Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World

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, Physiognomies, 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 I Ages of the World by Slavoj Zizek / 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 Bozovic 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

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

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 2003 2002 2001

2000

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. 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 / Erik Gunderson. p. cm. — (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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DM HHK EG

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 masculine 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 argumentation is a sham. Scholarship has already provided levelheaded and accurate descriptions of what the ancients said about oratory. Indeed, antiquity itself is filled with just such accounts of its own rhetorical practice. This is a necessary 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

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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 forgotten 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 antiquarianism 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 argument do we heed? How are the two related? Two sorts of readers may be expected to take interest in such questions, 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 question 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-

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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 particular 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 suspect 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 project 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

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 rhetoric 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 WHAT DID ANCIENT ORATORY LOOK LIKE?

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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 complemented 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 looking 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 example 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 speculative, 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 scholars 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 instead forces the issue of the relationship between texts and bodies in motion 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

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fact, loss of the body in the text is mourned as early as Plato, Phaedrus 276a8, where the living voice (Xoyog E\I\\>V%O<;) 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 forthwith that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to this object" (1963a, 165-66). Since the libido never willingly abandons its objects, 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 objectivity: 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 melancholic. That is, if melancholy is the unconscious loss of a love object experienced 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 selfpresence 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 represent 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 melancholic trope whereby identity is assumed at all (Butler 1997b, 167-68): rhetorical theory thus "performs" its own impossibility relative to compassing 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

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to himself. Indeed if the melancholic process is an ambivalent movement that sustains the topographical distinction between ego and superego (Butler 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 Cicero'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 meanings 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

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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 compromised 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 becomes a theorist of himself and his own spectator. In this guise, his inspiration 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 wanton 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 revivifying an ancient morality within whose terms the performance would be intelligible. Such moral issues are interesting in themselves: why should performances 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" performance 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 opposes 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 performance 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 position to its subjects. And here the theory even embraces the ironies of the

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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 theorist 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 ilium 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 l.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

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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, Marcefili, vir bonus dicendiperitus).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 distinction is perhaps tendentious to the extent that words can never be segregated 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 practices of the Roman world, the surface of the male body is thus fully implicated 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

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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 recognized 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 handbooks to the elite male self. Maud Gleason has elegantly summarized this situation: "In a value system that prized rhetorical skill as the quintessential human excellence, and in a society so structured that this perfection could be achieved only by adult males, arbiters of rhetoric were also arbiters of masculine deportment" (1995, 104). The man who speaks and performs 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 teaching 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 maintaining the authority that accompanies hegemonic performances. The handbook forms the point of explicit and expressed knowledge from which one comes to see and to know both good men and their authoritative performances. 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 (l.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, maintenance, 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 performance, 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 rhetoric 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 grounding 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 dividing 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 relatively 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 interested 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 problems 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 observer status" of an anthropologist (Gleason 1995, xi). While Gleason does

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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 manliness. The young men who consciously studied his rhetorical exempla unconsciously imitated the gestalt of his self-presentation. The result was, for many generations, the smooth-flowing cultural reproduction of the patterns 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 enchanting 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-

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ist accounts of ancient rhetorical theory are all too easily produced: for example, faith in the veracity of Quintilian will yield a compelling "construct 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 unimpeachably 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). Conversely 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, 4 9 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 exclusively 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 objectivism and subjectivism by way of a sort of dialectical overcoming.22 Bourdieu's method, though, requires a reinvestment in the immanence of practice 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 performance 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 ancient rhetorical theory that suggests that practice may not be autonomous, that it ought to have supplementation, and that it is even incomplete without a theoretical component. Thus the "subjective" aspect of ancient performance 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

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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 theoretical 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 rhetorical 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 objectivist 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 deployment 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 (xexvai). 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

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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 pleasure?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 questions and problems are less crises that arrive to trouble rhetorical masculinity 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, attention 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 performance, 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 selfrelation 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 experienced, 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

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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 questions 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 Bourdieu becomes useful to us precisely where he discusses the production of knowledge, the theory effect, and problems of objectivity in the social sciences 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 questions 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

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15

speech and writing that haunt rhetorical theory.28 Derrida champions writing 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 differance for Derrida (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 impossible 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 social 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

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its supplement or aid, but hates the text as its own effacement. Performance likewise requires of the student that he be the supplement or effacement 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 supplement or as the assistant for his own self-mastery and self-presence. Yet this student also requires performance as supplement or effacement of his nonpresence 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 successful 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 therapy 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, heterosexuality, 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 observation (Freud 1976, 48). Similarly, they themselves expressly utter the threats

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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 introduced 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 reproducing 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 operating 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,

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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 accommodate 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 appealing to structures of desire that precede the advent of the therapist, "provides the strongest resistance to the cure." 34 The attainment to full selfknowledge — to put for a moment a very lopsided gloss upon Wo es war, soil 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 everywhere presumed in Roman life.36 The handbook as failed therapist inculcates the same sorts of desires whose emergence within analysis Freud highlights. 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 approximations 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 promises a mechanism to aspire to authority in general. If all of this seems abstract, it is no accident: the trajectory of the performative ultimately extends

INTRODUCTION

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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 transference 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 Freudian concept becomes relevant: repetition. Freud sees repetition as the expression 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 refused 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 handbooks 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 process 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 critique of others (170). The student is asked to refuse traces of femininity in

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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 effeminate. 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 hegemonic 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 elusive 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 understanding 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 positioned 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 disappears 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 implicated 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

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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 unconscious. 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 reproduced 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 psychoanalytic 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 authenticity can naturally never be completed given that its consummation would

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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, soil 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 movement 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 acquires his "health" at the cost of reinscribing the legitimacy of virile authority. To what extent does analysis itself offer a cure only by way of a fundamental 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 xenophobia. 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 psychoanalysis. 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 psychoanalysis. 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.431 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 oratory 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 ancients 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 Foucault 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 incitement" (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

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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 product 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 antiquity. It is true to the extent that the knowledge that it produces, a knowledge 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 difference 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 grappled with the problem in both of the later volumes of The History of Sexuality, 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 principle 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 parallel notion of power, both theories are enriched: Foucault is given a structure 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 signification 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 portraits of exteriority. Jouy is given a position exterior to power and symbolization even though a closer reading reveals that he is clearly participating 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 opportunities for an alternative or counterhegemonic reading of antiquity, but they should not be taken as moments of authenticity falling outside the law and

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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 noblest 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 reproduced, 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 exhaustively 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 founding 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 compulsory materialization of the body through time (1993,1-2, 9), the rhetorical theorists take up a similar stance and rework it for their own ends. This incompleteness becomes an injunction to eternal study and labor, to endless 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 1 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 nonetheless 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 handbook 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 coherent identity, cruelties that include self-cruelty as well, the abasement through which coherence is Actively 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 justification 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 performance 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

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examination of active interventions into this same set of questions. Rhetorical theory and practice and their interrelationship thus offer an overt example 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 technology of subjects in the world is herein implicated.

CHAPTER 1

Reading and Writing

five branches of study requisite to the proper study of the art. While some Greeks may have divided the question up differently,1 the Latin tradition is marked by unanimity.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 terminology: 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 terminology: 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 ANCIENT RHETORICAL THEORISTS TEND TO RECOGNIZE

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are already learning from flawed "bootleg" copies of his lectures (l.pr.7). There is a veritable hunger for texts on the part of the audience. Quintilian's problem presents only the most striking case of a condition presupposed 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 prominent 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 persuasion. 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 Demosthenes: 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, < e t > 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 consideranda. [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 beyond its own capacities. Despite our author's line of thought, he neverthe-

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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 elements 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 nee hoc confisus sum posse fieri, ut de his rebus satis commode scribi posset, nee, si id fieri non posset, hoc, quod feci, fore inutile putabam, propterea quod hie 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 appropriate 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 327) 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 handbook 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 successor 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

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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 concerning 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 prescriptions of the Ad Herennium appear to have even been scaled down somewhat 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 delivery. 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 producing 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 countenance." 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

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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 performance, 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, nee 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 eloquentia neque ad earn 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 knowledge 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 l.pr.18-20) Here we have no promise of reaching true eloquence: neither Demosthenes 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 performer. 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

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project of oratorical training itself, there remain a number of open questions 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 crystallizes. 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 positive precept. Likewise these works endlessly reproduce in lesser form similar 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 moment 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 oratory, 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 increase 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

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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 theoretical 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 indispensable 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 practice of others as orators. The handbook thus offers a special variety of "reading lessons" designed to impart specific hermeneutic techniques. Other texts become embedded 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 restoring 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, Quintilian 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 example 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

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introduced in terms of a pronunciation exercise/example, Quintilian's treatment 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 imo5iaoToX,T|v vel VTCooxiy\xi]v vocant, quo deponendus. suspenditur "arma virumque cano," quia illud "virum" ad sequentia pertinet, ut sit, "virum Troiae qui primus ab oris," et hie 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 imodiaaxoXf) or {moony^r] — 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 Quintilian 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 intelligibility 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.

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[One always looks in the same direction that one gestures. There are exceptions when we need to condemn or concede 14 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 between 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 susceptible 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 contexts 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 deployment 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 always 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: language is conceived of as having gestures embedded in it at every level, and these are themselves coded for class, place of birth, gender, and profession.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

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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" (Xe^ig YQOKJHxr]) (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 conversation (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"

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(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 variety 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, indignantur, interrogant, inrident, elevant? aliter enim dicitur: tu mihi quodcumque hoc regni et cantando tu ilium? 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 appropriateness. 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

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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) Ouintilian'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 community 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 readers into the disposition required by his own text. In actual practice, Quintilian'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 Quintilian'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 problems 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 presented 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

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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 Quintilian 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 autonomy of the elite habitus will prove insufficient. Quintilian imposes new burdens and new standards: reflection, self-reflection, and the whole aestheticization 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 Quintilian'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 Cicero's speeches, his theoretical works, and even letters.25 Cicero's speeches become the models for Quintilian's precepts; and Cicero's theoretical writings 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.

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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 bringing 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 gestures. 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, concentrated in 11.3.162-69. Quintilian begins, narratio magis prolatam manum, amictum recedentem, gestum distinctum, vocem sermoni proximam et tantum acriorem, sonum simplicem frequentissime postulabit in his dumtaxat: U Q. enim Ligarius, cum esset in Africa nulla belli suscipio," et a A . Cluentius Habitus pater huiusce." aliud in eadem poscent adfectus, vel concitati "nubit genero socrus," vel flebiles "constituitur in foro Laodiceae spectaculum 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 borrowed 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 sonin-law"; pathos for "a spectacle painful and piteous to the whole province 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

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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 particularly 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 amaritudinis dederunt, super modum ac paene naturam vocis humanae acerba: "quin conpescitis vocem istam, indicem stultitiae, testem paucitatis?" sed id, quod excedere modum dixi, in ilia parte prima est: "quin conpescitis." [There is a tone different from these and almost exceeding the capacities 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, attestations 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.

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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 ^IOVOTOVICX, "monotony" in its etymological sense (11.3.47-51). In this instance, as opposed to the "you" (tu) example 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 lowerlevel variations within this same general emotional register. Quintilian usually 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 monotonous. 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 Quintilian 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 himself 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 justifying 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 embarrassment and ensuring success.

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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 restrained and subdued {contraction atque summissum), but that the words "on behalf of a most honorable man" {pro fortissimo viro) require something 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 complements 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 textualized 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 relationship to the manly original is multiply mediated. This recovery of Cicero's delivery, which we might as well call a discovery 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." Quintilian brings forth in a jumble natural impulses, tendencies of the subject matter, attributed psychological effects (or at least imputed rhetorical effects 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

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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 Quintilian 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 uncloseable 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 writing as a supplement to life.

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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 orthodoxy 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 (l.pr.7). This unauthorized dissemination 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 homespun eloquence emerge in an environment where the audience's aesthetic critique of an orator has been informed in prescriptive detail by the authoritative handbook? The unquestioned reproduction of the elite habitus within such social structures as the family cannot be taken for granted once the

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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 phantasmatic 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 gestures he is describing (11.3.84, evoking Cicero, Pro Archia 8.19): Quintilian 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 , 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)

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After first pausing over the gesture itself, elaborate and awkward by contemporary 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 ritualized, and second of the process of collecting and recounting the exemplary 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

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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 unparalleled 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 authorlessness 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

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first person is indicative of a rather insubstantial framework holding together 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 essentially the same basic material as do all the other authors, sometimes presenting 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 advocates. 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 vouchsafing rhetoric in general. Furthermore these two paradoxical and selfreferential 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, 56869). 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

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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 everywhere 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-

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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 technology of rhetoric, eloquence is wholly other than it is after the advent of a science of speech. Rhetorical theory does not allow for nontechnical eloquence. 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, quern 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 overseers of the young orator's practice inculcate these standards, the whole body of orators will share a scheme for self-evaluation and mutual evaluation. The hermeneutic circle is tightly closed. Once Quintilian has told you how to stand when you are about to speak, the aesthetics of preelocutionary stances has been opened up as a formal topic of inquiry. One no longer happens to stand agreeably before a speech, even if this agreeably 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

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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 silenced 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 existence 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 mastered" 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/outgroup 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 compass 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 tendencies 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.

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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 discussion 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 handbooks 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 ilium de ratione dicendi sane exilem libellum, plura Crasso libuisset scribere; cum enim omnibus memoriam sui turn 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 orators, 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 memorial 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

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memorialization, a collection recording and preserving all of Rome's eloquence. 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 constructed 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 definitely 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 proscriptive 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 Quintilian'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

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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 condemnation 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 Herennium 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 Ciceronian 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 memorializing 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 Ciceronian 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 oratorical 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. Rhetorical 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

A N 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 theoretical 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 somewhere around the nineties C.E. In his encyclopedic survey of the departments 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? Quintilian'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 provided by his predecessors. In other words, Quintilian promises little novelty, 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

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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 perpetually creates knowledge, and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects 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, nevertheless 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 campaign 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 naivete of antiquity: "Of course he didn't find the body . . . " Rather we ought to note that Quintilian's is a productive failure, 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 introduction, Cato lays down the definition that the orator is the good man skilled

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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 correspond 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 personality 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 consider 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 proliferation, 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

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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 emergence 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 readings 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 anterior 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 subjectivation, the moment of interpellation. The theory of the body thus becomes 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 arbitrary to the extent that other knowledges of the body could be imagined,10

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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 subject 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 descriptions 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. 11 The metaphor 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, unreflective 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

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be moved by one's own fictions.13 Thus even in the case of assumed passions, 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 complements 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 necessary 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 conversion 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 movements alone. A dancer may tell a story without using a single word. 15 Quintilian is shoring up any gaps between the body and the soul. Quintilan makes gestures coincide in spirit with the voice, and both movement and sound are servants of the soul: "[A gesture] both itself harmonizes 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)"11 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 illuminates 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-

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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 significance 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 derivative, 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

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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 supplementations 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 derivative. 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: performative 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.

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[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.] (Ouintilian 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 homologous, 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 Ton ajoute que, de toutes les especes de capital incorpore, le capital linguistique est, avec Vhexis 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 debats en apparence les plus futiles sur la langue mobilisent tant d'energies 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 eyebrow 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

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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 remembered 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 description 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, particularly 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 system of paired adjectives employed by the users of the legitimate language to classify others and to judge their quality, and in which the term designating the properties ascribed to the dominant always receives 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 understand fully the implications of the specific antagonisms and hostile pairings. In other words, an explanation of the process of domination and its mystification 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

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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 condition 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 different 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 Quintilian'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 possibilities: 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 Quintilian'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. Observation of the body will allow the student to modulate his own physical selfpresentation. 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

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political truth. And the investment of this good body requires the simultaneous 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 methods 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 innocuous 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 potentially cruel in the act of observation. The orator needs to bear in mind that he is watched with more attention 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 conspicitur. Quare sit, ut in omnibus honestis debet esse, splendidus et uirilis: nam et toga et calceus et capillus tarn nimia cura quam neglegentia sunt reprendenda.

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[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 negligence 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, spotless, 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 mystified. 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 performance. After giving many and detailed pieces of advice, threats, and behaviors 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.

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[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 inexpressible 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).2A He is observed for this quality. Indeed, his entire labor tends toward allowing 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. Kennedy 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, 9095; 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

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with the speakers' staff (axf]JitQov). So much for telling an aristocrat something he does not want to hear. Homer literalizes the metaphorical domination and violence of the orator and his oratory. 27 In Quintilian and other authors, though, this same fundamental social violence persists in a euphemised 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 something 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

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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 proliferation 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 eyebrows must be observed, evaluated, and found acceptable. Thus the proliferation of body parts examined by no means serves as a promise of authority 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 knowledge 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. Foucault 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

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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 reproduction 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. Quintilian 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, accompanying the meaning of the verbal aspect of the performance. The regulation of the hand also extends to having it perform differently in the different 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 following 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 Quintilian, 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 gestures need to observe the "lurking beats of speech" (latentes sermonis

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percussiones).35 Such an argument reinstalls gestures into a natural and naturally harmonized role vis-a-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 injunctions 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 conveyance 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, discussing 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). Misusing 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).

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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 Herennium, makes relatively simple injunctions to the body, and in contemporary 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 guarantee security, might not further analysis be in order? The proliferation of body parts has not given more security, but only opened up more prospects 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 (naturd), that is, requires more labor {curd). 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 coordinated 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 example, 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

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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 carefully 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 realization 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 knowledge 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 differently, 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 boundaries. 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

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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: 6iWa|iiv jiXeioxriv e/ei 11x605, ocpGaXfxog 5e§i6g, xauxa xcov xdxco, xai 6x1 8|iJtecpuxe xoiai 6e2;ioiai xa agoeva. [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

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shoulders around must be prevented at all costs, even at the price of selfmortification (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 obscure 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 socalled 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 accordingly 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 illegitimate 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

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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 applied to a man as a whole, a vir fortis, 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 constructed 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 become 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 adjective 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

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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 elements 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 curd) 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 defective 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 regulation 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 occlude the fact that this independence is predicated upon a prior act of vigorous erasure made in the social register.

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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' performance, authenticity, and authority.46 The two occurrences of the adverb urbane in Quintilian's discussion of

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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 metaphorical 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 secured 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 imposes 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-

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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 description, 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 consequences. 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 formulation 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: TE%vr\ helps ipvoiq 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 orator's own body. The problem of labor makes nature an open and uncloseable 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 meanings. 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

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cannot be dissociated from these other truths, as the station of a man becomes 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 analytics 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 pleasure 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 perform these vital truths on its own.

CHAPTER 3

Self-Mastery

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 (l.pr.l). And while Quintilian despairs of being able to contribute much of originality, he does propose to offer his own judgment when various authors have written variously on the same topic (l.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 originality: his predecessors too readily assume that their readers are already accomplished 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 ostentation and the favor that they hope to win for themselves (l.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 (l.pr.7): nothing will be omitted. The orator will not just need to have a mastery of rhetorical techniques and tropes, he will also have to be a good man, or vir bonus, and to possess every virtue of the soul (l.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: QUINTILIAN OPENS HIS INSTITUTIO ORATORIA

Sit igitur orator uir talis qualis uere sapiens appellari possit, nee 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 tendendum est: . . . Nam est certe aliquid consummata eloquentia neque ad earn peruenire natura humani ingenii prohibet.

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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 knowledge 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 l.pr. 18-20) Two difficulties arise here. First, a rift between the relationship between character (mores) and training has been exposed. Thus, even though Quintilian 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 examine 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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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 nevertheless 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, considerations of "you." The problem of the soul and its relation to presentations and performances is a tangled one in Quintilian. Let us, then, examine some of the more relevant points of his treatment of the relationship between performance and being. First, Quintilian makes this communion of affective experiences relatively transparent provided that one's performance is satisfactory. Good performance naturally penetrates into the inner man. In fact, Quintilian seems to endorse a psychology in which external representations 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.

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[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 tarn 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 ourselves 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 performance 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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judges that disposition it receives from us" (sic uelut media uox, quern habitum a nostris acceperit, hunc iudicum animis dabii) (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 ilium 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

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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, authenticity 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 commendatam uiribus actionis adfirmarim plus habituram esse momenti quam optimam eadem ilia destitutam. [If delivery has such an effect in matters that we know to be idle and Active 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 anecdote that seems almost obligatory in a rhetorical treatise: Demosthenes is asked what aspect of speaking was most important. He answers, "Delivery" (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 content 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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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 unconvincingly rejects the possibility of a bad man who is a good orator. Nevertheless, a moralized regulation of the contents and qualities of performance follows immediately from Quintilian's construction of the situation: performance 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 appropriately provoked only where the orator is manifesting himself as a vir bonus.1 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 erumpunt, 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 Active 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 "discipline" {disciplina) and "reason" {ratio) to his feelings, while the unengaged

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speaker needs to agitate himself internally with affecting images of the proper emotions. There is no radical distinction, then, between authenticity 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 external 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 cannot 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 orator 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 persuasione 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, splendor, 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 pronunciation, 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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Quintilian's presentation and critique of the other camp reproduces on their side the very confusion of natura and cura that is an enabling condition for his own argument. These others, introduced by Quintilian's formula 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 aspirations 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 acknowledgment 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 performances 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 dolendum 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, indignation, 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).10] 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 Quintilian, 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

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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 presence. 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 supplementation 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, vigorous, masculine subject (v/r) 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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Bourdieu so that he may read the habitus for its unacknowledged structurings 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 technology 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 Quintilian to be the crudest 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 arguments. But, by way of a brief external example, let me cite a recollection of

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Seneca the Elder. Cassius Severus once told Seneca how he lost his patience 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 tarn 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 pantomime, 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.l6) This is all happening after Cicero's death. Cestius attracts followers with his replies to the published speeches of Cicero. Severus has just complained 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 performance 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, emotional presence and instead reinscribes the performance in the register of the ridiculous and subpolitical.13 Some in the audience may think the interruption somewhat thick-headed, but this does not keep it from being effective. 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 anecdotes 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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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: urbaneque 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 spectacle 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 ilia frequens et concitata in utramque partem nutatio, quam in Curione patre inrisit et Iulius, 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

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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 selfmastery 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 Demosthenes. 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 . . . acpaene 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-

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mosthenes' style of delivery attributed to Eratosthenes and to Demetrius of Phaleron. This master of delivery was accused of frenzied, Bacchic performances 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 Demosthenes 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 training 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. Similarly, if we suppose that Demosthenes sought to spare his voice the debilitating 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 appearance 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): ex be xouxou xaxdyeiov \iev oixo&o|ir)aai jxeXexrixr|Qiov, 6 br\ &ieo(p^8to xai xaO' f|(acxg, evxauOa 68 Jtdvxoog \iev exaaxrjg f||i£Qac; xaxtovxa jtXdxxeiv xf]v imoxQiaiv xai Stajtoveiv xrjv cpcovf)v, JIOX-

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Xaxig 5e xai fxryvag e%r\c, bvo xai tgeig aiwajtxeiv, ^UQOI3|X8VOV x^g xecpaXfjc; GaxeQov jiegog VJIZQ XOU jxr|6e |3ouX,o[xev(p navv jtQoeXBeiv evdexeaBai bC aloxvvr\v. [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. Quintilian 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

