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CHAPTER TWELVE
Epideictic Oratory
Alex Petkas
A late antique individual’s life was punctuated by publicly experienced occasions. Some were cyclical or regularly occurring: They included birthdays, arrivals, departures of important persons such as governors and emperors, contests and feasts, often in honor of God or gods, saints, heroes, or rulers. Others were theoretically unique, such as marriages, deaths, disasters, and victories. Which events one participated in, and the degree to which one could participate, varied greatly depending on social status, location, and gender; urbanites had many more such events to choose from than their rural counterparts. All of these occasions could be augmented by public speeches composed for and delivered at the event – the more important the occasion, the more likely a speaker would be slotted into the agenda. Prose speeches in this era took over many of the ceremonial and ritual roles of poetry from earlier periods (Pernot 2015, pp. 15–16). Thus while the conventions of this “epideictic” oratory drew on the millennium‐old tradition of paideia and had important precedents in the classical age of the fifth and fourth century BCE Greek poleis, the genre achieved an unprecedented flowering in the highly ceremonialized imperial Roman world, especially in the Greek‐speaking East (Pernot 2015, pp. 1–28; both judicial and deliberative rhetoric remained important as well, and central in teaching: Webb 2003; Heath 2004).
12.1 What Do We Mean by “Epideictic”?
The term “epideictic” (epideixis, “a display,” with the related verb epideiknusthai, “to make a display”) out of context might suggest a staggeringly broad range of discourse (Burgess 1902 takes such an approach). Aristotle was the first to associate the genre of epideictic rhetoric specifically with praise and blame; he additionally claims its point of reference as the present (whereas judicial addresses the past and deliberative the future; Rhetoric 1358b). This schema – which we might reframe as evaluative discourse with reference to the present occasion – is still useful for identifying many of the salient features of late antique epideictic, and we will follow it in this chapter; despite the fact that epideictic in many ways breaks down into a set of discrete subgenres, it was unified enough that it could also be treated as a single category by late antique practitioners and theoreticians – for example, Menander Rhetor (see below).
It is helpful to be aware of some related and occasionally interchangeable terms. Encomium is the most common word for describing the extended praise of individuals; it is often treated by the handbooks as a smaller unit within an entire epideictic speech. Panegyric etymologically refers to a festival (panegyris) and thus by extension to the sort of speech delivered there (such as Isocrates’s Panegyricus) (on terminology: Russell 1998, pp. 19–21; Pernot 2015, pp. 70–71); while often used as a synonym for epideictic by modern scholars, the word was more often used in its more focused sense by ancient authors. For many reasons, praise is much more common than blame in the practice of epideictic. (For invective see Flower 2013).
A treatment this brief of a topic this vast cannot hope to be comprehensive. My main objectives will be to give an overview of the subject of late antique epideictic, indicate some exciting recent developments in the field, and provide some illustrative examples. We will thus leave aside many forms of speech and writing that might fit the category as laid out above. Imperial panegyrics, perhaps the highest‐stakes form of epideictic rhetoric in late antiquity, are distinctive enough to deserve their own separate chapter in this volume. I will therefore focus on aspects of the genre other than its role in negotiating power between ruled and rulers or among the ruling classes – and thus I will bypass, too, the praise of imperial governors and officials, which can be argued to have more in common with imperial panegyric than, say, with festal orations (compare the basilikos logos with the prosphonetikos at Menander (II) 368 and 414.31, respectively). Julian’s fascinating and idiosyncratic Misopogon is composed in the form of an epideictic speech (an inverted “praise of city”; Marcone 1984; Gleason 1993), but it falls outside of our scope because of its imperial quality. I also will not be concerned with verse epideictics (both of praise and blame) such as are found among the poems of Claudian in Latin. While here the comparison with prose epideictic, even in Greek, is illuminating, nevertheless such poetry is indebted enough to the traditions of Latin epic and satire to merit separate treatment (Long 1996, pp. 65–105; Ware 2012).
These two omissions make the focus of this essay overwhelmingly Greek; besides the (imperial) Panegyrici Latini, there are far fewer surviving examples of prose epideictic in Latin from late antiquity. This is not merely an accident of transmission. The epideictic genre was seen by Cicero as primarily a Greek phenomenon, the one exception being the funeral oration performed in the senate house (De Orat 2.341); he lists no examples of Roman epideictic in his Brutus. Quintilian echoes Cicero’s genealogical judgment, though he observes that prose epideictic has become quite fashionable in his own day (Inst. 3.7; there are, of course, many Silver Latin poetic examples; see Peirano 2012, pp. 117–172). Isidore of Seville in part reproduces the earlier Roman bias when criticizing panegyric as a wicked Greek invention by which orators flatter rulers with specious lies (Etymologies 6.8.7), although professing suspicion of false and empty speeches is, in fact, a very ancient topos within Greek epideictic itself (e.g. Thucydides 2.35). There are, nonetheless, a few other extant late antique Latin epideictics such as Ambrose’s funeral oration for his brother Satyrus (Savon 1980; McCauley et al. 1953). The genres of biography and hagiography draw much from the epideictic tradition but also deserve separate treatment. Syriac literature seems for the most part to be only indirectly affected by the Greek epideictic tradition until the later Middle Ages (Watt 1989, 1993 for Antony of Tagrit). Our chronological focus is primarily on the fourth century, which stands out for the quantity, variety, and innovativeness of its surviving epideictic speeches.
