Until now, it has been our policy to include only one review per professional theater production ... more Until now, it has been our policy to include only one review per professional theater production of a Wilder play in the Thornton Wilder Journal. Recognizing that this is a time of change in the world, we decided to alter our course as well and include two reviews of Magis Theatre Company's production of The Alcestiad. With two different points of view-one from classical studies, represented by Jerise Fogel, and the other from a theatrical vantage, as represented by Haas Regen-we enrich our coverage of this rarely produced play. Reviewed by Jerise Fogel The Magis Theatre Company has birthed a giant in their ambitious and yet admirably simple staging of Thornton Wilder's The Alcestiad on Roosevelt
One important innovation of Cicero's Brutus is the way in which it represents the transmissio... more One important innovation of Cicero's Brutus is the way in which it represents the transmission, reception, and development of oratorical skills. Cicero dismantles and transforms existing family rhetoric of descent by using traditional vocabulary describing talent and familial influence in new ways. He emphasizes the possibility of learning from and differentiating oneself from age-mates and colleagues within the same generation. The result is an incipient republican aesthetic of oratory.
Scholia: Studies in Classical Antiquity, Jan 1, 2007
This essay examines one significant strand of the literary and cultural logic of Cicero's history... more This essay examines one significant strand of the literary and cultural logic of Cicero's history of oratory, Brutus, namely its way of representing style's "descent," that is, the passing on and receiving or developing of oratorical skills. It is not an attempt to gauge Cicero's personal politics in the 50s-40s (which were broadly anti-Caesarian in interesting and ambivalent ways; but these are not the topic of this paper). 1 Nor will I be much concerned with the so-called "Atticist controversy." 2 Instead, this is an attempt to 1 See the excellent discussion, with important secondary works cited, of E. Narducci, Cicerone e l'eloquenza romana: Retorica e progetto culturale, Laterza: Roma/Bari 1997, 97-154, 99-101. C. Rathofer, Ciceros 'Brutus' als literarisches Paradigma eines Auctoritas-Verhältnisses, Anton Hain: Frankfurt a.M. 1986, surveys the literature and rehashes the modern polemics at length, 24-50; Rathofer is typical in seeing the Brutus as a political appeal to Brutus; M. Gelzer, "Ciceros Brutus als politische Kundgebung," Philologus 93 (1938) 128-131, argued that Cicero was appealing directly to Caesar. A. Gowing, "Memory and Silence in Cicero's Brutus," Eranos 98 (2000) 39-64, a stimulating literary study, evokes the tense and brooding atmosphere of the dialogue's politics, and analyzes the significant exhortations to silence about current affairs in light of Cicero's concern with the gaining of immortality and fame through written works. On the connection with the Pro Marcello, see the Appendix of Gowing and M. Rambaud, "Le Pro Marcello et l'insinuation politique," in R. Chevallier, ed., Présence de Cicéron, Paris 1984, 44-56. On the entire period, see especially the sensitive study of H. Strasburger, Ciceros philosophisches Spätwerk als Aufruf gegen die Herrschaft Caesars, ed. Gisela Strasburger, Olms:
Abstract I argue that rhetorical appeal to the'ancestral constitution,'that is, one kind ... more Abstract I argue that rhetorical appeal to the'ancestral constitution,'that is, one kind of argument from precedent, can be found in Cicero's speeches and that the most interesting use of it is in the contio speeches, which constitute a genre unto themselves. Chapter I ...
Cicero’s first speech as praetor before a contio meeting, De Imperio Cn. Pompei, gives us a sense... more Cicero’s first speech as praetor before a contio meeting, De Imperio Cn. Pompei, gives us a sense of the early stages of the development of imperial metaphor. De imp. Cn. Pomp. is an ingenious attempt at articulating a vocabulary of consensus for its audience, which consisted of a large swath of Roman inhabitants in addition to the reading public cultivated by Cicero. It reveals to us the creation of several different areas of public discourse. Many biographers of Cicero and historians of the Roman republic seek the impulses toward their creation in the socio-economic position of Cicero himself, and in his own original assimilation of Greek rhetorical techniques to Roman circumstances. But this explanation is clearly insufficient to explain the public appeal of the extension of the idea of personal patronage (clientela) into the realm of foreign affairs, for instance, and its institutionalization in the late republic and early empire. Certainly, emphasizing the virtus and auctoritas of Rome as compared with its foreign peers and allies was one important way in which the Roman ruling class could legitimate its own imperialist ideology. But the appeal of the argument was also an eminently popularis one. Metaphorical claims to ancestry and precedent consequently play a prominent role in the opening speech of Cicero’s praetorship: they provide a “pre-text” for Roman imperium as it was embodied by first the late republican warrior-generals, and then the emperor himself. They lay the necessary rhetorical groundwork for linking populist claims to imperial politics. This paper will concentrate on three of these: the relationship of Roma/socius as imitative of the traditional Roman relationship of patronus/cliens; the idea that virtus historically grounds the claim of the Roman people to rule over groups that might alternatively have been imagined as peers or rivals within the world of the Hellenistic Mediterranean; and the idea that there is a kind of auctoritas that belongs to the Roman people as a whole.