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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 selfreflection: the truth of rhetoric and the rhetoric of truth require as much. The most provocative and masterful staging of Demosthenes by Quintilian 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 Demosthenes 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 representation of a body. One does not even find an image of a perfect body, instead there is a body in pieces, a corps morcele, scattered throughout the text; and a good many of these pieces are elements reflecting bodily error,

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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 Demosthenes, 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 literature 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 Seminar, Lacan closes out his year's lectures in a chapter entitled "A, m, a, 5" (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 l, 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) (Es/Id)

x

> x N

img m(oi) (Ich/ego)

<

a(utre)

/ ^ / ^

symb A(autre)

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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 technology of the rhetorical handbook, and then a moment of rebirth and reinstallation 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. Moreover, this discipline even names itself as discipline. So too does the discipline 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 between 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

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symbolic in its fashion represents the ideal dimension toward which rhetorical 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 possibility 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 o b j e c t - A , m, ay S" (1988b, 323). Lacan's version shows us how the play between these other elements, the Sujet and the Autrey work through the ego and its imaginary relationship. 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 Roman 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 structuring 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

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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 T 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 furnishes the matrix within which we ourselves observe this paradoxical moment 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: Quintilian gazes upon Demosthenes and instructs his own student as to the necessity 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 metaphysics 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

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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 Hesiod'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 cannot 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 autotheorization 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

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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 theoretical texts cite a law that they also bring into being (see Butler 1993,1216). 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 contingencies 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 manliness, 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 hegemony. In order to consolidate his position as a legitimate oratorical subject the speaker has to jettison a vast freight of cultural cargo, heaving it overboard 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 special kind of wounding. This is not an enabling wound in the sense that the

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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 subjection 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 specific: the orator has presented to him an elaborate hermeneutics of the self; he, more than any other member of the society, is commanded to participate 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 selfberatement. Students will even disseminate imperfect teachings of Quintilian 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 during his lectures have been hastily thrown together and are already making the rounds (l.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, quern tu melius, Catule, meministi, quod me puero tanto opere ferretur? "Quo me miser conferam? Quo vertam? In Capitoliumne? 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)

is a vexed character. ! Sometimes 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 IN THE RHETORICAL TRADITION THE ACTOR

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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 questions 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 constitution 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 sophisticated 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 constitution. And second, this text is acutely aware of the problems of vision and

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ideology, elaborating these twin issues via a modified Althusserian paradigm 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 assumption, 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 singular 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 expressed 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 performance is a citation of a law (Butler 1993, 12-16). The act is thus a dissimulated 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 visible 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 citationality" (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 produced, by such norms. Although this constitutive constraint does not foreclose 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

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relationship to the issue of performance and find themselves engaged with the problems of the subject. In the rhetorical discussion, the crisis revolves around performances that are not performances of the self, performances 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 erroneous citations, performances whereby an improper subject or an "illegitimate" 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 performance 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 expressive 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 grounding 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 repudiations for the students of oratory. They purchase their subjectivity at the cost of this refusal. In fact, this refusal serves as the domain of "unthinkable, 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, commanding them to a specific self-performance. Butler notes that "since the law must be repeated to remain an authoritative 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

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for the hegemonic male subject that would necessarily ensue. Not surprisingly, this effort to supplement the law produces further articulations of the techniques of power. The production of more knowledge of performance 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 possibility 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 segregated 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 person of the orators, and the imitators of truth (imitatores veritatis) cannot be radically distinguished from the performers of truth itself {veritatis ipsius actores) J 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

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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 Active" (1992, 3). Of particular interest for the rhetorical theory of performance is Freud's notion 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, legislation, and consolidation of the body such that it maintains a controlled relationship to the ego conceived of as a bodily ego. The truth of performance 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 meaning 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 reproduction 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

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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 relationship to power as played out via the body: "[I]f prohibitions in some sense constitute projected morphologies, then reworking the terms of those prohibitions 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 materialized 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 revolutionary possibilities of a critique such as Butler's own text represents. In fact, the whole genre of the handbook is designed to forestall errant iterations. 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.11 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 legitimate 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 consolidate 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

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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 oratore, 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 ofDe 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 sity histrionum levis ars etscaena declarai). In order to mention acting in connection 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 injunction 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

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name Roscius is attached to an example of performance, one can be assured 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: Turn 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, quern 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 tarn insigne nee tarn 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 insubstantial 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 "fetching" (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 prominent 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

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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 causing 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 Demosthenes 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 (l.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 Demosthenes. 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 familiar 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 explicit inspiration from an actor. In fact, if it were not for an actor, Demosthenes 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. IldXiv 5e jroxe cpaaiv exjteaovxoc; auxou xai ajuovxoc; ol'xa5e ovymXV|i8vov xai papecog cpeQOvxoc;, 8JtaxoXou0r|Gai ZdxuQOV xov imoXQIXTJV 8Jtixr)6eiov ovxa xai aDV8iaeA.0eiv. 65DQO^8VOU 5e xov Ar^ooQevovc, JIQ05 auxov, 6x1 Jtdvxarv cpdojiovcoxaxoc; GJV xcov Xeyovxoov xai [XIXQOU &8(DV xaxavaX,a)X8vai xf]v xov acojiaxog ax^iryv elg xoirco, Xapiv oox ex8i JiQog xov 6rpov, aXka XQautataovxeg dv6Qa)jroi vav-

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xai xai a^ia0eig axouovxai xai xaxexouoi xo |3rpa, jiagoQaxai 53 auxog, "a^ri0r| 'kiyeic, d) Ar]^6a0evec;" cpavai xov SaxuQov, "ahXeya) xo ai'xiov iaaojxai xaxecog, av ^ioi xoov EuQiJti5ou xiva Qriaeoov f\ SocpoxXeovg eQEXr\or\(; ebteiv ajto 0x6^1x05." ebtovxoc; 6e xou Ar]|ioa08vou5, ^lexataxpovxa xov Zdxugov oika) jtXaaai xai 6i8^8X08LV

8V TJ08L JtQ8JTOVXl X a i

5 i a 0 8 G 8 L XT]V OUTTJV QrjOlV, G)GX'

81)01)5 oXxoc; exepav xco Ari^oo0eveL <pavr|vai. Jieio0evxa 5' ooov ex xr]5 imoxQiaecog xco Xoyco xoapiou xai x^Qixoc; rcpooeoxi, ^ILXQOV fiYTlcraaOat xai xo |iTi6ev eivai xr\v aaxrioiv a^ieAxyuvxi xrjg JtQOcpopag xai SiaOeaeoog xoov Xeyofxevcov. ex 5e xouxou xaxayetov txev olxo5o^irpai jxeA,exrixr)Qiov, . . . [People tell of another occasion when Demosthenes had suffered a defeat and was returning home, troubled and chafing at his misfortune. 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 neglected 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 inexperienced 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.

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Sailors ought to represent the enfranchised Athenian lower classes and the political power wielded by traditionally dominated factions of a Greek citystate. 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" (yiri boni) are not in charge of public discourse. As far as "mere appearances" are concerned, Satyrus gives us no comfort: his reworking of the text Demosthenes had delivered does nothing other than to change its semblance in the latter's eyes (SXcoc; exepav xcp Ar]|Lioa0evei cpavrjvai). 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 (Geqia) of his performance from the public space of the theater (Geaxpov) and into his cave. Here he watches himself for himself, doubling the grammar of the middle voice of the Greek verb 9eaa6ai. And this moment then itself becomes a classic scene for theoretical 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 discussion 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. Moreover, 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: Xeyexat S3 avGQamou JtQoaeXGovxog auxcp 5eo|a,evou auvriyoQiag xai 6i8^i6vxo5 d)g imo TOD X,d|3oi jtAjiyac;, "bXka ov ye", cpdvai xov Ari^oa06VTiv, "xouxcov obv Aiyeig ovbev JtejtovGag." ejuxeivavxoc; 5e xr\v (povrjv xov avBQomou xai pocovxog "eya) Ar||i6a0eveg ovbev jiejrovGa;" "vr\ Ala" cpdvai, "viiv dxouco cpcovfiv a&ixoufxevou xai jiejiovBoxog." oikcog cpexo ^ieya JTQOC; maxiv eivai xov xovov xai xr]v ijjtoxQiaiv xcov Xeyovxoov. X015 jxev OIJV jioMoic; {jjioxQivojxevog fJQeaxe GaDjiaaxcog, oi be xcxpievxeg xajteivov fiyo^vxo xai dyevveg at)xou xo jrXda^ia xai |iaXax6v, aw xai Ar]|ir]XQL05 6 ^aXriQetfc; eaxtv. [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 suffered." This was how much Demosthenes thought the tone and delivery 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 (^uxAxxxov). 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

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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 performance is well received, it is also immediately suspect. In fact, this passage has used an unusual word for delivery that highlights this crisis: KXao\ia is a technical term for "intonation" or for presentation more generally (Liddell and Scott 1968, s.v. K\ao\ia III.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 jtXdoai and jtXdxteiv 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 performance. 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 ilia perihodo "stetit soleatus praetor populi Romani" inclinatio incumbentis in mulierculam Verris effingenda est, aut in ilia "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 Hydriae prologo, aut mulieris, ut in Georgo, incidit, tremula uel effeminata 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 Verrem 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

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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 Quintilian 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 effeminate, 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 discusses. 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 technique of prosopopoeia, literally, the donning of a mask. A well-known rhetorical technique, prosopopoeia involves giving a speech in another character, 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 contains a wealth of useful references, including the relevant passages in Quintilian 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 fatherland 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 declasse or gauche; the stage also

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poses problems of pleasure. The Rhetorica ad Herennium defines the orator 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 nee venustatem conspiciendam nee 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 aesthetic 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. Baseness in his appearance would cast him out of the arena of legitimacy in another direction. Again we have the paradox: the orator cannot be superficial 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 Nodes 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 xa xo[xipa ilia x^a~

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vLaxia et jxaXaxoi X^WVLGXOI 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. Hortensius 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 gestuosae, 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 acerbiusque apud consilium iudicum, cum de causa Sullae quaereretur, non iam histrionem eum esse diceret, sed gesticulariam Dionysiamque eum notissimae saltatriculae nomine appellaret, turn uoce molli atque demissa Hortensius "Dionysia," inquit "Dionysia malo equidem esse quam quod tu, Torquate, a^iouaoc;, avacppodixog, ajTQoadiovuaoc;." [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 reproaches 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. Hortensius. 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 carefully 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 bitterly 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, Nodes 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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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 histrionics added to the melange 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 referring to the orator by the name of a dancing girl. Hortensius' defense is not a retreat to hypervirility. Instead he becomes 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 selfconscious 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, uncultivated, charmless, a man unloved by Dionysus" (a^iouoog, avacpQo5iTog, buiQOobvovvooc,). If we read this answer etymologically, Hortensius is arguing 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

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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 interpretations 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 categories 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" recuperation 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 indication 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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(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 authority. 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' oratory 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 splendore elegans, compositione aptus, facultate copiosus; eaque erat cum summo ingenio turn exercitationibus maxumis consecutus. rem complectebatur memoriter, dividebat acute, nee praetermittebat fere quicquam, 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 vocabulary 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 material; 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-

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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 hie verba exprimens scaenicus, sed universam rem et sententiam non demonstratione, 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; supplosio 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 illustrated vocal delivery with almost exclusively theatrical examples, his intervention comes a day late and a dollar short. In fact, these injunctions are

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already clearly too late not just logically but historically: the hand is commanded 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 boundary 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 between 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. Instead 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 antonyms 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 authority 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 outside, the actor. The actor inhabits the illegitimate body the handbook discovers for its student. As if the insistence upon virility were not enough in his first formulation, 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 Accordingly 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

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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 movement 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 explicit is servile, and it panders to meaning much as a woman is subordinated 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 Psychoanalysis that castration implicates both the masculine and the feminine subject according to the logic of the gaze (1992,155) where the gaze is "the 'unapprehensive' 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 conditions 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

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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 eroticism 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 encomium 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 performances of the same caliber? Even as the rhetorical master rejects the actors, he frequently picks scenes that reveal the staginess and theatricality of rhetoric 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 borderland of the realm of oratory. Legitimate authority holds sway within this range, while lawlessness is the hallmark of the exiled margin.24

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Quare norit se quisque, nee 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 nee in loquendo distinctionibus temporibus adfectionibus moleste utemur. Vt si sit in scaena dicendum: quid igitur faciam? non earn ne nunc quidem, cum arcessor ultro? an potius ita me comparem, non perpeti meretricum contumelias? Hie enim dubitationis moras, uocis flexus, uarias manus, diuersos nutus actor adhibebit. Aliud oratio sapit nee uult nimium esse condita: actione enim constat, non imitatione. Quare non inmerito reprenditur pronuntiatio uultuosa et gesticulationibus molesta et uocis mutationibus resultans. Nee inutiliter ex Graecis ueteres transtulerunt, quod ab iis sumptum Laenas Popilius posuit, esse hanc fniocosamt actionem. Optime igitur idem qui omnia Cicero praeceperat quae supra ex Oratore 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

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authorities usefully took from the Greek that term which Popilius Laena defined, namely that this is a \mocosam\ (mimicked?) delivery.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 passage with a maxim borrowed from the founding moments of philosophy, "Know thyself," yvcoBi oavxov. 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 QuintiHan's own text. This knowledge of the oratorical 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. QuintiHan'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 ^ir]68V ayav we have here in Quintilian the two famous Delphic injunctions. 27 QuintiHan's discourse on the body borrows the building blocks of philosophy in order to argue for a theory of the rhetorical body. Selfknowledge 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:

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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 prologue finishes with the speaker saying, "Pay attention and listen quietly so that you can know what the Eunuch means" (date operant, cum silentio animum attendite, / ut pernoscatis quid sibi Eunuchus vult) (44-45). The Latin is filled with fertile ambiguities: date operant 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 himself." 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 operations. 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 Quintilian 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 courtesan mistress. He hesitates on the threshold of pleasure, reproach, and abuse. The dramatic scene parallels the scenario for the prospective orator. Should

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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 disjunction 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 Active, 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 quasfictas 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 axiomatically 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. However, 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 monitory 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

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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) egoideal 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, oscillating in an impossible circuit of desire. Like the comic youth, the orator asks himself, "So what am I to do?" {quid igitur faciam?). 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 exemplary 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. Igitur Polus lugubri habitu Electrae indutus ossa atque urnam e sepulcro

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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, Nodes 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 performance 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 Plutarch'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. Xeyexat 5e xai avxbq ov&ev \\xxov voarjaac; xou Ar^ooeevoug jtegi TT]V imoxQicav, xoirto \iev Twaxiq) xco xa)fi(p5a>, xoirco 5' Aioamq) tea

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TQaycp&a) JtQoaexeiv ejiijieXcog. TOY 55 Atacojrov xouxov IGXOQOIKJIV i^jcoxQivofxevov ev GedxQcp xov JTEQI TT\<; xtfxcoQiag xou ©ueoxou (3ou\evo\ievov9Axpea, xcbv imriQexov xivog dcpvco jraQa5Qa|i6vxog, e^a) xcov eauxou Xoyioyaov 5id xo jtdGog ovxa xa> axrjjtxQcp Jtaxd^ai xai dveXeiv. [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 regarding 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" (idao^iai). 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

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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 performance 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, promised, and affirmed. This is partly owing to the necessarily duplicitous possibilities 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 project 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 tarn fictum quam versus, quam scaena, quam fabulae? Tamen in hoc genere saepe ipse vidi, ut ex persona mihi ardere oculi hominis histrionis viderentur tspondalli ilia dicentis: segregare abs te ausu's aut sine Mo Salamina ingredi? neque paternum aspectum es veritus?

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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 Active 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: Antonius' statement to this effect is terse and emphatic. In contrast to this certainty, however, Antonius' own speech is strikingly cluttered with statements of subjective impressions, employing the phrases mihi viderentur,

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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 homologous 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 guarantee 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 0edo0ai can be invoked once again. The spectacle stages a truth of authentic authors, true texts, and sincere bodies. It even stages a knowing audience, 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

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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 assimilation 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 theoretical 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 theoretical 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 pleasure 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

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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 excoriated 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 performativity 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 legitimate/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 pleasure 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

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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 authority. 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 selfidentity 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

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 performance. 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 parodic 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 pleasures 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 misunderstanding 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 IN SEVERAL OF THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS,

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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 "classics" 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 foundation of intellectual life also portrays a moment of refusal. Lucian indicates 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 surrounding the speaker's body. The issues, though, are confused and confusing: 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 (SiWajxiv) in speaking. As a natural result of this, he will be unassailable and unsurpassable. 6 'EQorcqg, d) [leiQCtxiov, ojtcog av QT)T(DQ yevoio xai TO ae^ivoxaxov Tomo xai jravxijiov ovo^ia aocpiaxric; eivai do^aic;' a|3ia)xa yap eivai ooi (pr)5, ei \ii) xoiai3xr]v xiva xr\v 5uva^iiv jteQipaXoio ev xoig Axr/oic; d)g a^ia/ov eivai xai avimoaxaxov xai 0au[xa£ea0ai JCQOC; ajtdvxcov xai ajto(3hejtea0ai, Ji6Qiajioi35aaxov axova^ia xoic; c,EXkif]oi doxow x a ' xai 5r] xag em xouxo ayovoac, 66oug atxtveg Jtoxe eiaiv eQeXeic, ex(i,a08iv. [You ask, my young friend, how you might become a rhetor and seem to be that most august and universally honored name sophistes. For

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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 performer 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 addressing 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 (6au^d£ea6ai JtQog ajidvxarv xai ajto|3Xejiea0ai). The relationship of mastery over one's opponents within the oratorical 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 acknowledging an exalted position; and the text of the passage has eclipsed any moment of evaluation and any considerations other than force immanent in language, both in the spoken word (ev xoig Xoyoig) and in the mystified power of a name or title (TO aejivoxaxov xoirco xai jtdvxijxov 6vo|ia

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aocpiOTTig). 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 a>tovo\ia in a process that parallels his trajectory of becoming a name or ovo^a. While the text will shortly make styles into bodies, here the person becomes language. The order of language and the order of the body interpenetrate. 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 signified 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 sentences, and the whole opening is genteel, general, and abstract. The narrator 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 attendant 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. axojtei youv OJTOGOL xeoog [ir\bsv ovxeg 8V5O^OL xai jrXouaioi xai vr\ Ala EvyevEOxaxoi e5o^av euro xarv ^oyov. ojxcog 5e \ii\ 5e5i0i, \ir\be Ttgbg TO ^leyeOog xcov eXm^o^xevarv ajTo5uaji£TT)aT]g, (XUQIOUC; xivdc; xovc, Jtovoug jiQOJtovr]aai olr]0eLc;. ov yap ae xpaxeidv xiva ou&e OQGLOV xai i6Q(bxoc; ^xeaxriv f]|xeic; a^o^iev, obc; ex \ieoy\c, auxrjc; avaaxQ8i|)ai xa^iovxa, ejrei ou&ev dv SiecpeQO^iev xcov aXXarv oaoi xrjv ovvr\Qr\ exeivrjv fiyoirvxai, ^laxpav xai avdvxri xai xanaxrjpav xai d)g xo JIOM ajteyvcoa^ievTiv. [Well, consider how many men who were once nobodies seemed reputable, wealthy, and by God true bluebloods owing to their oratory.

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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 oratoria 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." 11 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 presence. 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 politics. Ultimately, the student of the Teacher of Rhetoric has to choose between two performative styles: a flamboyant, shameless sexual pandering 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.

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Obviously my reading is a bit perverse. In fact, I am going to compound 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. Unfortunately 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 appreciate 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: ripog be xr\v exepav eXBdov eugriaeig KOKKOVC, xai aXkovq, ev TOUTOIC; 5e xai jtavao96v xiva xai jzayndkov av&Qa, diaaeaaXeu^iivov TO |3a6ia|ia, ejctxexXaa^ievov xov ati/eva, yuvaixeiov TO |3Xe|i|a,a, ^ieXiXQov TO cpcovTijia, (AUQOOV ajtojrveovTa, TCO 5axTutap axpcp TT]V xecpaXr\v xv(0|i8vov, bXiyaq \iev eTi, oftXag &e xai uaxivBivac; Tag TQixac; ei)08TL^ovTa, jravapQov Tiva 2aQ5avajraX,A,ov f\ Kivupav r\ avxbv 'AyaBoova, TOV TT|C; TQaycodiac; erceQaoTov exeivov jioir\zi\v. Xeyco 6e d)g ajio Toikoov yvcoQi^oic; atrcov, \i\\be oe o i k o Geojieaiov X Q ^ a x a L cpiX,ov3A9QoSLTri xai XaQiai 6iaXd0oi. xairoi TL <pr\\ii; xav ei ^IIJOVTL yag aoi jtQoaeX,Go)v eijtoi TL, TO CY^ITITTLOV exeivo avot^ag GTOjxa, xai xr\v ovvi\Qr\ cpcovfiv acpeiri, ^1016015 av cbg oi>xi xarv xa0 s f]^ag eaTiv, OL

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aQOUQrjg XCXQJIOV TQ8(p6^£VOV.

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eSo^xev, aXka xi ^evov cpdajxa dpoaco r\ a[x(3Qoaia

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 hyacinthine locks, some all-soft Sardanapalus or Cinuras or Agathon himself, 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 allbeautiful. 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 5iaaeaaXei^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 lexicographers 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 cmaedi (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

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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 detorqueantur, ne inmodicus hiatus rictum distendat, ne supinus uultus, ne deiecti in terram oculi, ne inclinata utrolibet ceruix. Nam frons pluribus 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 translation 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 hie 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)

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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 "wildness" 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 legitimate 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 (yuvaixeiov TO |3Aimia). This point stands in precise contrast to the manliness of the other guide's gaze (aQQevoojtoc; TO f&ejjjxa). 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 uncontrolled 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

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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 apposite 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: Su x3 ouxog, d) Jtai, Jioxepov obc; avr\Q xpecpei; Km Jtou Jteog; Ilou %Xaiva; Hov Aaxamxai; AIX d)g yvvi] Stye3; Eixa nov xa xixBia; Ti cpf]g; Ti OLyag; 'AXka brtf ex xov (letarug ^Tixcb of, ejtei&r) y3 auxog OV |3ouXei cpQaaai; [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 exclusive binarism of the question Mnesilochus asks (jtoxepov . . . alX\ . . br\z\ . .) 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 gender, 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 (fxeXtXQOv xo epeovrma), 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 (^IUQCDV ajiojtveovxa). I am instead thinking of the phrase "opening that Hymettic mouth" (xo CY(LIT)XXLOV exeivo avoi^ag

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axo^a), 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 attributes 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" (cog ovojia^et auxoc;, |3aaiA,euc; ev xoig Xoyotg).15 Although he is about to make some further remark about this guide's program of study, the narrator breaks off: xa JtQCOia niv exeiva — \iaXkov Se avxbq ebtdxco JTQOC; ae * y^oiov yap VJIEQ XOIOUXOU QT]XOQ05 8|I8 JTOl£lO0ai XOVC, XoyOUg, CpaiAoV IJJtOXQIXT|V LG035 XCOV XOlOlkoV XCU XTjXlXOUXOOV, |IT] XCXl (XUVXQL'l|)a) KOV

jceaoDV xov fJQeoa 6v imoxQivo|iai. <J>atr| xoiyaQow av TCQOC, ae d)5e jrcog emajraad^ievog orcoaov exi XOLJTOV xf]5 X6|LITI5 xai \mo\xeibiaoa<; xo yXa^vgbv exeivo xai analbv oiov 8L(o0ev, AiJxo9ai6a xr\v xa)|iixf|v f\ MaX6dxr]v r\ TXvKEQav xivd |iL^ir]ad(i8vo5 xco iiQoor\vei xov (pBey^cxxovg* dypoixov y«Q TO CJLQQEvcojtov xai ov jtQog dpQOD xai epaa^LOD QT]xoQOg. cpr|aei 5' oirv navv ^lexQid^ov VTCEQ ai)xo^ . . . [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.

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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 qualities. 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 masking 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" (cpcur]) and indefinite phrasing of the introduction to the second paragraph (obSe iiioq) 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. Remember 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 unspeakable 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 Asianism debate, can be read as a compulsory repetition of this act of incorporation 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.

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When speaking to his will to oratorical power, the effeminate guide addresses the prospective student as "my sweet" (d) ^teXt^a). This is an erotic hailing, appropriate to lyric poetry and not to rhetorical prose. The narrator hailed this subject as "my young fellow" (d) ^xeiQaxiov). 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) pleasure 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" (aXKo yap xi JtaQa xauxa 6 QTIXOOQ) (Praeceptor 14). What then, does the orator need to bring with him? K6|LiL^e xotvuv xo \xeyioxov [iev xr]v a^iaBlav, eixa Bpaaog, ejti xouxoic; 5e xoX\iav xai avaiaxuvxiav. al5(o 5e r\ emeixeiav f\ \iexQioxryca f\ eQvBr\\ia oixoi ajraXiJte* axQeia yap xai imevavxia xco KQayiiaxi. aKka xai porjv oxi \ieyioTr\v xai \ieXoq avaiaxuvxov xai |3a6ia^ia oiov xo 8|i,6v. xauxa be avayxaia navv xai jiova eaxtv oxe Ixava. xai f] 8a9fi5 6e eaxco ei)av6r]5 r\ XEDXT], epyov xr]5 Tapavxivr]5 epyaalag, (bg &iacpaivea6ai xo ao|ia, xai f\ xgr]jtig 'AXXLXTI yvvaixeLa, xo noXvoxibec,, r\ e^ipag SixucovLa jttXoig xoic; Xeuxotg ejtiTCQEiiovoa, xai axoXou0oi ^oXXoi xai (3L(3XIOV aei. [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 sometimes 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 himself out. A blushing or modest femininity is resolutely rejected. 17 The

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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 sexualized; 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, boldness, 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 stirring the audience (docere, conciliare, movere).19 Willful inauthenticity is also the hallmark of the word choice (lectio, ^8^15) of this kind of orator. One is commanded to pick out from somewhere fifteen — twenty at the most —Attic words (Praeceptor 16). These will be sprinkled in as a sweetener to one's speech (xaBdjcep tt fjSua^a). 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 authoritative 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 classically 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

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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: Ei39i)5 ovv ooi JtQoaeiai xaQT8Qog T15 avrjp, imoaxA.T]QOc;, avbgdyb^ TO |3a6ia|i,a, noXvv xbv fjXiov ejti TCO aco^iati 5eixvi3a)v, aQQevcojrog TO |3X8|i|ia, eyQK)yoQ(bc„ xr\<; TQaxeiag obov exeivrig fiye^icov, ^iriQoug Ttvag 6 ^ictTaiog 5ie^ia)v jtpog ae. e'jieaBai yap oi JtaQaxeXeuojievoc;, imoSeixvug TCX Ar\\xooQevovc, lxvr\ xai UXaxodvoc, xai aXkiov TLVOOV, ^leyaXa |iev xai VJIEQ xovc, vuv, a\iavQa be r\br] xai aoacpr] TCX TCOXKCL VTC6 xov XQOVOU, cpriaei 8ij5aL|iova ae eaeaBat xai vo^ico Y0t|ir]a8LV Triv c Pt]TOQixf]v, el xaTa TOI3TCOV 65ei3aeiag oiajieQ oi ejti TCOV xdXcov PaivovTeg. [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 indistinct 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 argued, 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

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Asianists are outlandish, radical, feminine, and generally ridiculous, while the Atticists are pure, conservative, and manly. In other words, spatialization (read: xenophobia) is the inaugurating move in the choice of appellation, 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, exclusion, 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 (xa^ooxayaGog) 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 KVQIOC, SO as to himself become her XUQIOC;, where XUQIOC; 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 (Demosthenes) 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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education: "He offers you stale old rhetorical examples" (ecoXa jrapabeiy\iaxa jtaQaxiGelg xcov Xoywv). The guide was also described when he was first introduced as a fool (fidxaiog) who raved (X,T)QOUC; xivag). 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 ov gqbia |U|AEio6ai: they are "not easy to imitate." The invocation of imitation ought to put us on our guard. Not only is it something 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 themselves invested with bodies in the simile that follows: "Such are the products 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 representation 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 corporeality or untrained verbal expression. Desmouliez explains things differently: "Nous decouvrons ainsi l'origine des metaphores entre le corps humain et le style, et, en meme temps, leur signification esthetique. L'art grec, au dela de sa volonte de realisme, a defini un ideal de beaute. Et de meme que la merite du peintre ou du sculpteur se mesurera a la fidelite dans la reproduction de cet ideal, de meme l'orateur sera d'autant plus proche de la perfection que son style meritera davantage d'etre compare au corps humain, dans la plenitude 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,

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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" (ajteocpiYMiva) and "precisely stretched tight" (axpifkbg ajtoxexa^ieva) 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" (xaig yQa\i\iai<;) 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 antedate 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 inauguration. These two figures of idealized homosexual desire and of elitist mastery 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" (oiixexi no0eiv6c; ovojxa^o^iai, aXK r\bi\ xoig A165 xai Ar|5as jcataiv 6\i
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(Praeceptor 24). The original name, Potheinus, remains quite legible despite 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 children 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 emasculation 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 (6 5 8 jrdvxcov aviaQOxaxov) 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 fashion we have already seen in Quintilian's advice on self-mastery: Demosthenes' name stands at the head of a tradition of punishing, manly discipline.

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And, as we well know, one can labor endlessly and nevertheless only approximate 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 (cda^oov xai aQx a i o 5 ^5 aXr]6cog xai Kpovixog avOpamog) (Praeceptor 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 association 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 (ejti TOD KQOVOU) (Praeceptor 8) one ought to in fact become a man from the time of Kronos (KQOVIXOC; avOQOJiog) (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" (oXiya tpuA.A.a ex xov 'EXtxcovog Xapcbv cnkixa \ia\a JTOLT]TTIS ex Jtoijievog xaTecmi) (Praeceptor 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 (e6L5a^av) (Hesiod, Works and Days 22). Thus, in the original passage, legitimate authority and education are in no way compromised. The student is invested 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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is guaranteeing to always bracket his own discourse with the markers of its ultimate authorship and authorization. Thus, although the narrator in Lucian 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 acknowledged 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

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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 TTJTOQIXTI, and her portrait as she sits at the summit of the two paths of life is given in fine detail: f] \IEV ecp3 t)o|n]X,ou xa6ria9(0 TCOLVV xaXr] xai eujtQoaojioc;, TO TT]5 'AjxaMteiac; xeQag exouoa ev Tfl 5e^iq JtavToioig xaQjioic; I)JT£Q|3QI3OV* ejii Gaxepa 5e |ioi xov jtXoarcov &6xei jtaQeaxcDxa opav, xQ^aovv 6X,ov xai ejteQaatov. xai f| 56^a 5e xai i] ioxvc, JiaQeaxooaav, xai oi ejtaivoi Jtepi Jiaaav autriv 'EQCDQI [XIXQOIC; eoixotec; jtoMoi arcavxaxo06v jt8QLJtX.8X8Q0a)aav exjteto^ievoi. ei Jtou TOV NeiXov ei5ec; YQOtcpfi ^ejxt^iievov, auxov \iev xeijievov ejti XQoxo5eiX,ou xivog r\ ITCKOV xov jroxajiLOu, OLOL jtoXXot ev auto), ^ILXQCX 5e xtva Jtai&ia jrap3 auxov jrai^ovxa — JTT]X81S ^8 OUTOIJC; oi AiyujiTioi xaA,ouai,— TOIODTOI xai Jiepi TT]V TT]TOQLXTIV oi ejtaivoi. 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 Jir]x8LS32 — such, indeed, are the praises surrounding Rhetoric] (Lucian, Praeceptor 6) Much as the Nile is painted as surrounded and supported by its own products, so is Rhetoric, herself a surpassingly beautiful figure, encompassed by her own fruits: opulence, wealth, fame, power, and praise. She is enshrouded in desire, for such is the required translation of praises that are like so many little eQarreg. 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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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: IlQoaei 6f| ov 6 eQaaxrjc; ETCIQV\MX)V bi)kabr\ oxi xaxiaxa yeveaBai em Trig axpag, cbg yafxriaeidc; xe auxryv aveX,0a)v xai Jidvxa exeiva exOLS> xov jtXotrcov xr]v bof^av xouc; ejta'ivouc;* vo^icp y«Q arcavxa yiYvexai xou yeya\ir]fK6xo(;.

[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 expression ov 6 8Qaaxf]5 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 (xo |ivcxa9ai) from lusting (xo epav): 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 KVQIOC, with her, no man in charge of her, no overseer, and no guarantor. This situation introduces a moment of

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confusion. Women ought to have a XVQIOC;: 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 "illegitimate" (jtapa v6|iov) for a real woman at the very moment before she is to be acquired and her goods yielded over to the man "by law" (vo^ico). 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 (jtcxQa) 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 erastes and eromenos. In the nuptial version, though, the student is no longer the passive partner. He is himself an erastes. Student and guide now relate to one another as peers, as erastes to erastes, as active lover to active lover. Through Rhetoric they may exchange pleasure with one another without compromising their virile authority, 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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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 daughter of another man. Furthermore, when one takes a wife, one masters or breaks her, one tames her like a horse. The Greek verb is 5a^ia^8LV. 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

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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" (xaXa yap eati xai e ixf) Xeyojxeva). 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 discourse of cultural consumption that condemns them to their gaucheries. This obscure versus obvious distinction is mobilized to generate the distinction 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 injunction 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" (TO Se OLJLIOL TCOV xaxcov jroXXaxig). "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" (|ieTCup8Q(JL>v TTJV jtuyTyv). 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" (xai otaoc; TUQavvig TO Jipayjia eaTw). 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 democratic pandering of this oratory is always on the verge of falling into tyranny.38 Perhaps, then, on the other side our narrator should be seen as an Aristogiton, as both a tyrannicide and legitimate (active) lover (erastes). 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 recherche and garish circumlocutions and neologisms, 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 situation and scene of amazement, however, is constituted out of a fascinating contempt. The audience responds to authority: they see the virtue of education; 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 canonical 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 legitimacy, they are unable to distinguish the true legitimacy of the old discipline. It should be recalled that at the opening of the Pracceptor 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.

