Social status and legal privilege in the Roman Empire

For the Greeks and Romans, the Earth's furthest perimeter was a realm radically different from what they perceived as central and human. The alien qualities of these "edges of the Earth" became the basis of a literary tradition that endured throughout antiquity and into the Renaissance, despite the growing challenges of emerging scientific perspectives. This survey reveals that the Greeks, and to a somewhat lesser extent the Romans, saw geography not as a branch of physical science but as an important literary genre. The tradition described by Romm emerged in Homer and Hestiod, whose imaginative geography defined the Earth by giving it boundaries - the river Ocean, the Pillars of Heracles, and other mythical forms of circumscription. Other Greek authors developed exotic literary landscapes by filling these "limits" with idealized human societies and bizarre or monstrous animal life, while the Romans adapted the concept of perimeters to goals of imperial conquest. As Hellenistic and Roman voyages of exploration failed to confirm the fancied landscapes, the tradition came to be seen as one in which invented narratives had masqueraded as truths. As a result, some of late antiquity's most daring innovations seized on geography as a theme for prose fiction, and the explorer's log became an important antecedent of the early modern novel.

"The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought. Geography, Exploration and Fiction", James S. Romm, New Jersey 1992 : [recenzja] / Izabela Żbikowska.

The reader had long been neglected in the history of western literature. This situation began changing in 60s of the 20 th century when literary critics turned their attention to reader. In order to observe the aesthetic activities and response in the reading process, the theorists of reception-response put forward some models of reader. Wolfgang Iser, a scholar of aesthetic response,presents a concept of "the implied reader"after studying the other models carefully.He thinks that"the implied reader"exists in the predispositions of the text and the actualizing acts of the reader.The study of the reader typology is conducive to show the advantage of Iserian type and its present significance.

On"The Implied Reader

The careers of two popular second-century rhetorical virtuosos offer Maud Gleason fascinating insights into the ways ancient Romans constructed masculinity during a time marked by anxiety over manly deportment. Declamation was an exhilarating art form for the Greeks and bilingual Romans of the Second Sophistic movement, and its best practitioners would travel the empire performing in front of enraptured audiences. The mastery of rhetoric marked the transition to manhood for all aristocratic citizens and remained crucial to a man's social standing. In treating rhetoric as a process of self-presentation in a face-to-face society, Gleason analyzes the deportment and writings of the two Sophists - Favorinus, a eunuch, and Polemo, a man who met conventional gender expectations - to suggest the ways character and gender were perceived. Physiognomical texts of the era show how intently men scrutinized one another for minute signs of gender deviance in such features as gait, gesture, facial expression, and voice. Rhetoricians trained to develop these traits in a \"masculine\" fashion. Examining the successful career of Favorinus, whose high-pitched voice and florid presentation contrasted sharply with the traditionalist style of Polemo, Gleason shows, however, that ideal masculine behavior was not a monolithic abstraction. In a highly accessible study treating the semiotics of deportment and the medical, cultural, and moral issues surrounding rhetorical activity, she explores the possibilities of self presentation in the search for recognition as a speaker and a man.

Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome

DESPITE the extensive re-writing of Perry's 1951 Sather Lectures and a large added body of valuable notes their general principle and the theory of the Romance resulting from it remain simple, namely, that literary works must not be treated like biological specimens capable of spontaneous evolution from form to form. Each is the unique production of a writer's purpose, consciously willed, and it is in this area not in the re-shuffling of depersonalized literary forms that a research for origins must proceed. Ask why, not how. The Romances exhibit a bewildering variety of ingredients—love-story, adventure, myth, history, science, religion—and the problem has seemed to be that of deciding which ingredient was the originating nucleus and how it generated the next stage in the series. Perry starts by dismissing all this summarily ('Rohde devoted, irrelevantly, some 275 pages of his great book to what he called Vorlmtfer . . . without realizing the futility of it'). He attacks at length Aristotle who, alloyed with nineteenth-century biological assumptions, supplied the basically misleading evolutionary theory behind all such speculation, and insists that we examine the circumstance and intention of the individual writer, since (with Croce) 'every piece of literature . . . is . . . a distinct literary form of its own' and created by him ad hoc.

Ancient Romances - B. E. Perry: The Ancient Romances . A Literary-Historical Account of their Origins. (Sather Classical Lectures, vol. 37.) Pp. xii+407. Berkeley: University of California Press (London: Cambridge University Press), 1967. Cloth, £3·40 net.

Rudis Locutor: Speech and Self-Fashioning in Apuleius' Metamorphoses.

Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

In ancient Rome, where literacy was limited and speech was the main medium used to communicate status and identity face-to-face in daily life, an education in rhetoric was a valuable form of cultural capital and a key signifier of elite male identity. To lose the ability to speak would have caused one to be viewed as no longer elite, no longer a man, and perhaps even no longer human. We see such a fantasy horror story played out in the Metamorphoses &nbsp;or The Golden Ass, written by Roman North African author, orator, and philosopher Apuleius of Madauros—the only novel in Latin to survive in its entirety from antiquity. In the novel's first-person narrative as well as its famous inset tales such as the Tale of Cupid and Psyche, the Metamorphoses is invested in questions of power and powerlessness, truth and knowledge, and communication and interpretation within the pluralistic but hierarchical world of the High Roman Empire (ca. 100–200 CE). Discourse, Knowledge, and Power presents a new approach to the Metamorphoses: it is the first in-depth investigation of the use of speech and discourse as tools of characterization in Apuleius' novel. It argues that discourse, broadly defined to include speech, silence, written text, and nonverbal communication, is the primary tool for negotiating identity, status, and power in the Metamorphoses. Although it takes as its starting point the role of discourse in the characterization of literary figures, it contends that the process we see in the Metamorphoses reflects the real world of the second century CE Roman Empire. Previous scholarship on Apuleius' novel has read it as either a literary puzzle or a source-text for social, philosophical, or religious history. In contrast, this book uses a framework of discourse analysis, an umbrella term for various methods of studying the social political functions of discourse, to bring Latin literary studies into dialogue with Roman rhetoric, social and cultural history, religion, and philosophy as well as approaches to language and power from the fields of sociology, linguistics, and linguistic anthropology. Discourse, Knowledge, and Power argues that a fictional account of a man who becomes an animal has much to tell us not only about ancient Roman society and culture, but also about the dynamics of human and gendered communication, the anxieties of the privileged, and their implications for swiftly shifting configurations of status and power whether in the second or twenty-first centuries. 

Evelyn Wynn Adkins

Papers

Rudis Locutor: Speech and Self-Fashioning in Apuleius' Metamorphoses.

Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses

Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses