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Major Characters in Roman Declamation by Miller MAJOR CHARACTERS IN ROMAN DECLAMATION BY MILLER KRAUSE A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2016 © 2016 Miller Krause 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank the faculty and staff of the University of Florida for their support and patience, though which I was able to complete this dissertation in a relaxed time frame that allowed me to explore profitably many other avenues of research unrelated to declamation. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................3 ABSTRACT............................................................................................................6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION.........................................................................................7 Definition.....................................................................................................7 History of Declamation..............................................................................10 Literature Review......................................................................................13 Declamation as Philosophy.......................................................................20 Methods ....................................................................................................25 2 REASON AND JUSTICE...........................................................................29 The Philosopher (Philosophus) ................................................................30 The Orator (Orator, Disertus)....................................................................32 The Physician (Medicus)...........................................................................34 3 DIVINE AND HUMAN................................................................................42 Named Gods.............................................................................................44 Vesta ..............................................................................................45 Mars ...............................................................................................47 Jupiter, Minerva, Prometheus.........................................................48 Priests (Sacerdotes) .................................................................................49 Vestal Virgins and the Pontifex.......................................................50 Priest of Mars .................................................................................55 Generic Priests...............................................................................56 Religious Figures not Aligned with the City...............................................60 Enemy Priests and Vestal Virgins...................................................60 The Mage (Magus) .........................................................................61 Oracles and Sacrifices..............................................................................63 Dreamers ..................................................................................................66 People Saved or Destroyed by Gods........................................................68 4 THE MARTIAL SPIRIT ..............................................................................70 The Soldier (Miles)....................................................................................70 The General (Imperator and Dux).............................................................73 Other Officers: The Tribune (Tribunus) .....................................................79 The War Hero (Vir Fortis)..........................................................................80 The Tyrannicide (Tyrannicida)..................................................................90 The Gladiator (Gladiator) and the Martial Artist (Pancratiasta).................95 4 5 MERCHANTS AND ARTISTS ...................................................................99 The Merchant (Mercator, Negotiator)......................................................100 The Slave Dealer (Venaliciarius, Mango)................................................102 The Pimp (Leno) and the Prostitute (Meretrix)........................................103 The Pimp (Leno)...........................................................................104 The Prostitute (Meretrix)...............................................................108 The Craftsman (Artifex)...........................................................................114 Phidias and Parrhasius.................................................................115 Craftsmen of the Dec. Maj............................................................117 6 FIGURES OUTSIDE THE LAW ..............................................................121 The King (Rex)........................................................................................122 Cotys ............................................................................................123 Philip and Alexander.....................................................................125 The Tyrant (Tyrannus).............................................................................126 The Attempted Tyrant ...................................................................132 The Retired Tyrant........................................................................136 The Dead Tyrant...........................................................................137 The Pirate (Pirata, Prædo) and Brigand (Latro)......................................139 The Exile (Exul) ......................................................................................144 The Proscript (Proscriptus) .....................................................................149 7. CONCLUSIONS......................................................................................151 LIST OF REFERENCES....................................................................................156 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.................................................................................160 5 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy MAJOR CHARACTERS IN ROMAN DECLAMATION By Miller Krause December 2016 Chair: Konstantinos Kapparis Major: Classical Studies Roman declamation analyzes philosophical questions by working and reworking fictitious speeches that present imaginary characters contesting wildly improbable suits as if in a court of law. Past scholarship into the nature of these suits has focused on the laws governing these suits or on mining the cases for social history and cultural insight. This dissertation examines instead the characters that declamation uses to raise and define its philosophic questions. The first chapter provides an introduction to declamation and a new perspective on philosophy’s influence on declamation. The subsequent chapters group the major characters of declamation into political and religious characters, military characters, merchants and artists, and characters outside the law. 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Definition Declamation was a practice and a product. Both in schools and outside them, elite Hellenistic Greeks and Romans, and after them Christians such as the sixth century bishop Ennodius and major figures of the Renaissance like Juan Luis Vives, Thomas More, and Desiderius Erasmus, composed and delivered persuasive speeches on topics that were fictions. Some Romans, like Seneca the Elder, Calpurnius Flaccus, and two figures falsely, as it seems, identified as Quintilian in the manuscript tradition, wrote excerpts of these speeches or, in a few instances, committed the entirety to paper. These products make up the surviving classical Latin corpus of declamation, our best evidence for the practice in ancient Roman society. The later Latin declamations, from Ennodius on, imitate and innovate upon the classical corpus. In broad outline, the products took two forms: controversiæ, mock judicial speeches that assign punishment or reward for some past action, and suasoriæ or deliberationes, speeches regarding a future course of action and presented in the persona of an advisor generally to a king or free city, but occasionally to a military commander or notable citizen. The suasoriæ adapted well-known historical, mythic, or literary situations, sometimes with a twist: for example, a declaimer might argue that Hannibal, upon being recalled to Carthage, should obey orders or disobey them either to continue the fight in Italy or to invade Egypt.1 Romans knew the persona or character of Hannibal and so automatically had a frame of reference for the speech: when and where it was set, who might be giving it, what might be credible, and, for dramatic 1. The theme proposed at Auct. ad Her. 3.2. 7 irony, what actually happened. Suasoriæ thus require a practitioner to put himself into the shoes, as it were, of a well-known figure to work out a moral dilemma from a perspective alien to his own.2 The persona in which the declaimer of a suasoria speaks is that of an advisor to a man of power, thinking and speaking not as a king or general, but as a subordinate advisor, an active participant in a democracy, or a concerned fellow citizen.3 Controversiæ, on the other hand, rarely adopted from outside sources such personæ and settings.4 Instead, they relied upon a plethora of stock characters
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