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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 Pracceptor 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 area 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 ay(i)viOTr\v 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 Furthermore, 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 something to say in the space afforded by the audience's praises. 40 The orator is supposed not just to be an "all-fearsome" (jrdv6eivov) competitor, but also a nasty one: he must sabotage any advances made by other speakers. One is commanded to deride (xaxaye^a) all speakers. If someone says something 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 dissatisfied 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 reappropriation of the style and phrasing of traditional learning can be used to trouble the serene field of decency, dignity, and appropriateness in which injunctions 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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"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: Ta 55 aXka xgi] GaQQeiv' r\ %6X\xa yap xai f] avaiaxuvxia xai ijjeudoc; jiQOXBiQov xai OQXOC; ejt3 axQoig aei xotg xeikeoi xai cpBovog JtQog ajtavxag xai ^iioog xai (3Xaacpri(iLa xai 5ia(3oXai mGavoi —xauxd ae aoi5i|iov ev ppaxei xai jtepipXejrxov ajtocpavei. [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. L5ia be jrdvxa Jtpdyfxaxa Jtoieiv aoi Se5ox0a), xupeueiv \1eQvoKeoQa1 Xayveueiv jxoixeueiv, f\ ai>X£iv ye, %av ^if] Jtotrig, xai JTQOC; ajravxag Xiyeiv xai yQa|i|j,axeia ujio5eixvuvai imo yuvaixcbv br\Qev ypacpevxa. xaXog yap £^vai GeXe xai aoi jieAixo) imo xcov yuvaixcov ajttyu6d£ea0ai 5oxeiv* eig xr]v Qrycogixriv yap xai xoirco avoiaouaiv oi jtoMxn, d)g 5ia xoirco GOV xai axpi xr|g yuvaixanaxiSog evboxijxouvxog. xai xo 5eiva 5e, [ir\ ai&ea6rig, ei xai jtQog av&Qarv ejii xco 8X8Q(p eQaa6at 5oxoir]g, xai xauxa yeveirjxrig f\ xai vr\ Ala <paX,axQog fj5ri cpv. cOOC eaxcoaav oi xai ejti xoikcp auvovxeg* r\v be \xi] d>aiv, oixexai ixavoi. nolXa yag xai ex xou xoiouxou JiQog xr\v QT|XOQLXT]V XQr\oi\ia jraQayiyvexai. [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 purportedly 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 quarters. And your thing, don't feel any shame over it, if you seem to

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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' attractive and studied dress became the occasion for slurs by his rivals and opponents that he was a cocksucker {Nodes 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. xai ^irjv xai mxxoixj0ai XQ\], ^d^toxa \iev xa Jtdvxa, el 8e \ii\9 Jidvxog exeiva. xai auxo 8e aoi xo oxo\xa jtQog ajtavxa ojxoicoc; xexr]vexa), xai f] ytatfxxa imriQexeixa) xai Jtpog xoug Xoyovc; xai JtQog xa aXka ojtoaa av duvrytai. bvvaxai be ov aoX.oixi£eiv \iovov xai (3ae(3aQi^8Lv ovbe \V\QEIV fj ejtioQxeiv f\ Xoi5oQ£ia0ai r\ SiapdXXeiv xai apeuSea0ai, aXKa xai VIJXXODQ XL 6Xko imoxeXeiv, xai jxdXiaxa f\v JtQog oi5xo) jtoXX.0^5 xoi^g epooxag |if| 5iaQxearig. Jtdvxa aijxfi ye emaxdaGo xai yovi^icoxeQa yiyveoQw xai ^r]5ev djroaxQe(p8O0a). [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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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 oratory. In his relations to other men, the orator plays the passive partner (eQdoGca) 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 master. 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 becomes 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 (\idkanoi XITOOVLOXOI) 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 everything alike. This is more than a little suggestive. The wordplay is redone in the next clause: it should do its duty vis-a-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

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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" (yovi|ia)xeQa yiyvEoQw). 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 productive" 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 legitimacy. 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 apposite 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 xcov JTOVCOV cpueaGai xa ayaGd). 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 Socrates about a story told by Prodicus about the young Heracles, who is about

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to choose the kind of future life he wants to lead: two women, Virtue (3 AQ6TT]) 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 (Eudai^ovia), as her friends call her, or Baseness (Kaxia), 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: xai (pavrjvai auxcp bvo yuvaixac; Jipoaievai ^eya^ac;, TT]V \IEV EXEQCLV etJJtQejrr] xe l6eiv xai eXeuBepiov cpuaei, xexoojxr^evriv TO ^tev acojia xa0aQoxriTL, xa 5e ojxjiaxa ai5oi, xo Se o%r\\ia aaxpQoavvr], eaBfjxi Se Xeuxri, xr]v 5' exegav xe0Qa|4xevriv \iev eig jtoXuaaQxiav xe xai djtaX,6xr|xa, xexaXXamia^evriv 5e xo \iev %Q(jd\xa oiaxe Xeuxoxepav xe xai eQD0QoxeQav xov ovxog Soxeiv cpaiveaBai, xo 5e axr|[xa oioxe Soxeiv oQ0ox8Qav XT]5 yvoeox; elvai, xa Se o^ifxaxa e/eiv dvajtejcxa|ieva, ea6rixa Se 8^ f]g av ^dXiaxa dipa SiaXd^iJtoi* xaxaaxorceia0ai Se Gajia eauxrjv, ejtiaxojteiv Se xai ei xig aXkoz, avxr\v 9edxai, jtoXXdxig Se xai eig xr]v eauxrig axidv djio|3Xejteiv. [(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 selfcontrol. The second was fleshy and soft, done up with cosmetics to make her appear artificially whiter and more blushing. She held herself 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 superficiality, narcissism and pageantry characterize the two of them. Virtue later castigates Vice with a telling list of her perversions that closes thus: xd S3 dcpQO&Loia JTQO XOU SeiaBai avayxd^eig, Jidvxa |ir|xava)|ievri xai yuvai2;i xoig avSpdai xQO^evr}' oika) ydp JtaiSeueig xoug aeauxr]g cpitarug, xr]5 \iev vuxxdg i)|3Qi£ouaa, xrjg S5 finipag xo XQr\oi\iu>Taxov xaxaxoifxi^ouaa.

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[You compel unnecessary sexual acts, employing all sorts of machinations 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 preambles 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 (jcovog). 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 (yv6}\xr\) 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 hardwon. 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 contrary, 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 punishment that governs it. The narrator behaves toward the young man as an erastes 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 biographical. 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 considerations 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 nonscholarly works his teachers had beaten him, but his father had conceived some

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hopes for a future career.50 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 inexperience 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 (oikco aacpr] jrdvxa f]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, TexvT] and nai5eia. They are, naturally, both put into different bodies and compared. Even though the body of Craft is called manly (av5Qixr|) 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 becoming 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

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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 addressed 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, pleasure 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 permutations 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 succinctly concluded: "Mais en realite 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 nightmarish (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 ostentatious 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 imperfect 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 required by such a scenario —a misnaming that includes oneself and the

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excluded margins in its nominalizing act — generates a supplementary remainder 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 doppleganger 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?

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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 principles. Accordingly the good and legitimate pleasures that have been reserved 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 rhetoric, 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 ruleladen 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 THIS CHAPTER BRINGS

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(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 ambitious, 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 numbered 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 Bude edition, says of it, "Le De Oratore est un chef-d'oeuvre, en effet, non peut-etre du point de vue de l'art pur (il manque a l'auteur certains des qualites de Platon), mais un chef-d'oeuvre de bon sens, de raison droite et saine, de pensee genereuse et haute. C'est le plus original et le plus interessant des traites des rhetorique" (Courbaud 1967, viii). If the De Oratore is a masterpiece of good taste and rightthinking, 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 imitation 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

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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 return 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'ecole? Des regies, rien que des regies; et on croit a l'efficacite souveraine de ces regies. On definit, on classe, on distingue." Courbaud the good scholar on Cicero himself defines, classifies, and distinguishes 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 critiqued 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 hegemonic Roman male. Next we will ask about the form in which these messages 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

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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 rhetorical 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 reproduction of the Roman order. Hence De oratore is no trifling matter of speculation 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 (forthcoming) 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 bereavement (orbitas) and as a lamentation of the plunder of its hereditary distinction (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

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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,1 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.). 1 0 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 precepts (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.

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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 registers 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 grammarians rigidly distinguish the two words. One reads that decus is characteristic 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, sustaining itself by its own decor {suo decore se ipsa sustentat) {De republica 3.40). The physical and the abstract collapse as the spiritual relies upon the physical 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 abstract. The spell of erotic enchantment cast by masculinity's charms furnishes 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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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: "Decorum 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 quern 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 tarn caduceo quam nomine oratoris ornatus incolumis vel inter hostium tela versari; turn, 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 tubthumper, 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.)

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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 beautiful 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 actor 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 artfully 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 Kuhnert 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-a-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:

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Non enim possum quin exclamem euge. euge, Lysiteles, Jtcdiv. facile palmam habes: hie victust, vicit tua comoedia. hie 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 between 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 performance. 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 acting, 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 Antonius 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 concept. 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 euphemism 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 homosociality 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 sentiment 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 yesterday'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 savages, 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

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Caecilius. Apparently Crassus is happy to keep the discussion in the metaphoric register of the comic stage that Catulus first evoked. Crassus' remarks, borrowed from Caecilius or not, build a set of provocative dichotomies. 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 interruptions of both Catulus and Crassus is itself erotic after its fashion. Strikingly, Antonius tacitly accepts his characterization by Crassus as "less than human" 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: Antonius is on stage throughout the De oratore. But let us look more closely at the description of yesterday's performance. 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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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 economy of the performance of a speech on oratory. Every good orator already knows that he varies his act with varied situations. But the playful seductions 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 oratore 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 propriety 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 discussion 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

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vocabulary of Roman slavery: liberty is a function of subjection to the orator. Wilkins' commentary (1892) pauses to correct any possible confusion 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 statement 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 barbarity 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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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 oratory 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 performative physical decor and quickly found ourselves amid a textual performance 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 Rhetoric 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 eternal 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 transmuted into self-mastery's quasi masochism. The dialogue may seem to be a

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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 selfmastery. 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, except 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 Bude 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 (pulcherrima) and is impelled by his cupidity (cupiditate — a fiscal and erotic word

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here) to acquire them at In Verrem 2.85. Thus, even when adamare indicates 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 philosopher 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 {patientiam 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' courtship of Socrates, wherein Alcibiades plays the active part of the erastes 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 philosophy 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 context. 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 "regies, rien que des regies" will be explored below. First, though, let us make the rhetorical parallel explicit by adducing another passage from just a few paragraphs later:

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Sin veterem ilium 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 ilia Aristotelia vis comprehendenda 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 consummate 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 selfmastery 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 (philosophies). 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. Philosophy 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 associate 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 consonant with the erotic investment and exclusion we have routinely encountered in the field of oratory. Thus this expulsion of the teachers of rhetoric participates fully in the rhetoric of rhetoric's own constitution; and as this "impudent" oratory is cleared away, a sublimated homoerotic oratory is thereby

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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" (Butler 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 Active. 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 overripe." 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

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not at all clear at first glance why Crassus chose this term rather than something like timory "fear." Certainly Antonius takes Crassus as if he had said something more like fear, and he grounds his own concurring explanation 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 oratory 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 commandment 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 discussion. 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 statement if we take this protestation seriously and no longer allow magnificence to coexist with shamelessness. If we readily accept Crassus' second sentence, this would clearly help to naturalize the association of magnificence 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 consolidated. 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 variosque 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; quern vero non pudet, — id quod in plerisque video — hunc ego non reprehensione solum, 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 initial 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 anything 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 preservation of dignity. This shameless indignity, however, comes from an indecorous 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 impropriety, 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 performative 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

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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 homosociality. 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 oipudor and timor is entirely appropriate: 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 homosexual 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 (avaioxvvxia) and daring (TOAJIT]) 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 impudent 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 problem 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 difficulty in beginning a speech. Wilkins, Sorof, and Harnecker variously compare 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 commentators 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 documentary text that expounds what Cicero actually thought, and not as a handbook 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

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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 commentator 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 unimpeded 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 quern plerique fugimus) quam plurimum scribere. Stilus optimus 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 education and inculcation represents a triumph of reproduction for a hypostatized 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. Furthermore 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 orator'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 sententiae 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)

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The translation of acumen as intelligence rather than point or tip is intended 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 illegitimate 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: despite 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 oratore. 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: something 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)7*6 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, discourse, 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 performance as its consequence if not its self-representation. This failed presentation 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 discussing 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 unreflective speech allows for a discourse that is more masterful and more real. Crassus believes that writing is genius' best means to self-fulfillment, its

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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 mediation 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 handbook loses its predicate and becomes simply the subject: there is a true character and genius at work here. Writing forges this genius even as writing 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 sublime 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 performativity 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 effaces 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 category 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 Mimesis non point 'pastiche' (quoiqu'il ne manque pas d'exemples d'imitation assez etroitement con?u) mais plutot 'reference . . . au patrimoine litteraire' represents par les grandes chefs d'ouvre" (1971). Paternity 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 conversation, 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).

