In Calpurnius Flaccus's Declamation 2, a Roman wife is accused of infidelity on the grounds that she has given birth to an "Aethiopian" (Aethiops). The present article seeks to contextualize this relatively understudied declamation within the recent efflorescence of scholarship on ancient race, highlighting its connections to conventional discourses of race in Latin literature. In what follows, I identify a system of racial categorization as a component of Rome's imperializing vision of the world and demonstrate how discourses of race regulate domestic concerns at Rome, such as marriage, extramarital desire, and reproduction. The article also seeks to show how anxieties of racial contact, exemplified by blackness as index of symbolic exteriority, collide with anxieties regarding the presence of enslaved people within the Roman household.
This study explores the place of Ciceronian rhetoric and the humanist tradition of argument in Anthony Trollope's historical and fictional writing. I argue that although Trollope, for reasons common to the Victorians, expresses significant doubt about the value of Ciceronian inventio in his Life of Cicero, he celebrates the tradition-particularly the role of disputatio in utramque partem (argument on both sides of an issue) and skepticism-in novels such as He Knew He Was Right. In this way, Trollope's fiction features what Thomas O. Sloane characterizes as a rhetorical cast of mind.
Writing amid the overthrow of the French Bourbon monarchy, Mary Wollstonecraft in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) undertakes her own radical rethinking of established hierarchies, specifically those between rational "conviction" and passionate "persuasion" as they pertained to larger debates about how to influence collective opinion and action. Responding to British and French Enlightenment rhetorics and to French political oratory, Wollstonecraft posits the deep integration of reason and passion in the language of influence as much by the performance as by the precepts of her text. She also considers how such language necessitates and engenders deliberation about its compatibility with the public good. If French Revolution resembles the Vindications by its animus against the rhetoric of (often veiled) self-interest, it simultaneously attests to, and consequentially retheorizes, the role of rhetorical persuasion in the service of democratic contestation and change.
Towards the end of his life (ca. 1790-1797), Edmund Burke resorted to a series of sublime appeals in his letters, pamphlets, and speeches, repeating several of the aesthetic forms he had theorized in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757/1759). These appeals invoked psychological terror and provoked violent response, leading Burke and his intended audience away from the prudential deliberation and liberal constitutionalism that he espoused in previous decades. Burke's sublime rhetoric constituted an illiberal response to efforts at promoting toleration of religious Dissenters and electoral reform. Additionally, Burke's authoritarian sublimity accounts for the reception of his Revolutionary arguments both in the late eighteenth century and in our own times. Finally, analysis of Burke's sublime appeals in the 1790s reveals that Burke was more than a psychological theorist of aesthetic affect. He was also a rhetorical practitioner with political effect.
This study explores the moral character (Ethos) of metic litigants and non-litigants in select forensic orations of public nature in the Demosthenic corpus and argues the ad hoc socio-economic standing of metics, their legal status, and their occupations were critical factors in constructing elaborate and complex metic portrayals (individual or collective) in forensic narratives. The evidence shows negative portrayals of metic men and women, but metics were not invariably depicted as the malevolent "other." Taking as its starting point the Aristotelian teachings about constructing ethos in forensic narratives, which ought themselves to be ethikai, this analysis draws attention to legal status as a critical factor in constructing moral character, and in more nuanced and complex ways than contemporary, 4th-century BCE rhetorical theory would advise. Provided these portrayals were curated to appeal to large panels of citizen dikastai, these rhetorical portrayals of metics in court may shed light on ambivalent Athenian attitudes towards metics.
