnium is beaten

for botching his sculpted body. But when one turns to the Praeceptor,

sculpted bodies recur in the educational biography: one's oratory must be

like the product of history's finest sculptors. If it isn't, a psychic beating is

administered. Egregious failures meet with castration. This violence is ad-

dressed not to a stony imitation of the body but to a social and psychological

truth of the body.

The sovereignty of legitimate speech is won along a trail that begins and

ends with pain and hatred. The pain one avoided in the world has become

self-imposed in oratory. And where pleasure is admitted to this conceptual

framework, it is a whorish and revolting mockery. At the same time, plea-

sure keeps being admitted to the scene and seems indeed necessary to its

very maintenance. The manly orator is husband to and master of the female

Rhetoric. He can even, apparently, don the mask of an effeminate and

eroticized creature like Pollux. But he maintains a contemptuous stance

toward this faculty that can justly be called his own.

The persistence of the Asianism and Atticism debate in all of its permu-

tations should provoke in us the suspicion that there is something vital in

the assumption of this effeminate persona and its subsequent smashing

under foot. A compulsion to repetition of this act of destruction subtends

the debate, not some arid positivistic question of style. As Reardon suc-

cinctly concluded: "Mais en r6alit6 l'Asianisme et l'Atticisme ne sont guere

que des mots" (1971, 94). Much as the orator is always prone to confusion

with the actor, so is he open to confusion with a woman or the passive

homosexual who serves as her conceptual isomorph. To a certain extent,

the shoe fits, but the orators refuse to wear it. Even though there may be a

sort of melancholy remembrance of the road not taken and the blows

endured on the way to masculinity, these narratives of subjection and

subjectiviation insist that other bodies and other selves would be nightmar-

ish (cf. Butler 1997b, 132-50). The more fundamental gesture in this talk

of bodies and gestures is this very act of renunciation itself. In this ostenta-

tious refusal there is a claim to power that covers both the self and the

world. We find a consolidation of the rhetorical subject predicated upon a

necessary liminalization of other orders, of the foreign, of the feminine, of

the body as productive of pleasure.

This act of assumption of the name oratory, though, is always imper-

fect and never complete. It is a self-wounding as well as a constitutive and

subjectivating act. One returns again and again to the scene of the crime

and strikes the compact anew. There is an attempt to purchase a kind of

being by exiling an "alienness" that has been constituted within and by the

very order that one seeks to consolidate. The inevitable misnaming re-

quired by such a scenario- a misnaming that includes oneself and the

186 STAGING MASCULINITY

excluded margins in its nominalizing act - generates a supplementary re-

mainder with which the orator is consigned to grapple endlessly. This is the

specter of the half-named or doubly named Pollux whom we can find

stalking the pages of the Praeceptor from first to last. Indeed Pollux can

even be found by other unnameable names in Quintilian, Cicero, and the

rest of our rhetorical theorists. Pollux, his body, and his pleasure serve as

an incitement to discourse that subtends the long history of the rhetoric on

rhetoric. The spectacle of this body repeatedly staged as a dopplegainger in

the theatrum philosophicum of oratorical theory concludes with a death

that secures the viability of the self-mastering master for whom pleasure is

mastery. Have the politics of legitimating this pleasure declined and fallen

with the Roman Empire?

CHAPTER 6

Love

THIS CHAPTER BRINGS US BACK to the problems of reading, writing, and

textuality that we took up in the first chapter. At the same time, this will be

the occasion for seeing the good body and good corporeality set against a

broader social and intellectual backdrop. The occasion for this conceptual

summary and reunion is Cicero's De oratore. And while we will be moving

in closer to the problem of the text, we will also be moving back a bit from

the close scrutiny of the orator's body in action to examine instead the text

itself as a social performance.

Where my first chapter saw textuality as both a problem and a ruse in

Quintilian, here we will find the text to be an enactment of its own prin-

ciples. Accordingly the good and legitimate pleasures that have been re-

served for the present chapter are not only defined but also enacted by

Cicero's work qua text, even as this text decries the idea of the rhetorical

handbook.1 The mise-en-scene and characters of the De oratore, as well as

its specific precepts, perform the text's own principles of good rhetorical

theory by way of both rule and example. Furthermore, this vision of rheto-

ric, more than just refusing pleasure and pedanticism, also presents itself as

a bond that holds together civil society. And so De oratore becomes a tract

revealing and encapsulating homosocial desire. By reading this text as a

performance - a paradoxical activity that immediately recalls Quintilian in

the first chapter - we will descry the disciplined movements and tones, the

actio atque pronuntiatio of pleasing masters of rhetoric, of praeceptores who

become models of and for the very precepts they would disparage in a rule-

laden handbook. Hence we have a text that performs for us the very manly

presence of the vir bonus that our studies have long sought, and in so

doing, it concomitantly assaults the idea of the handbook, as being the

death of manly presence and thus of elite Roman society itself.2

What follows is intended to serve as more than an exposition of the De

oratore and the technique it employs. This long and elaborate text admits of

a variety of productive readings. Hall sees De oratore as a highly refined text

and one very much concerned with the details of social life.3 MacKendrick

187

188 STAGING MASCULINITY

(1948) reads for a politics of pedagogy in terms of aristocratic propaganda.

If we relax somewhat the rigidity of this cold-war phasing, we can translate

his argument into an investigation of the elitism and education. Orban

(1950) vindicates De oratore as a philosophical dialogue that augments the

intellectual status of rhetoric. Kroll (1903) is similarly interested in the

union of philosophy and politics that De oratore advocates. Each of these

readings examines one or more key threads of the text: Cicero, ever ambi-

tious, has taken on society, politics, education, philosophy, and oratory. I

would like to use this work to gather together many of the themes that have

previously arisen and to show that Cicero's dialogue canonizes its version

of pleasure and textuality in such a way as to legitimate not just Cicero and

his rhetoric, but the whole social order that language is meant to help bind

together.4

This reading will, I hope, both round out and advance the work of

prior chapters. Such a reading, though, is itself enabled only by keeping in

mind those earlier conclusions. If I read Cicero as if he were staging a

comedy of Plautus or borrowing from the poetic lexicon of an amorous

Catullus, I do so to stage and eroticize the authoritative version of rhetoric

whose existence has been predicated on the exclusion of the histrionic, the

seductive, and the hedonistic. Such a reading is meant to be more than

mere willfulness or perversion on my part, for I will be examining the scars

and traces of those prior excisions as oratory is translated into a sublimated

reinscription of those same renounced qualities.5 Textuality itself is num-

bered among these problems that are announced and then overcome,

purged and then reinstated. Textuality will thus offer another nexus at

which the problems of authority and authenticity that plague acting and

pleasure get worked at all over again.

The De oratore has been praised lavishly as a rhetorical treatise.

Courbaud, the editor of the Bud6 edition, says of it, "Le De Oratore est un

chef-d'oeuvre, en effet, non peut-&tre du point de vue de l'art pur (il

manque a l'auteur certains des qualit6s de Platon), mais un chef-d'oeuvre de

bon sens, de raison droite et saine, de pens6e g6n6reuse et haute. C'est le

plus original et le plus int6ressant des trait6s des rh6torique" (Courbaud

1967, viii). If the De Oratore is a masterpiece of good taste and right-

thinking, the acme of its genre, what, then, has been lost or occluded in this

process of sublimation? The answer is that the genre of the handbook itself

has been lost, as well as the possibility of direct didacticism. The written

depiction of this society of elite peers, their authority and distinction, and of

their pleasure constitutes a new antihandbook. This antihandbook posits its

authority as emerging from within its own dialogic form and from its imita-

tion of social performance. De oratore as a mere text is itself condemned to

be always and only words on a page, but with its written society of good men

De oratore simultaneously seeks to overcome the baseness of the rhetorical

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189

handbook in contradistinction to the precepts of an Ad Herennium, a De

inventione, or an Institutio oratoria. Courbaud participates in this line of

argument when he rejects detailed oratorical instruction like Quintilian's.

From Courbaud's introduction we learn that Cicero is the voice in the

wilderness fighting against pedantry and that Quintilian represents the re-

turn on a grand scale of this abhorrent practice (1967, xv-xvi). Courbaud

praises Cicero's chef-d'oeuvre for its liberation from the schoolhouse:

"Qu'enseigne-t-on dans l'6cole? Des regles, rien que des regles; et on croit

a l'efficacit6 souveraine de ces regles. On d6finit, on classe, on distingue."

Courbaud the good scholar on Cicero himself defines, classifies, and distin-

guishes in the course of his exposition of Ciceronian excellence. There is an

ironic aspiration toward the sublimity of a Cicero even as the scholar finds

himself in the position of a Quintilian: one seeks to offer a lucid analytic

account of something ineffably grand. This same section of Courbaud's

introduction goes on to express horror at the sovereignty of rules over "les

aptitudes naturelles." This praise of the individual will return in the end of

the present chapter in the discussion of Cicero's great individuals and his

republic of manly, authentic peers. Courbaud, then, has gotten his Cicero

right: one cannot assemble a good man from a list of rules.

Courbaud's protest is framed in an idiom that has been carefully cri-

tiqued by Bourdieu. Bourdieu remarks that "for a full understanding we

have to consider another property of all aristocracies. The essence in which

they see themselves refuses to be contained in any definition. Escaping

petty rules and regulations, it is, by nature, freedom" (1984, 24). To what

extent, then, is the critique of rules that Courbaud lauds in the De oratore

implicated in the production of freedom and aristocracy for its readers?

And to what mastery must we subject ourselves if we are to aspire to attain

the same heights of culture?

To recapitulate the various strands of this introduction, let me offer in

abbreviated form a set of questions and provisional answers that will guide

the interests of this chapter. If there is a legitimate oratorical pleasure, what

sort of pleasure might this be? Of what would it consist? What sort of social

issues ally themselves to this pleasure? Here we will be picking up decor and

similar genteel aesthetic terms from the chapter on discovering the body,

complementing them with the image of the manly guide, and affixing these

words and images to be specific provisions of De oratore. The social station

and roles of these men of good pleasure will all cluster around a cult of

individuality and authority that fetishizes the image and roles of the hege-

monic Roman male. Next we will ask about the form in which these mes-

sages are transmitted. What kind of rhetorical theory corresponds to these

men and their version of pleasure? What sort of text encompasses such a

theory? What kind of textuality has been lost or excluded? Here we will find

that the dialogue of peers and authorities displaces the book of precepts.

190 STAGING MASCULINITY

This sort of book is the only kind allowed the mature vir bonus, and other

varieties are suited only to foreigners, the young, and the inept. And finally,

given these men and this text, what sort of world are they intended to

occupy? With this last question we will find Cicero using oratory and rhetori-

cal theory to create a fantasy of Roman society, a society seen as on the

brink of dissolution and in need of salvation. Cicero's project, though,

allows for the simultaneous description, salvation, and successful reproduc-

tion of the Roman order. Hence De oratore is no trifling matter of specula-

tion or mere portraiture of rhetoric and its history; it is instead a handbook

not just of the self, but also of the world.

Let us pause for a word on De oratore itself. As the title indicates, it is

a dialogue about oratory and the orator. Cicero completed this work in 55

B.C.E. (Cicero, Ad Atticum 4.13.2 [November 55]). Thus De oratore is a

product of the period following upon Cicero's exile in 58 and his restitution

in 57, a period during which Cicero withdraws from the courts and public

life while the triumvirs dominate Roman politics.6 As Habinek (forthcom-

ing) has shown, though, Cicero's cultural projects are by no means a form

of defeatist secession: Cicero uses the works of this period to build a

"commonwealth of letters," a literary fiction put to use in the maintenance

of aristocratic domination in a period of political discord. The present

chapter is meant to complement this thesis by examining in some detail the

social consequences of Cicero's account of oratory. Cicero uses his dialogue

to harness the full potentialities of rhetorical discipline in order to use them

to shore up an unstable Roman social and political climate.

The dramatic date of the discussion that the young Cicero supposedly

attended, and that De oratore purportedly records, is September 91 B.C.E.

The dialogue occupies two days of colloquy and discussion during the Ludi

Romani, or Roman Games. This is a time of festival at Rome; there is a

cessation of public business and an opportunity for the busy leisure of

Cicero's dramatis personae. On the day before the conversation depicted in

De oratore, a number of prominent Romans had gathered to discuss the

contemporary political crisis, and their discussion lasted until an advanced

hour (De oratore 1.3). A summary of political upheaval of 91 can be found

in Wilkins' commentary on the dialogue (1892, 5-8). Wilkins is right to

remind us of the obscurity of this political crisis that involved the extension

of the franchise to the Italian allies. But Wilkins ought also to note that De

oratore itself sheds almost no light on this subject. In fact, the opening of

book 3 offers the clearest depiction in the dialogue of the events of 91, yet

Crassus' swan song is portrayed there as an attack on the Senate's bereave-

ment (orbitas) and as a lamentation of the plunder of its hereditary distinc-

tion (patrimonium dignitatis) at the hands of the consul Philippus (De

oratore 3.3). Thus the crisis is depicted in terms of a threat to the privilege

LOVE

191

of the Roman ruling class as originating within that class, a threat posed by

a consul. In 55 B.C.E., though, Pompey and Crassus, two of the triumvirs

and two of the biggest threats to the Roman Senate, were the consuls. I do

not wish to advocate a narrow, allegorical reading of De oratore,7 but the

parallel sense of political upheaval felt within the dialogue and without it

should be borne in mind when the characters within the De oratore are

found to be preoccupied with the preservation and reproduction of a ruling

class.8

While any commentary, or even most translations, of the De oratore

would provide a more comprehensive description of the participants in the

dialogue,9 a few words on some of the men mentioned in the discussion

below are in order. The two principal speakers are L. Licinius Crassus

(140-91 B.C.E.) and M. Antonius (140-87 B.C.E.).10 Both men had held

Rome's hightest office prior to 91, Crassus serving as consul in 95 and

Antonius in 99. These men were not only at the forefront of the political

class of their era, but they were also considered to be the leading orators of

the day. These conjoint attainments by both contribute to their authority

(auctoritas), the quality that Cicero singles out when he claims he prefers to

record their discussion rather than to repeat readily available Greek pre-

cepts (De oratore 1.23). Antonius and Crassus are thus authorities in the

fullest sense of the term, and this authority adheres to their persons, not to

some abstract maxims.

These two elder speakers and statesmen are asked for their opinions

on oratory by two young aspiring men of affairs, P. Sulpicius Rufus (124-88

B.C.E.) and M. Aurelius Cotta (born 124; consul 74 B.C.E.). The first is

more a student of Crassus, and the second inclines to Antonius. The other

two figures who will be mentioned below are Q. Lutatius Catulus (consul

102; dies 87 B.C.E.), a senior politician who knew Scipio and Laelius when

he was young, and C. Iulius Caesar Strabo Vopiscus (c. 130-87 B.C.E.), a

man of affairs known for his wit in his oratory.

One should note how few of the participants in the dialogue survived

this turbulent political period. Any Roman reader would recall that it was

not just Crassus who would be dead within a few years of this discussion. In

any case, all of these men were prominent politicians in their day, good

men with solid family and social ties.

Before exploring the text of the De oratore as text, I would like to set out a

portrait of rhetorical pleasures and social callings. The assimilation of the

quality of the man to the quality of his pleasures will serve to bridge the gulf

between the society of oratory and the sensuality that has hitherto been

found clinging to oratory. Thus the good pleasures of good men become

guarantors of legitimate rhetorical pleasures.

192 STAGING MASCULINITY

Pleasure and society in the realm of rhetoric operate via a set of paired

associations and implied equations that ultimately yield a vision of social

station as truth. In tracing this associative course, truth will first be taken

for beauty, then beauty for pleasure, and lastly pleasure for social standing.

In other words, the domination of the dominant fraction becomes a fair

and pleasing truth.11 The genteel pleasures of this social mastery are the

obverse of the pleasures that texts like Lucian's ostentatiously attempt to

extirpate.

Decor or "grace" aptly describes the beauty of the martial orator, a

beauty set against decadence and on the side of truth. In the De oratore the

word decor as such does not appear. Nevertheless, the more abstract moral

cognate of decor, decus, appears twice in a pair of revealing passages.

Cicero's use of these two reveals a close affinity between manifest elegance

and social esteem, and the lexicographer's distinction between the moral

and physical translations of the term decus falls apart when the two regis-

ters are merged within the De oratore. In fact, it is not clear that we should

ever assume a radical division between the two spheres, but rather suspect

that the production and maintenance of such semantic divisions within

Latin is the result of the very tropes of social mastery and homosocial

displacement of the homosexual component of affective life that we are

examining.

Decus, which is formed from the same verbal stem as is decor, means

"honor" or "distinction" in the abstract or again "graceful attractiveness"

when physically manifest. Late in the history of the language, Latin gram-

marians rigidly distinguish the two words. One reads that decus is character-

istic of a man's dignity, decor of his physical appearance (decus honoris,

decor formae est).12 One of these beauties is sublime, the other earthly. But

this schema is rather forced and does not correspond to the early history of

these words. In particular, Cicero tells of virtus, or (manly) virtue, sustain-

ing itself by its own decor (suo decore se ipsa sustentat) (De re publica 3.40).

The physical and the abstract collapse as the spiritual relies upon the physi-

cal quality. Additionally, Cicero argues that a quasi-erotic virtus or manly

virtue ought to entice a man to true decus with its seductive charms (suis te

oportet illecebris ipsa virtus trahat ad verum decus) (De re publica 6.25).

The verbal parallel between these two passages is striking: the "beauty" of

the first passage rewritten as "charms" in the second, and Cicero's images

are resolutely concrete and corporeal as he treats of these abstractions.

Masculine excellence spans elegance and honor, the concrete and the ab-

stract. The spell of erotic enchantment cast by masculinity's charms fur-

nishes us with the paradigm of the homosociality that we will constantly

find in the De oratore.

Prior to examining the specifically physical attractions of rhetoric in

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193

the De oratore, it will be helpful to pause briefly over the morality of decus.

At De oratore 1.199, the study of law is destined for use as a distinction and

ornament to Crassus' old age (ad decus atque ornamentum senectutis).13

When Crassus wonders what could be more resplendent (praeclarius) than

such a program and study, we see that, as was the case with the ornament

(ornamentum) with which decus is first yoked, here too decus finds itself

suddenly ostentatious rather than an abstract "distinction." Decus, then, is

part of the legitimate ostentation and showiness of the vir bonus, and it

serves as part of his expected social performance. Oliensis offers a succinct

portrait of Horace's position that could apply equally to our orators: "Deco-

rum is always an expression of power . . . Manliness depends on decorum,

and decorum depends on manliness."14

The orator is a god among men, a scourge to his enemies, the producer

of public virtue, and the extirpator of public vice:

Non enim causidicum nescio quem neque clamatorem aut rabulam hoc

sermone nostro conquirimus, sed eum virum, qui primum sit eius artis

antistes, cuius cum ipsa natura magnam homini facultatem daret,

tamen esse deus putatur, ut id ipsum, quod erat hominis

proprium, non partum per nos, sed divinitus ad nos delatum videretur;

deinde, qui possit non tam caduceo quam nomine oratoris ornatus

incolumis vel inter hostium tela versari; tum, qui scelus fraudemque

nocentis possit dicendo subicere odio civium supplicioque constringere;

idemque ingeni praesidio innocentiam iudiciorum poena liberare;

idemque languentem labentemque populum aut ad decus excitare aut

ab errore deducere aut inflammare in improbos aut incitatum in bonos

mitigare; qui denique, quemcumque in animis hominum motum res et

causa postulet, eum dicendo vel excitare possit vel sedare.

[I am not looking to discuss some pleader or shouter or ranting tub-

thumper, but instead that man who is a high priest of the art. While

nature herself gave a grand capacity for oratory to man, it nevertheless

seems God-given, so that man's ability, though it is his own, appears

not born of us but to descend to us from on high. I am looking for a

man who can make his way unharmed even amid the missiles of the

enemy, adorned not so much by a herald's staff as by the title orator, a

man who can with his speech subject to public odium the crime and

treachery of the guilty and secure their punishment, a man who can

liberate innocence from legal penalties with his protecting genius, a

man who can stir a listless and failing public to glory, lead them from

error, enrage them against the wicked, or assuage their wrath toward

good men, a man, finally, whose speech can arouse or calm in the

hearts of men whatever passion the situation or the case may require.]

(Cicero, De oratore 1.202.)

194 STAGING MASCULINITY

This passage reads like a sermon upon the mysteries of oratory. The good

orator is a thing almost divine and rigidly segregated from a mere shouter

or brawler. Then, as he advances like some invincible soldier, the spears of

the orator's enemies fail before his very title. And, lastly, the orator does

not so much manifest a social honor/beauty as he actively creates it in a

frequently undeserving populace: the epithets "listless" (languentem) and

"failing" (labentem) are cutting. Briefly, then, the orator's person is beauti-

ful and honorable. It evinces decor. At the same time, his pursuits and his

products are themselves always surrounded by this same noble comeliness.

The hand of this godlike being is to be seen at every turn. The social order

both radiates and is everywhere permeated by the effects of the orator. The

truth of this sociality, though derived from the consequences of the orator's

practice, has the higher sanction of nature itself. It seems even to be the

dispensation of a divinity.

While the body's beauty from earlier chapters fits well with the

broader role of decor/decus in the De oratore, beauty and truth also find a

complementary pairing of beauty and pleasure:

nunc hoc propono, quod mihi persuasi, quamvis ars non sit, tamen nihil

esse perfecto oratore praeclarius; nam ut usum dicendi omittam, qui in

omni pacata et libera civitate dominatur, tanta oblectatio est in ipsa

facultate dicendi, ut nihil hominum aut auribus aut mentibus iucundius

percipi possit. Qui enim cantus moderata oratione dulcior inveniri

potest? Quod carmen artificiosa verborum conclusione aptius? Qui ac-

tor imitanda quam orator suscipienda veritate iucundior? Quid autem

subtilius quam crebrae acutaeque sententiae? Quid admirabilius quam

res splendore inlustrata verborum? Quid plenius quam omni genere

rerum cumulata oratio? Neque ulla non propria oratoris res est, quae

quidem ornate dici graviterque debet.

[Now I will give you my sincere belief: although it's not an "art," there is

nothing more distinguished than a consummate orator. Omitting the

utility of speech and its sovereignty in all peaceful and free states,

there is such delight in the very capacity for speaking that nothing more

pleasing can be perceived by human ears or minds. What song is sweeter

than a well-measured oration? What poem better composed than an art-

fully finished phrase? What actor more agreeable for imitating the truth

than an orator for championing it? And then what more precise than a

succession of penetrating maxims? What more admirable than a subject

illustrated with verbal splendor? What fuller than an oration heaped

high with material of every sort? Nor is there any subject inappropriate

to an orator, provided that it requires ornate and serious expression.]

(Cicero, De oratore 2.33-34)

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Notice that the radiance, honor, and glory of praeclarius appears once

again, only this time attached to the speaker himself and not to one of his

attendant pursuits. Personal grandeur is next explained (nam) by way of an

appeal to the superlative delights of the faculty of speech (oblectatio,

dulcior, and nihil iucundius). This transfer of attention from the man to his

profession suffuses the former with pleasure and delight in the euphemized

register of the latter. There is no Pollux here, no fair body inciting and

offering fleshy delights - splendor, ornamentation, and the truth accrue to

the orator via his art and not his body. This flashy and sensual vocabulary is

directed toward inner and essential qualities of the good male speaker,

Cato's vir bonus dicendi peritus, and his calling: remember, the perfect

orator (perfecto oratore) was the opening image of this passage, even if his

oratory is the subsequent focus of the passage (see Kihnert 1994, 63-68,

again). The sensualism and spectacle rendered here thus safely dodge both

the superficial actor and bad pleasure by transforming the praise of the

orator into a praise of the art of rhetoric.

Keeping with this unspoken and unspeakable pleasure, beauty, and

splendor for a moment longer, let me examine it in one last example: the

pleasure of Antonius. First there is Antonius the encomiast of eloquence;

but there is also Antonius the teacher of rhetoric, or the praeceptor

rhetorum, the role he plays vis-h-vis Sulpicius and Cotta. In fact, this

teaching will turn out to also be a sort of seduction of these young men, as

will be seen below. Within the setting of the dialogue, Antonius' praise of

oratory is interrupted by Catulus, who commends the eloquent praise of

eloquence as particularly apt (De oratore 2.29). In so doing, Catulus lets

us see that all of the beauty and pleasure of eloquence do in fact redound

back upon the person of the speaker. In this way, Antonius' speech is a

self-praise, and the laurels we would put on the brow of oratory are ones

he manages to win for his own. The praise and beauty of an abstraction

are once again intimately bound up with a real body and character. A

good man ought to be ashamed to solicit or to bestow praise for personal

beauty or to bask in the pleasure of his male presence. But forbidden

carnal delights are deflected into the aesthetic register even as this realm is

suffused with a wholly sensual vocabulary.

This same scene in the De oratore, though, will move us from the

analysis of beauty and pleasure and into the discussion of pleasure and

social station. Catulus' interruption of Antony's praise of oratory, "I can't

help but cry out" (non possum quin exclamem), is explicitly taken from

Plautus' Trinummus, as Catulus himself signals. In the original for this

citation, the slave Stasimon cries out these words and the following at a

clever speech of his master's friend:

196 STAGING MASCULINITY

Non enim p6ssum quin exclamem euge. euge, Lysiteles, nakv.

facile palmam habes: hic victust, vicit tua comoedia.

hic agit magis ex argumento et versus melioris facit.

[I can't help but cry out, "Bravo, bravo, Lysiteles. Encore!"

You easily take the prize: he's beat; your comedy wins.

Lysiteles plays more to the plot and composes better verses.]

(Plautus, Trinummus 705-7)

Here the text of the De oratore opens itself up as the text of a performance,

the product of a comedy. A metatextual moment from Plautus is rehearsed

giving a parallel metatextual event in Cicero's dialogue. The contest be-

tween Antonius and Crassus is pushed into the agonistic scene from the

Trinummus, and the orators' auditors are here suddenly aligned with the

most passive possible Romans, slaves. At the same time, Antonius and

Crassus become masters and, in a doubled sense, actors. They are actors

putting on a play within a play, staging their own scenes within Cicero's

broader drama. As we saw before in the chapter on acting, citations from

drama obsessively return to haunt oratory, destabilizing rhetoric time and

again by refusing closure and self-identity to the orator and his perfor-

mance. On the surface of Cicero's dialogue we find self-aware gentlemen

politely patting one another on the back, but at another level these same

performances of gentility are associated with baser stuff: slaves, mere act-

ing, and fake plots.

If it seems an unpleasant and also far-fetched reading of this passage to

so rigidly insist upon the theatrical in it, Crassus' own interruption at 2.40

and Antonius response to it do nothing to dispel the sense of staginess that

hangs over the text. And these responses also heighten the air of euphemized

pleasures and seductions. Crassus is pleased that Antonius' orator now

seems more aristocratic and genteel, and he marvels at how today's Anto-

nius has been transformed in the space of a night: he has been polished and

returned a human being (hominem). Why should a Roman bother to remark

that one of his peers is a human?

Let us then pause for a second at homo, the species word for man, as

opposed to the gender term for man. In either case, of course, the word is

best understood by the set of constitutive exclusions that sustain the con-

cept.15 To be a man (homo) in this instance is the same but different from

all of our prior injunctions to be a man (vir). It is worthwhile to note a

Ciceronian parallel from the letters to Atticus that offers a similarly genteel

moment: "If you want to be a man (homo), come back to us."16 In the

letter human means "one of us" and is part of our euphemized homosocial

world of polite male pleasures.

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Cicero opens by mentioning the manumission of a slave of Atticus' at

Cicero's request, and Cicero also includes a discussion of the slave's new

name as a freedman, T. Caecilius, a name derived from Atticus' own.

This name is compared with the name of another slave who became

M. Pomponius by way of a combination of Cicero's and Atticus' own

names (ex me et ex te iunctus) (Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum 4.15.1). This

M. Pomponius, a virtual offspring of these two men, their mutual son in

name, cements homosocial relations between the two Romans.17 In this

case, it is not a woman who is exchanged; rather it is a slave who is freed

by way of becoming the child/dependent/client of Cicero and Atticus.

This letter continues, though, with a fear that Atticus will not return

hastily because he will be detained by the "grace and charm" (lepos) of

Clodius and the learning of Pituanius. Lepos is usually a positive word, but

this is only another way of saying that it is genteel and unerotic, a euphe-

mism for beauty rather than patent and suspect beauty. While we are

supposed to take lepos as a pleasant social grace and not a physical charm,

the society of other men nevertheless produces a quasi-sexual jealousy:

"Return, Atticus, to our little family, my lepos, and my learning." The talk

of the bond Cicero and Atticus share via their freedmen-children is pitted

against the scene of learned charms imagined abroad, and one homo-

sociality is set against another that Cicero as well can furnish: will Atticus

choose good lovers or Cicero, a good husband with charms of his own?

Shackelton-Bailey's commentary on this letter (1965) notes that this senti-

ment is insincere since Clodius and Pituanius would have been thought of

as boors by both Cicero and Atticus. This detail does not disrupt the

structure of Cicero's sentiment, it only makes the protest less earnest: "Of

course you will return to me."

Thus, homo is not simply a mortal, a nonanimal; nor is it even a simple

question of breeding. Instead homo in these contexts means a pleasing man,

where this pleasure derives from the good Eros, which is a sexuality put

under erasure, though still legible. This is the Eros of good men (homines/

viri boni) and their good society. It is an Eros found not just between Cicero

and Atticus, but one that characterizes the society of the De oratore.

To return to Crassus' praise of today's Antonius at the expense of yester-

day's, yesterday Antonius potrayed the orator as something of a one-trick

pony (unius cuiusdam operis), an orator who was like some oarsman or

porter (remigem aliquem aut baiulum), a man lacking "humanity" (inopem

humanitatis), the quality that separates men from beasts, citizens from sav-

ages, cruelty from kindness. This orator was "inurbane" (inurbanum).

This critique of Antonius' portrait of the orator is again signaled by

Crassus as a line from a comedy, in this case a line from a now-lost play of

198

STAGING MASCULINITY

Caecilius. Apparently Crassus is happy to keep the discussion in the meta-

phoric register of the comic stage that Catulus first evoked. Crassus' re-

marks, borrowed from Caecilius or not, build a set of provocative dichoto-

mies. We have yesterday's Antonius versus today's Antonius, rough and

inhuman Antonius versus polished and humane Antonius, the oarsman

and porter versus the refined and urbane orator. Polished and humane

Antonius begs comparison with the civilized and urbane orator. In other

words, the depiction of the orator and the speaker who does the depicting

are again conflated. This time, though, the issue is not manifestly pleasure,

but instead urbanity - though this quality has already been put into some

doubt above- and social station, or, more broadly, humanity tout court. Of

course in this last case humanity stands in as a token that signifies all of the

other qualities taken together. Thus humanity is actually a special subset of

pleasing sociality. A gentleman is the only human worth being.

Although we are not speaking openly of pleasures here, we have

hardly left 2.33 and its delights behind. Indeed this whole excursus is

provoked by those sentiments. But Antonius' own response to the interrup-

tions of both Catulus and Crassus is itself erotic after its fashion. Strikingly,

Antonius tacitly accepts his characterization by Crassus as "less than hu-

man" by responding that yesterday he had set himself the task of refuting

Crassus and thereby "abducting" his students.18 This loaded reply puts a

new spin on Catulus' implicit charge of dramaturgy and agonism: yesterday

was the contest, while today Antonius is sincere. Now we are forced to

revise our opinion of Antonius and instead see him as merely a performer

in book 1. But with Catulus' interruption, today is a performance as well:

the orator is always an actor, but Antonius does not only play one part.

Antonius says that yesterday he was playing a role, but Catulus says that he

is acting another today. Clearly both characterizations are accurate: Anto-

nius is on stage throughout the De oratore.

But let us look more closely at the description of yesterday's perfor-

mance. Antonius says that the goal was an "abduction" (abducerem). The

Latin word is as broad in its meaning as the English and generally includes

the simple notion of leading someone off in another direction, but it also

can imply the sinister import that abduction has in English: Antonius may

mean that he merely sought to lead Sulpicius and Cotta away or astray, but

the verb is also appropriate to an erotic abduction. While Antonius' use of

"fight" (pugnare) in the next sentence suggests a more narrowly military

reading of abducerem, we should not allow Antonius to put the cat back in

the bag so easily, especially since in Latin literary rapes a potential seducer

expects to encounter resistance and a fight. Thus we can stage the De

oratore like a passage from Ovid's Metamorphoses as well as we could stage

it as a scene from a comedy of Plautus.

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199

One way or the other, Antonius in book 2 of the De oratore recasts

the Antonius of book 1 as a man who was putting on an enticing spectacle.

If yesterday Antonius offered specious enticements and if according to

Catulus he is still performing today, why the change? Antonius' answer to

this question: Today Catulus and Caesar are present, older men than the

youthful Sulpicious and Cotta, and two dignified peers.

Changes in the circumstances of the performance alter the erotic econ-

omy of the performance of a speech on oratory. Every good orator already

knows that he varies his act with varied situations. But the playful seduc-

tions offered the youths yesterday do not vanish with the arrival of these

additional men. Nor should we imagine a suspension of performativity,

which is always a histrionics denied or under erasure, acting. Just as the

orator is never really an actor, though he routinely varies his performance,

so also does this love that is never really love reveal itself in a variety of

forms. In fact, if we change around the proper names of this scene and

make them into Atticus, Clodius, and Pituanius, the scene of the De ora-

tore becomes the same one Cicero imagines for himself in the letter to

Atticus: a contest of mutual enticements among peers, the pleasure of

learned men. Who will best entice and captivate the others?

Pleasure, beauty, and splendor have begun to drift toward a fourth

term on our itinerary: station. When Antonius gives the presence of

Catulus and Caesar as a cause for his changed behavior, he immediately

reminds us that the De oratore as performance is obsessed with the propri-

ety of its own performance. In fact, book 2 started in 2.17 with a discussion

of the adjective ineptus, which we can translate as "gauche." This discus-

sion of inappropriate acts and performances continues on through to 2.28

before the De oratore can get started with Antonius' own performance. A

number of questions subtend this discussion: What sort of man rightly

speaks? when does he? for whom? This opening of book 2 contains a good

deal of mutual admiration, and this admiration ends by revealing that

everyone present is a good man. Likewise it concludes that it would be

appropriate for them to hold the very discussion that comprises the text of

the De oratore. The text thus sets out rules for a rhetorical community and

then approves of its own community within these terms.

In this context, then, I would like to focus on one term that has

repeatedly crept into this whole section: "free" (liber). From Catulus'

interruption and the discussion of the passage from the letter to Atticus, it

is already clear that we are watching a play by and about free men, men

who are not slaves. Yet, it is not just the men who are free, but their city as

well. Back in 2.33, the orator is lord in every peaceful and free state (qui in

omni pacata et libera civitate dominatur). Where the state is free (libera),

the orator is master (dominus). The statement offers a paradox of the

200 STAGING MASCULINITY

vocabulary of Roman slavery: liberty is a function of subjection to the

orator. Wilkins' commentary (1892) pauses to correct any possible confu-

sion in this place: he insists that Cicero - confusing as usual the author

with the speakers in dialogue - is speaking of how things should be. Given

this interpretation, the subjunctive mood might be more expected, bland

and generalizing in this clause, but Wilkins wants to convert the vivid

indicative's statement of fact into a potentiality. Of course such a reading is

allowed, but it detracts from the vigor of the passage and tends to obscure

the degree to which this is a very real and lively fantasy of oratory. As will

be discussed below, both the Rome of the dramatic date of the dialogue

and the Rome of the date of the dialogue's composition are imagined as

being on the brink of political collapse and in need, therefore, of the

mastery of rhetoric and the masterful freedom it brings. Grammar's state-

ment of fact conflicts with the anxieties about political realities shared by

both author and his dramatic characters.

As with the state, though, so with the man. For both parties liberty

and pleasure are united. The orator's speech brings delight (oblectatio) to

the state whose master is the orator; or rather, speech in general brings

delight. These words follow immediately upon the description of the

orator-master. But the orator too is himself engaged more directly with

delight and freedom: he must himself produce for his audience a "liberal"

delight, the delight appropriate to freedom (libera oblectatio) (De oratore

1.118). While freedom and delight may accrue to the city from the mastery

of the orator in 2.33, here the producer of this delight requires scrupulous

care and is the occasion of both anxiety and snide exclusions familiar from

earlier chapters:

Sed quia de oratore quaerimus, fingendus est nobis oratione nostra

detractis omnibus vitiis orator atque omni laude cumulatus. Neque

enim, si multitudo litium, si varietas causarum, si haec turba et

barbaria forensis dat locum vel vitiosissimis oratoribus, idcirco nos

hoc, quod quaerimus, omittemus. Itaque in eis artibus, in quibus non

utilitas quaeritur necessaria, sed animi libera quaedam oblectatio,

quam diligenter et quam prope fastidiose iudicamus! Nullae enim lites

neque controversiae sunt, quae cogant homines sicut in foro non

bonos oratores, item in theatro actores malos perpeti.

[But since we are asking about the orator, we need to imagine in our

own speech a flawless orator and one crowned with praise. Even if the

mass of disputes, the variety of cases, or the rabble and forensic barbar-

ity afford a place for even the worst orators, we shall not abandon our

project because of this. In those arts in which one seeks not some

practical use but some liberal intellectual pleasure, note how careful

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201

and almost finicky we are when we pass our judgments! For there are

no cases or quarrels that can force men to endure bad orators in the

forum any more than they would put up with bad actors in the

theater.]

(Cicero, De oratore 1.118)

Crassus's oration on the orator requires of its auditors that they suspend

their notions of how things often are in favor of a vision of the sublime

ideal. Crassus advocates that the orator become master of himself and

deploy his techniques of self-mastery if he is to find pleasure and freedom

for himself and the world. Oratory can be an ugly affair, and it is our job to

labor to ensure that we hold fast to the straight and narrow: we will find

thereby the public good and liberal pleasure united in one and the same

man. The erasures required to sustain the vision of excellence offered by

this and similar passages have already been described at length in earlier

chapters. In this passage one is merely assured that, despite the oft-realized

potential for bad oratory, men (homines) detest it. The world longs for a

good orator.

I will get back to the orator's "freedom for himself" in a moment, as it

has perhaps not been perfectly justified by the arguments that immediately

precede it. First, though, I would like to assemble at long last the full

collection of notions this section set out to explore. Truth and beauty had

added to them beauty and pleasure. To beauty and pleasure were added

pleasure and station. Treated as a transitive set of propositions, all of the

terms play off and against one another: truth is associated with station,

station with beauty, and so forth. This field of terms is the garden of earthly

delights for which oratory is intended. But note that this paradise of ora-

tory is still haunted, provisional, and incomplete. The painting of this

Edenic portrait could not proceed without reference to actors, slaves, and

barbarians. We started this whole discussion by noting the orator's per-

formative physical decor and quickly found ourselves amid a textual perfor-

mance that gave us a vision of good pleasure by locating this pleasure either

in oratory itself/herself or in the community of orators who exchange Rheto-

ric as some bride to cement their own mutual relations. But where did we

end? Back at self-mastery, back with a Demosthenes before his mirror.

Antonius the gnarly bodied praeceptor gives way to Demosthenes the eter-

nal student, seeking impossible perfection.

The good love of the De oratore, the amor bonus of the vir bonus, never

fully suffuses the community of men so as to allow the text to stand fully as

an example of its own teaching; but instead this love is ultimately trans-

muted into self-mastery's quasi masochism. The dialogue may seem to be a

202 STAGING MASCULINITY

gentlemanly enactment of a sort of masculine performative sublime, but it

remains a text that has to be transformed by its readers into utterances that

would themselves aspire to be performative of their own ethos. The whole

erotic vocabulary that surrounds the orator elsewhere in the De oratore has

to be associated less with simple beauty and pleasure than with self-

mastery. Love is a question of proper discipline.

Rhetorical sexuality in the De oratore comes in a variety of forms. We

will next deal with two special cases drawn explicitly from the lexicon of

Eros: love (amor) and shame (pudor). In the case of amor, we already

have the pleasures and attempted seductions above. These, in conjunction

with the unshakable association of performance, pleasure, and mastery,

prepare us for the explicit attachment to self-mastery of forms of the verb

meaning "to love" (amo).19 And so when the orator's love finally does dare

speak its name, it still speaks obliquely, and we find again the special case

of the love of self-discipline as we have come to know it from earlier

chapters. When Cotta the student asks Crassus the praeceptor what is

needed beyond certain natural capacities if one is to become an orator,

Crassus answers with a smile (adridens), "What do you think, Cotta, ex-

cept application and a certain passion of love? Just as in life, so certainly in

this that you are after, nobody will ever attain to anything exceptional

without it."20 An excellent and less literal translation of the crux of this

answer is given by the Bud6 edition: to be an orator one needs "la zele, la

flamme, la passion." This zeal and passion of love is a love felt for the

learning of oratory, the student's love of his task. This special kind of love

is required to segregate oneself from the common herd of men, for such is

the pastoral etymology of the adjective egregium, "exceptional." And, as

was seen above, this distinction from other men is the mastery of them.

Again, mastery and self-mastery are yoked, this time under the sign of the

love promulgated by the De oratore.

An additional Eros will round out our portrait of love before we

complicate it with shame. Cicero twice uses forms of the verb adamare in

the De oratore. The Oxford Latin Dictionary tells us to translate this word

as "to love or admire greatly," "to conceive a sexual passion for, fall in love

with," or "to form a desire to possess." The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae,

noting that the word is not found before Cicero, shows more reserve in

translating it: "to be affected by a love of a thing (later of a person)"

(amore rei [postea hominis] affici). The Oxford lexicographers should take

the palm in this case despite the German reluctance to make this word as

strongly sensual and worldly as they might. For example, note that Verres,

routinely sexualized by Cicero, falls for some gorgeous statues (pulcher-

rima) and is impelled by his cupidity (cupiditate - a fiscal and erotic word

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203

here) to acquire them at In Verrem 2.85. Thus, even when adamare indi-

cates a passion for a thing, it is a strong passion for it, a passion readily

compared to an erotic one. At De oratore 3.62 and 3.71 two such powerful

passions are conceived, the first a love for philosophy and the second a love

for some philosophical orators. Yet these passages not surprisingly mention

more than intellectual captation.

In the course of a history of philosophy, Crassus mentions the philoso-

pher Antisthenes' relation to Socrates. While this clause is just one fragment

among many elements of a long exposition on the history of philosophy, the

particular image used on this occasion should give us pause: Antisthenes

"fell in love with the endurance and hardiness in Socrates' discourse (pa-

tientiam et duritiem in Socratico sermone maxime adamarat)" (De oratore

3.62). Socrates himself is famous from Alcibiades' account in Plato's

Symposium - a dialogue dedicated to the question of love - for his personal

endurance and hardiness. These qualities formed part of the attractions of

Socrates for Alcibiades and contribute to the young man's love for the older

philosopher. In fact, Alcibiades is kind enough to offer us a frank confession,

or at least an ironic confession, that lets the mask slip from a truth otherwise

concealed in the paradigm of ancient homosexual love. Alcibiades' court-

ship of Socrates, wherein Alcibiades plays the active part of the erastus and

Socrates is passively pursued as the eromenos, shows in detail an erotic

attraction to an older and authoritative male and his self-mastery induced in

a younger male. Antisthenes, then, falls for Socrates all over again, and he is

truly smitten (maxime). Where Alcibiades had both the body and the philoso-

phy of Socrates to admire, Antisthenes needs only the words themselves to

provoke his Eros.

But what does this excursus have to do with our orators? As has

already been hinted, this vocabulary fits perfectly into the rhetorical con-

text. These terms could easily describe Lucian's rough praeceptor who is

himself only the embodiment of a certain manly philosophy and sexuality

of rhetoric as set against an effeminate one. Similarly, the erotic economy

of the De oratore in general and in particular the details of Antonius'

courtship of his audience can be seen as a sexual gambit that invests the

discourse on rhetoric with a desire never segregable from the author of that

discourse. Men thus feel a "philosophical" love for one another while

scorning carnality. This philosophy is not pure and abstracted, but it is

instead specifically attached to the man who speaks it. The place of the

precious individual and the conjoint assault on handbooks comprised of

"regles, rien que des regles" will be explored below. First, though, let us

make the rhetorical parallel explicit by adducing another passage from just

a few paragraphs later:

204 STAGING MASCULINITY

Sin veterem illum Periclen aut hunc etiam, qui familior nobis propter

scriptorum multitudinem est, Demosthenem sequi voltis et si illam

praeclaram et eximiam speciem oratoris perfecti et pulchritudinem

adamastis, aut vobis haec Carneadia aut illa Aristotelia vis compre-

hendenda est.

[But if you want to emulate Pericles of old or Demosthenes, who is

better known to us because of his abundant writings, and if you long

for that glorious and exalted splendor and beauty of being a consum-

mate orator, you must embrace either the "force" of Carneades or

Aristotle.]

(Cicero, De oratore 3.71)

By now it is not so much Demosthenes who is familiar to us as it is the

vocabulary of this scene. Following Pericles or Demosthenes means falling

in love with an exquisite image and beauty. Going down the harsh guide's

path means falling in love with him and seeing his very harshness as fair.

One then gladly embraces philosophy and its discipline, embracing its

violence, even.21 The Latin after all nowhere says philosophy but instead

gives us vis, "force," or, stronger still, "violence." I understand that this

aggressive translation of vis is unusual, but I choose it to highlight the

aspect of violence that accompanies rhetorical love: the process of self-

mastery is a symbolic violence that justifies worldly hegemony. One can

compare 3.143, where the learned orator (doctus orator) is identified with

the philosophical orator (philosophus). Thus all rhetorical learning aspires

to the condition of philosophical force (vis), and there is no space left

between philosophy and rhetoric.22 So also in 3.79-80 Crassus makes the

contrast between the vulgar orator and the philosophical orator. Philoso-

phy is thus elitist in a social sense: the common herd has its oratory, and

philosophical oratory belongs to a self-mastering hegemonic social class.

Furthermore, there is literally no space in the social body for the vulgar

oratory. It is impudent, and Crassus when he was censor purged Rome of

its praeceptores (3.92 and 3.94).23

If we assume that an adamare relative to this bad rhetoric would associ-

ate itself with a sexualized impudence in the homosocial field of rhetoric,

we can say that Crassus rids society of Pollux and his breed. Of course the

expulsion of the Latin Rhetores is not described as an erotic event. Yet the

vocabulary of this event, by invoking the term impudentes, is entirely conso-

nant with the erotic investment and exclusion we have routinely encountered

in the field of oratory. Thus this expulsion of the teachers of rhetoric partici-

pates fully in the rhetoric of rhetoric's own constitution; and as this "impu-

dent" oratory is cleared away, a sublimated homoerotic oratory is thereby

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205

benefited. As Butler has argued of the deployment of the "gays in the

military" crisis, that refusal of homosexuality can actually be reread as an

utterance that performs a more profound psychic truth of the form, "We

must not have our homosexuality in order to have our homosexuality" (But-

ler 1997a, 110). Similarly, even if we are prohibited by scrupulous readers

from locating any "real" sexual content in the expelled rhetoric, this rhetoric

nevertheless participates in and helps promote the erotics under erasure of

the censorious dominant rhetoric that expelled the queer rhetoric of a man

like Pollux.

Getting back to 3.71 and its vis, though: another "perfect orator" is

sighted and occasions another logical displacement. It is as if only after this

impossible name of perfection has been uttered that the eroticism of a word

like adamare breaks out onto the scene: that is, this true love has no real,

worldly referent in such a formulation. And while love remains "unreal" or

genuine only when and as denied, discipline or philosophical "violence"

(vis) fills the space evacuated by the exile of explicit sexuality.

If love is explicit only when denied or when deferred onto a love for

some attributes possessed by a man rather than expressed as a love for the

man himself, we should not be surprised to find a sexuality of shame and

repression, a sexuality that is itself denied. This shame suffuses the scene of

a speaker performing. After all, it is in performance that one will have the

most trouble avoiding falling for the speaker himself as opposed to what he

represents. In performance we find love, good or bad. And we have seen

that the good is never radically distinct from the bad whose exclusion

enables its sublime virtues. We have already seen the unchaste version of

the performative scene with Pollux, the shameless panderer. On the other

hand, good oratory will provide good pleasure: it is just that there must be

no slippage, and the qualifying adjective good (bonus) must be sustained

even though it is fictive. Indeed it is a vital fabrication.

Such a vulgar, sensual reading of orators, though, is expressly written

out of the De oratore. Yet like anything put under erasure, the legibility of

the effaced sign subverts the intention that would eradicate it: "So let our

orator be magnificent and charming - nor could it be otherwise - such that

he shall have a firm and austere charm, not one that is sweet and over-

ripe."24 The magnificence and pleasantness of the orator are necessary

qualities: the name orator apparently cannot be thought without these

terms. The pleasure of his pleasantness, though, must be hard and rugged,

not sweet and like an overripe fruit.25

This virile sexuality is, however, as chaste and blushing as a maiden:

the word that governs the characterization of the moment when Crassus is

about to begin speaking is pudor, "shame, modesty, decency."26 This is a

highly moralized Latin term and very often has a sexual aspect to it. It is

206 STAGING MASCULINITY

not at all clear at first glance why Crassus chose this term rather than

something like timor, "fear." Certainly Antonius takes Crassus as if he had

said something more like fear, and he grounds his own concurring explana-

tion of Crassus' feelings by addressing the causes of a speaker's initial

fears.27 While fear may play a vital role in Crassus' conception of his

difficulty at the beginning of a speech, it will be more useful to ask first why

Crassus chose such a morally and sexually provocative way to express his

fear. The answer must be that Crassus fears both that he will be desired and

give pleasure, and that he will not. This shame is appropriate to the chaste

gratification of the homosocial audience, and this gratification includes

making them admire the splendor, ornamentation, et cetera of one's ora-

tory and not one's body. So also does this shame correspond to a fear of

displeasing them and being cast out of their number for having thwarted

their desire.

The passage at 1.119-20 contains several different stages of shame

and fear whose articulation needs to be examined closely. Thus, although

Crassus ends in fear and trembling (exalbescam... contremescam) (De

oratore 1.121), this is not where he began. Crassus begins with a command-

ment that the orator provoke admiration (admirabilis esse). The orator

then will avoid being the bad orator rejected by a critical audience as was

discussed just before in 1.118. Next Crassus moves on to silence, or rather

to the breaking of a silence that perhaps ought not be broken (quod adhuc

semper tacui et tacendum putavi). Crassus speaks out only because he is in a

community of intimates (homines familiarissimos). From what follows,

though, it is not clear why Crassus' criticism should require silence when so

many other reproaches and praises of a similar general cast have been

freely spoken. What makes him hesitate before speaking? And why does

he seem almost ashamed to speak of shame? It will turn out that this silence

and shame are indicative of a performance of the very themes under discus-

sion. Both silence and shame suffuse and subtend this dialogue and its

pretensions to be a performance of good men experienced at speaking.

Crassus says that no matter how fluent (facillime) and magnificent

(ornatissime) speakers may be, if they do not approach the prospect of

speaking with trepidation (timide) and if they are not perturbed as they

start speaking, he thinks them brazen and shameless (impudentes). Next

Crassus disavows that a truly good speaker could ever not be perturbed.

Thus Crassus apparently obviates the need for his whole preceding state-

ment if we take this protestation seriously and no longer allow magnifi-

cence to coexist with shamelessness. If we readily accept Crassus' second

sentence, this would clearly help to naturalize the association of magnifi-

cence and an accompanying sense of shame. For a moment in that first

sentence, it seemed possible to be both disgusting and magnificent: this

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moment is not long-lived. Shame and splendor are yoked institutionally,

and this is one such passage where the association is reiterated and consoli-

dated. Beauty and its enticements require shame, while for its part shame

preserves beauty.

Crassus next gives the opposite and negative formulation of his first

positive version:

ut enim quisque optime dicit, ita maxime dicendi difficultatem varios-

que eventus orationis exspectationemque hominum pertimescit; qui

vero nihil potest dignum re, dignum nomine oratoris, dignum hominum

auribus efficere atque edere, is mihi, etiam si commovetur in dicendo,

tamen impudens videtur; non enim pudendo, sed non faciendo id, quod

non decet, impudentiae nomen effugere debemus; quem vero non

pudet,- id quod in plerisque video-hunc ego non reprehensione so-

lum, sed etiam poena dignum puto.

[The better a man speaks, so much more does he fear the difficulty of

speaking, the various possible outcomes of an oration, and men's ini-

tial expectations. But if a man can produce nothing worthy of the case,

of the title orator, or of the ears of men, even if he gets upset when

speaking, he seems shameless to me: one should avoid being branded

with the label shameless not by feeling shame but by not doing any-

thing inappropriate. Now he who feels no shame - and I see this in a

lot of people - I think that he doesn't deserve just reproach, but even

punishment.]

(Cicero, De oratore, 1.120-21)

Crassus invokes dignity obsessively: shamelessness, it turns out, originates

in a violation of dignity. Conversely, shame ought to involve the preserva-

tion of dignity. This shameless indignity, however, comes from an indeco-

rous performance. And here decet should remind us of decor and decus as

discussed above. Thus there is a crypto-sexuality to the good performance,

and a sexual failure where performance fails. The shame of such an impro-

priety, though, counts for nothing if ignoble deeds have already been done:

one's decor and splendor have been lost and the crowd's desire has been

turned to outrage. One thus feels appropriate shame at the thought of

failing the audience, and this shame turns into fear.28 The best orator

should and must always feel fear even if he never fails, while the failed

orator should feel fear as he fails: his failure is equated with shamelessness

and the good Eros of good performance is forever lost. The fear of per-

formative failure is thus also a fear of a sexual failure: will he have too

much of one kind of sex or too little of the other? Will he suffer from

priapism or impotence? Crassus' shame is thus doubly sexual but tends in

208 STAGING MASCULINITY

contrary and contradictory directions. I am not seeking to reduce oratory

to sex, and I do not insist upon real arousals or a specific eroticism that is

"really" at the bottom of oratory. The orator is not simply some version of

a closeted homosexual. This account is instead productive and expansive in

the sense of revealing the ways in which gender, pleasure, and social status

participate in the construction and modulation of a broad array of human

activities.

If we read Crassus' shame more generally, we find a shame felt at

various outcomes (varios eventus) because one knows that the performance

will be a sexualized event whether a success or a failure. One feels shame at

men's expectations (expectationem hominum) because an orator does not

know what will become of him when he meets their desire: will he live up to

it? Will he satisfy other men in the wrong manner? And most generally, it is

a shame felt at the brushing up together of homosexuality and homo-

sociality. When this shame merges into fear we have a moment of paranoia:

the rejection of the expression "I love him" transmutes it into the thought

"He hates me."29 For the orator, this is a fear of rejection by one's peers. It

is also a shame felt even at the notion of homosocial love, a disgusting, vile

love like Pollux'. Thus the fusion of pudor and timor is entirely appropri-

ate: the two notions participate fully in the process of the eroticization and

the sublimation of oratory, and these words ensure the reproduction of a

certain brand of desire written under prohibition. The repressed homosex-

ual desire returns as a homosocial desire, and technical rhetorical literature

ensures the repetition of this scene of sexual threat and resolution. One

could characterize the whole of the Praeceptor rhetorum or the moment

just before Crassus begins a speech as particularly vivid examples of this

negotiation of desire into proper relations with polite society.

Crassus blushes. Because of this we know him to be upright and

chaste, even as he is about to enter the field of love: "Crassus had a truly

striking sense of modesty (pudor). It was by no means a hindrance to his

oratory; instead it even helped by giving him an upstanding air."30 This

break in the narrative for an evaluative aside moves Crassus' precepts from

the universal and into the particular: again the generic idea finds its highest

truth when applied to the body of the individual who delivers it. The

authority of the messenger underwrites the validity of the message.

This recognition of Crassus' shame is also marked with another word

that has a twofold valence: probitas can mean either general uprightness

or specifically sexual continence. Crassus felt ashamed. He hesitated to

break his silence and tell his truth. Even though he did perform for his

peers, they agree with one another that his shame has always been a

chaste shame, that his performances are not shameless. Remember that

shamelessness (&vatogxr~va) and daring (t4r1) came in second only to

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ignorance as requisites for Pollux' students. Thus Crassus is in word and

deed the anti-Pollux, a hardy and manly orator, one fully implicated in an

elaborate set of careful sexualized postures and refusals. The De oratore

does not just preach such manly virtues, it enacts them, using the drama

of a dialogue to portray the society its doctrines would produce. This,

though, is the society of a censorious Crassus, a society from which impu-

dent desires have been cast out and for which sublime ones are crafted.

The De oratore offers a pleasure of homosociality felt via oratory as an

abstraction like the lady Rhetoric from Lucian. Only this is a Rhetoric

who is never somatized because somaticism is precisely the problem. How

can one write about oratory without going astray if the body is an implied

referent in all discourse?

The good love of the good man is a love in action, an Eros performed after

a moment of shamed hesitation. The action of this love unfolds in the

process of reading the De oratore as a drama. In the subtle details of the

illusion of self-presence proffered by these characters, we see a model of

good actio, the acting of the part of the good man, the role one is born to

and always strives to live up to.

The portrait of Crassus has consequences that extend out to the prob-

lem of the De oratore as an authoritative rhetorical text in its own right.

There is a striking unanimity with which the commentary on the passage

draws parallels with Cicero's own biography and Cicero's professed diffi-

culty in beginning a speech. Wilkins, Sorof, and Harnecker variously com-

pare this passage to the Pro Rege Deiotaro, to Divinatio in Caecilium 41,

Pro cluentio 57, Academica 2.64, and to the famous failure of the first

version of the Pro Milone, in each instance indicating some sort of personal

performative difficulty on Cicero's part. Strangely, none of these commen-

tators seems eager to take the opening of the Pro Rege Deiotaro as a

rhetorical commonplace rather than as a heartfelt sentiment: "While it is

usual for me to be greatly moved at the start of all weighty cases ..."31

Despite the rhetoricity of the passage I am myself in no haste to declare this

opening to be an example of pure art over nature, of cura against natura.

On the contrary, the confusion of the two is important to my argument

throughout this study. However, it is worth noting that these scholarly

cross-references implicitly support reading the De oratore as a documen-

tary text that expounds what Cicero actually thought, and not as a hand-

book or a set of rhetorical precepts. On the other hand, it would perhaps

be misleading to consider Cicero's speeches to be fully explained by the

precepts he gives for speaking in his theoretical works since these latter are

not themselves unambiguous or unliterary texts.32

Reading the speeches through the technical literature produces an

210 STAGING MASCULINITY

authenticity triumphant and the apotheosis of the De oratore such that a

work that contains numerous precepts of the sort found in handbooks

becomes instead an authentic, true performance of Cicero's spirit. And

this truth of the text in turn validates the authenticity of Cicero's orations.

As is clear from the first chapter, this decoding of Cicero, which is also a

nonreading of Cicero, begins as early as Quintilian, our first major com-

mentator on Cicero. See, for example, 10.3.1, where Quintilian explicitly

identifies Cicero with Crassus, or 10.5.2, which allows for the confusion of

their personae. With the commentators' help, Cicero thus slides unim-

peded into the role of actor of truth and writer of truth while the perils of

performativity and textuality evanesce. In this manner, then, we can take

Crassus' fear in a broader sense: it is indicative of a moment where both

the authenticity of texts and the authenticity of rhetorical actors is on the

line. Rather than grant the identity of the voice of the text and the truth of

Cicero the man, it is time to look instead into the problems of textuality

that themselves preoccupy the De oratore.

If the text is more a theater piece than a rulebook, what then is the

relationship of the De oratore to writing in general and rhetorical rules and

strictures in particular? How does the relationship of the De oratore to

writing impinge upon the themes of pleasure, performance, self-mastery, the

authenticity of the vir bonus, and the visibility of his social world? After

some preliminary remarks on writing in general, these questions will be

approached via two other questions. First, according to the De oratore, what

are the limitations of writing? And second, how is oratory transmitted?

Crassus goes over a course of diligent exercise (exercitatio) by which

an aspiring orator may hope to improve his oratory in general and practice

to make it perfect.33 In addition to prescribing much and varied speaking,

Crassus sets as the chief requisite for a student's progress writing as much

as possible:

caput autem est, quod, ut vere dicam, minime facimus (est enim magni

laboris quem plerique fugimus) quam plurimum scribere. Stilus opti-

mus et praestantissimus dicendi effector ac magister.

[The most important task and one that, truth be told, we hardly do -

for it is a question of great effort and most of us avoid toil-is to write

as much as possible. The pen is the best, the preeminent producer and

teacher of speaking.]

(Cicero, De oratore, 1.150)

While here the pen is the best teacher of speaking (magister dicendi), in the

discussion that follows anyone professing the title of teacher of speaking

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will be derided. The title denied the man is bestowed upon the student's

pen. The hidden agency, or nonagency, of writing and its mode of educa-

tion and inculcation represents a triumph of reproduction for a hy-

postatized Rhetoric by a participant in the field of rhetoric: rhetoric is

learned by doing, not by subjection to grubby teachers. And, significantly,

writing is a practical and necessary exercise for a speaker. The distinction

between writing and speech becomes a hierarchy of writing over speech. In

fact, Crassus presently goes on to describe the triumph of careful writing

over mere reflection and especially over extemporaneous speech: you can't

speak well without the power of writing to back you up.34

This image is a foretaste of and a bridge to a more extensive depiction

of writing as power. Rather than being untrue or specious, writing is, if

anything, more true than speech. Like many a truth before this, the present

truth of writing first requires labor, discipline, and meditation. Further-

more this writing is portrayed as itself being a version of disciplined speech

and not radically distinct from it. One speaks oneself more truly and best

learns to give voice to oneself via the pen, not via spontaneous expression

nor by subjection to rhetorical precepts. The man who speaks, then, speaks

best to the extent that his speaking is informed, shaped, and trained by

writing. Even where a prewritten script is wanting, the practice and labor

(exercitatio and labor) of writing should have left their stamp on the ora-

tor's speech. There is no magister dicendi here, only the self-realization of

an oratory mastered by the mediation of inscription.

Writing, though, is more than a simple matter of auto-affection and

self-realization, and the mastery of writing is not confined to domination of

another (ill-informed) speaker. Writing is also master of the subject matter,

a subject matter that yields itself up to writing's wit and contemplation

(acumen):

Omnes enim, sive artis sunt loci sive ingeni cuiusdam ac prudentiae, qui

modo insunt in ea re, de qua scribimus, anquirentibus nobis omnique

acie ingeni contemplantibus ostendunt se et occurrunt; omensque sen-

tentiae verbaque omnia, quae sunt cuiusque generis maxime inlustria,

sub acumen stili subeant et succedant necesse est.

[All the opportunities for arguments, whether they arise from art or

some cleverness and prudence, provided they are contained within

that matter of which we are writing, show and offer themselves to us as

we inquire and consider with every "point" (acies) of our intelligence;

and all the most brilliant ideas and words of every sort necessarily

come under and before the intelligence (acumen) of our pen.]

(Cicero, De oratore, 1.151)

212 STAGING MASCULINITY

The translation of acumen as intelligence rather than point or tip is in-

tended to elicit the cerebral quality of this scene of writing. Writing is

prudent speech. A prudent speech masters an impudent (unwritten) one,

and a prudent speech knows fully and intimately its subject. It masters its

subject by knowing it. Likewise, this is a full and complete knowledge that

offers itself in its entirety to the writer and his pen-point as intelligence and

authorship merge. Much as writing is more than mere self-presence, so also

the subject of writing, the subject who appears via writing and who guides

the pen, is a more elaborate creature than one might at first guess.

Let us look more into the power of writing. In these preliminary

arguments about writing, a potentially dangerous split in the nature of

writing presents itself. If writing is power and mastery, one may justly

worry about illegitimate forms of writing. Bad writing would imply illegiti-

mate authority. Improper rhetorical handbooks, handbooks composed of

endless and tedious rules and regulations, would promote and embody

illegitimate power.

Set against and constraining this vision of the superlative power of

writing are depictions of writing's limitations. Such limitations may be

seen as correctives to or assaults on illegitimate writing. If writing is

power, it is not at the same time the principle of its own authority. Writing

remains incomplete in itself, and there is something left over, a power

anterior to writing. This is clearly the case at the opening of book 3, when

Cicero is reflecting on the character of Crassus before presenting the last

acts of his own drama, the De oratore. Cicero hopes to give Crassus his

due even as Cicero is sure that this record will fall short of the intelligence

of his original (De oratore 3.14).

Readers of Plato are supposed to be familiar with this problem: de-

spite the superlative writing of Plato, "nevertheless, one suspects that there

was more to (Socrates) than what was written (tamen maius quiddam de

illo, de quo scripta sunt, suspicatur)."35 Cicero hopes, then, that his own

readers will harbor similar suspicions of Crassus after reading the De ora-

tore. Neither the point of Cicero's pen (acumen stili) nor the insight of his

intelligence (acies ingenii) can compass Crassus' intelligence and character

(ingenium). The writing that could both master and explore all now fails to

capture the principle of its own origin, the ingenium. According to Cicero's

Crassus, writing is necessary to good performance and to mastering the

contents of a speech. And speech, of course, is meant to be a performance

of the self as vir bonus. But when Cicero himself writes up his community

of good men, writing cannot master and cannot comprehend them: some-

thing greater is left over.

Beauty and pleasure sneak back into this mystified point of origin

when the ingenium is identified with decus in another of Cicero's rhetorical

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works, the Brutus. Cicero the narrator tells his addressee, Brutus, "for as a

man's distinction is in his character, so is eloquence the illumination of the

character itself (ut enim hominis decus ingenium, sic ingeni ipsius lumen est

eloquentia)" (Cicero, Brutus 59). The illumination of the ingenium may be

eloquence, but the eloquent text of Cicero can only hope to reflect dimly

the beauty and beautiful characters (decor atque decus)36 of its participants

as it posits the beautiful authenticity of the ingenium as an ultimately

ineffable and inexplicable quality. Eloquence brings to light the beauty that

is the character of the good man, but it does not thereby explain it.

This ingenium, intelligent character and character of intelligence, can

be read as presence or as the authenticity of the ego. Thus the De oratore

assumes at its center the very principal of self that a performative theory of

identity would place always elsewhere, a subject built via mediation, dis-

course, abjection, and iteration. While any theory predicated on the death of

the subject would suffice for a critique of the good man's genius, an emphasis

on performance is particularly apt as performance necessarily inheres within

the core of rhetoric itself as well as within a text on rhetoric, and most

particularly within this dialogue on rhetoric. There is a sleight of hand

whereby writing fails Cicero the author of the De oratore, even as the text's

Crassus promises that writing provides mastery and self-fulfillment. In the

first case, writing stages a performance that one feels has a supplement left

over, a character that transcends representation. In Crassus' version, an

opposite movement is effected: writing forges the very genius that eludes

written representation. How can these two versions be reconciled?

Elsewhere in our rhetorical studies we have always found that the

orator is an incomplete creature. He needs constant self-surveillance and

discipline so that he may sustain his own privileged identity. This image of

the ingenium assumes the existence of that point to which the orator strives,

but it is again a position that neither performance nor writing as surparole

will ever reach or comprehend. Once again failure produces iterative perfor-

mance as its consequence if not its self-representation. This failed presenta-

tion of the ingenium thrives on its own failure. That is, Cicero posits a sense

of superabundant interiority as he represents good men in the act of discuss-

ing good men: "Yes, they were great men, greater than their writing or my

writing can ever fully indicate." This rhetorical trope of inadequacy itself

furnishes us with a triumph of authorship, not a textual defeat since the

ineffable authenticity of the orator is just what the argument of the De

oratore seeks to establish at every turn. In the second case, that of Crassus'

writing, writing again produces interiority by completing the deficiencies of

spontaneous performance. This supplementation and mediation of unreflec-

tive speech allows for a discourse that is more masterful and more real.

Crassus believes that writing is genius' best means to self-fulfillment, its

214 STAGING MASCULINITY

means of best articulating a discourse designed to reveal and to propagate

one's thoughts. For both Cicero the author and Crassus the embedded

character, writing is the occasion for a production, reproduction, and media-

tion of interiority and presence. Thus the De oratore may be a failed drama

in the sense that its good men are not "really there" in the text; but once

again we have a fertile failure. As the De oratore itself would put it, the right

direction has been indicated (see 1.204 and 2.150).

A student of the text now knows where to turn and how to act, even if

he will never exactly have what he seeks. Cicero has written an account of

the necessity of reading and writing. He tells of a self mediated by writing,

a self discovered within his own rhetorical handbook even as this handbook

refuses to see itself as akin to others. The subject of writing and the hand-

book loses its predicate and becomes simply the subject: there is a true

character and genius at work here. Writing forges this genius even as writ-

ing itself fails to compass it. This is a subject always in progress: the

occasions for performances are innumerable, and in each case a pause for

reflection and hence for written reflection will be the best course.

Cicero, then, performs himself in this text. Much as speeches are

venues for the authentic performance of the self as good man, so too is this

dialogue on speaking an opportunity for discovering with the pen's clever

point the "true" Cicero. He illuminates his own eloquent genius even as we

acknowledge that it extends beyond what can be gleaned from reading

these pages. We cannot make a rigid distinction between self-production

and a written claim of self-production: the self has been posited as a sub-

lime performative inscription. This self is a self-citation: writing alludes to

genius just as genius furnishes that which is clever about writing. Cicero's

writer-speaker thus lives a very rich version of Butler's thesis on per-

formativity as citationality. In his case, the law cited is that of his own

ingenium.

Writing has something incomplete to it, it imitates or alludes rather

than giving the thing itself. Yet the De oratore pleads the case of the virtues

of imitation. Imitation is a vital mode of rhetorical training. Imitation

replaces rhetorical rulebooks and completes the task they can never finish.

In fact, imitation and practice are the first two rules of Antonius' advice to

his students: "My first rule is to point out a model, then the student applies

himself to imitation."37 Naturally one has to be careful to pick a model

well, not to imitate failings, and to imitate more than superficially (De

oratore 2.91-92). Antonius uses his principle of imitation to explain why an

age tends to produce more or less a single style of speaking (De oratore

2.92). Thus there are masters and schools, but there are no textbooks or

vulgar precepts, only models and copies. Furthermore Antonius detects

imitation by reading others' writings,38 and he argues that successful imita-

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tion entails practice performing and writing like one's model (De oratore

2.96). Selective imitation and the succession of generations of mortal men

thus explain the history of oratory. This history is not a theoretical or

philosophical investigation, it is a raw genealogical investigation that ef-

faces a sociological one: who were the fathers? who the sons?