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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 reproduction. 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 position 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: Turn 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 performed 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 written 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 oratorical 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 necessary — 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 authority, we learn how to react with scorn for the cheap and easy. Apparently

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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 forensic, 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 functional 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 (yiri 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 enaction of their virtue. Poor Sulpicius is accepted by Crassus as an orator but is simultaneously 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" (pbservatio) 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 especially older peers, produce the good man experienced at speaking. Sulpicius 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. Rhetorical 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 accepting 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 Cicero'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 identificatory 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 oratory. The text intervenes to supplement this social life —this life held together 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

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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 techniques 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 instruments of subjectivization and as processes concomitant to those of performance 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 rhetorical precepts we can understand any explicit instruction, but especially any codified and transcribed dictates. Examples of such would be the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero's own De inventione,41 and Quintilian's Institutio 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 handbook? Anyone who is lacking in authority in some manner. Nor will the handbook make up for these crippling defects, as such a text cannot guarantee authority. Even the best text, the De oratore, which contains the personality 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 Romans are set against Greeks commonplaces. The text reads ilia 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 depicted 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 sublimity of the textual representation of such company. As far as the Greeks go, their ineptitude and gaucheries are highlighted 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 Romans finds a kindred contrast in 2.247, where the good orator's control is compared to scurrilous license. Permissiveness is precisely what the company 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 proverbial: 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 authentic 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 imitation 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 goodness 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

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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 sophisticated than a simple nostalgic yet resonant invocation of a Roman past could muster. The De oratore presents the apparatus of aristocratic domination 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 contains all of the constitutive exclusions that acting and hedonistic precepts h&d 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 aristocratic 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 rhetorical literature. This is an aristocratic, aggressive, masochistic, and narcissistic 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 patrimony. 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 forensic 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 argument, the text, and the textual performance, though, reproduce in a striking 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 technocratic 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

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veracity, coherence, or sincerity. Some critics believe almost everything, Gotoff nearly nothing. Gotoff thus seems an ardent partisan of Demosthenes' alleged position that performance was everything, even as he subsumes the notion of performance within the broader category of illusion.1 "The fact is," he concludes, "that the orator of a judicial speech is concerned 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 theatrical 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 authorities. 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 himself as a highly reasonable man: and his authority, it augments the argument, doesn't it? This speech become text and text that gestures toward speech per-

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forms a specific version of authority. As with any article from a prestigious journal, there are abundant footnotes. Gotoff cites; he interprets; he attributes. 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 Quintilian 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, T v e 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 tradition of Latin scholarship. The specification of the lecture and the university only reinforces the effect. The ancient version might go something like this, U 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 authority 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 interpret 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

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Latin, and careful interpretation readily insinuate themselves into the ancient 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 Quintilian, 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 includes 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 importance 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, Wilamowitz is widely recognized as one of the founders of modern philology, a textual ancestor whom one seeks to reproduce mimetically if not spontaneously. Nietzsche marks a point of divergence: acknowledged as a father of so-called postmodernity, he was nevertheless trained and for a while em-

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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 rhetoric, 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 Nietzsche 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 rhetoric 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 tradition 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 rhetoric 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 according to the rules of masculinist ontology and teleology. We must be wary of

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reproducing the good man within our own critique of masculinity.9 Nevertheless, 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 rhetorical 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 predicated 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 experience 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 effects. Furthermore the rhetorical texts themselves train their readers in the means whereby the reader too might imbibe excellence, speak authoritatively, 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 reinscribes the legitimacy of virile authority.

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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 importantly, 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 traditionally, 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 ignorant 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 knowledge (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 discourse, must know more bodies than ever before, must perform an even

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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 enacting. 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 Quintilian, 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 melancholy 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 oratore fingendo talem informabo qualis fonasse nemo fuit non enim quaero quis fuerit, sed quid sit Mud quo nihil possit esse praestantius. Oratori. 8. On the formal aspects of the Brutus as an "Aristotelian" dialogue, see Büchner 1964, 324. 9. Cato, De rhetorica fr. 14; preserved in Seneca Maior Controversiae l.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 1960,1516 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.

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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, παις 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 Bourdieu'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 tane 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 τέχναι (Wilkins 1895, 27-29). 26. Foucault's answer centers around practice and self-mastery or self-posses­ sion (ασκησις and εγκράτεια). 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

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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 development 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 importance 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 homosexuality 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 homosexuality 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

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"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, Winkler, 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.

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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 persuadendum 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 ilium qui loqui nesciat, nee sperandum est qui Latine non possity 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" (όλως δέ δει εύανάγνωστον είναι το γεγραμμένον και εΰφραστον). Aristotle, Rhetoric 1407bll. 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.

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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 particularly 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-à-vis Cicero in the course of his discussion of performance 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 tarnen quasi vultus mutandus est? 29. omnia sine remissione sine varietate, vi summa vocis et totius corporis contendo ne 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 apparerei, 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 hie 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 principium orationis, per quod animus auditoris constituitur ad audiendum. Narrano 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"

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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, 23738, 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 "insiders." 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 conceived as necessarily Romans or necessarily members of certain families. Cicero thus makes room for relative arrivistes such as himself while also requiring complete 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 describe 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 performance can be found in Gleason 1995. Fantham 1982 examines Quintilian's relationship 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 economies of pleasure (1990a, 158-59). 11. Compare Isocrates' Antidosis and Against the Sophists. See also the discussion of authentic performance in the chapter on actors. 12. Verum Uli persuasione sua fruantury qui hominibus ut sint oratores satis

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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 Us 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 theoretical analysis produces the object of its inquiry. Foucault calls this "dominationobservation." 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 Cicero, 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

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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. Marius uero, sine quibus trunca esset actio ac debilis, uix dici potest quot motus habeant, cum paene ipsam uerborum copiant 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 Me gestus, quo manus modice supinata ac per singulos a minimo collecta digitos redeunte flexu simul explicatur atque conuertitur. 32. Est et ilia caua et rara et supra umeri altitudinem elata cum quodam motu uelut hortatrix manus, a peregrinis scholis tarnen prope recepta tremula scaenica. Rara is to be taken in the sense offered by the Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. rarus I.e. Compare Maier-Eichhorn 1989, 95: "mit weit gespreizten Fingern." 33. manus cum sensu et ineiperet 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 sententiis 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 ilium de quo dixi decorem, turn etiam ad significationem. 11.3.68. 37. Plerumque tarnen 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 delictis non molliamus, nee 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

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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 described 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. Kühnert 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 exposition 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: Demosthenes, quid esset in toto dicendi opere primum interrogatus, pronuntiationi palmam dedit, eidemque secundum ac tertium locum, donee ab eo quaeri desinerei, ut earn uideri posset non praecipuam sed solam iudicasse. This same anecdote as preserved in Cicero's De oratore is the starting point for Wöhrle's discussion of actio. See Wöhrle 1990. 7. This is the Aristotelian problem of ήθος. 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,

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"of ankles" (?!), conceals the name for a specific festival. There have been a variety of interesting guesses: Rademacher 1971 suggested but did not print ludo rum saltatoriorum. Cousin 1979 documents other efforts. Cousin himself accepts Lydorum et Carum licentiay "the licence of the Lydians and Carians," and he notes the association of these peoples with the exotic rites of Cybele. Winterbottom 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 observations despite some efforts at explaining the psychoanalytic implications of his material. 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 commentary 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 consciousness," 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 François George's pithy summary of the Cartesian cogito à la Sartre: "l'Autre me voit, donc 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 urbanitas 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.

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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 Dénès 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 represents the site at which the male subject deposits his lack." Compare Rose 1982, 4044, on feminine sexuality as a masquerade mobilized by a fundamental reference to a male sign. 7. Michel 1971; Büchner 1964, 212-13; and Schulte 1935 discuss the phrase veritatis ipsius adores. 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 "Critically 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 διάθεσις as delivery. But Liddell and Scott 1968,

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s.v. διάθεσις I.2.b, cites this passage and gives Longinus, Ars rhetorica 104 (ed. Hammer) as a parallel. Ordinarily one would be tempted to see διάθεσις 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 étude, trop étudie pour un orateur." Kytzler 1970 is far closer to the original phrasing: "in Bewegung und Haltung zeigte er für einen Redner übergenug 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 l.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 legitimacy 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 μωκωσαν, from μωκασθαι, 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 μέτρον άριστον. 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

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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 l.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 μίμησις 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. ώς άμαχον είναι και ανυπόστατον. That is, ώς 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 όνομα and είναι while ignoring the qualification of "seeming" as implicit in δόξαις. But here one only needs to note that seeing is itself yoked to the "being/becoming" of γένοιο. 10. Tò μεν ούν θήραμα ου σμικρόν ουδέ ολίγης της σπουδής δεόμενον, άλλα εφ3 οτω και πονησαι πολλά και άγρυπνησαι και πάν ότιουν ύπομειναι άξιον. Praeceptor 2. 11. Altius tarnen ibunt qui ad summa nitentur quam qui praesumpta desperatione quo uelint euadendiprotinus circa ima substiterint. Quintilian l.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-

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ing his head with one finger, though he was totally removed from effeminacy and wantonness" (και Πομπήιον το ένί κνασθαι την κεφαλήν δακτυλω πορρωτάτω θηλύτητος και ακολασίας οντά, 89el). 14. This example of καταφρόνησις 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. Laugh ton 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. μαχαιροποιοϋ υίον και άλλον 'Ατρόμητου τινός γραμματιστου ζήλουν άξιων. Praeceptor 10. 23. οία τα της παλαιάς εργασίας εστίν, Ήγησίου και των άμφί Κριτίον και Νησιώτην, άπεσφιγμένα και νευρώδη και σκληρά και ακριβώς άποτεταμένα ταις γραμμαις. 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 γράμμα is a character or letter and is formed of lines. Each line is a γραμμή. The line and the letter are closely related, but not properly confused where lines (γραμμαί) 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

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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. πήχυς 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. τους δε άρχοντας μεν άρχομένοις, αρχόμενους δέ άρχουσιν ομοίους ίδια τε και δημοσία επαινεί τε και τιμά. Plato, Republic 562d. 38. Compare Wöhrle 1990, 43, on Aristotle and Cleon: "Die maßlose ύπόκρισις 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 (μοχθηρία) 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. Οι φίλοι δέ άναπηδάτωσαν αεί και μισθον των δείπνων αποτινέτωσαν, ει ποτέ αϊσθοιντό σε καταπεσούμενον, χείρα όρέγοντες και παρέχοντες εύρειν το λεχθησόμενον εν τοις μεταξύ των επαίνων διαλείμμασι. Praeceptor 21. The μισθόν των δείπνων presumably corresponds to the Latin sportula. 41. ύπομειδία δέ τα πολλά και δήλος γίγνου μη άρεσκόμενος τοις λεγομένοις. Praeceptor 22. 42. Τοιαύτα μέν τα φανερά και τα έξω; 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 2A.26. 47. ουκ εξαπατήσω δε σε προοιμίοις ηδονής, αλλ' ήπερ οι θεοί διέθεσαν τα οντά διηγήσομαι μετ3 αληθείας. Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.1.27. 48. Compare Branham 1989, 28, for a more directly autobiographical reading of this scene.