Until now, it has been our policy to include only one review per professional theater production ... more Until now, it has been our policy to include only one review per professional theater production of a Wilder play in the Thornton Wilder Journal. Recognizing that this is a time of change in the world, we decided to alter our course as well and include two reviews of Magis Theatre Company's production of The Alcestiad. With two different points of view-one from classical studies, represented by Jerise Fogel, and the other from a theatrical vantage, as represented by Haas Regen-we enrich our coverage of this rarely produced play. Reviewed by Jerise Fogel The Magis Theatre Company has birthed a giant in their ambitious and yet admirably simple staging of Thornton Wilder's The Alcestiad on Roosevelt
One important innovation of Cicero's Brutus is the way in which it represents the transmissio... more One important innovation of Cicero's Brutus is the way in which it represents the transmission, reception, and development of oratorical skills. Cicero dismantles and transforms existing family rhetoric of descent by using traditional vocabulary describing talent and familial influence in new ways. He emphasizes the possibility of learning from and differentiating oneself from age-mates and colleagues within the same generation. The result is an incipient republican aesthetic of oratory.
Scholia: Studies in Classical Antiquity, Jan 1, 2007
This essay examines one significant strand of the literary and cultural logic of Cicero's history... more This essay examines one significant strand of the literary and cultural logic of Cicero's history of oratory, Brutus, namely its way of representing style's "descent," that is, the passing on and receiving or developing of oratorical skills. It is not an attempt to gauge Cicero's personal politics in the 50s-40s (which were broadly anti-Caesarian in interesting and ambivalent ways; but these are not the topic of this paper). 1 Nor will I be much concerned with the so-called "Atticist controversy." 2 Instead, this is an attempt to 1 See the excellent discussion, with important secondary works cited, of E. Narducci, Cicerone e l'eloquenza romana: Retorica e progetto culturale, Laterza: Roma/Bari 1997, 97-154, 99-101. C. Rathofer, Ciceros 'Brutus' als literarisches Paradigma eines Auctoritas-Verhältnisses, Anton Hain: Frankfurt a.M. 1986, surveys the literature and rehashes the modern polemics at length, 24-50; Rathofer is typical in seeing the Brutus as a political appeal to Brutus; M. Gelzer, "Ciceros Brutus als politische Kundgebung," Philologus 93 (1938) 128-131, argued that Cicero was appealing directly to Caesar. A. Gowing, "Memory and Silence in Cicero's Brutus," Eranos 98 (2000) 39-64, a stimulating literary study, evokes the tense and brooding atmosphere of the dialogue's politics, and analyzes the significant exhortations to silence about current affairs in light of Cicero's concern with the gaining of immortality and fame through written works. On the connection with the Pro Marcello, see the Appendix of Gowing and M. Rambaud, "Le Pro Marcello et l'insinuation politique," in R. Chevallier, ed., Présence de Cicéron, Paris 1984, 44-56. On the entire period, see especially the sensitive study of H. Strasburger, Ciceros philosophisches Spätwerk als Aufruf gegen die Herrschaft Caesars, ed. Gisela Strasburger, Olms:
Abstract I argue that rhetorical appeal to the'ancestral constitution,'that is, one kind ... more Abstract I argue that rhetorical appeal to the'ancestral constitution,'that is, one kind of argument from precedent, can be found in Cicero's speeches and that the most interesting use of it is in the contio speeches, which constitute a genre unto themselves. Chapter I ...
Cicero’s first speech as praetor before a contio meeting, De Imperio Cn. Pompei, gives us a sense... more Cicero’s first speech as praetor before a contio meeting, De Imperio Cn. Pompei, gives us a sense of the early stages of the development of imperial metaphor. De imp. Cn. Pomp. is an ingenious attempt at articulating a vocabulary of consensus for its audience, which consisted of a large swath of Roman inhabitants in addition to the reading public cultivated by Cicero. It reveals to us the creation of several different areas of public discourse. Many biographers of Cicero and historians of the Roman republic seek the impulses toward their creation in the socio-economic position of Cicero himself, and in his own original assimilation of Greek rhetorical techniques to Roman circumstances. But this explanation is clearly insufficient to explain the public appeal of the extension of the idea of personal patronage (clientela) into the realm of foreign affairs, for instance, and its institutionalization in the late republic and early empire. Certainly, emphasizing the virtus and auctoritas of Rome as compared with its foreign peers and allies was one important way in which the Roman ruling class could legitimate its own imperialist ideology. But the appeal of the argument was also an eminently popularis one. Metaphorical claims to ancestry and precedent consequently play a prominent role in the opening speech of Cicero’s praetorship: they provide a “pre-text” for Roman imperium as it was embodied by first the late republican warrior-generals, and then the emperor himself. They lay the necessary rhetorical groundwork for linking populist claims to imperial politics. This paper will concentrate on three of these: the relationship of Roma/socius as imitative of the traditional Roman relationship of patronus/cliens; the idea that virtus historically grounds the claim of the Roman people to rule over groups that might alternatively have been imagined as peers or rivals within the world of the Hellenistic Mediterranean; and the idea that there is a kind of auctoritas that belongs to the Roman people as a whole.
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