By 1434, Alberti was in Florence in employ of Pope Eugenius IV, who would also facilitate the return from exile of Cosimo de’ Medici. The art of Florence would ensure Alberti’s rhetorical high notes in De pictura. Alberti’s popularity lies in his invitation to art, not in its execution. Art theory has never perpetuated art process; organic continuum precedes intellectual reflection. The genesis of De pictura, our first modern book on painting, derives from the personal passion of Leon Battista Alberti in the humanist classroom and attendance before the visual majesty of Padua, Bologna, northern Europe, and Rome – witnessed by the acute eye of an illegitimate son, born in exile.

In the two loci classici about Roman satire, Quintilian and Diomedes famously draw a bifurcation of the history of the genre into two strands, which often comes in handy for modern scholars. This chapter argues that this bifurcation is the result of a stratification of, and compromise between, at least two different views: a communis opinio held by most authors of satire of the Republican period and their readers, and the single but ‘authoritative’ view of Horace, who established meter as a formal criterion to define satire. This chapter traces the origins of both views by discussing the relevant sources, and shows how Horace’s Satires appropriated pre-existing ideas about the nature and history of the genre, innovated on key aspects of them, and became a source of original ideas in turn. A similar scheme applies to Quintilian and Diomedes too: their perspective combines previous stances, but this combination itself represents an innovation which influences our own view of Roman satire in turn. Thus, while focusing on Roman satire, this chapter discusses a more general dynamic in the creation of literary histories.

The concepts of progress and decline play a dominant role in ancient views on literary history. Roman culture inherited from Aristotle the idea that the arts gradually mature. Whereas archaic and classical Greek literature was generally known to the Romans as a corpus of canonical works that represented the acme of each genre, Latin literature gave the Romans the image of a long march of advancement towards the Greek models’ perfection. From Aristotle onwards, progress is conceived as an addition of pertinent procedures. The attainment of maturity does not entail decadence, but rather the possibility of creating works fully corresponding to the nature of the genre. If an acme is thought to have been reached, later authors may aim at what they regard as a more authentic acme; the process thus continues. Various Latin texts show that a continuous progress towards an ideal perfection is not excluded. The idea of decadence, in Cicero’s Brutus and in post-Augustan texts, relates to reasons that do not concern ‘internal’ dynamics of artistic development, but the distrust in the conditions and prospects of politics and morality in the ‘external’ context, including the lack of self-discipline in an excessive display of increasingly sophisticated formal virtuosity.

How does Plinian intertextuality contribute to making a book unit distinctive from its fellows? Taking Book 6 as its subject, this chapter first looks at the depth of intertextual investment made by Pliny in the second Vesuvius letter (6.20), and looks at the challenge set by its apparent references to Petronius. It then looks at the persistent intertextual presence across Book 6 of Cicero, Catullus, Vergil, Quintilian and Tacitus, and argues for a coherent programme of engagement particularly with Vergil, Quintilian and the Dialogus of Tacitus. The chapter ends by reflecting on why Pliny appeared to have good reason in the early second-century CE to be confident about the vigour and life-expectancy of public oratory at Rome.

This chapter moves from painting to ’practice’. A particularly striking example both of theatricalised domestic space and activity is seen in the layout and decoration of dining rooms (triclinia), and in the range of entertainments presented within them. We examine how, responding to changes in the political, cultural and economic conditions of Roman society during this period, these private triclinium spaces and their decorative schemes were often systematic adaptations drawing upon the continuously evolving public discourse generated by theatrical entertainments. The chapter describes the range and nature of presentations that took place within the house, primarily as part of the dinner entertainments. Our focus is upon the likely venues as well as the decor of these spaces, and how, in combination, they created highly theatricalised and richly suggestive settings for performance and its reception. We include a detailed case study of the Pompeian House of Marcus Lucretius, detailing how these elements have been synthesised through the deployment of a pervasive theatricalism to create a highly appropriate setting for visitors as they move through its various rooms and spaces

This chapter discusses how the layout and organisation of the ancient Roman house comprised a veritable Mise-en-scène in which both patrons and guests expressed and were conditioned by a culture and aesthetic practices in which the theatre was a dominant influence. It analyses the spatial and decorative organisation of Roman domestic spaces, and describes how these created an intensely theatricalised ambience which directly impacted upon and was reflected in the behaviour of both patrons and guests.

The chapter explores efforts to answer how a community premised on a dislocation from the past, but comprised of people who bring with them their own pasts, locates itself in time. How does a community constituted by other pasts not simply blur into those pasts? I argue that in both Rome and the United States a particular type of Stranger, the corrosive Stranger, is constructed in response to this question. The corrosive Stranger is not defined against some preexistent purity, but is used to construct an imagined purity that gives a community a genealogy that distinguishes it from other communities and also posits a notion of true belonging that is different from juridical membership. I look at the different efforts by Cato the Elder, Cicero, and Varro for the Romans and then by Noah Webster for the United States to craft a genealogy of national identity that is defined against the threats of the corrosive Stranger. I then look at attempts by W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington to confront the burden of memory reflected in the Stranger marked by race who carries America’s own memory.

The tradition that Hamlet is Shakespeare’s mouthpiece: almost universally accepted for reasons of tradition and prejudice towards the class and education of the princely speaker. The Player’s speech: a successful exercise in using Virgil to express emotion, as recommended by Quintilian. Hamlet’s advice: drawing essentially from Quintilian. The play-within-a-play: risibly poor dramaturgy, a display of dialectic rather than rhetoric, well suited to ensuring that Claudius is moved by the facts rather than by the fiction of the play. The pay-off: Hamlet as clown. In this chapter, I map a tension between two ideals of performance: moving the emotions of an audience versus an accurate mimesis of reality.

In this chapter I provide a sketch of rhetorical performance practice as it emerges from the rich, complex, and contradictory texts of the Greco-Roman world. A visual conception of ancient rhetoric: John Bulwer’s representation of rhetorical stage acting, which contrasts the stage actor with the dialectician. Greece and Rome: Greece developed the art of rhetoric, accepting the centrality of acting or ‘hypokrisis’, while Roman orators placed more emphasis on the constant persona of the orator. Cicero and Roscius: a case study of how Cicero used performance skills to defend the celebrity stage actor in court. Cicero’s ‘De Oratore’: Cicero’s masterpiece, couched as a dialogue to make it clear there is no single set of rules for being an orator. Quintilian: who codified Cicero, and made rhetoric the foundation of an educational programme. Tacitus: who dissented from Quintilian’s political conformism. Augustine: who tried to adapt his rhetorical training to serve the needs of Christian preaching, anticipating the dilemmas faced by rhetorical performers in the Renaissance.

The introduction offers a brief history of free speech in Antiquity, which serves as a background for the chapters of this book. It starts with the emergence of free speech (parrhesia) as a civic and political virtue in the Greek world, in connection with the rise of democracy. It then continues with the Roman world, where free speech became embedded in Roman oratory and was included among the rhetorical figures in handbooks of rhetoric. It addresses the close connection between free speech and citizenship in Roman thought. In the second century AD, a Christian rhetoric of free speech came into being. The introduction shows how, over the course of the centuries, free speech spread from the political and the judicial to the moral and the religious sphere. In spite of these shifts, free speech retained its importance as a tool of political criticism.

This chapter traces key moments in the rhetorical tradition in the context of which the problematic relationship of difference and similarity between rhetorical and poetic discourse is evoked and discussed. The competing claims of affinity and difference between poetic and rhetorical discourse in Gorgias’ Helen, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Kant and others are analyzed as aspects of rhetoric’s self-definition.

This chapter focuses on the strategic evocation of the appropriate boundaries between rhetorical and poetic speech in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. If Quintilian’s exhortation to use poetic models judiciously in books 8 and 10 is read side by side with his elaborate deployment of poetic metaphors to represent both his work and that of the orator throughout the work, a far more complex picture emerges, one in which poetry is not simply a repository of sentences to be emulated but a source of cultural authority to be subsumed by the rhetorical medium.

Epistles 1.20 is an unorthodox plea for length in court speeches. It is also one of the two salient peaks of ‘Quintilian in Brief’, a whole letter modelled, selectively and unpredictably, on Quintilian’s chapter on style (Institutio 12.10). This chapter reads it in detail, for argument and for intertexture, and shows that it is an imitative tableau of unusual complexity, focused on Institutio 12.10 but ranging widely across Quintilian’s work and looking through ‘windows’ to Cicero’s Brutus and Orator. The letter – addressed to Tacitus – also engages obliquely but closely with his Dialogus de oratoribus; Pliny’s anonymous interlocutor, I suggest, is a version of Tacitus’ Aper. A postscript on Epistles 1.21 reads this short note about buying slaves as a wry miniaturisation of Institutio 11, and sharp intertextual annotation of Epistles 1.20 and its virtuosic imitatio.

Chapter 3 begins an inductive argument for establishing Quintilian’s presence in the Epistles and establishes a method for reading it. It considers ten brief liaisons in which Pliny culls an epigram, metaphor or other distinctive detail from the Institutio. I argue that these similarities show imitation, not accident, and situate them within an imitative culture where declaimers, poets and prose writers routinely borrowed and improved on each others’ sententiae. These encounters are routinely self-conscious, but not necessarily (I argue) systematic or invested in allusively taking position against Quintilian: their function is also, and importantly, aesthetic. Lexical signatures play a part, but a much more discreet one than usually supposed – suggesting that we might all do well to spend less time with concordances and word searches and more time reading for the idea.

This chapter reads the cycle of letters to Quadratus and Fuscus of which Epistles 7.9 (Chapter 8) forms the keystone. Epistles 6.11 introduces these two young men as the bright future of Roman oratory, with a fanfare constructed from Quintilian (Institutio 10) and Tacitus’ Aper (Dialogus). Epistles 6.29 is the partner to Epistles 7.9, matching but varying its imitation of Quintilian and Cicero, as Pliny continues playing praeceptor in surprising and arch ways. Epistles 9.36 and 9.40, describing his villa routine to Fuscus, constitute the twin sphragis of the collection. These deceptively simple letters take us to the core of Pliny’s self-styling as man and author, perofmed with pregnant imitations which confirm Quintilian’s very special, and very personal, role in the Epistles.

This short chapter first reviews the argument of the book, then goes back to beginnings. The Institutio opens with strong generic positioning, situating Quintilian’s project against Cicero’s Orator and Sallust’s Jugurtha. Pliny’s cover note (Epistles 1.1) operates more discreetly, but reveals itself, through precise reworking of Quintilian’s cover note to Trypho, as an infrared invitation to read this collection of letters as ‘Quintilian in Brief’. Further traces of Quintilian’s first and last prefaces (Institutio 1.pr. and 12.pr.) in Epistles 1.2 and 9.1-2 offer final, open-ended confirmation that the Insitutio is hard-wired into the Epistles from start to end: Latin prose imitation, in Pliny’s hands, is a very fine art.

Lupercus is addressed twice in Pliny’s collection, receiving two very different pieces of Quintilianic imitation. Epistles 9.26 is a partner-letter to Epistles 1.20 (subject of Chapter 6), arguing for audacity in oratory. It opens with another window imitation (Institutio 2 and De oratore), and proceeds – I suggest – to some especially free imitatio of Institutio 12.10, completing in quite different fashion the work begun in Epistles 1.20. Epistles 2.5 is a partner to Epistles 7.9 (subject of Chapter 8), and behaves differently again. A relatively short letter, it features dense, eclectic and wide-ranging imitation of the Institutio. More than that: with two more window imitations (Cicero and Seneca the Elder), I argue, the letter miniaturises Quintilian’s first book and styles itself as a belated proem to Pliny’s collection.