In some cases, though, imitation offers an inadequate rubric within

which to explain an orator's style. There are great individuals who imitate

no model and follow their own natures.39 Similarly the idea of imitation

from this portion of the text apparently does not conflict with 3.34-36,

where it is argued that there are as many styles as there are orators. The

title orator presupposes a nature, a character, and a beauty (natura,

ingenium, decor/decus). The agglomeration of these mystified categories

produces an individual whose individuality may not be reduced to some

function of vulgar schoolhouse training. These passages privilege the idea

of nature as the origin of the orator's distinctive character. In 2.98 some

orators seem unique - their natures made them do it - and in 3.34-36

effectively all orators are unique. Taken to its extreme, this idea of nature

obviates imitation. We can get by this impasse by denaturalizing the cate-

gory nature: these two models are complementary to the extent that one's

nature is culturally produced. A nature offers an imitation of a socially

viable and recognized essence. It performs a citation of the notion of the

individual within the confines of the social laws of the subject. In this

scene, then, nature is another name for a successful, self-effacing copy.

Antonius' theory thus embraces two modes of origin: spontaneous

generation and mimetic reproduction.40 In the course of summarizing

Bompaire 1958, Reardon uses a telling phrase in this regard. Discussing the

relationship between education and imitation, Reardon writes, "On entend

par Mim6sis non point 'pastiche' (quoiqu'il ne manque pas d'exemples

d'imitation assez 6troitement conqu) mais plutOt 'r6f6rence. . . au patri-

moine litt6raire' repr6sent6 par les grandes chefs d'ouvre" (1971). Pater-

nity and patrimony, identity and the textbook coincide in the mimetic

reproduction of good men as good men via "great books." In fact, Crassus

as Cicero writes him expressly likens his own instruction to that of a father,

even to that of any father: "I have told you everything I thought. If you had

gone up to any head of a house and drawn him aside from some conversa-

tion, he probably would have given you the same answers."41 Neither mode

of paternity, though, neither spontaneous generation nor mimetic filiation,

has room for handbooks or detailed precepts like Quintilian's. One is not

told how to fold the toga as in Quintilian, one imitates the fold of another's

toga.42 This desire expressed through mimesis can be read as part of a more

profound psychic economy: imitation allows one to desire the father and to

have the father by becoming him (see Silverman 1992, 194).

216 STAGING MASCULINITY

Such identificatory social reproduction not surprisingly would oppose

explicit technologies of rhetorical reproduction. Rhetorical rules disrupt

the mysteries of oratory on several levels. First, rules allow for impersonal

oratorical reproduction that bypasses the homosocial ties that mimetic

paternity forges. Similarly, any diligent schoolboy might claim the right to

the title orator and entry into the top and exclusive ranks of hegemonic

Roman society without first making the right connections and working his

way up the social and political ladder. Thus the structure of the community

of orators as a whole is threatened. Next, rules can dispel the illusion of

presence and authenticity upon which the doctrine of the good man is

predicated. As has been discussed in prior chapters, only where cura is

yoked to natura can rules be integrated into the project of legitimate repro-

duction. Bare rules threaten to produce a Pollux, the wretched student of a

teacher whose instructions were few, abundantly clear, and easy to follow.

The threat of nonmimetic reproduction thus threatens the orator and his

community on a variety of levels.

Nowhere is there space for the parvenu. Or, if a new man (novus

homo) does appear, his legitimate right to occupy a position amid such

peers is guaranteed by a notion of rhetorical inculcation that proves that he

really is a good man and that he has not stumbled upon a trick of seeming

one. Cicero himself was a new man or novus homo and not a person born

into the elite ranks of Roman politicians and speakers. Cicero was merely

son of an elite family of the city of Arpinum. Thus his attachment to the

Roman aristocracy represents an ascent on Cicero's part into a social posi-

tion homologous to his original one, but this time on a grander scale.

Naturally, not all Romans were eager to embrace Cicero the arriviste into

their ranks. If he is to have any hope of being taken seriously, the new man

must enter into the symbolic order of legitimate rhetorical discourse by

finding a father to whose law he has fully acceded: he must become a good

son with an authoritative patrimony.

Imitation itself is a difficult question: it must extend beyond mere

mimicry. Copying the fold of a toga is a slight thing, and a student may

justly fear that this is all he has done. Thus the young Sulpicius interrupts

Crassus to lament that he may not have imitated Crassus well enough:

Tum ille "tu vero, quod monuit idem, ut ea, quae in quoque maxima

essent, imitaremur; ex quo vereor ne nihil sim tui nisi supplosionem

pedis imitatus et pauca quaedam verba et aliquem, si forte, motum."

[Then he said, "Yes, you can (find fault with me) because he advised

us to imitate whatever is the greatest in each. Accordingly I am afraid

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that I have imitated nothing of you except the stamp of your foot,

some few words, and perhaps a bit of your gestures."]

(Cicero, De oratore 3.47)

Sulpicius worries that he offers mere mimicry of delivery and word choice.

If actio is supposed to be an imitation of the self and the playing of one's

own persona, Sulpicius fears that he is merely histrionic and that his per-

formed self is not at its core enough a Sulpicius derived from Crassus.

Crassus responds to this fear by advising Sulpicius that the younger man

has gone beyond superficial imitation. Crassus says that provided he has

the time he will tell Sulpicius later what his student has taken from himself

and what from other places. Crassus thus accepts Sulpicius but withholds

from him the keys to self-knowledge. Perhaps this is not too surprising.

Such a description on Crassus' part would involve the complete writing of

his own ingenium as well as that of Sulpicius: the text would have to be too

explicit. We also know that this task of complete writing is an impossible

one, though it is ever in progress. It is in progress, of course, in the very

performance Crassus is giving of himself, even if this performance never

wholly encompasses his self. This performance already has something writ-

ten to it because the pen and genius are never radically disjoint: good

speech has a written quality to it. And, obviously, this is also a written

Crassus, not the man speaking for himself.

When Crassus returns to his narrative from Sulpicius' interruption,

though, he charts a course that ought to both unsettle and reassure his

young disciple. Crassus refuses to give a puerile doctrine (puerilis doctrina)

of speaking "good Latin" (Latine) (De oratore 3.48). The idiomatic usage

of Latine conflates speaking the language well with speaking it at all; "in

Latin" gets confused with "in good Latin." The sense of this word then

encapsulates the whole process of constitutive exclusions involved in ora-

torical training: you are either on top or you are nowhere.

Crassus himself offers a similar sort of gloss upon the word. Crassus

describes how failure to speak Latine leads to derision (De oratore 3.52).

Crassus himself commands that his auditors deride (deridite) those students

who have only embraced oratorical "force" (oratoriam vim) -- and here a

comparison with philosophical force/violence as discussed above is neces-

sary - by way of rhetoricians' precepts (praeceptis rhetorum) as opposed to

the true orator's (vero enim oratori) vast and exhaustive human experience

(De oratore 3.54). Crassus says, "On my authority deride and disparage"

(me acutore deridite atque contemnite), and we find here instruction on how

to read Lucian's Praeceptor rhetorum: under the guidance of a good author-

ity, we learn how to react with scorn for the cheap and easy. Apparently

218 STAGING MASCULINITY

precepts produce a subphilosophical vim and hence an illegitimate force.

On the other hand, the experiences of the legitimate orator drift into

philosophical oratory and philosophical force. In other words, an elite

Roman's social practice and habituation, his habitus a la Bourdieu, become

a philosophical proposition, a truth in and of oratorical performance. This

same theme is hammered home throughout the section on philosophy.

Crassus next yokes philosophy and rhetoric and eventually gets to the

adamare of 3.71 discussed above. Finally, Crassus in 3.91-95 condemns

self-professed teaching instructors (dicendi magistros) as vulgar and foren-

sic, and he tells of the banishment of the Latin rhetoricians when he was

censor. In each of these cases as well, Sulpicius learns not to trust explicit

training and to instead rely on his initiation into the higher mysteries of

oratory via his association with men like Crassus and his participation in the

elite lifestyle of the orator.

The condemnation in 3.92 of vulgar oratory as forensic is likewise

telling. Once again, the oratory we are speaking of is not a simple func-

tional affair. Antonius may have given this impression in book 1, but we

know from the opening of the second book and his disavowal of his prior

stance that the orator is no grubby, workaday functionary (operarius).43

Oratory and the orator are philosophical and metaphysical objects, not

practical ones. Good oratory here transcends the narrow confines of the

forum. Good oratory is everywhere where there are good men (viri boni).

This text performs a scene of good men performing their goodness; it

reveals their rhetoric on the goodness of rhetoric; it enacts their own en-

action of their virtue.

Poor Sulpicius is accepted by Crassus as an orator but is simulta-

neously deprived of a sure knowledge of the nature and extent of his

mimetic success. Sulpicius is also deprived of any recourse to precepts of

diction or rules of performance. As will be said later in 2.232, there is no art

of oratory, just an "observation" (observatio) of it.44 In fact, even simple

imitation as a means of oratorical success is itself parodic. Instead Sulpicius

has left to him a deeper imitation - whatever that may be - philosophy,

and love. Intimate familiarity with the life and workings of elite Roman

society and a profound psychological attachment to one's peers, and espe-

cially older peers, produce the good man experienced at speaking. Sulpi-

cius must become a Crassus, but he has no sure route to this goal left to

him. He should cultivate a cathexis to the discipline of philosophy and to

the enticing attributes of oratory, the euphemized love depicted above.

If Sulpicius needs to love Crassus, Crassus has a profound need of

Sulpicius as well. Cicero's Orator, a book written about nine years after the

De oratore, contains a telling scene in this regard. Cicero informs the

younger Brutus who plays Sulpicius to his Crassus: "When I say 'me,'

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Brutus, I am saying 'you': for whatever was going to happen in my case has

long since come to pass; you, though . . "45 This moment identifies master

with student. They are differentiated only along the axis of time. Rhetori-

cal training is a technique of social replacement and reproduction that is

both homosocial and narcissistic. This is a movement waiting to ensue upon

the introduction of the theme of imitation. The identities of both master

and student are implicated in their mutual relations of identification. The

whole social order is hereby implicated in this model of oratory: the older

man takes the younger man as a version of himself just as the younger man

aspires to be the older one and tries to see himself in him.46

As a silent observer within the dialogue of the De oratore, Cicero is

most like Sulpicius, the student in search of a father and an identity as an

orator. Thus one should note again the problem of the confusion of Crassus

with Cicero as discussed above. Taking Crassus for Cicero implies accept-

ing the son as the father: Cicero the author now begets the man whose

model enables Cicero's own rhetorical engendering. Mimetic reproduction

locks Crassus, Cicero, Sulpicius, and Brutus in a mutually determining

relationship of fathers and sons who each vouch for the legitimacy of the

other. In its fashion, this circular relationship of paternity and filiation in

which Cicero finds himself implicated is fully complementary to that other

mode of reproduction advocated by Crassus, spontaneous generation. Like

Napoleon, Cicero can proclaim himself to be his own ancestor. Authentic

oratory and legitimate society here find texts in the Orator and the De

oratore that accommodate themselves to their principles. In each case Cic-

ero's text reminds us that this is not a handbook, this is a book of love, a

book of the love felt between men and between fathers and sons.

Oratorical training is depicted as the mode par excellence of this identi-

ficatory sociality. Identification, desire, and performance are all lodged in

rhetorical theory, but these same principles constitute the key elements of

the practice of social life. Moreover we have seen that pleasure, beauty,

love, mastery, and violence everywhere permeate the social world of ora-

tory. The text intervenes to supplement this social life - this life held to-

gether by imitation and identification, and a life that transcends its own

depiction - both by portraying it all over again and by offering regulations

to constrain the conceptualization and practice of social life: thus we could

say that the text offers a portrait of habitus rather than habitus itself. The

distinction between a representation of autonomous practical sense and

that sense itself indicates a vital distance from the purely sociological mode

of a Bourdieu.

The De oratore offers a technology of the self preached by one of the

products of this same technology. Such a text thereby serves as a handbook

of the self, the world, and the self in the world even as it denies closure and

220 STAGING MASCULINITY

completeness to any of these and even to itself. This denial, though, is itself

the locus at which the techniques of iterative performance and self-mastery

are inculcated. This acknowledged incompleteness thus occasions tech-

niques of reproduction of the social order. These techniques ensure the

reproduction of this order as an order characterized by a certain kind of

desire and a certain kind of text. Furthermore this social order, while never

closed, is always in the process of having various movements, pleasures,

and souls exiled from it as if it would thereby become complete. Such texts

then call upon the machinery of abjection as one of the corollary instru-

ments of subjectivization and as processes concomitant to those of perfor-

mance and self-mastery.

Against such a text as the De oratore and its techniques, rules and

rulebooks can never aspire even to the presentation of this textual failure

and the invocation of the supplement of interiority and self-presence.

Those books cannot cite some authentic and authoritative good man like a

Crassus who both resides within and beyond their pages. The De oratore

makes a second gesture complementary to the exclusion of unauthorized

texts: it excludes the sort of folks who are alleged to need these texts.

Accordingly, the assault on instruction that is impersonal and nonimitative,

the instruction of rhetorical precepts, is by no means isolated to 3.54. In

fact, rhetorical precepts are universally derided in the De oratore. By rhe-

torical precepts we can understand any explicit instruction, but especially

any codified and transcribed dictates. Examples of such would be the Rheto-

rica ad Herennium, Cicero's own De inventione,47 and Quintilian's Insti-

tutio oratoria, even if Quintilian does see himself as Cicero's heir. Such

rules and regulations, incompatible with the doctrine of great individuals

and imitation, are scorned as beneath Cicero's orator. Who needs a hand-

book? Anyone who is lacking in authority in some manner. Nor will the

handbook make up for these crippling defects, as such a text cannot guaran-

tee authority. Even the best text, the De oratore, which contains the person-

ality of the good man rather than mere instructions, has something greater

(maius quiddam) left over after it has been read.

The De oratore is filled with binarisms that put its characters and their

society on one side while maligning the opposite pedantic pole. Antonius

contrasts his words to those a teacher gives to boys (2.180). The material of

the De oratore is subtle and not obvious like others' teachings (2.84). A

similar pairing of difficulty and ease makes for a frequent point of contrast

that occurs variously in 2.69, 3.38, and 3.98. This notion of ease and

familiarity also has national origin added to it in 1.23: authoritative Ro-

mans are set against Greeks commonplaces. The text reads illa pateant in

promptuque sint omnibus. One can translate pateant variously, but I would

take the sentence as saying that the Greek material is both intellectually

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and physically accessible, where in promptu implies that it is easy to get

your hands on one of these books and pateant signifies that the precepts are

easy to understand.48 Conversely, the society of good men such as is de-

picted in the De oratore does not admit any and all. We may not arrive at

their table unbidden, nor may we readily read and comprehend the sublim-

ity of the textual representation of such company.

As far as the Greeks go, their ineptitude and gaucheries are high-

lighted in a discussion of ineptus (De oratore 2.17-18). The Greeklings are

literally ill-fitted to Roman rhetorical society. The savoir faire of the Ro-

mans finds a kindred contrast in 2.247, where the good orator's control is

compared to scurrilous license. Permissiveness is precisely what the com-

pany of good men cannot allow. Good men are moderate, judicious, and

self-controlled. Good taste and judgment are offered the highest praises:

the orator stands out as celestial, and he is no mere pleader (cansidicum)

(De oratore 1.202); he is a god among men (3.53). And so we can now add

to our formula equating the man to his pleasure, a corollary expression: as

is the man, so his text and doctrines. The latter half of this formula is nearly

a commonplace: "You hear it on the streets, and for the Greeks it's prover-

bial: Men's oratory was as their lives."49

License, foreignness, ease: the exiled terms are familiar. The abjections

that enable this variety of text parallel the refusals from earlier chapters. The

text that performs models for imitation does not give precepts without a

praeceptor firmly placed within the elite social field. In fact, the apotheosis of

the orator is itself predicated on these same rejections. Any and all of these

exiled terms were found in the discussions of Lucian, actors, self-mastery,

and the constitution of the body. The whole discourse of the body in the

world converges with the discourse of the text in the world. This process is

facilitated by Cicero's merging of writing and the authentic voice. The au-

thentic self-presence of writing helps produce a self-present text in the De

oratore. The presence recorded by this text is likewise the presence of the

social world that its readers are invited to enter.

Put differently, the De oratore is itself both imitation, being the imita-

tion of a conversation from the past, and performance. Furthemore, it

imitates performance and performs imitation. The De oratore "enacts" the

bodies and the doctrine of good men. Cicero substitutes a performative

inscription for Austin's (1962) performative utterance. This substitution is

facilitated by the assertion that speech is written and that writing is speech.

For Quintilian in particular this second proposition proved vital to his own

textual performance. Cicero's text performs the good body and the good-

ness of discipline while purging the world of bad bodies and bad texts. The

ironies of Cicero's own political and practical difficulties at this period only

underscore the notion that what the world needs is to be more like good

222

STAGING MASCULINITY

literature. The readers of Cicero's text have by and large agreed with this

proposition.

Habinek has taught us to expect to find in Roman literary and cultural

products strategies for the maintenance of aristocratic domination. In the

De oratore we find an invocation of a community of orators discussing

oratory as part of their own reflection on the political and social crisis of

their day. The techniques of the De oratore, though are far more sophisti-

cated than a simple nostalgic yet resonant invocation of a Roman past

could muster. The De oratore presents the apparatus of aristocratic domina-

tion in its full splendor. The De oratore encapsulates all of the prior themes

and interests of this study while going beyond them as well. In Cicero the

problem of the text is exacerbated relative to "mere" handbooks, and

overcome relative to this authoritative staging of Romans. This dialogue

inscribes, enacts, and brings to life the insufficient body constructed via

rhetorical discourse and the discourse of self-mastery. The De oratore con-

tains all of the constitutive exclusions that acting and hedonistic precepts

hid elicited, but it counters these with its self-present text and speakers

with their sublime joys displaced into the social field and onto their shared

art. In the De oratore, then, aristocratic domination is maintained by way

of a commandment to an endless iteration of the performance of an aristo-

cratic self. This self is always almost grounded by its own performance, but

always also stuck in the process of becoming, a process that also entails the

active exclusion of other bodies, performances, and texts.

This has been the study of a particular mode of being. This being is

enacted in performance (actio), but this being is also commanded in rhetori-

cal literature. This is an aristocratic, aggressive, masochistic, and narcissis-

tic mode of being, one filled with pleasure, shame, and fear while bought at

the expense of both the orator and the rest of the world. Uneasy lies the

head that wears a crown. I hope to have offered a study of the structure and

function of such unease and of who stood to gain from it.

Conclusion:

We Other Romans

I WISH TO END WITH A READING of a reading of rhetoric. I have chosen

as an example a piece by a leading scholar on Roman oratory. This essay

is worth reading because its author is the master of a prevalent scholarly

mode that others often only imperfectly execute. The work is charming,

the style seductive, the scholar an authority in his field. In other words, I

hope to examine the work of a legitimate heir to Cicero and the De

oratore and to ask what it means to reproduce so faithfully one's patri-

mony. The air of tactlessness that hangs about my own reading itself

indicates the extent to which one still writes within a certain rhetorical

milieu. What emerges here, then, is not an attack on a person and a

corresponding bid for my own fame - a young Roman's first public foren-

sic act was traditionally a prosecution - but rather this critique is intended

to call attention to styles of scholarly self-presentation.

Harold Gotoff (1993) has written an excellent essay on Cicero as a

performer of rhetoric. He starts with the page, and he retrieves from it a

number of important insights into rhetoric as a living practice. This essay

perhaps offers to many sufficient answer to my own initial query, "What

did ancient oratory look like?" Gotoff's piece also necessarily confronts

several of the key themes of the present study. Gotoff realizes the problems

of textuality, he engages the ironies of acting as a metaphor for oratory, and

he even addresses the question of performances of authority. The argu-

ment, the text, and the textual performance, though, reproduce in a strik-

ing manner many of the very problems of oratory that have preoccupied

the present study as a whole.

Gotoff emphasizes theater in Cicero. He praises Cicero as a master

showman and rightly complains that too few readers of Cicero think of his

dramaturgy. Gotoff furnishes welcome arguments against dreary techno-

cratic readings of Cicero whereby the text of a speech is fed through the

rulebooks on oratory. Gotoff overcompensates, though: he instead argues

that every aspect of the speech is instead a function of the exigencies of the

performance, and that the performance's only real end is victory, not

223

224 STAGING MASCULINITY

veracity, coherence, or sincerity. Some critics believe almost everything,

Gotoff nearly nothing. Gotoff thus seems an ardent partisan of Demosthe-

nes' alleged position that performance was everything, even as he sub-

sumes the notion of performance within the broader category of illusion.'

"The fact is," he concludes, "that the orator of a judicial speech is con-

cerned entirely with the momentary effect."2 Gotoff then reads a number

of speeches for their effects. The ensuing discussion resembles in form and

content the researches of Quintilian.

A number of ambiguities arise within Gotoff's treatment of the theatri-

cal metaphor. Gotoff imagines a Cicero asking himself, "Will he use his

own auctoritas as a substitute for argument?" (1993, 292). Why should

authority and argument be seen as mutually irreconcilable? As should be

clear from my own earlier observations, every performance invokes the

authority of the good man and plays within a carefully circumscribed and

sanctified stage. Admittedly, Gotoff himself does insist that Cicero "has

introduced himself as a character in the drama that is the speech" (1993,

312), that an oration is also very much about the orator. In fact, Gotoff sees

Cicero the advocate as an agglomeration of characters, as "a variety of

personae invented and portrayed by Cicero the orator" (312). Gotoff ends

his essay with a veritable fugue on the illusory in and as oratory:

In the drama of a Roman trial [Cicero] is merely his own protagonist.

For when a man gets up to speak, his intention is clear and simple: to

persuade. And in order to persuade he will say, do, become whatever

is necessary to accomplish his aim. Verisimilitude is more important

than truth; and the critic would be well advised never to trust the

absolute sincerity of the man's words or the persona he presents. The

only exception, of course, is when a scholar gives a public talk. (313)

This is a clever ending. It is an urbane and self-aware gesture on the part of

the author inviting his readers to savor a juicy irony. This text, we learn in

the footnote that actually concludes the essay, was once itself a speech. The

note naturally does not indicate the changes required to move from the

verbal performance into the textual. At a minimum one supposes that

Gotoff did not read his own footnotes to his original audience: he doubtless

performed his authority with a minimum of citations from other authori-

ties. In any case, Gotoff's conclusion invites a confusion of written text

with delivered speech. It also invites us to wonder about the question of

authority over reasoned argumentation. Gotoff would doubtless see him-

self as a highly reasonable man: and his authority, it augments the argu-

ment, doesn't it?

This speech become text and text that gestures toward speech per-

WE OTHER ROMANS

225

forms a specific version of authority. As with any article from a prestigious

journal, there are abundant footnotes. Gotoff cites; he interprets; he attri-

butes. His opinions are based upon solid readings of his texts: he furnishes

abundant tokens of authorities both ancient and modern to support his

position. This is not an exercise designed to produce momentary effects or

conviction at any price. Gotoff comes across as good man, experienced at

writing.

Gotoff thus performs the Roman rhetorical ideal even as he writes an

essay on the mechanics of Roman rhetorical performance. Like a Quintil-

ian he reads the speeches of Cicero and mines them in order to produce an

authoritative commentary. One even requires Gotoff if we are to read

Cicero: the endless fictions of the Roman orator require an interpreter to

cut through the illusions. Unlike Quintilian, though, Gotoff adds in two

very Ciceronian moments wherein he gestures to the community of good

men for which his own work is destined.