12.2 Topoi
In attempting to understand late antique epideictic, we are aided in particular by a set of rhetorical treatises most likely from the late third century. These include two texts on epideictic attributed to the sophist Menander of Laodicea (third century CE), usually collectively referred to as “Menander Rhetor” I and II (below often as “M. R.”). They were almost surely written by different authors (Russell and Wilson 1981, pp. xxxiv–xl) and the first of the two is particularly unlikely to have actually come from Menander (Heath 2004, pp. 127–131). In addition to these there are the beginning sections “on epideictic speeches,” from a larger rhetorical treatise probably from around the same period, falsely attributed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus (hereafter “Dionysius”; translation (based on Radermacher’s text) in Russell and Wilson 1981, pp. 362–381). The first Menandrian treatise organizes the speeches by the subject of praise; treatise I
I organizes encomia by occasion. “Dionysius” follows the same occasion‐based approach as Menander II. This method of categorization by occasion type has no equivalent in the treatises dedicated to the deliberative and judicial genres: Encomium here is seen no longer as an abstract rhetorical form, but rather as a social practice, or set of social practices, embodied in concrete circumstances (Pernot 2015, p. 20).
Whether our fourth century epideictic authors actually possessed and referred to copies of these works, or had been exposed to them in their rhetorical training, is difficult to say with confidence, but many parallels with extant epideictics suggest that at the very least these treatises reflect trends prevalent in late antiquity. Nonetheless, it should be kept in mind that the more talented a rhetor was, the less dependent he was likely to be on topoi. Moreover, a quality rhetorical education emphasized sensitivity and a critical stance toward textbook formulae (Heath 2004, pp. 217–254; Menander II.430.7–8).
12.3 Some Social Aspects of Epideictic
Pure “display” was an important feature of high imperial Greek rhetorical culture, and this continued into the now increasingly so‐called Third Sophistic (Fowler and Quiroga Puertas 2014). For young elite men attending school, an important part of rhetorical education involved learning to emulate examples both living and dead (Libanius, Or. 1.23; see Cribiore 2007, pp. 138–141). It was standard academic practice to attend the lectures not just of one’s own chosen teacher but of other sophists in the city as well (Libanius, Or. 1.16), and these were often simply model speeches. While the lectures were often referred to as epideixeis, they could also treat, besides “epideictic” in our sense, judicial and deliberative declamations (drawn from historical or fictional situations); students would then learn to produce their own examples in imitation (Cribiore 2001, pp. 231–238). Even if the occasion or theme (hypothesis) was fictional, the stakes for teachers were real: Failure to regularly impress even their own students could mean “a risk of being scorned and overlooked by the lads as they flutter away” to other teachers, as Synesius remarks in his humorous and unflattering portrayal of the life of professional sophists in the Dio (12–14, esp. 14.2). In his student days in Athens, Libanius felt the inverse of this pressure: He incurred the anger of his school when he, unimpressed, failed to clamor and applaud his own teacher’s speeches (Or. 1.17).
There were many consequential fields for epideictic action beyond the classroom. From the earlier, high imperial period, there is abundant inscriptional evidence for contests at civic festivals and Panhellenic games, at which prizes were awarded for prose encomia (see Wörrle 1988). Festal orations (panegyric proper), treated below, were not always formally competitive. On the other hand, Libanius’s autobiography vividly records the intensely competitive atmosphere at Constantinople of public rhetoric contests, which do not seem to be necessarily associated with religious festivals. He records one instance of a Cappadocian sophist at Constantinople who, as a result of an impressive speech in one single competition, was installed in an imperially sponsored chair of rhetoric by recommendation of the city council (Or. 1.35).
This rhetorical, epideictic culture played a determinative role in the development of the nascent Christian homiletic discourse. It provided the social and intellectual context for the consumption of highly stylized, extended speeches pertaining to ethically or socially normative themes; it also reinforced a traditional vocabulary of praise and blame based on examples drawn from a traditional repertoire (Cameron 1991, pp. 73–88). But even though we have extensive knowledge of the oral culture of late antiquity, we must never forget, when dealing with extant examples of epideictic, that what we have are texts and not verbatim transcripts of oral performances. Extant epideictic speeches are a literary genre purporting to imitate or record social acts; similar things could be said, mutatis mutandis, about much of Greek and Latin poetry. The historian must thus be careful before inferring from a written speech what was actually said on a particular occasion; and the literary scholar should take note both of an epideictic text’s performative possibilities and its potential literary ambitions. We possess many of the works that we do precisely because their authors in one way or another hoped and ensured that they would transcend the often ephemeral circumstances that they purport to address, and this often involved revising an originally delivered speech. Though this fact may sometimes cast doubt on the strict “historicity” of texts, it can also be seen to enhance their complexity and depth. At any rate, an author’s license in revising was not unlimited.
