I am leaving the discussion of Quintilian who of course also features in these Cambridge Classics volumes until later in the Spring because soon I should have the brand new Loeb volumes providing us with Quintilian’s declamations themselves. Here I’m going to deal with the further discussion of books, codexes, and the book trade offered by P.E. Easterling one of the editors of Volume 1 Part 2. Somewhere in the late 8th century B.C. Greek as we know it in... Read more
You know things are not going well, when they start shooting down balloons over America. I suppose politicians, who themselves are often full of hot air, just couldn’t stand being upstaged by a Chinese balloon, or unidentified small balloons, or drones flying over open spaces…. Look up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, no its the Goodyear blimp—- Don’t shoot!!! Read more
Aelius Aristides (or perhaps he should be called Ailius, since he kept complaining about being unwell) lived in the middle of the second century A.D. and spent no little time at the Aesclepion in Pergamum trying to get well. He seems to have spent a whole decade there going through treatments, but as my recent posts on Pergamon show, this was not just a clinic. There was a theater, a meeting place and much more at this sight, and in... Read more
One of the main reasons for paying attention to rhetoric and its evolution during the Empire is because, like in the case of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, there was a reaction to the 2nd Sophistic and florid Asiatic rhetoric, and we see the echo of this in Paul’s writings, especially in 1-2 Corinthians, where he stresses he is interested in persuading, not entertaining, in the more disciplined forms of rhetoric (see B.W. Winter’s good monograph Is Paul Among the Sophists). So... Read more
Dionysius of Halicarnassus (i.e. Bodrum) arrived in Rome in A.D. 30 sick and tired of Asiatic rhetoric as propagated by his fellow orators in the province of Asia. Unlike some Greek Dionysius saw in Romans a more appropriate and sober and disciplined style of rhetoric. Dionysius is what one could call an armchair rhetorician by which I mean a person who did not himself declaim but taught many Romans to do so, and he wrote treatises about the art of... Read more
Cicero was the master rhetorician of the late Republic period. He was not a philosopher, and he knew it. In the Cambridge Classic volume on The Late Republic includes a good and somewhat extensive chapter on Cicero by L.P. Wilkinson (pp 56-93). Since some time ago I have reviewed one of the best biographies on Cicero on this blog I will not focus on that aspect of this chapter. Like many a good rhetor, Cicero placed emphasis on the... Read more
Though I am on sabbatical, I went to Wilmore today to have lunch with an old friend, and it was hard to believe what I saw. It was snowing, and cold, and there were lines to get into Hughes Auditorium going down Lexington Avenue for blocks. In addition, there were people all over the quad, and all over the seminary campus across the street. There were cars parked everywhere, even in many places where they shouldn’t and now there are... Read more
There was a lecture at the SBL in November in Denver about the beginnings of the use of codexes, and this particular lecture traced it back to the handling of Martial’s writings, most famously known for his Epigrams in the first century. Here are some slides about it from the lecture…. Brent Nongbri was the presenter of this lecture and the title involves imagining, because we don’t actually have a Martial codex, but as Nongbri points out we have early... Read more
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