First, Gotoff recounts the following anecdote as an example of the

techniques of extemporization: "I remember Professor Roger Mynors

shortly before delivering the first Jackson lecture at Harvard, excusing

himself with the words, 'I've got to go polish my ad libs' " (1993, 304). The

personal recollection might have come straight from Cicero's De oratore:

"When I was younger, I remember the great Antonius once said . .."

Gotoff's reference to Mynors sets our author within an authoritative tradi-

tion of Latin scholarship. The specification of the lecture and the university

only reinforces the effect. The ancient version might go something like this,

"A number of us were chatting at Crassus' house in Tusculum. . ." Given

their relative ages I suspect that Mynors' lecture may even have been given

when Gotoff was a graduate student at Harvard: a young Cicero indeed.

Gotoff's finale contains another such moment. The note that closes

the last paragraph reads: "A version of this paper was delivered as a James

Loeb Classical Lecture at Harvard University on October 30, 1991" (1993,

313 n. 66). Harvard again: this was once a performance of scholarly author-

ity given not in some provincial backwater but in Rome itself. Gotoff was

invited to speak. Furthermore Gotoff has become Mynors; and the scholar

of a prior generation has been succeeded by a member of the next who

lectures and provides urbane fare to that same learned community different

only in its actual composition. Once again, parallels could be drawn to the

myth of rhetorical succession embodied by the De oratore.

Some might justly condemn this reading as ungentlemanly, but it does

emphasize the extent to which classical scholarship tends not just to inter-

pret but also to reproduce the spirit of its objects of study. When it comes

to writing and lecturing one performs a by-now familiar variant upon the

good man experienced at speaking: good scholarship, a solid knowledge of

226 STAGING MASCULINITY

Latin, and careful interpretation readily insinuate themselves into the an-

cient formula. Styles of argumentation and subject matter are carefully

attended to; so too, naturally, does one notice who speaks when and

where, as well what university has trained and what employed the scholar

who writes/speaks to us. I am by no means arguing that Gotoff is "wrong."

On the contrary, he is as "right" about Cicero as is the De oratore itself

"right" about Ciceronian practice. His is a reading to which one is invited.

Indeed, his is a thoroughly Ciceronian interpretation of Cicero.

This brings us to the question of style. The style in which my own text

is written is difficult: the reader has been asked to endure dead languages

and modern neologisms placed side by side. Worst of all, each discourse is

bent to accommodate the other: the postmoderns lie next to authors with

whom one might have thought they had made a break. And poor Quintil-

ian, suddenly he is a commentator not only on Cicero but also on Derrida

and Lacan. There are numerous obvious tropes, and rhetoric is generally in

evidence. Is this good philosophy? Is it bad theory? Is it all bad philology

impressed into the service of theory for its own sake? Is it neither fish nor

fowl, but just, as Gorgias might rhyme in, offal? Perhaps one would be

wiser to try to avoid facile antithesis and to ascend to a point beyond good

and bad.

Take, for example, the case of Nietzsche. Derrida begins his own

commentary on Nietzsche's styles with a fragment from a letter that in-

cludes the remark that the publication of The Birth of Tragedy had made

him "the most scabrous philologist of the present day."3 The remark was

made in November 1872. Nietzsche was at the time teaching his seminar on

ancient rhetoric (Nietzsche 1989). Upon reading Nietzsche's lecture notes,

though, one is surprised not at the outrageousness of their content but at

their fidelity to the Greeks and the Romans. There is little here that would

not or could not be found in a conservative course of the same title were it

offered today. For example, the account of delivery occupies less than one

page.4 This discussion consists of two brief citations from Dionysius of

Halicarnassus, some Cicero, the Demosthenes anecdote about the impor-

tance of delivery, and a few other ancient commonplaces.

Where is the scabrousness? Or, better still, why had Nietzsche been

scabrous in his book if, as his lectures reveal, he clearly knew better? This

must have puzzled Nietzsche's peer Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf.

Wilamowitz would himself eventually author a seminal essay on ancient

styles (Wilamowitz-Moellendorf 1900). More importantly, though, Wilamo-

witz is widely recognized as one of the founders of modern philology, a

textual ancestor whom one seeks to reproduce mimetically if not spontane-

ously. Nietzsche marks a point of divergence: acknowledged as a father of

so-called postmodernity, he was nevertheless trained and for a while em-

WE OTHER ROMANS

227

ployed as a classical philologist.5 Within his original profession Nietzsche

has become something of a Remus: most who hold similar degrees and

positions today aspire to be like Wilamowitz. What would it mean to

imagine a different study of the city of Romulus?

Nietzsche did not just know how to translate Greek and Latin, he

knew how to mistranslate it. He did not merely understand ancient rheto-

ric, but he knew how to give a rhetorical account of his own thinking. In

fact, Nehamas (1985) argues that questions of rhetoric become deeply

philosophical issues for Nietzsche throughout his writings. Nietzsche was

not "wrong" about tragedy: he was not just summarizing what antiquity

explicitly said of the genre, but he also went well beyond the representation

of tragedy offered up ready-made by Aristotle and his successors.6 Nietz-

sche labors-and clearly it is something of a labor-to offer a description

that exceeds the "Apollonian" perspective. When Nietzsche repents of the

errors of this youthful text, he regrets failures to make a decided enough

break with the philosophical and so too the philological traditions.7

An account of rhetoric need not be narrowly Aristotelian either. Of

course, an account of rhetoric cannot help but be somewhat Aristotelian

given the pride of place Aristotle's Rhetoric held within antiquity in general

and particularly within Cicero's own thinking. Still, a philosophy of rheto-

ric or even a taxonomy of rhetoric can only go so far and no further. Such

techniques of reading reveal structures and functions, patterns and ploys.

They are necessary tasks, but not exhaustive ones. The Aristotelian tradi-

tion has difficulty grappling with more protean questions: what of the

sociology of rhetoric? what of the psychology of rhetoric? what of the

rhetoric of rhetoric?8 Indeed, even the question of the philosophy of rheto-

ric remains double difficult in the absence of an extensive and self-aware

account of the rhetoric of philosophy.

Philosophers have long presented the orators as their antithesis:

against the discourse of truth to which philosophy aspires the orators offer

anything that will please, any argument that will win the day. Clearly,

though, the orators were themselves frequently exercised by questions of

truth and meaning: Cicero and Quintilian both aspire to train an orator

who can be what he seems, who can speak what is, and whose words will

not just be true but also have the power to produce truth in the world. In

this version the orator becomes something of a philosopher-king.

Nietzsche again becomes useful: he too is the rhetorical philosopher;

and, disturbingly, he too argues for a discourse that is virile and masterful.

Zarathustra's version of wisdom as a woman waiting to be won thus recalls

Lucian's teacher of rhetoric (Nehamas 1985, 114-15). A ccontemporary

genealogical reading needs always to guard against itself proceeding accord-

ing to the rules of masculinist ontology and teleology. We must be wary of

228 STAGING MASCULINITY

reproducing the good man within our own critique of masculinity.9 Never-

theless, the genealogy itself indicates the manner in which it would be

impossible to dispense with this figure with a flourish of the pen.

What would it mean to perform a philosophy of rhetoric, to enact a

true oratory? A question such as this hovers about the pages of the rhetori-

cal literature we have been reading. In order to find himself good and true,

the orator produced a universe of unlivable bodies and souls. These bad

subjects became the stuff of subjection: they were to be mastered by the

orator both in the world and in himself. The orator's psyche becomes a

microcosm for the logic of the world: as goes the mode of self-knowledge

for the hegemonic man, so too flows the authoritative logos of the world.

And this logos may perhaps be decried as mere rhetoric, a hypostasis with

no basis in reality, something produced by the orator, by the rhetorical

theorist, and even by the critic of oratory. But such a resistance already

acknowledges a point this study has long maintained: the text of the world

is performed and iterated; it is not closed, finished, or perfect; rhetorical

claims are not ontological ones; utterances are not divinely performative.

The orators themselves knew this. Their entire self-imposed regime is predi-

cated upon such a realization. Their discourse may not be the truth of the

world, but it comprises a vital would-be truth, a fiction with the power to

produce lived reality.

Moreover even if we imagine queer, radical, nasty subjects who live

some sort of alternative and subterranean life apart from the orators, we

produce a portrait already anticipated by the good men themselves. They

have not only sketched the outlines of virtue, but they have constrained

the sort of space that vice itself can occupy: crazy emperors like Nero offer

one version of a subversive parody enacted from within the confines of the

rubric of the good man. One would have to be madder even than they to

pretend that the world of the good man vanishes so soon as one loses

interest in it.

The "truth" of Rome remains doggedly elusive. Students of Roman

women have long struggled with the difficulties of depicting their experi-

ence in objective terms.10 How can we separate the masculinist account

from historical truth? Yet the discourse of Rome keeps reproducing the

qualities goodness and virility as subjective structures with objective ef-

fects. Furthermore the rhetorical texts themselves train their readers in the

means whereby the reader too might imbibe excellence, speak authorita-

tively, and perform the excellence and decorum of their learning. As was

mentioned in the introduction and subsequently argued in the body of this

study, when the orator acquires his knowledge he simultaneously re-

inscribes the legitimacy of virile authority.

WE OTHER ROMANS

229

Scholars today must attempt to avoid being such good students of

ancient rhetoric that they reproduce even the relations of appropriation for

which an elitist text like the De oratore argues. In fact, to the extent that

the Ad Herennium and the work of C. Julius Victor are seen as "base"

examples of their genre when compared to Quintilian, or, more impor-

tantly, the great Cicero, critics reveal their own desire to prove the blueness

of their blood, to claim to understand fully the authors of these already

exclusive texts within a genre invested with the highest social capital. In

short, the need to prove that one's Latin really was as good as Cicero's can

itself be a sign of a complicity with the aristocracy of the culture of rhetoric.

Cicero becomes a Bloomian strong poet, and the weak fall before his pen,

so much mightier than his sword (cf. Bloom 1973, 11). Rhetorical criticism

can itself then become a sort of prose poetry written by a "deep reader"

where the scholar offers not just exegesis but also an argument in favor of

his own claim to filiation with the master (Bloom 1973, 95-96).

Your author has perhaps overstepped his bounds. It would be possible

to accuse him of any number of crimes: ingratitude, incompetence, malice.

Or perhaps this is all mere braggadocio, youthful excess, something he will

grow out of. Undeniably he is something of an inheritor, trained tradition-

ally, and a card-carrying member of the community of commentators. If all

goes well, he will cast aside his Asiatic youth and grow into Attic maturity

much as did Cicero himself. A variety of other possible readings of my

reading are already contained in the preceding pages: all the jargon damages

and even conceals the honeyed truths of Attic simplicity; this is Asiatic

excess, effeminate fluff, with a mere ten Attic words sprinkled atop a pile of

ignorance; the author was too lazy to climb the hard road; this is the gaudy

exposition of a pandering body of knowledge designed to seduce the igno-

rant into believing either that theory is significant to a philologist or perhaps

even that Latin might be relevant to a theorist. Let's not even talk about the

implications for the author's "thing" even if phallicism is very much the thing

to ponder when reflecting upon my own report upon the condition of knowl-

edge (cf. Lyotard 1984).

As with Gotoff, so here too: one even needs Gunderson if we are to

read Cicero. The claims of the commentator are ever bold. I would ask,

though, that the reader read more carefully rhetoric, theory, and the theory

of rhetoric. I would ask that the commentary on performance be seen as a

sort of performance in its own right. I wish to argue against the happy

acceptance of the crown to which we as scholars have an inherited and an

acquired claim. It is possible, then, to see in these pages not an Asiatic

excess but rather a new Atticism. Now one must be master of more dis-

course, must know more bodies than ever before, must perform an even

230 STAGING MASCULINITY

more elaborate rhetoric of knowing. Perhaps I only offer a new version of

mastery. Perhaps I reproduce at the next level of abstraction the theory

effect that I critique in the ancients.

It would be unwise to become distracted by an endless ascent of the

metatheoretical ladder: it makes for an effective rhetorical climax, not a

logical one. Furthermore such a recursive labor would itself perform the

very subjection to theory and abstraction that I would resist in the final

instance. No productive end is served by further reifying the theoretical: it

is already all too material. Instead I would argue for more and better

students of oratory and performance, actors whose agency struggles against

and not with the ontological consequences of reading, writing, and enact-

ing. Finally, I hope that my own play has been the thing to catch the

conscience of the king.

Notes

Introduction

1. Maier-Eichhorn 1989 offers a useful, straightforward reading of Quintil-

ian, and she includes two appendices illustrating specific gestures.

2. For the sociology of rhetoric, one can see, for example, Habinek 1995;

Sinclair 1995a, 1995b. Examples of a more historical approach might be the reading

of Cicero's Pro Archia in Narducci 1997 or the readings of the fragmentary speeches

of Cicero offered by Crawford 1994. Obviously, though none of these scholars is

solely concerned with one sort of inquiry over the other.

3. See Derrida 1981 and Ferrari 1987, 208-10. Charles 1992 provides a

Lancanian reading of this dialogue. Also, it should be noted that Cicero's De

oratore is itself heavily influenced by the Phaedrus.

4. See Lloyd 1993 for an account of the maleness of reason in Western

thought as a whole. Irigaray revisits Plato's cave and describes the problems of

speculative hysteria to be found therein (Irigaray 1985, 243-364).

5. On melancholic identification, see Butler 1997b, 132-50. The problems of

heterosexuality and the gendering of speech to which Butler's reading of melan-

choly gives rise will be discussed in subsequent chapters.

6. ut cognoscas quae viri omnium eloquentissimi clarissimique senserint de

omni ratione dicendi. De oratore 1.5.

7. atque ego in summo oratorefingendo talem informabo qualis fortasse nemo

fuit. non enim quaero quis fuerit, sed quid sit illud quo nihil possit esse praestantius.

Orator 7.

8. On the formal aspects of the Brutus as an "Aristotelian" dialogue, see

Btuchner 1964, 324.

9. Cato, De rhetorica fr. 14; preserved in Seneca Maior Controversiae

1.pr.9.

10. The bibliography on the vir bonus is extensive. On the persistence of

Cato's formulation in Roman thought see Kennedy 1972, 56-57. Michel 1960, 15-

16 highlights the social usefulness of the good man. Winterbottom 1964 argues that

Quintilian's use of the vir bonus is a reaction to delatores, men who turned a profit

by accusing the politically vulnerable. Gwynn 1926, 230-41 explains Quintilian's

phrase by way of a general moral reaction against his age. Michel 1960, 19-38

covers the morality of oratory in general. Laughton 1961, 28 insists upon the

Romanness of such a rhetorical morality. Brinton 1983 relates Quintilian's good

man to Platonic thought.

231

232

NOTES TO PAGES 7-14

11. For a much fuller account of morality and education that encompasses

both Greek and contemporary thought, see Too, forthcoming.

12. In both Greek and Latin, the terms for child, rutig and puer, can also

mean slave. Hence the opposition between man and "boy" revolves around the

issue of either being in power and authority or being subject to someone else's

power and authority. Compare Golden 1985.

13. Walters 1997 offers a detailed analysis of the semantic and social field

covered by the Roman term vir. See also Santoro L'Hoir 1992.

14. See Hellegouarc'h 1963, 489-90 on the mercurial use of the term boni.

The appellation reflects partisanship, not a fixed content.

15. For the political reading of bonus and the Latin words with which it is

associated, see Hellegouarc'h 1963, 184-95. Sinclair 1993 covers the social status of

the orator as leading citizen.

16. The Oxford Latin Dictionary cites Plautus, Captivi 583: "It's characteristic

of the down-and-out to be spiteful and to envy good [i.e. affluent] men" (est

miserorum ut malevolentes sint atque invideant bonis).

17. This formulation expressly picks up on a definition of gender offered by

Butler 1990b, 270-71. Her arguments concerning gender and performance will be

discussed in more detail below.

18. Gleason 1995, xxv. For habitus, see Bourdieu 1990, 52-65, and, as Bour-

dieu's predecessor in such a use of the term, Mauss 1973, 73.

19. A critique of psychoanalysis is put in these terms. See Bourdieu 1990, 77.

20. Bourdieu 1990, 26. Bourdieu is himself quoting from others.

21. Lausberg 1990 comes close to complete objectivist complicity, though.

Similarly, Fantham 1982 might be described as heavily influenced by a subjectivist

approach. Gotoff 1993 is also highly intentionalist.

22. "Reflexive sociology" is Bourdieu's name for his project as a whole. See

Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 for an overview.

23. See Rhetorica ad Herennium 3.16.19ff. The text asserts that delivery is an

overlooked department of oratory, but compare the next example.

24. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1403b20ff. Compare 1413b9, where the so-called writ-

ten style and the spoken style of composition are contrasted relative to their amena-

bility to effective public delivery. On Aristotle's place in the history of performance

see Solmsen 1941, 45-57.

25. Corax and Tisias as handbook writers: Quintilian 3.1.8.; Cicero, De inven-

tione 2.2.6, De oratore 1.20.91, and Brutus 12.46. Compare Kennedy 1963, 58-59,

and see also Wilkins' introduction to his edition of Cicero's Orator: it becomes clear

that almost everyone wrote IxvatU (Wilkins 1895, 27-29).

26. Foucault's answer centers around practice and self-mastery or self-posses-

sion (ioxriotg and yxQT aELta). See Foucault 1990b, 33-78. Foucault's focus in

this work is, broadly speaking, the philosophy of fourth- and fifth-century Athens.

That his work should be so readily transferable to later Greek thought and to

Roman thought is further indicative of the stability of the set of problems in which

rhetorical performance participates. Rhetorical performance, then, neither inaugu-

rates nor completes this eternal crisis in ancient masculinity.

27. Jarratt (1991) also gives a reading of contemporary theory with and against

ancient rhetoric. Her focus, though, is upon the Sophists, thinkers who appear

before the canonical version of ancient rhetoric is instituted and men whose

thoughts may even be said to have provoked a conservative reaction in that very act

NOTES TO PAGES 15-21 233

of canonization. I am interested in showing the extent to which canonical ancient

rhetoric invites its own radical rereading in the course of offering its bodily tenets.

See also Poulakos 1994 for a poststructuralist reading of Gorgias' Helen in a manner

that deconstructs aristocratic presence in and through rhetoric.

28. Leo 1913, 21-46, offers a traditional account of the historical develop-

ment and interconnectedness of writing, speech, and the law in Rome.

29. Brown 1974 provocatively argues for the relevance of psychoanalysis in

the study of Rome; but Brown is more interested in pointing out areas of impor-

tance than in following up either on Freud or the Latin. Janan's work on Catullus

(1994) offers a compelling example of systematically engaged Lacanian criticism as

applied to Latin literature. The first chapter of that book has been noted as a

valuable primer on psychoanalysis for students of antiquity (McMahon 1995).

Other examples of psychoanalytic criticism of Latin literature can be found in

Leach 1993 and Leach 1999.

30. See, for example, his mother's castration threats (Freud 1976, 49) and the

constant examination of the boy for his sexual theories by his father.

31. This proposition is fundamental to Lacan's reading (1994) of the case as a

whole.

32. See Freud 1963b. Compare Lacan 1988a, 129-42, where pathogenesis is

removed from the foreground of the discussion. See Butler 1990a, 35-78, for a

genealogy of the prohibitions that produce homosexuality as a pathology by way of

and within the terms of the psychic apparatus. Butler 1997b revisits these questions

in greater detail.

33. On the homosexual aspect of everyday life and social virtues, see for

example Freud 1970a, 112; 1963c, 113, 162-65. The last passage, in particular, is

useful for seeing the connection between a pathologized relationship to homosexual-

ity and the mechanism of paranoia. The ancient orator himself often evinces signs

of this same affliction. For a critique of Freudian theory as resistant to homosexual-

ity even where it posits a primary bisexuality, see Butler 1990a, 61.

34. Freud 1970a, 107. Compare Freud 1970b, 167-71, which covers much of

the same ground.

35. The countertransference receives more discussion in Freud 1970.

36. Compare Lacan 1988a, 237-46, where the transference is put into the field

of speech.

37. Freud 1970a, 162. Compare Lacan 1988b, 89-90, the exact relevance of

which will be discussed shortly.

38. See Lacan 1977, 1-8. But note that Lacan 1988a, 74, offers a substitute for

the mirror stage with a new illustration and that Lacan 1988b, 102, expressly states

that the original essay is getting long in the tooth. In fact, the discussion to be found

in Lacan 1981 offers even further elaboration and development of this same theme.

All of these subsequent accounts revolve around optics and cameras and leave to

one side the baby before the mirror of the original formulation. See especially

Lacan 1988a, 73-88; 1988b, 235-36; and 1981, 67-119. Rose 1986 provides a

valuable gloss on many of these issues. See also Silverman 1992 for commentary

upon Lacan's eleventh seminar in particular.

39. The symbolic function is presented as complementary to arguments about

the gaze in Lacan 1981, 105, where the process of the gaze is appropriated by the

symbolic.

40. Lacan 1988b, 29. Notice, for example, that even in the chapter entitled

234

NOTES TO PAGES 22-29

"The Wolf! The Wolf!" where the infant's life initially seems to be aligned with the

real- the order that resists signification and is therefore radically exterior to the

symbolic - nevertheless this child's extremely limited vocabulary already puts him

within the symbolic. This child who has a two-word vocabulary allows for a view of

the symbolic in initio. See Lacan 1988a, 96-106 (especially 104). Hence, of course,

the infantile sexuality to which I refer above is already structured by the symbolic

and should not be seen as a fundamentally other or revolutionary state. Lacan 1994

discusses at length the child's movement into the world of language and of Oedipus.

41. Compare the case of Hans, who is asked to find health in a subjection to

father, Freud, and God. Lacan 1994 offers extensive commentary on this issue.

42. For "failure," see especially the so-called failure of the prison system and

prison reform as detailed in Foucault 1979, 268-72, or the so-called failure of

certain sexual prohibitions in Foucault 1990a, 41.

43. Foucault 1990b, 1988a. Foucault 1988b makes it clear that antiquity was a

persistent concern for him throughout the last period of his career.

44. Foucault began to be important to classicists in the 1980s. Halperin, Win-

kler, and Zeitlin 1990 offers a seminal collection of essays influenced by Foucault.

A prominent trend at present, though, is a critique of Foucault, his methods, and

even his qualifications. A key moment in this debate came with Richlin 1991. More

recently, see the articles collected in Larmour, Miller, and Platter 1998. Skinner

1996 surveys the Foucault debate within classics. Even though the relationship to

Foucault can be strained, it is clear that his questions have proven to be the ones

around which much of the contemporary debate on ancient sexuality is oriented.

45. Foucault 1990a, 8, 11. The latter passage focuses on the "putting into

discourse of pleasure."

46. Foucault 1979, 138-40. Compare Foucault 1979, 197, where discourse's

power relies on techniques of analysis. See also 1980b, 56-60.

47. Foucault 1979, 189. In Foucault 1988, 42, disclosure and renunciation are

fused in Christian confessional techniques. Here again, the orator can be evoked:

he as well discovers in himself traces that he simultaneously refuses and engages in a

technique that chronically produces such unpleasant discoveries.

48. See Butler 1997b, 83-105, for a much fuller discussion.

49. Butler 1997b reengages with Althusser in a move that seems designed to

forge a similar link.

50. For performative as citationality, see Butler 1993, 12 and 14.

51. See Bourdieu 1990, 52-65, for "structuring structures."

Chapter 1

1. See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 3.3 for an overview of the problem as it

stood in his time.

2. The Rhetorica ad Herennium 1.3; Cicero, De inventione 1.9; Quintilian

3.3.1; and C. Iulius Victor (Giomini and Celantano 1980, 1.16) all champion the

same five divisions. The first text is the earliest Latin rhetorical handbook we have,

while the last is among latest. Giomini and Celantano 1980, iv explain the evidence

in support of assigning Victor to the fourth century C.E. It should be noted that

there is no standard reference system for citing Victor. Future references to him will

come from this edition, which supersedes Halm 1863, though it does give Halm's

page numbers in its own margins.

NOTES TO PAGES 29-39 235

3. Kroll 1940, 1075, identifies Theophrastus as the source of this mode of

analyzing performance. Cicero's relationship to Theophrastus is examined in both

Runia 1989 and Fortenbaugh 1989.

4. On Roman social concerns over access to and the dissemination of rhetori-

cal training see Habinek 1998, 60-61 and 109.

5. Nobody believes the work to be Cicero's. Its uncertain authorship has also

left its dating in doubt. Achard 1989, v-xxxiv gives an excellent summary of these

problems. It most likely dates from some time shortly before Cicero's own writings,

or else it is contemporaneous with Cicero's earliest works.

6. Pronuntiationem multi maxime utilem oratori dicerunt esse <et> ad per-

suadendum plurimum valere. Nos quidem unum de quinque rebus plurimum posse

non facile dixerimus. Ad Herennium 3.19.

7. It is, of course, impossible to give real "page numbers" for a text originally

written on a number of book rolls. I only seek to indicate the scale of the discussion

and of the text in terms familiar to a modern reader. The 192-page edition to which

I am referring is Marx 1894.

8. Compare Pucci 1991 on Augustine and Horace.

9. de gestu scripserunt. Quintilian 11.3.143.

10. sed de his nequaquam nobis existimo laborandum; neque enim docemus

illum qui loqui nesciat, nec sperandum est qui Latine non possit, hunc ornate esse

dicturum, neque qui non dicat quod intellegatur, hunc posse quod admirandum sit

dicere. Giomini and Celentano 1980, 82.5-9.

11. sin contendemus per continuationem, bracchio celeri, mobili vultu, acri

aspectu utemur. Ad Herennium 3.27.

12. See for example Cicero, De oratore 1.94 and 1.78, which include the

phrase aut vero si esse posset [or indeed if he could exist].

13. This thesis will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter.

14. Some editors follow Spalding and delete "or concede" (aut concedere).

Winterbottom 1970 retains it; Cousin 1979 deletes.

15. The passages are Aeneid 3.620 in the first example and 1.335 in the second.

16. See Graf 1991 on the social aspects of Roman gestures.

17. Derrida 1976 is the locus classicus, although Derrida engages with these

questions throughout his oeuvre. One might compare in particular the essays of

Derrida 1978 and the whole of Derrida 1987.

18. "It is necessary that something written be easy to read and easy to speak"

(6Xog S 6t6L eavatyvworov cvat Yo yeyqs7a evov xact LEi3pQaorov). Aristotle,

Rhetoric 1407b11.

19. Svenbro 1993, 3. Compare Svenbro 1993, 45. Svenbro 1993, 196-97 re-

veals how erotically charged the bodily politics of such texts could be. My own

discussion of sex and the schoolmaster will come in later chapters.

20. Quintilian 9.4.19: "First, there are two kinds of style, one is taut and

tightly woven, the other is lax as in conversation and letters, except where they deal

with something of a higher nature such as philosophy, the state, and the like" (Est

igitur ante omnia oratio alia uincta atque contexta, soluta alia, qualis in sermone

<et> epistulis, nisi cum aliquid supra naturam suam tractant, ut de philosophia, de

re publica similibusque). We find here a consistent blurring of the vocabulary of

genre, style, and literature and the diction of spoken language. Thus oratio means

both style and speech; and sermo means both a discussion and a literary dialogue.

21. The passages are from, respectively, Aeneid 1.78, Eclogues 3.25, Aeneid

1.617, and Aeneid 11.383.

236

NOTES TO PAGES 40-52

22. See Martindale 1993 for a detailed analysis of this question both as it

relates to Romans reading Romans and our reading them. Martindale is also par-

ticularly interested in (re)readings of Vergil.

23. Gotoff 1993 offers a reading of Cicero the performer by way of his texts.

Goldhill 1989 grapples in a very self-aware fashion with the variety of problems that

arise when reading Attic tragedy for its staging. The essay represents an advanced

moment in an ongoing debate on performing tragedy.

24. See Rademacher 1971, 433-37, for a staggering list of references.

25. For a general study of the relationship between Quintilian and Cicero, see

Guillemin 1959. Cousin 1936 is quite exhaustive on the same topic. Cousin 1936,

100-101, touches in passing on the issue of actio, and Cousin 1936, 618-31, covers

it more carefully. Yet both passages omit any discussion of the problem of inheriting

performance via a written text. Fantham 1982 offers a detailed study of Quintilian's

borrowings and originality vis-a-vis Cicero in the course of his discussion of perfor-

mance in the Institutio.

26. These phrases come from Cicero, Pro Ligario 1.2, Pro Cluenio. 5.11, Pro

Cluentio 5.14, In Verrem 1.30.76.

27. Compare Quintilian 9.2.32: "It is impossible to compose spoken dialogue

without composing the speech of a character" (nam certe sermo fingi non potest, ut

non personae sermo fingatur). Behind all speech there lies a speaker.

28. nonne ad singulas paene distinctiones quamvis in eadem facie tamen quasi

vultus mutandus est?

29. omnia sine remissione sine varietate, vi summa vocis et totius corporis

contentione dicebam. Cicero, Brutus 313. In the same dialogue one can catch

glimpses of other orators, who are branded as uniformly slow, calm, excited, et

cetera. Some speakers clearly thought it worth sticking to particular varieties of

delivery.

30. quod notavi, ut appareret, non solum in membris causae, set etiam in

articulis esse aliquam pronuntiandi variatatem, sine qua nihil neque maius neque

minus est. 11.3.51.

31. Ausonius, in Miloniam 36. The published revised version of the speech

opens with an ironic reminder of this moment "Did I fear . . ." (etsi vereor...).

32. Quintilian is citing Cicero, Pro Archia 1.1.

33. femur ferire, quod Athenis primus fecisse creditur Cleon. . . Quintilian

11.3.123.

34. ut in tanta per omnes gentes nationesque linguae diversitate hic mihi

omnium hominum communis sermo videatur. Quintilian 11.3.87.

35. Inventio in sex partes orationis consumitur: in exordium, narrationem,

divisionem, confirmationem, confutationem, conclusionem. Exordium est princi-

pium orationis, per quod animus auditoris constituitur ad audiendum. Narratio

est... Ad Herennium 1.3.4.

36. quid est orator? vir bonus dicendi peritus. Fortunatianus, Ars rhetorica

1.10 (Halm 1863).

37. Sinclair 1993, 570-71. Sinclair 1995b offers even more extensive analysis

of the community of the sententia.

38. Sententia est oratio sumpta de vita, quae aut quid sit aut quid esse oporteat

in vita, breviter ostendit. Ad Herennium 4.24.

39. Again, Sinclair 1993 offers a thorough study of the sociology of the Ad

Herennium (see especially 563). In general, Sinclair believes that the author is quite

aristocratic. While rhetorical training is never lowbrow, I find these "accessible"

NOTES TO PAGES 55-63

237

rules much less elitist than other alternatives. Compare MacKendrick 1948. For a

discussion of the author as a "populist" (popularis) see Ungern-Sternberg 1973,

which follows up on Marx 1894. Of course, "popular" in this context should only be

read as less elitist than the most extreme Roman positions: advocating certain

policies beneficial to the lower classes did not imply believing that anyone other

than gentlemen ought to be the people's champion and spokesman.

40. Kennedy 1972, 114-38, discusses this work in general. Grube 1962, 237-

38, and Bonner 1977, 79, talk about its pedantic style. Cicero disparages this work

at De oratore 1.5. The refusal of the simple prescriptive style is thus an opening

gesture in the move toward dialogue.

41. MacKendrick 1948 also reads Cicero's theoretical texts as written for "in-

siders." On the other hand, Ruch 1958 emphasizes the international quality of

Cicero's thought. Hence the elite of ability or culture need not be narrowly con-

ceived as necessarily Romans or necessarily members of certain families. Cicero

thus makes room for relative arrivistes such as himself while also requiring com-

plete submission to the dominant cultural paradigm. The perils and pitfalls of such

strategies are covered in Bourdieu 1984.

Chapter 2

1. A shorter version of this chapter appeared as Gunderson 1998.

2. Bremmer and Roodenburg 1992; Bourdieu 1990; Schmitt 1984; and

Boltanski 1971 offer useful sociological analyses of bodies and gestures. Mauss 1973

remains a classic within this realm. Graf 1991 investigates Quintilian from this

perspective. Tuite 1993 examines the semiotics of gestures. Butler 1989 and Lash

1984 examine the body from within critical theory. Jackson 1983 attempts to de-

scribe a body that is anterior to all signs and radically independent from language.

The present analysis focuses on the production of meanings of the body and the

regulation of a bodily-ego within such processes.

3. An excellent discussion of later and mostly Greek material on perfor-

mance can be found in Gleason 1995. Fantham 1982 examines Quintilian's relation-

ship to earlier authors' discussions of performance.

4. See Bardon 1952, 2:111-12 for some discussion of these lost works.

5. Boltanski 1971, 214-16, argues for an increase in somatic knowledge and

observation as social class rises.

6. Foucault 1979, 268-72. Or see Foucault 1990a for his investigation of

sexuality not as a fact or substance but as a story that has to be repeatedly and

endlessly discovered and told.

7. See Cicero, Pro S. Roscio Amerino 84, Pro Milone 32, and Philippicae

2.35.

8. The whole of Quintilian's twelfth book engages the question of whether

one can be a good orator without being a good man.

9. See Butler 1997b, 31-62, especially 59-62. Her commentary centers on

Hegel 1977, 111-19, and I have borrowed the idiom of Hegel as well.

10. Such knowledges could be connected with Foucault's call for other econo-

mies of pleasure (1990a, 158-59).

11. Compare Isocrates' Antidosis and Against the Sophists. See also the discus-

sion of authentic performance in the chapter on actors.

12. Verum illi persuasione sua fruantur, qui hominibus ut sint oratores satis

238

NOTES TO PAGES 64-73

putant nasci: nostro labori dent ueniam, qui nihil credimus esse perfectum nisi ubi

natura cura iuuetur. Quintilian 11.3.11. This section will be discussed at greater

length in the next chapter.

13. ideoque in iis primum est bene adfici et concipere imagines rerum et

tamquam ueris moueri.

14. See Derrida 1976 and my arguments in the preceding chapter and in the

introduction.

15. Compare Lucian, De saltatione 63. The arguments there, even if they

become hyperbolic, depend upon the legibility of dance. In an extreme case, a man

performing the madness of Ajax seems to go as crazy as his subject: he nearly kills

the person performing Odysseus. On another occasion a dancer is brought along as

an interpreter by a commanding general out among unknown peoples. See De

saltatione 83 and 64.

16. (gestus) qui et ipse uoci consentit et animo cum ea simul paret. 11.3.65.

17. in intimos penetret adfectus. 11.3.67.

18. Subsequent chapters will study these two special cases.

19. Compare also Seneca, Epistulae morales 114 for a long fugue on body and

stylistic criticism. The spirit and the body's movements are made to coincide, and

then the dissolute life and speech of Maecenas are read through this thesis. A

philosophical regulation of the soul thus becomes necessary for any moral speaker.

One can think as well of Dionysius of Halicarnassus' On the Ancient Orators, where

the Asiatic and Attic styles are made into bodies.

20. See Foucault 1979, 184, for the conjoint constitution and extraction of

knowledge that takes place in examination. See also Foucault 1979, 305, where

"knowable man" is a product of "analytical investment," a process whereby theo-

retical analysis produces the object of its inquiry. Foucault calls this "domination-

observation."

21. This passage is discussed in more detail when the topic of actors in general

and their relationship to orators is taken up in the chapter on acting.

22. The Latin phrase appears in Quintilian 11.3.1, which is referring to Cic-

ero, De oratore 3.222. Bodily eloquence, eloquentia corporis, also mentioned in

11.3.1, is taken from Cicero, Orator 55.

23. Against Quintilian's version see Fortunatianus, Ars rhetorica 2.1. This

author boldly claims to exhaust the topic of characterization with his twenty-one

divisions (persona quot modis consideratur? viginti et uno). His discussion is an

agreeable and unconvincing jumble of attributes that makes a muddle of divisions

such as Quintilian's. It may be said in Fortunatianus' favor, though, that his student

is assured of ready comprehension of other souls and indeed even of his own.

24. Further discussion of these terms can be found in the final chapter.

25. Compare Cicero, Brutus 171 for "urbanity" (urbanitas) as an ineffable

quality. This passage seems to restrict itself to the opposition between the Roman

and the provincial, but I would like to read the urbane more fully. Urbanity is the

quality possessed by the sophisticated and socially prominent man of the city. He is

a man of authority, and one recognizes his hegemony, but cannot exactly say from

whence it comes. Quintilian's cruel take on urbanity will be discussed below.

26. See Quintilian 11.3.138-39, and compare 11.3.69 and 11.3.159 on the

body and head. Everywhere Quintilian requires propriety and straightness: there is

a double play on the Latin rectus.

27. Thalmann 1988 and Rose 1988 argue that the sociology of this scene is

NOTES TO PAGES 74-84

239

complex and that the reactions that it would engender in its audience are by no

means univocal or aristocentric. See also Bourdieu 1991, 109.

28. Manus uero, sine quibus trunca esset actio ac debilis, uix dici potest quot

motus habeant, cum paene ipsam uerborum copiam persequantur. 11.3.85.

29. hae, prope est ut dicam, ipsae locuntur. 11.3.85.

30. Maier-Eichhorn 1989 provides both a commentary and a set of useful

illustrations.

31. Est admirationi conueniens ille gestus, quo manus modice supinata ac per

singulos a minimo collecta digitos redeunte flexu simul explicatur atque conuertitur.

32. Est et illa caua et rara et supra umeri altitudinem elata cum quodam motu

uelut hortatrix manus, a peregrinis scholis tamen prope recepta tremula scaenica.

Rara is to be taken in the sense offered by the Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. rarus

1.c. Compare Maier-Eichhorn 1989, 95: "mit weit gespreizten Fingern."

33. manus cum sensu et inciperet et deponeretur: alioqui enim aut ante uocem

erit gestus aut post uocem, quod est utrumque deforme. 11.3.106.

34. 11.3.107. Compare the discussion of Antonius' use of his hands in Cicero,

Brutus 141: "his hands kept to the general tenor of his speech, but they did not

express its ideas word-for-word" (gestus erat non verba exprimens, sed cum sen-

tentiis congruens).

35. These last are clearly the same beats as Cicero's "more subtle rhythm"

(cantus obscurior). See Cicero, Orator 57.

36. Praecipuum uero in actione sicut in corpore ipso caput est, cum ad illum de

quo dixi decorem, tum etiam ad significationem. 11.3.68.

37. Plerumque tamen et uox temperata et gestus modestus et sedens umero toga

et laterum lenis in utramque partem motus, eodem spectantibus oculis, decebit.

11.3.161.

38. One can also compare 11.3.70, which tells how the head should follow the

gestures.

39. See Needham 1973, which brings together a number of classic essays on

the sociology of the left and right. His selection includes Lloyd 1962, which covers

classical philosophy.

40. Compare Graf 1991, 47, on bodily and spiritual self-control in Quintilian's

gestures.

41. Gleason 1995 gives an excellent discussion of the sociology of the voice

during the Second Sophistic.

42. Quare uocem deliciis non molliamus, nec inbuatur ea consuetudine quam

desideratura sit, sed exercitatio eius talis sit qualis usus . . . sedfirmetur consuetudine.

43. Longissime fugienda mollis actio, qualem in Titio Cicero dicit fuisse, unde

etiam saltationis quoddam genus Titius sit appellatum. 11.3.128. Dancing was a

notoriously erotic, undignified, and effeminate activity.

44. firmitas corporis, ne ad spadonum et mulierum et aegrorum exilitatem uox

nostra tenuetur. 11.3.19.

45. quod ambulatio, unctio, ueneris abstinentia, facilis ciborum digestio, id est

frugalitas, praestat.

46. Compare Butler 1997a, 28-38, for a reading of the "injurious action of

names" as it relates to iteration, interpellation, and the necessary vulnerability to

being named that structures the conditions of becoming a subject at all.

47. Winterbottom 1976, 59, highlights the adversarial aspect of urbanitas.

Ramage 1961 recognizes the exclusionary tactics inhering within urbanity. Ramage

240

NOTES TO PAGES 84-95

1963 traces the historical variations in the semantic field of urbanitas from the

period of Cicero to Quintilian. Ramage 1973 is broader still. See Desmouliez

1952, 170, for the connection between urbanitas and the elitist Attic style. The

aggressive side of urbanitas is also clear from Quintilian's use at 6.3.104 of the

definition of urbanitas formulated by Domitius Martus, where urbanitas is de-

scribed as "very well suited to defense or assault" (maxime idonea ad resistendum

vel lacessendum). Quintilian's comment on Domitius' ideas notes that Domitius'

full definition of urbanitas is virtually identical to Quintilian's own concept or

oratory. See the discussion of this passage in de Saint-Denis 1939. De Saint-Denis

believes that Cicero and Quintilian use the term in the same manner.

48. Foucault said the same of the prisoner caught in the panopticon (1979,

202-3).

Chapter 3

1. See Fantham 1982 for the issues of traditional and original material in

Quintilian 11.3.

2. Kiuhnert 1994, 163-68, discusses the relationship of the vir bonus to the

perfect orator (perfectus orator).

3. See Bourdieu 1991, 127-36, for the practical politics of the "theory effect"

whereby description becomes prescription.

4. See Aristotle, Rhetoric 1408a23-35, which makes a similar argument

about how an enthusiastic speaker communicates his excitement to his listeners.

But Aristotle's version is made more as a cutting aside than as a part of an exposi-

tion of the mechanics of performance and the soul.

5. Michel 1981, 116, points out that for Cicero as well heart and tongue

should coincide. Michel situates this position within ancient philosophical disputes.

6. The English of this sentence loosely translates Quintilian 11.3.6: Demos-

thenes, quid esset in toto dicendi opere primum interrogatus, pronuntiationi palmam

dedit, eidemque secundum ac tertium locum, donec ab eo quaeri desineret, ut earn

uideri posset non praecipuam sed solam iudicasse. This same anecdote as preserved

in Cicero's De oratore is the starting point for WOhrle's discussion of actio. See

Wohrle 1990.

7. This is the Aristotelian problem of i10og. Grant 1943 summarizes Cic-

ero's thoughts on character and oratory. He adds the observation that prior knowl-

edge of the orator by his audience was important in Cicero's thinking (1943, 474).

This idea turns the whole of a man's life into a performance. Grant's documenta-

tion of Cicero's emphasis on sincerity in oratory offers a useful parallel to Quintil-

ian here and below.

8. The image is specifically musical; for example, the striking of the chords of

a lyre. The body is an instrument, the orator a virtuoso player. The good performer

necessarily "plays from the heart."

9. Kroll 1924, 93-95, examines the authority of antiquity in oratory as dis-

cussed by Quintilian and other theorists. It is worth noting, though, that the distinc-

tion between Quintilian and his foes turns on the self-consciousness of this relation-

ship to the past. Against Quintilian, though, see Ramage 1961, 486, for Cotta's

affecting rusticity as a positive virtue.

10. The transmitted text is unclear as to the possessor of this license. If

ludorum is sound, then a "licentious" festal scene is being invoked and talarium,

NOTES TO PAGES 96-110

241

"of ankles" (?!), conceals the name for a specific festival. There have been a

variety of interesting guesses: Rademacher 1971 suggested but did not print

ludorum saltatoriorum. Cousin 1979 documents other efforts. Cousin himself ac-

cepts Lydorum et Carum licentia, "the licence of the Lydians and Carians," and he

notes the association of these peoples with the exotic rites of Cybele. Win-

terbottom 1970 accepts the text as it stands.

11. See Gunderson 1997; Riggsby 1995; and Leach 1990 for more on Pliny's

letters and aristocratic ethos.

12. This debate persists up to the present: see Butler's rereading of Althusser

(1997b, 106-31).

13. Sinclair 1995b, 124, also reads this scene for its aggressive contest over

membership in the aristocratic community.

14. Why, for example, is the De corona evoked so often, with the Philippics

appearing to come in second place? What are the consequences of this selected

reading of the remnants of Demosthenes' work?

15. McCarty 1989 surveys mirrors in antiquity but omits any Lacanian observa-

tions despite some efforts at explaining the psychoanalytic implications of his mate-

rial. For mirrors and Roman women see Wyke 1994.

16. The wealth of other possibilities for a reading of a passage about truth and

vision can be appreciated by referring to the encyclopaedic Jay 1993. See Rose 1986

for Lacan, vision, and the sexual subject.

17. This is derived from Lacan 1988b, 243, and Lacan's subsequent commen-

tary on the illustration.

18. Lacan 1988b, 321, assigns the death instinct to A.

19. See Kristeva 1982. Butler 1993 and 1989 are also useful here.

20. Silverman 1992, 15-51. Silverman's rereading of the Lacanian screen as

historical, ideological, and cinematic allows for an extremely productive extension

of Lacan's thought along the lines indicated by Althusser. Butler 1997b also engages

many of these same issues.

21. See Butler 1997b, 31-62 for a reading of Hegel's "unhappy conscious-

ness," the body, and subjection.

22. Lacan 1981, 79-90. This can be fruitfully compared to Jay 1993, 275-98,

and his discussion of Sartre, the mirror, and the gaze of the other. Jay (288) cites

Frangois George's pithy summary of the Cartesian cogito a la Sartre: "l'Autre me

voit, done je suis."

23. Compare the prisoner who becomes the principle of his own subjection

within the optical apparatus of the panopticon. See Foucault 1979, 202-3.

24. An account of such transgressions and the policing of oratory against their

effects will occupy the next two chapters.

25. The Latin words surrounding these terms would be virilitas, adfectus,

auctoritas, and fides. The text of Quintilian is saturated with these words and their

cognates.

26. The following are merely examples. Provincials: latent in all uses of ur-

banitas such as at 11.3.30; barbarism: 11.3.69; animals: latrare non agere: "that's

barking, not pleading a case" (11.3.31: a citation from Cicero).

27. An image more native to the antique scene might be brigandage or piracy.

These nonsocial societies are often represented as bound together by complicity in a

horrible crime such as human sacrifice, cannibalism, et cetera. This pure fantasy of

an alien social order is perhaps more telling of the sort of symbolic violence at the

foundation of the "legitimate" order. See Habinek 1998, 69-87.

242

NOTES TO PAGES 111-21

Chapter 4

1. Acting figures heavily as a guiding metaphor for Roman politics in Dupont

1985 and Bartsch 1994. On the Roman theater in general, see D6nes 1977 and

Grimal 1973. Cousin 1973 and Dumont 1973 discuss the relationship of Quintilian

and Cicero to the theater.

2. See Edwards 1993, 98-136, and Green 1933 on the morality of acting. On

actors, orators, and gestures, see Graf 1991.

3. Wiseman 1995 engages the numerous ambiguities and difficulties of

Remus.

4. Compare Edwards 1997 for the cultural logic of "infamy" at Rome as it

related to prostitutes, actors, and gladiators. The actor's legal and social position

was among the worst at Rome.

5. Butler 1997b also engages Althusserian subjectivation as it relates to the

performative self.

6. This is a modification of Silverman 1992, 46: "Female subjectivity repre-

sents the site at which the male subject deposits his lack." Compare Rose 1982, 40-

44, on feminine sexuality as a masquerade mobilized by a fundamental reference to

a male sign.