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49. Ά ρ τ ι μεν έπεπαύμην εις τά διδασκαλεία φοιτών ήδη την ήλικίαν πρόσηβος ών. Lucian, Somnium l. 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. έπεί νύξ έπήλθεν κατέδαρθον ετι ενδακρυς και την σκυτάλην εννόων. Somnium 4. 52. ή έτερα δε μάλα ευπρόσωπος και το σχήμα ευπρεπής και κόσμιος τήν άναβολήν. Somnium 6. Compare the description of Rhetoric in the Praeceptor, where "fair of face" (ευπρόσωπος) is also used. 53. κάτω νενευκώς εις το έργον, χαμαιπετής και χαμαίζηλος και πάντα τρόπον ταπεινός, ανακύπτων δε ουδέποτε ουδέ άνδρωδες ουδέ ελεύθερον ουδέν έπινοων.

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 familiäres 1.9.23 (September 54) describes both Cicero's retreat 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 Kennedy 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 oratore. 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

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192-208

offering a mélange 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 καλοκαγαθία. 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, turn 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—nee tarnen 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 qualités, il ne serait pas orateur), mais un charme viril et réel, qui ne soit ni douceâtre 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 (commovetur) 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 tarnen 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-Göttingen 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: "Assuredly 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 το πρέπονIdecet to το καλόν Idecor, 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, quern imitetur; turn accédât exercitatio . . . De oratore 2.90. 38. ex quorum scriptis. De oratore 2.92. 39. Atque esse tarnen multos videmus, qui neminen imitentur et suapte natura, quod velini, 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 reconstruction of Dionysius' fragmentary On Imitation and its relationship to other works by Dionysius. 41. Effudi vobis omnia quae sentiebam, quae fortasse, quemcumque patremfamilias 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. MacKendrick 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

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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 anstößigste Philologe des Träges." 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 argument 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 Zarathustra 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 rereadings 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.15,19799, 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, 175η. 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,!, 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., l l l n . 1 Barwick, Κ., 204η. 22 Bloom, Η., 229 Boltanski, L., 59η. 2, 60η. 5, 67 Bompaire, X, 149η. 2, 215 Bonner, S., 55η, 118η, 215η. 40 Bottermann-Göttingen, Η., 209η. 31 Bourdieu, P., 9-10, lOnn. 18,19,11, lin. 20,12, 27η, 32, 37, 57η, 59η. 2, 67-69, 72-73, 73η, 78, 80, 88η.3, 97,106,113,174,189,218 Bowersock, G., 150η. 4 Branham, B., 150,172η, 180η. 45, 183η. 48 Bremmer, Χ, 59η. 2 Brinton, Α., 7η. 10 Brown, Ν., 16η Brown, P., 9 Brutus, 6, 55, 213, 219 Büchner, Κ., 8η. 6,115η. 7 Butler, X, 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, 82-83,106,115-16,13435,138-40,147,171,185 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, X, 37n. 14, 41n. 25, 95n. 10, llln.1 Craig, C , 209n. 32 Crassus, 53, 55,118-20,132-33,14243,190-91,191n. 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 Denes, T., l l l n . 1 Derrida, I , 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, X, l l l n . 1 Dupont, E, l l l n . 1 Edwards, C , lllnn. 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 Eratosthenes, 100 Euripides, 121 Explicitness, 2, 24, 83,126,128,13234, 217, 220 Fanon,E, 173n. 36 Fantham, E., lln. 21, 41n. 25, 59n. 2, 87n Fatherhood, 9,47,117,183, 214-15, 219; Law of the Father, 113,147, 216; Paternal Gaze, 145-47. See also Authority Ferrari, G., 3n. 3 Fitzgerald, W., 150n. 5 Fortenbaugh, W., 175n. 38 Fortunatianus, 50 Foucault, M., viii, 9,13,13n, 22-23, 23nn. 43-45, 24, 24nn.46,47,25, 60, 60n. 6, 62n, 65n. 20, 72, 74, 84n. 48,109n.23,115,161n. 16 Fowler, W., 205n. 26 Frank, T., 187n. 1 Freud, S., 3,13,16,16n, 17,17nn. 30, 32, 33,18,18nn. 34, 35,19n, 22,116, 116n. 10, 208n. 29 Gabba, E., 164n. 21 Gallagher, C , ix Gallus,P.,31-32

GENERAL INDEX

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 bonus Giomini, R., 29n. 2 Gleason, M., 8-10, lOn. 18,12, 59n. 3, 81n. 41,105,227n. 8 Golden, M., 7n. 12 Goldhill, S., 41n. 23, 227n. 8 Gonfroy, K, 120n., 161n. 17,197n Gorgias, 14n Gotoff, H., l l n . 21, 41n. 23,116n. 8, 126n, 209n. 32, 223-26, 224nn. 1,2, 229 Graf, R, 37n. 16, 59n. 2, 80n, l l l n . 2 Grant, W., 93n. 7 Green, W., l l l n . 2 Griffith, M., ix Grimal, P., l l l n . 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, llOn, 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, X, 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., 115n. 7

263

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 "Know thyself," 137 Krenkel,W., 129n. 17 Kristeva, J., 106,106n. 19,173n. 36 Kroll, W., 29n. 3, 31, 95n. 9,188,193n. 13,204n.21 Kronos, 168 Kiihnert, E, 88n. 2,195 Kytzler, B., 132n Lacan, J., viii, 13,13nn. 31, 32,14,1718,18nn. 36, 37, 20, 20n, 21, 21nn. 39-41, 22, 25,103-4, 104nn.16,17, 105-6,106nn.18,20, 107-8, 108n, 109,113,116,134,134n, 145-46, 148,171,176n. 39,191n.8, 226 Lamour, D., 23n. 44 Lash, S., 59n. 2 Laughton, E., 7n. 10,115n. 7, 164n. 21 Lausberg, H., l l n . 21, 31 Leach, E., 16n, 96n, 191n. 8 Leda, 166-67 Leeman, A., 183n. 7,191n. 9 Leen, A., 165n Leo, E, 15n Lloyd, G.,78n Lloyd, G(enevieve), 3n. 4 Lossau, M., 175n. 38

264

GENERAL INDEX

Lucian, 209, 217, 219n. 46, 227 Lyotard,J.-E, 229 MacKendrick, P., 52n, 57n, 187, 215n. 42 MacMullen, R., 169n. 31 Maier-Eichhorn, U., In, 74n. 30, 75n. 32 Martha, J., 132n Martin, J., 31 Martindale, C.,40, 40n Marx, E , 31n. 7, 52n Masochism, 89,117, 222 Mauss, M., lOn. 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, 39, 46, 49, 52, 57, 60, 78, 80, 86, 112,121,145,147,152,187, 213-14, 221 Prodicus, 180,182 Pucci, J., 31n. 8 Pudor, 127n, 205-8 Rackham, H., 191n. 9 Rademacher, L., 41n. 24, 95n. 10 Ramage, E., 84n. 47, 95n. 9, 187n. 3 Reardon, B., 185,215 Remus, 111, 227 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 30-35, 47, 50-52,54,77,127,188, 220, 229 Richlin, A., 23n. 44,155,155n, 169n. 30,180n. 44 Riggsby, A., 96n Romm, X, 166nn. 25, 27,184n. 50 Romulus, 111,227 Roodenburg, H., 59n. 2 Roscius, 118-20,141-42,146 Rose, I , 20n, 104n. 16,109,115n. 6, 140n Rose, P., 73n Rubin, G., 164 Ruch, M., 57n

GENERAL INDEX

Santoro L'Hoir, R, 7n. 13,196n. 15 Sardanapalus, 154-55,157-58 Sartre, J.-R, 108n. 22 Satyrus, 121,142 Saussure, P., 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, R, 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; opposed 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

265

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, X, 52n Venus, 128-30,132,154-55 Vergil, 35-37, 39-41, 44, 48 Verres, 126 Veyne, P., 169n. 31 Victor, 29n. 2, 32, 50-51 Vir bonus, 6-9, 15-19, 21, 27-28, 3 7 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., l l n . 22 Walters,!, 7n. 13 Wardy, R., 227n. 8 Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, U., 163n, 226-27, 227n. 5 Wilde, O., 155 Wilkins, A., 12n. 25,190,191n. 9, 200, 209 Winkler, J., 23n. 44 Winterbottom, M., 7n. 10, 37n. 14, 84n. 47, 95n. 10,187n. 2 Wiseman, T , l l l n . 3 Wohl,V, ix, 166n. 28 Wohrle, G., 92n, 175n. 38 Writing, 15, 29-58, 63,102, 211-12, 214, 221, 230 Wyke, M., 7,103n, 155n, 173n. 35 Xenophon,180-82 Zeitlin, R, 23n. 44 Zeus, 166-68

Index Locorum

Alexander Defiguris 28.3: 137n. 27 Aristophanes Clouds: 149 Thesmophoriazousai: 179n 130-45: 158 Aristotle Politics 1312al: 158n Rhetoric: 12, 227 1403b20:12n. 24, 31 1403b34:175n. 38 1407bll: 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 1.205-8: 218n. 44 2.5: 54

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 Pro Ligario 1.1: 48 1.2: 42n Pro Milone: 2, 44, 45, 46, 98, 209 11.32: 60n. 7 31.85: 48 Pro Rabirio perduellionis reo 6.18: 43 Pro rege Deiotaro 1.1: 209 Pro Sestio: 116n. 8 Pro S. Roscio Amerino 30.84: 60n. 7 Tusculan Disputations 3.41: 205n. 25 [Cicero] Rhetorica ad Herennium 1.1: 6, 52 1.3: 29n. 2 1.4: 50n. 35 3.19: 12n. 23, 30 3.25-26: 127 3.27: 31, 32n. 11 4.24: 51n. 38 Dionysius of Halicarnassus On the Ancient Orators: 65n. 19, 215n. 40 On Imitation: 215n. 40 Fortunatianus Ars Rhetorica 1.10: 50n. 36 2.1: 70n Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 1.5.1-3: 127-28, 178 6.5.1-8: 140-41

INDEX LOCORUM

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

269

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 Enemies 89el: 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 Life of Pompey 48: 157 [Plutarch] Lives of the Ten Orators 844d: 101 Pollux Onomasticon 167n. 29 Quintilian Institutio oratoria 1 .pr. 1: 87 l.pr.2: 87 l.pr.4: 87 l.pr.6: 9 l.pr.7:30,47, 87 l.pr.9: 6, 87 l.pr.18-20: 33, 88, 120, 149n. 1, 153n 1.7.34-35: 59 1.11.9:156 1.11.18:80 3.1.8: 12n. 25 3.1.19:7 3.3: 29n. 1 4.2.39: 156 5.10.23-25: 70 6.3.104: 84n. 47 9.2.32: 43n 9.4.19: 38n. 20 10.1.76: 100 10.3.1: 210 10.3.25: 102

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 11.3.144-49: 162 11.3.158:53,73,75 11.3.159: 72n. 26,75, 79 11.3.160: 77-78 11.3.161: 77n. 37 11.3.161-62: 75 11.3.162: 48 11.3.162-69: 42 11.3.169: 43 11.3.175-76: 40 11.3.177: 72 11.3.180-84: 62,137 11.3.183:139 11.3.184: 67 12.1.25: 88 Seneca Epistulae morales 114: 65n. 19 114.2: 221n Seneca the Elder Controversiae: 151n. 8 l.pr.9: 7n. 9 3.pr.l6: 98 Sophocles Electra: 140-41 Suetonius De grammaticis et rhetoribus 26: 32 Tacitus Dialogus de oratoribus: 151n. 8

INDEX LOCORUM

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

271