I will first offer a more extended treatment of a single epideictic speech, and then go on to treat other forms more briefly.
12.4 An Epithalamium
Himerius, sophist and teacher of rhetoric in Athens (fl. mid 340 s–mid 360 s), wrote an epithalamios logos for his former student Severus. Menander and “Dionysius” both address this genre of “wedding speech” (II.339.11; 269 Radermacher), which had its origins in the “wedding poem” (epithalamium) of which many famous earlier examples are extant both in Latin and Greek (e.g. Theocritus 18; Catullus 62, 64). Himerius’s piece is strikingly close at points to the lighthearted advice of Menander – much more so than to the moralizing “Dionysius” (Russell 1979; Penella 2007 (who also provides a translation)). Nonetheless he executes this performance for Severus and his bride with his own personal touch and sensitivity to the specific situation.
He begins with a proem (9.3–6), in which he touches on the mythic and historical origins of the genre of the current speech. Apollo turned to wedding songs after he had won great victories playing the lyre; similarly, Lesbian Sappho positioned herself in a soon‐to‐be couple’s bedroom, gathered the young maidens, and summoned Aphrodite “after the contests.” Now Himerius takes up the same duty. Through this mythic figuration he contrasts the lighthearted and joyful world of wedding rhetoric with the agonistic contests for which he and his students normally train: The lyric contests of the past here represent the sophistic performances and contests of his day (“It is time for me, too, to be done with serious music so that I may dance along with the young girls in honor of Aphrodite” [9.3]). He conceives of his project, here more vividly than elsewhere, as a fundamentally poetic one.
Next comes the thesis section, which according to the handbook guidelines is supposed to argue that marriage is a good thing (M. R. II.400.29). Himerius begins, fittingly, with the origin of the universe (9.7). The cosmogonic union of God and Nature is the first event in a long series of famous marital couplings: Ocean and Tethys, the Danube and the Black Sea, the Rhine and the Atlantic. The two great aforementioned rivers arise at the same source, but Eros divided them and sent them chasing after different lovers. Himerius leaves implicit, but obvious, the fact that the god responsible for this happy provincial event is also the god who gave the future Romans their northern border.
Geographical texturing is, in fact, one of the more striking features of this epithalamios. The groom was a native of Athens, who had been set up with a noble wife from a distant Thracian city named after Philip II of Macedon (either Philippopolis or (probably) Philippi; Penella 2007). An ecumenical marriage between an outsider and someone from what was still the conceptual center of the civilized world for many Greeks – especially the small but entrenched local elite of Athens (Watts 2006, pp. 48–78) – deserved an ecumenical treatment. Thus while in the thesis section Himerius does highlight, after the rather “cosmic” Danube and Rhine, some more local lover‐rivers, such as the Boeotian Enipeus and the Attic Ilissus, in the following “praise of the families” section he pans back out. Needing a glorious example with which to compare the youthful love of the couple, he aptly adduces Philip II himself and Olympias, the mother of Alexander – who fell in love with the young king upon seeing him at the Mysteries of Samothrace (but contrast Plutarch, Alexander 2.2). He goes on to praise the royal Thracian lineage of the bride’s family, describing where their city lies (west of the Bosporus, near the Scythians, with the Aegean lying to the so
uth). Then Himerius (himself originally from Bithynia) having earlier pointed out that the story (trite by then) of Athenian autochthony is a myth (9.9), elaborates on the noble and non‐Athenian origin of the groom’s family: They originally came from the province of Diospontus (the name had actually been “Helenopontus” since the reign of Constantine). Thus the orator deftly turns a potential point of weakness or anxiety for the young couple into an object of praise: Such outsiders, he implies, do not debase but ennoble the stock of the city. This integrative act of rhetoric incidentally shows that knowledge of localized traditions of myth and ancestry was still vibrant and very useful in the popular culture of late antiquity; enthusiasm for it is widely attested in contemporary epideictic (e.g. Libanius, Antiochikos (= Or.11)).
While his praise of the bride in the final section is woven with elegant studs of Sappho and Anacreon, he warms to the conclusion with an elaborate paraleipsis: “If I had a poetic nature such that I could freely let my tongue loose,” he would have summoned the Muses from their home in Athens (not Boeotia, pace the poets) and the Nereids from the sea and would have led a chorus of Nymphs, Dryads, Satyrs, Pan, Dionysus, and others. But he restrains himself. Despite suggesting above that he does not have a poetic nature, he proceeds rather to demonstrate the opposite, rounding off this paraleipsis with brief wedding ode “such as I would have provided if a song had been needed.” The piece that follows is not in verse but is so poetic in language that editors have suspected a lost fragment of Sappho under it (Bergk PLG 133). Whether or not there is a Lesbian Vorlage here, the audience is left with a sense that the orator has not, in fact, unleashed his full potential, but that the nuptial feast has nonetheless received what was “needed” – in this case, rhetorical brilliance under firm and cool control, and respect for the aesthetic virtue of to prepon (appropriateness) with respect to kairos (occasion).