7. Michel 1971; Butchner 1964, 212-13; and Schulte 1935 discuss the phrase

veritatis ipsius actores. Cicero's relationship to the intellectual traditions laid down

by Isocrates and Plato figures prominently in each of these accounts. On Cicero and

Isocrates, see Laughton 1961 and Smethurst 1953. See Douglas 1973, 95, for a

critique of such investigations, which he characterizes as "narrow and mechanistic."

Likewise, Hobsbawm 1983 ought to make us wary of all traditions and careful to

always search out more proximate explanations for traditional arguments here and

elsewhere. Douglas 1973, 108-15, also offers a useful critique of any simple version

of truth in Cicero and Quintilian as it relates to the arts: truth (veritas) must include

beauty (pulchritudo). Truth, the imitation of truth, and the production of truth are

never simple questions of accuracy.

8. Gotoff 1993 even embraces the metaphor as a means of reading Cicero's

speeches. See 1993, 306, for an ironic instance of Cicero claiming that an actor was

pleading (agere) on his behalf in the Pro Sestio.

9. The "easiest" words can provoke the most difficulty. Compare with the

problem of agere, "to do," the difficulties of amare, "to love" (Gunderson 1997).

10. Silverman 1992, 5. Butler also adopts the bodily ego for her project (1993,

58). Both Butler and Silverman are reflecting on the early pages of Freud's The Ego

and the Id.

11. Butler 1993, 110, speaks of the erotics of prohibition. The phrase "Criti-

cally Queer" provides the title to Butler's last chapter, a politicized finale to the

whole of Bodies That Matter.

12. Bonner 1949, 20-21, reviews the passages in which stage training is said to

aid in declamation.

13. Compare Cicero, De officiis 1.130, where dignity is to attractiveness as

male is to female within the realm of beauty. The Latin terms are dignitas, venustas,

and pulchritudo. The pleasure of effeminate beauty attaches itself to the male body

only after being first sanctioned by mastery and pain. Gonfroy 1978 explicitly links

these themes to homosexuality and social status.

14. It is very unusual to see &&O eot as delivery. But Liddell and Scott 1968,

NOTES TO PAGES 126-46

243

s.v. taeotg I.2.b, cites this passage and gives Longinus, Ars rhetorica 104 (ed.

Hammer) as a parallel. Ordinarily one would be tempted to see 6 OroLg as "dispo-

sition" and as indicative of the order of one's words. However, the point of this

passage is narrowly directed toward performance, and so too would rearranging the

word order of a piece of poetry render it unmetrical and hence less pleasing.

15. See Gotoff 1993, 312-13, for the variety of Cicero's dramatic personae;

but one must note as well the masks Cicero will not assume.

16. Politically pudor is yoked to integrity (integritas) and severity (severitas)

and opposed to brazenness (audacia). But these words have a sort of sexual ethics

to them in addition to their political aspect. On the political use of pudor and its

associated terms, see Hellegouarc'h 1963, 288.

17. Krenkel 1981 surveys Roman slurs against fellatio. Parker 1997 offers a

structuralist account of Roman sexual norms as they relate to the distinction be-

tween the active and the passive.

18. For Hortensius the outlandish, "Asiatic" speaker, see Cicero, Brutus 325

and Grube 1962, 248.

19. And see Hellegouarc'h 1963, 174-75 for studium as political attachment.

It should be recalled that the study of letters is a political study after its own fashion.

20. Translators of this passage are well aware of the prejudices against acting.

Indeed they are so conscious of them that they can force Cicero to be critical rather

than positive or, at worst, euphemistic. Hendrickson in Hendrickson and Hubbell

1962 offers, "his delivery and gesture even a little too studied for the orator."

Martha 1960 reads, "Dans sa tenue et dans son geste il y avait un art etude, trop

6tudie pour un orateur." Kytzler 1970 is far closer to the original phrasing: "in

Bewegung und Haltung zeigte er fur einen Redner iubergenug Kunst."

21. For example, recall the transgressions of Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria

11.3.57 and 90-91.

22. The Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. latus 1.C. offers a variety of references.

Catullus 6.13 is not mentioned there, but it is quite explicit: with its latera ecfututa,

that is, "fucked-out flanks."

23. Silverman 1996, 133. "Unapprehensible" is cited from Lacan.

24. Compare Habinek 1998, 69-87. Habinek explains that because "the legiti-

macy of the state and its elites was always open to contestation" (69), the fantasy of

banditry was mobilized as a means of defining a legitimate Rome in the face of a

competing antisociety of rogues.

25. The text is corrupt at this point. Becher suggested swxwoav, from toxa-

o0at, an uncommon word that means "to mimic" and hence also "to jest or ridicule."

26. Cicero says that Antonius' delivery had gestures that fitted with the words

but did not express them (Brutus 141).

27. Actually, Quintilian is almost certainly thinking of the Greek phrase

sttQov iQLtorov. Nevertheless, the idea and the epigrammatic phrasing are closely

related to "nothing in excess." Compare Alexander, De figuris 28.3 (Spengel).

Cleobulus, one of the Seven Sages, was said to have been the author of this quot-

able quote.

28. Silverman 1992, 195. Compare Rose 1986, 181. See also Silverman 1992,

192, for the close affinity of conventional subjectivity and moral masochism.

29. Compare Silverman 1992, 142-43, on Fassbinder's film Ali: Fear Eats the

Soul: "The look foregrounds the desiring subjectivity of the figure from whom

it issues, a subjectivity which pivots upon lack, whether or not that lack is

244

NOTES TO PAGES 149-57

acknowledged. In the scene involving Emmi's co-workers, the look attempts to

deny the void upon which it rests both through a sadistic identification with the

gaze, and through the projection of insufficiency onto Ali." The theoreticians of

rhetoric, as their name implies, would here be like the German coworkers who

look upon the Arab's body in fascination, and the actor corresponds to Ali.

Chapter 5

1. Compare the imagery of Quintilian 1.pr.18-20.

2. Jones 1986, 6-8, provides a brief biography of Lucian. Jones' work care-

fully documents Lucian and the world in which he lived, and it argues for an author

whose interests were as timely as they were literary. The literary aspect has tradi-

tionally dominated Lucian scholarship. Moreover, ever since Bompaire 1958 the

question of imitation or [titotg has virtually monopolized scholarly interest in

Lucian.

3. Deferrari 1969 offers an exhaustive study of the Attic morphology of verbs

in Lucian.

4. Bowersock 1969 provides the seminal study of the social and political

context of intellectuals who were part of the so-called Second Sophistic. More

recently, Anderson 1985 and 1993 offer insights into this same milieu.

5. One can compare Fitzgerald 1989, which explores pleasure and literary

expression in Horace. His invocation of Nietzsche's class-inflected readings and of

the master-slave relation in Horace's writings offers the most overlap with the

present investigation of bodies, politics, and literary pleasure.

6. g S aaxov elVaLt xa &vvocatov. That is, 6g with the infinitive ex-

presses the result in objective terms rather than as a subjective intention.

7. See Bardon 1940, 51, for a brief summary of the ambiguity surrounding

the degree of professional and practical activity indicated by the term rhetor in

various Latin authors.

8. This same image of fulfilling a request is very common: Cicero's De ora-

tore, Brutus, and the Orator use it, as do Tacitus' Dialogus and Seneca the Elder's

Controversiae. See Janson 1964 for a discussion of the trope.

9. One might object to this reading of the passage that it privileges the

association between 6vo ac and Elvat while ignoring the qualification of "seeming"

as implicit in bo aLg. But here one only needs to note that seeing is itself yoked to

the "being/becoming" of yEvoto.

10. To Ev oiv p0 a a o o LxQOv ov 6ftig ti1g oovbg 66seoevov, kkXX

Ecp' oTq) xa Tov1oaLt nTokkXXa xazt LyQUvocv t xa LTav 6OtoUv ToToetvat E (Lov.

Praeceptor 2.

11. Altius tamen ibunt qui ad summa nitentur quam qui praesumpta despera-

tione quo uelint euadendi protinus circa ima substiterint. Quintilian 1.pr.18-20.

12. Wyke 1994, 137, explains the illegitimate politics of male cosmetics. See

also Richlin 1995 on Roman cosmetics. Note especially Richlin 1995, 204-5 for

the example of an orator using cosmetics in Pliny, Epistulae 6.2. As was the case

with singing, the prohibition indicates that there were real practitioners of the

"abomination."

13. Plutarch advises us that we can learn from the abuses of our enemies if

they contain some note of truth, like the insult that reproached "Pompey for scratch-

NOTES TO PAGES 158-69

245

ing his head with one finger, though he was totally removed from effeminacy and

wantonness" (xa Io[nltov To Ev'L xvcoOat Lv x pctXiv 6axt1Xop no toQQwtL0

1kOtiTo1 xact &xokaota 6via, 89el).

14. This example of xataqcpQ6ovrlol is taken from Aristotle, Politics 1312al. For

a fuller account of Sardanapalus' womanly life, see Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae

12.37-39.

15. See Jones 1986, 106: this was the title given Herodes by his pupils.

16. As was mentioned in the introduction, Foucault 1990b and 1988a have

shaped much of the subsequent discussion. Halperin 1990 underlies most discus-

sions within classics. Within Roman studies, see the essays collected in Hallett and

Skinner 1997. Skinner's introductory essay is a valuable overview of Roman

thought.

17. Lucian is not alone: Gonfroy 1978 sees femininity, passive homosexuality,

and servility as a conceptual knot in Cicero as well.

18. See Quintilian 11.3.58-60, which argues from passages of Cicero.

19. For an account of the polite ideal, see Schottlaender 1967. Compare

Grube 1965, 177-78; 1962, 243, 246.

20. It starts in earnest with Wilamowitz-Moellendorf 1900.

21. Against Kennedy's nontheorized position, compare Gabba 1982, 52,

where he sees the Asiatic style as self-consciously populist. Laughton 1961, 32,

argues that certain habits of metaphor and clauses betokens Asianism. Hence it

would be easy to adopt a conscious course of study that emulated Demetrius of

Phalerum or Hegesias of Magnesia. For Cicero's peer Hortensius as Asiatic, see

Cicero, Brutus 325 and compare Grube 1962, 248.

22. axaLQonoto vibv xa lXXov 'ATQo urov tvbg yQatatiatoTov iXovv

&CLWv. Praeceptor 10.

23. o La t T Tg nakatLag SQ yaoLag otLv, 'HylooV xcd Towv 6a1p KoQLtov xaL

NrlotjLEv , UeopLtytEva xt LoVE1W xaL ox a xaLa x0tl0og kwtoteTaEva tai

yo~tatg. Praeceptor 9.

24. Leen 1991 argues from the art and statues at Cicero's villa that sculpted

bodies are routinely deployed as extensions of their owner's own decorum.

25. Compare Romm 1990 on Lucian's complex relationship to sculpture rela-

tive to plastic arts: this passage is thus typically ambiguous.

26. The translation is a bit forced, though: a y6aca is a character or letter

and is formed of lines. Each line is a yQ9aUl. The line and the letter are closely

related, but not properly confused where lines (yact al) represent something like

penmanship. See Plato, Protagoras 326d for this. Nevertheless, writing retains an

affinity to the visual arts in a practical and etymological sense.

27. Yet see Romm 1990, 78, and the discussion of the irreverence with which

Lucian treats Phidias' work in his Pro imaginibus.

28. See Wohl 1996 for the ambiguities of these statues of elites as symbols of

Athenian democracy.

29. This Pollux may even be the Pollux whose Onomasticon still survives. See

Jones 1976, 108. Anderson 1976, 68 n. 22 offers additional bibliography on the

topic. His own arguments can be found at 70-71.

30. Compare Richlin 1993 on outlaw sexualities at Rome and the problems

involved in reading for them.

31. Dover 1978 remains a classic study. Dover's own hesitations in the face of

various erotic possibilities fall very much in line with the account of homosexuality

246

NOTES TO PAGES 170-83

to which most ancient literature invites its readers. See Veyne 1982 and MacMullen

1982 for brief overviews of homosexuality at Rome. Many of the essays contained

in Hallett and Skinner 1997 offer more detailed analyses of these questions as they

relate to Latin letters.

32. Liddell and Scott 1968, s.v. Jti ;g VI: these are the cubits of inundation

that come with the Nile's flooding.

33. A comic sequel to the marriage to rhetoric can be found in Lucian's Bis

accusatus. Rhetoric complains that her Syrian husband has been unfaithful. The

groom's desertion is provoked by the wantonness of his wife, and he leaves her

in favor of a homosexual affair with Dialogue. See Bis accusatus 31. Branham

1989, 34-37, summarizes the moves in the case and relates them to Lucian's

biography.

34. Compare Petronius, Satyricon 2 for Egypt's role in the death of painting.

In Petronius the decline is directly compared to the death of rhetoric at the hands of

fantastic contemporary "Asiatic" tastes.

35. Wyke 1994, 141, examines feminine adornment, foreignness, and male

panic.

36. For race, see Fanon 1982 and Memmi 1965. For women, see Kristeva

1982; Irigaray 1985; and Butler 1993, 38-42, on Irigaray and Plato.

37. Tobg ae

a ovag gv Eqxogvotg, Eg oExvovg S a govov 6polong

37ST bE cLxovtcl; V QXO

SO, cLQXO

S JbE UQXOUGLV io~ovS

i LL e xa qo6oLq tcntvaL re cT xal Tt. Plato, Republic 562d.

38. Compare Wohrle 1990, 43, on Aristotle and Cleon: "Die maBlose nox6QLt-

ot; ist Begleiter und damit zugleich Signum einer schlechten politischen Verfassung."

Aristotle, Rhetoric 1403b34ff complains of rhetorical success by way of delivery

alone and blames it on the depravity (so O1Qla) of the masses. See also Fortenbaugh

1986 and Lossau 1971, 156-58, on this topic. This moral matrix of actors, audience,

and aloof aristocrats should be familiar from the preceding chapter.

39. Compare Lacan on the psychoanalytic force of "I see myself seeing my-

self" (1981, 79-90) and its role in the preceding chapter.

40. O'L piXoL bE vn aovexatf&tCv E 'tX tLoo0v cv T bELtvwv C TotLvCTW0oav,

EL JOTe atLoOotoIVT oe TxaWtEOO'14evov, XEL9a 6OQyovTEg xaL J aT XovTeg UQEL V

To XeX6tooevov v Lrotog esetcti r v ctlvev bL8tXElatOL. Praeceptor 21. The

LLO0Ov Txv be8Ltvcv presumably corresponds to the Latin sportula.

41. h Jo etL&a bE 6 tookkXXa xaL b og yLyyvov Sl (aeoxoQevog "Toy ,Eyo Ev-

otg. Praeceptor 22.

42. TotLIVa v ri ( veEa xai a oEw; Praeceptor 23.

43. One can again refer to Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousae: the depilation

of Mnesilichus that is a precursor to his playing a woman provokes a panic and

horror that is in its turn supposed to elicit a laugh from the play's audience.

44. Richlin 1984 explores the ancient anxieties relating to female genitals and

their relation to satirical literature.

45. See Branham 1989, 38 and notes, for even more parallels than those that

follow.

46. This ambiguous naming occurs only at the end of the figure's own narra-

tive. See Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.26.

47. olx

la7r low be oE J OOOtL[otg S bovig, aka' fJIeQ o LOEoi bL~0Eoav t

Ovrct bLlyiloosat tX' rkie Lag. Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.27.

48. Compare Branham 1989, 28, for a more directly autobiographical reading

of this scene.

NOTES TO PAGES 183-91

247

49. "AQTLn v JEeraJpvy EL Et &tLaoaXaXLa (pOLTWv i&by t11v iXlkXcLav aO-

or3o; 5v. Lucian, Somnium 1.

50. Romm 1990, 95-98, examines Lucian's use of wax as a more potent

image than stone for his own artistry. Youthful play and plasticity figure more

prominently than rigid classicism. This is a much more optimistic reading of

Lucian than the one that follows. But whatever freedom we allow Lucian as

author, the sexual and social milieu within which he finds this liberty remains

uniformly harsh. His liberty is born of a sort of servitude whose traces are more

than still legible: they are reinscribed time and again in his work.

51. re vi 'tri0cv xatEBQ00ov tL ~va×XQUgx a Ti VOXU6Taiv vvo0v.

Somnium 4.

52.

a a 6 8 daka EQoowuog xa to ox ta E3TQeQ1s xa xoo toS triv

AvapoXiv. Somnium 6. Compare the description of Rhetoric in the Praeceptor,

where "fair of face" (i'mQo(onog) is also used.

53. xatc veCv Xv g CELg to EQyov, XaaLttTei1 xaL Xa aL t1og xa ntavta

to5ov taueTLVOg, avaxt0v 6bE o6E3tote otb Av6Qw&eg o6bi XieOegov oi6v

E3TLVOCOV.

Chapter 6

1. Compare Frank 1930, 30-31. Also see Frank 1930, 160: "[R]ules were for

dull minds that required the aid of rules."

2. Winterbottom 1964 argues for a reaction by Quintilian against contempo-

rary explicit instruction. And here explicitness recalls the ethical problems of actors

from earlier chapters. Of course, relative to Cicero, Quintilian seems most explicit.

3. Hall 1996. Hall owes a large debt to the work of Leeman, and more

broadly to Ramage 1973.

4. More generally, see Habinek 1998, 34-68, on the invention of Latin

literature.

5. Compare Gunderson 1997 on Catullus and Pliny as writers on literary

love.

6. Cicero, Ad familiares 1.9.23 (September 54) describes both Cicero's re-

treat and his composition of the De oratore.

7. The problem of allegory and the conflation of Cicero with Crassus will be

discussed below. Here let it be said that accepting the invitation to identify the two

figures has important political consequences for reading Latin literature in general,

not just reading the De oratore.

8. An interesting discussion that offers some parallels to this can be found in

Leach 1993. Leach's use of Derrida and Lacan to examine the problem of absence

and desire in Cicero's De amicitia is not unlike the problem of political loss and

bodily inscription in the De oratore.

9. Commentaries: Leeman 1981; Wilkins 1892; Piderit 1886-90; and Sorof

1875. Translations and editions: Courbaud 1967 and Rackham 1942. See also Ken-

nedy 1972, 80-90, on Antonius and Crassus in the history of Roman oratory.

10. Jones 1939, 317-29, assays the accuracy of characterization in the De ora-

tore. But Jones verifies this dialogue by repeated appeals to Cicero's Brutus: one text

vouches for another. Grimal 1995, 198, offers a view that is somewhat more subtle

than ones that require more accuracy of characterization. Grimal sees Cicero as

248

NOTES TO PAGES 192-208

offering a m61ange of traditional Roman biographical fidelity and broader Platonic

philosophical inquiry. This view still limits the question of character to one of genre.

11. Compare the Greek xaXoxya0La.

12. Gramm. 7.520.4. Compare Isidore, diff 1.163. Also see Gramm. 7.530.27

for the idea that decor itself is abstract relative to bodily beauty: decor is a quality of

one's bearing, beauty is a quality of individual parts (decor in habitu est, species in

membris).

13. Kroll 1903, 568-70, examines ornamentation in the De oratore and its

relationship to the rest of the rhetorical tradition.

14. Oliensis 1991, 107. She then goes on to explore Horace's attacks on fe-

male sexuality as a means to shore up his own virile decorum. As we have seen, the

orators employ the same tactics relative to women, foreigners, and slaves.

15. Santoro L'Hoir 1992 offers a thorough study of vir and homo. Despite the

usefulness of her discussion, she seems to overstate matters: from what follows it

will be clear that I cannot agree that homo is primarily a negative term while vir is

positive. Instead I only agree that vir is highly positive and that homo is therefore

available for numerous other uses including uses that are frequently negative, pas-

sive, or apolitical. Crassus cannot be implying that Antonius is passive, private, or

lowly by using homo of him: the passage actually has the inverse meaning.

16. si vis homo esse, recipe te ad nos. Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum 4.15.2.

17. See Gonfroy 1978 for slavery and homosexuality.

18. heri enim inquit hoc mihi proposueram, ut, si te refellissem, hos a te

discipulos abducerem. De oratore 2.40.

19. Hellegouarc'h 1963, 142-51, covers the purely political use of amare and

related words in Cicero's time.

20. quid censes, Cotta, nisi studium et ardorem quendam amoris? sine quo cum

in vita nihil quisquam egregium, tum certe hoc, quid tu expetis, nemo umquam

adsequetur. De oratore 1.134.

21. The learned speaker or doctus orator figures prominently in Kroll 1903

and Orban 1950.

22. De oratore 3.108-43 is largely dedicated to shoring up the rift between

philosophy and rhetoric, restoring them to a prior unity attributed to them. See

Barwick 1963, 69-71. The doctus orator is discussed there as well.

23. See Habinek 1998, 60-61, on the social politics of the expulsion.

24. ita sit nobis igitur ornatus et suavis orator-nec tamen potest aliter esse-ut

suavitatem habeat austeram et solidam, non dulcem atque decoctam. De oratore

3.103. Once again Courbaud's translation captures the spirit of the passage right

down to its sexuality: "Que l'orateur ait donc du brilliant et du charme (sans ces

qualit6s, il ne serait pas orateur), mais un charme viril et r6el, qui ne soit ni

douceatre ni fade."

25. See also Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.41 for an attack on Epicurean

suavitas.

26. Fowler 1909, 177-78, imagines pudor as prominent in the old, hardly

prerhetorical education of Roman elites.

27. See pertimesceret in De oratore 1.123.

28. The equation of shame and fear is also evident from agitation (com-

movetur) as contrasted with shamelessness (impudentes).

29. See Freud 1963 [1911], 162-64. Compare the "allegorical" reading of

Freud in Butler 1997a, 108-10.

NOTES TO PAGES 208-21

249

30. fuit enim mirificus quidam in Crasso pudor, qui tamen non modo non

obesset eius orationi, sed etiam probitatis commendatione prodesset. De oratore

1.122.

31. cum in omnibus causis gravioribus. . . initio commoveri soleam. Fear in

the opening of this speech is analyzed in Botterman-Gottingen 1992, 326-27.

32. Craig 1993, which follows up on methods expounded in Classen 1981, is a

useful exercise that reads the speeches through the technical literature. Gotoff 1993

shows what is missing from such accounts.

33. De oratore 1.149ff. To this passage one should compare 2.96. In that place

Antonius expresses a shorter but very similar philosophy of writing.

34. For speech and writing as mutual supports in ancient rhetoric, see Bahmer

1991, 77-97.

35. De oratore 3.15. Compare 1.16, which concerns oratory as a whole: "As-

suredly this is something greater than men believe it to be" (sed nimirum maius est

hoc quiddam quam homines opinantur). The description of the art and the artist

again echo one another. This passage, though, is done in the author's own voice and

is not delivered by any of the participants in the dialogue.

36. Michel 1981, 120, traces the movement in Cicero from to JQEeov/decet to

TO xacX6v/decor, or from the appropriate to abstract beauty. The Latin language

invites the slippage between registers.

37. Ergo hoc sit primum in praeceptis meis, ut demonstremus, quem imitetur;

tum accedat exercitatio . .. De oratore 2.90.

38. ex quorum scriptis. De oratore 2.92.

39. Atque esse tamen multos videmus, qui neminen imitentur et suapte natura,

quod velint, sine cuiusquam similitudine consequantur. De oratore 2.98.

40. Compare the advocacy of imitation in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On the

Ancient Orators 4.2. Hidber 1996, 56-74, offers a commentary on the passage and a

summary of the problem of imitation in antiquity as well as a discussion of the

modern bibliography on the topic. Bonner 1969, 39-58, offers a speculative recon-

struction of Dionysius' fragmentary On Imitation and its relationship to other works

by Dionysius.

41. Effudi vobis omnia quae sentiebam, quae fortasse, quemcumque patrem-

familias adripuissetis ex aliquo circulo, eadem vobis percontantibus respondisset.

Cicero, De oratore 1.159.

42. Compare Quintilian 11.3.137ff. with Cicero, De oratore 2.91. MacKen-

drick 1948, 344-45, highlights the elitism of the relationship of the De oratore to

explicit instructions.

43. This term is used in a complaint of Crassus' from 1.263. See also the

discussion above of the different Antonii on different days.

44. The problem of oratory's status as an art is actually one of the main

themes of the dialogue. See, for example, 1.107-10, 1.135, 1.205-8, 2.29-30, and

2.201. This theme is the natural counterpart of the denigration of precepts.

45. cum dico me, te, Brute, dico; nam in me quidem iam pridem effectum est

quod futurum fuit; tu autem . . . Cicero, Orator 110.

46. Compare the "allegorical" readings of the various essays of Lucian from

the preceding chapter.

47. This treatise was written around 87 B.C.E. and is disparaged in De oratore

1.5. See also Grube 1962, 237-38.

48. Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. patere. Entries 3, 5, and 6 allow for such a

250

NOTES TO PAGES 221-28

reading, and the other passages from Cicero suggest that we should insert this

theme here as well.

49. Hoc quod audire vulgo soles, quod apud Graecos in proverbium cessit:

talis hominibus fuit oratio qualis vita. Seneca, Epistulae morales 114.2.

Conclusion

1. For actio as only a part of his interests, see Gotoff 1993, 289 n. 1.

2. Gotoff 1993, 297. Compare the arguments of Gotoff 1993, 290-91.

3. Derrida 1979, 35. Nietzsche's phrase was "der anstoBigste Philologe des

Trages."

4. Nietzsche 1989, 164-66. The text is in German with an English translation

on the facing page: hence this reference is to "less than one page."

5. Wilamowitz in his attack on The Birth of Tragedy, though, questioned

whether Nietzsche ought to be employed at all. The text for him displays nothing

but the grossest ignorance. Wilamowitz complains that Nietzsche has eschewed the

tone of the "wissenschaftlicher Forscher" in favor of a hollow rhetoric cloaking

abject ignorance (Wilamowitz-Moellendorf 1969, 29). For a summary of the argu-

ment and a call for more who would follow in the footsteps of Wilamowitz see

Groth 1950.

6. Nehamas 1985, 13-41 argues for a hyperbole as the essence of Nietzsche's

style.

7. See Nietzsche 1956, 3-15. These paragraphs are from part 4 of his Zara-

thustra and have been reprinted as material introductory to The Birth of Tragedy.

8. Goldhill 1995 calls for such a project and indicates the extent to which

classical scholars are beginning to investigate metarhetorical issues. He laments,

though, that works like Kennedy 1994 and Gleason 1995 remain incomplete in this

regard. Wardy 1996 engages metarhetoric, but it avoids rhetorical handbooks and

remains deeply skeptical of the feminist critique of philosophical reason. Goldhill

lists both Jarratt 1991 and Poulakos 1994 among his examples of progressive reread-

ings of rhetoric.

9. Nietzsche himself warns that the genealogist must be suspicious of himself

as well (1956, 276).

10. See, for example, Hallett 1992 for a meditation of problems of method.

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General Index

Abjection, 80, 97, 106, 112, 114, 135,

142, 160, 213,220-21

Accius, 132

Achard, G., 30n. 5

Aeschines, 164

Aesopus, 141,142, 146

Agathon, 154-55,157, 158

Ajax, 64n. 15

Alcibiades, 203

Althusser, L., 25n, 62, 65-66, 97n,

106n. 20, 113n

Anderson, G., 150n. 4, 163,167n

Antisthenes, 203

Antonius, 53, 55, 136, 139, 142-45,

191,191n.9,195-96,196n.15,197-

99,201,203,206,214-15,218n.43,

220

Aphrodite. See Venus

Aristogiton, 166-67, 175

Aristophanes, 149, 158

Aristotle, 12, 31, 38, 85,118, 158,

175n. 38, 204, 227

Asia and Asianism, 65n. 19, 129n. 18,

155,160, 163,164, 164n. 21,166,

173,173n. 34, 185,229

Atreus, 142

Atticus, 197, 199

Augustine, 31n. 8

Ausonius, 46

Austin, J., 221

Austin, R., 126

Authenticity, 15, 25, 76, 87, 92, 94, 96,

188,210, 213

Authority, 7-8, 13, 41, 54, 57, 66-67,

74, 83, 96, 108, 112, 130, 139, 148,

152, 189, 208, 211, 223; of the Law,

26; paternal, 164, 171; virile, 14, 22,

95,127, 131,228

Bahmer, L., 211n

Bardon, H., 41, 59n. 4, 151n. 7

Bartsch, S., 111n. 1

Barwick, K., 204n. 22

Bloom, H., 229

Boltanski, L., 59n. 2, 60n. 5, 67

Bompaire, J., 149n. 2, 215

Bonner, S., 55n, 118n, 215n. 40

Bottermann-Gottingen, H., 209n. 31

Bourdieu, P., 9-10, 10nn. 18, 19, 11,

11n. 20, 12, 27n, 32, 37, 57n, 59n. 2,

67-69, 72-73, 73n, 78, 80, 88n. 3,

97,106, 113, 174, 189, 218

Bowersock, G., 150n. 4

Branham, B., 150, 172n, 180n. 45,

183n. 48

Bremmer, J., 59n. 2

Brinton, A., 7n. 10

Brown, N., 16n

Brown, P., 9

Brutus, 6, 55,213, 219

Bichner, K., 8n. 6, 115n. 7

Butler, J., ix, 3, 3n. 5, 4, 8n, 17, 17nn.

32, 33, 24n. 48, 25, 25n, 26, 26n, 27,

49, 59n. 2, 61, 61n. 9, 66, 69, 83n,

86, 97n, 106nn. 19, 20, 107, 107n,

109,112-13,113n,114-15,116n.10,

117,117n,135,139-40,147,173,

173n. 36, 185,205,208n. 29

Carneades, 204

Castor, 166-67

262

GENERAL INDEX

Castration, 82-83, 106, 115-16, 134-

35, 138-40, 147, 171,185

Cato, 7, 7n. 9, 8, 60, 195

Catullus, 16n, 188, 188n. 5

Catulus, 191,195, 198

Celentano, M., 29n. 2

Charles, C., 3n. 3

Cicero, Q., 6

Cinuras, 154-55, 157-58

Citationality, 26, 49, 51,113, 115

Clark, D., 118

Clarke, M., 32

Classen, C., 209n. 32

Cleobulus, 137n. 27

Cleon, 49, 175n. 38

Clodia, 126

Clodius, Appius, 126

Corax, 12

Cotta, 95n. 9, 191,195, 198-99, 202

Courbaud, E., 188-89, 191n. 9,205n.

24

Cousin, J., 37n. 14, 41n. 25, 95n. 10,

111n. 1

Craig, C., 209n. 32

Crassus, 53, 55, 118-20, 132-33, 142-

43, 190-91,191n. 9, 193, 196, 196n.

15,197-98, 201-9, 211,213,216-18,

218n. 43

Crawford, J., 2n

Critias, 165-66

Cura. See Discipline

de Beauvoir, S., 96

Decere, 72, 136, 207

Decor, 103, 189, 192, 194, 201,207,

213, 215

Decus, 192, 192n. 12, 193-94, 207,

212-13,215

Deferrari, R., 150n. 3

Demetrius of Phaleron, 101,123, 164n.

21

Democritus, 144

Demosthenes, 5, 20, 30, 33, 48-49, 85,

89, 92, 100-101,105-6, 118, 120-24,

127-29, 141-42, 154, 157, 163-64,

167, 178-79, 182, 201,204, 224, 226

D6nes, T., llln. 1

Derrida, J., viii, 3n. 3, 13-15, 20-21,

26, 38-39, 45, 51, 54, 64, 64nn. 14,

15, 191n. 8, 226, 226n. 3

de Saint-Denis, E., 84n. 47

Desmouliez, A., 84n. 47, 165-66

Dionysus, 128-30

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 65n. 19,

215n. 40, 226

Discipline, 5, 60, 64, 67-68, 71, 77-78,

82, 87-111,120, 122, 140, 167, 184,

211

Douglas, A., 115n. 7

Dover, K., 169n. 31

Dumont, J., 111n. 1

Dupont, E, 111n. 1

Edwards, C.,111 nn. 2, 4, 124

Effeminacy, 20, 23, 62, 75, 81-83, 106,

109, 120, 126, 128, 130-31, 133, 139,

143, 154-55,157, 160-61,165, 172,

174-75,179, 185,203,229

Electra, 140-41

Ennius, 132

Epicharmus, 180

GENERAL INDEX

263

Gaze, 24-25; and psychoanalysis, 20,

21n, 107-9, 134. See also Theory

Gellius, Aulus, 127-29, 140-41,

178-79

Gender, vii, 7, 13, 85-86, 95,104, 106,

112, 153, 158, 208. See also Vir bo-

nus

Giomini, R., 29n. 2

Gleason, M., 8-10, 10n. 18, 12, 59n. 3,

81n. 41,105,227n. 8

Golden, M., 7n. 12

Goldhill, S., 41n. 23,227n. 8

Gonfroy, E, 120n., 161n. 17, 197n

Gorgias, 14n

Gotoff, H., 11n. 21, 41n. 23, 116n. 8,

126n, 209n. 32,223-26, 224nn. 1, 2,

229

Graf, .E, 37n. 16, 59n. 2, 80n, llln. 2

Grant, W., 93n. 7

Green, W., 111n. 2

Griffith, M., ix

Grimal, P., llln. 1,191n. 10

Grube, G., 55n, 129n. 18, 162n. 19,

164n. 21,220n

Guillemin, A., 41n. 25

Gwynn, A., 7n. 10

Habinek, T., ix, 2n, 30n. 4, 38, 56, 72,

110n, 135n, 188n. 4, 190, 204n. 23,

222

Habitus, 10-11, 14, 32, 41, 47, 69, 79,

96-97, 106, 113,123,218-19

Hall, J., 187n. 3

Hallet, J., 161n. 16, 169n. 31,229n

Halm, C., 29n. 2

Halperin, D., 23n. 44, 161n. 16

Harmodius, 166-67

Harnecker, O., 209

Hegel, G., 61n. 9, 107n

Hegesias, 164n. 21, 165, 167

Heldmann, K., 33, 164

Helen, 171

Hellegouarc'h, J., 7n. 14, 127n, 130n,

202n. 19

Hendrickson, C., 132n

Heracles, 180-82

Herzfeld, M., 9

Hesiod, 107, 168-69

Hidber, T., 215n. 40

Hobsbawm, E., l15n. 7

Homer, 53, 72-73

Homosexuality, 13, 16-17, 17nn. 32,

33, 19, 117, 169, 179, 185,192, 203,

205,208

Homosociality, 13, 17, 117, 140, 173,

187, 192, 196-97,204, 206,219

Horace, viii, 31n. 8, 193, 193n. 14

Hortensius, 128, 129, 129n. 18, 130,

140, 164n. 21

Irigaray, L., 3n. 4, 173n. 36

Isocrates, 63n. 11, 115n. 7

Iteration, 69,213

Jackson, M., 59n. 2

Janan, M., 16n

Jarratt, S., 14n, 227n. 8

Jay, M., 104n. 16, 108n

Jones, C., 149n. 2, 159n, 167n, 191n.

10

Kennedy, G., 7n. 10, 12n. 25, 55n, 72,

164, 164n. 21,191n. 9,227n. 8

264

GENERAL INDEX

Lucian, 209, 217,219n. 46,227

Lyotard, J.-F., 229

MacKendrick, P., 52n, 57n, 187,215n.

42

MacMullen, R., 169n. 31

Maier-Eichhorn, U., 1n, 74n. 30, 75n.

32

Martha, J., 132n

Martin, J., 31

Martindale, C., 40, 40n

Marx, F., 31n. 7, 52n

Masochism, 89, 117, 222

Mauss, M., 10n. 18, 59n. 2

McCarty, W., 103n

McMahon, J., 16n

Melancholy, 3, 19-20, 185

Memmi, A., 173n. 36

Messala, 59-60

Michel, A., 7n. 10, 91n, 115n. 7,213n

Miller, P., 23n. 44

Milo, 157

Mirror, 5,103,201; mirror of theory,

147; mirror stage, 20n, 103-4

Mnesilochus, 158, 179n

Morality, 5, 7, 64, 86-87, 93

Mourning, 3

Muses, 108, 128-29

Mynors, R., 225

Napoleon, 219

Narcissism, 17, 181,219,221

Narducci, E., 2n

Nature, vii

Needham, R., 78n

Negative Oedipus Complex, 140, 147

Nehamas, A., 227, 227n. 6

Nesiotes, 165-66

Nietzsche, E, 38, 150n. 5,226, 226nn.

3, 4, 227,227nn. 5-7,228n

Nigidius, 31

"Nothing in excess," 137

Odysseus. See Ulysses

Oliensis, E., 193,193n. 14

Ontology. See Presence

Orban, M., 188, 204n. 21

Orestes, 140-41

Ovid, 198

Pacuvius, 144-46

Paranoia, 17n. 33, 89, 208

Parker H., 17, 129n. 17, 155

Performativity, 13, 26, 49, 86, 112, 199

Pericles, 204

Phidias, 166

Piderit, W., 191n. 9

Plato, 3, 3nn. 3, 4, 7n. 10, 38, 144, 154,

163-64,173n.36,174-75,203,212

Platter, C., 23n. 44

Plautus, 188, 195-96, 198

Pleasure, 6, 13, 19, 23, 64, 82, 112,

120, 124, 133, 147, 149-86, 187-88,

191-92, 200-201,208

Pliny, 96n, 155n, 188n

Plutarch, 101,120-23,141-42

Pollux, 166-67, 167n, 173-74, 176,

180-82, 185-86, 195,204-5,208-9

Polus, 140-41,146

Pompey, 157, 157n. 13, 191

Potheinus, 166-67. See also Pollux

Poulakos, T., 14n, 227n. 8

Presence, 3, 6, 12, 15-16, 26-27,

GENERAL INDEX

265

Santoro L'Hoir, F., 7n. 13, 196n. 15

Sardanapalus, 154-55,157-58

Sartre, J.-P., 108n. 22

Satyrus, 121, 142

Saussure,E, 152

Scaevola, 55

Schmitt, J.-C., 59n. 2

Schottlaender, R., 162n. 19

Schulte, H., 115n. 7

Scylla, viii

Sedgwick, E., 173

Seneca, 51

Seneca the Elder, 98

Shackleton-Bailey, D., 197

Silverman, K., 20n, 106, 106n. 20, 112,

115n. 6, 116, 116n. 10, 134, 134n,

140, 140n, 146n, 171,215

Sinclair, P., 2n, 7n. 15, 51, 51n. 37,

52n, 98n

Skinner, M., 23n. 44, 161n. 16, 169n.

31

Smethurst, S., 115n. 7

Socrates, 180, 182, 203,212

Solmsen, F., 12n. 24, 31

Sophocles, 121,140-41

Sorof, G., 191n. 9, 209

Stasimon, 195

Straightness, 72n. 26, 79, 156

Subjectivation, 107, 110, 114

Suetonius, 31

Sulpicius, 195-98, 216-18

Supplementarity, 11, 15-16, 45-46, 49,

57, 63-64, 66-67, 69, 78-79, 94-96,

115, 186, 213,219

Svenbro, J., 38n. 19, 56

Telamon, 144, 146

Terence, 138

Textuality, 4-6, 10-13, 16, 29-58, 63,

188-89, 223

Thalmann, G., 73n

Theophrastus, 31

Theory: gaze of, 5, 15, 69, 109; op-

posed to practice, 10; as a practice,

86; and self- subjection, 59, 69; and

the symbolic, 21; theory-effect, 88n.

3, 102; theory-theater, 122, 135, 186

Thersites, 72

Thyestes, 142

Tisias, 12

Titius, 81

Toga, 71, 77, 162, 215,216

Too, Y., 7n. 11

Torquatus, 128-30

Tuite, K., 59n. 2

Ulysses, 53, 64n. 15, 72-73

Ungern-Sternberg, J., 52n

Venus, 128-30, 132, 154-55

Vergil, 35-37, 39-41, 44, 48

Verres, 126

Veyne, PR, 169n. 31

Victor, 29n. 2, 32, 50-51

Vir bonus, 6-9, 15-19, 21, 27-28, 37-

38, 40, 45, 50, 54-55, 59-61, 65-67,

69, 71, 73, 75-76, 78, 80-83, 85, 87,

89, 109, 114-15,126, 133-34, 176,

187, 189-90, 193,195, 197,201,206,

210, 212-15,218, 220-21,224-25,

228

Wacquant, L., 11n. 22



Index Locorum

Alexander

Defiguris 28.3: 137n. 27

Aristophanes

Clouds: 149

Thesmophoriazousai: 179n

130-45:158

Aristotle

Politics 1312a1: 158n

Rhetoric: 12, 227

1403b20: 12n. 24, 31

1403b34: 175n. 38

1407b11: 38n. 18

1408a23-25: 90n

1413b4:38

1413b9: 12n. 24

Athenaeus

Depnosophistae 12.37-39: 158n

Ausonius

In Miloniam 36: 46n. 31

Catullus

Carmen 6.13: 133n. 22

Cicero

Academica 2.64:209

Ad Atticum 4.13.2:190

4.15.1: 197

4.15.2: 196n. 16

Adfamiliares 1.9.23: 190n

Brutus: 6, 55-56, 136-37,151n. 8

46:12n.25

59:213

141: 75n. 34, 137n. 26

163:55

171:72n.25

210:47

302:130

302-3:131

313: 44n. 29

325: 129n. 18, 164n. 21

De amicitia: 191n. 8

De inventione: 55, 189, 220

1.9: 29n. 2

2.6: 12n. 25

De officiis 1.130: 120n

De oratore 1.5: 6n. 6, 55n, 220n

1.6: 212n

1.23:191,220

1.78: 33n

1.91: 12n. 25

1.92::54

1.94: 33n

1.107-10: 218n. 44

1.118:200-201,206

1.119-20: 206

1.120-21:207

1.121:206

1.122: 208n. 30

1.123: 206n

1.126: 218n. 43

1.129:118

1.129-30:119

1.134: 202n. 20

1.135: 218n. 44

1.149: 210n

1.150:210

1.151:211

1.159:215

1.199:193

1.202: 193, 221

1.204:214

268 INDEX LOCORUM

Cicero (continued)

De oratore (continued)

2.17: 199

2.17-18:221

2.28::199

2.29:195

2.29-30: 218n. 44

2.30:54

2.33: 198, 199, 200

2.33-34:194

2.40: 196, 198n

2.69:220

2.84: 220

2.90-92:214

2.91: 215n. 42

2.96: 215

2.98: 215

2.150:214

2.180: 220

2.189: 143

2.193-94:143-44

2.201: 218n. 44

2.232:218

2.247:221

3.3: 190

3.14: 212

3.15:212

3.34-36: 215

3.38: 220

3.47: 217

3.48: 217

3.52:217

3.53:221

3.54:217,220

3.62:203

3.71:203-5,218

3.79-80:204

3.85: 120

3.91-95: 218

3.92: 204, 218

3.94:204

3.98: 220

3.103: 205n. 24

3.108-43: 204n. 22

3.213: 30

3.214:111

3.220:132

3.222: 67n

De re publica 3.40: 192

6.25:192

Divinatio in Caecilium 41: 209

In Verrem 1.30.76: 42n

2.34.85: 203

5.33.86:125

5.62.162:125

Orator: 6, 136-37, 151n. 8,218-19

7: 6n. 7

55: 67n

57: 76n. 35

110:219n.45

Philippicae: 2

2.14.35: 60n. 7

Pro Archia: 2n

1.1: 48n

8.19:48

Pro Caelio 33-34: 126

Pro Cluentio 5.11: 42n

5.14: 42n

20.57: 209

INDEX LOCORUM 269

Hesiod

Theogony 81-94:107

Works and Days 22:168

24:168

34:168

109-19:168

Hippocrates

Epidemics 2.6.15: 79

Homer

Iliad 174

2.212-69:72

3.217: 53

Isocrates

Against the Sophists: 63n. 11

Antidosis: 63n. 11

Longinus

Ars Rhetorica 104: 121n

Lucian

Bis accusatus 31: 172n

De saltatione 63: 64n. 15

64: 64n. 15

83: 64n. 15

Praeceptor rhetorum 1:151

2-3: 152-53

4:168

6: 170

8:168

9:163,165n.23

10:164n,168

12-13:159

14:161

15: 161

16:162

17:175

18:173

19: 174

20:174, 176

21: 176

22: 176, 177

23:178

24:167

Pro imagnibus: 166n. 27

Somnium 1:183

4:184

5:184

6:184

12: 184

13:184

Petronius

Satyricon 2: 173n. 34

Plato

Phaedrus, 276a8:3

Protagoras 326d: 166n. 26

Republic 562d: 175

Symposium: 203

Plautus

Captivi 583: 7n. 16

Trinummus 705-7: 195-96

Pliny

Epistulae 6.2: 155n

Plutarch

On Deriving Profit from One's Ene-

mies 89e1: 157

Life of Cicero 5.4-5:141-42

Life of Demosthenes 7.1-6: 120-21,

142

9.4: 101

11.2-4: 123

11.3: 101

270 INDEX LOCORUM

Quintilian (continued)

Institutio oratoria (continued)

10.3.30:101

10.5.2:210

11.3.1: 67n

11.3.2:90-91

11.3.5: 92, 139

11.3.6: 30, 92n

11.3.10-11:94

11.3.11: 63n. 12, 69

11.3.14: 90

11.3.19: 82n. 44

11.3.23:81

11.3.24: 81

11.3.30: 109n. 26

11.3.30-32:82

11.3.31: 109n. 26

11.3.35-36:36

11.3.47-51:44

11.3.51: 46n. 30

11.3.54:101

11.3.57: 125,133n. 21

11.3.58: 95

11.3.58-60: 162n. 18

11.3.61:63

11.3.61-62: 93

11.3.62: 91

11.3.64: 81

11.3.65-67: 64, 75

11.3.65: 64n. 16

11.3.67: 66, 64n. 17, 75

11.3.68: 76n. 36, 103

11.3.69: 72n. 26, 80, 109n. 26

11.3.70: 37, 77n. 38

11.3.72: 74, 76

11.3.72-84:76

11.3.76:76

11.3.78: 76

11.3.80:76

11.3.82: 74, 77, 156

11.3.83: 80

11.3.84:48

11.3.85: 74nn. 28, 29

11.3.87: 50n. 34

11.3.90-91: 126, 133n. 21

11.3.92:74

11.3.96-97:48

11.3.100:74

11.3.103:75

11.3.104: 74

11.3.106: 75n. 33

11.3.107: 75n. 34

11.3.108:48

11.3.112:80

11.3.114: 79

11.3.115:48

11.3.117: 83

11.3.120:100

11.3.122:77

11.3.123: 49n

11.3.125: 79

11.3.126: 84, 99

11.3.128: 79, 81n. 43

11.3.129: 100

11.3.130-33:80

11.3.133:84

11.3.137: 71,215n. 42

11.3.138-39: 72n. 26

11.3.143: 31n. 9

INDEX LOCORUM 271

Ternece

Eunuch: 140

44-45: 138

Vergil

Aeneid: 35, 44

1.1-2: 36

1.78: 39n. 21

1.335: 37n. 15

1.617: 39n. 21

3.620: 37n. 15

11.383: 39n. 21

Eclogues 3.25: 39n. 21

C. Iulius Victor

Ars Rehtorica 1.16: 29n. 2

82.5-9: 32n. 10

Xenophon

Memorabilia 2.1.20: 180

2.1.22: 181

2.1.26: 181n

2.1.27: 182n

2.1.28: 182

2.1.30: 182