This chapter analyzes historical declamation as an advanced stage of fiction training in the Roman rhetorical curriculum. It argues that rhetorical exercises, especially controversiae and suasoriae, fostered the skills of fictionalization through revisionist reimaginings of the Greek past. Exploring a wide corpus of exercises about Alexander the Great, the chapter demonstrates how students were trained to compose plausible fictions within recognizable historical frameworks. Drawing on rhetorical handbooks, school papyri, and declamations, it reconstructs four dominant themes: impersonations of Alexander and his circle; inter-polis disputes in the shadow of Macedonian conquest; “travel advisories” debating the limits of Alexander’s empire; and “postmortem” scenarios reflecting Alexander’s legacy. These exercises strengthened students’ command over the techniques of impersonation, pseudo-documentarism, and meta-exemplarity. The chapter also shows how historical declamations modelled indirect reflection on imperial power. Rather than transmitting historical truth, revisionist fictions taught students how to manipulate exempla and construct immersive alternatives to the Roman present.

This chapter argues that the Alexander Romance mounts a subversive critique of rhetorical education in the Roman world. Though long dismissed as ahistorical fantasy, the novel draws extensively on the declamatory school tradition, only to parody its constraints and elevate Alexander as a master rhetorician beyond the reach of paideia. Through close readings of episodes involving Aristotle, the Attic orators, Darius, and the Theban flautist Ismenias, the chapter shows how the Romance reframes Alexander not as a pupil of canonical figures but as their superior and eventual replacement. By satirizing epistolary fiction, impersonation exercises, and the “travel advisories” suasoriae from chapter 4, the novel rewrites Classical history to suit Alexander’s anti-sophistic persona. His distinctive voice – described as “divinely inspired” – becomes the true marker of kingship and character, in contrast to the pedantry of rhetorical mimesis. Ultimately, the Romance envisions an alternative model of fiction mastery and learning that dethrones classical exempla and reconfigures the boundaries of elite education.

This chapter discusses the importance of the audience in research on forensic performance. “Forensic performance” is taken here to include the dramaturgical techniques that inform Erving Goffman’s account of “the presentation of self in everyday life,” extending not only to ways of affirming one’s own position but also to ways of portraying the various figures or propositions in a legal dispute. These practices include the use of speech, gesture, and ritual to convey arguments, embody or criticize legal authority, and impersonate a party, witness, or any other participant in an actual or imagined scenario. The audience includes those in the courtroom and imagined observers in the larger public. The chapter begins by examining criticisms of forensic performance in the early modern period and then turns to the use of cross-examination in the nineteenth century. Finally, the discussion considers judges’ behavior, particularly when they encourage the audience to laugh in response to their questions. By doing so, judges merge the role of an impartial interlocutor attending to policy questions and the role of an individual to whom the law might apply.

Chapter 1 maps out the theoretical and cultural context for the early twenty-first century’s multi-scalar view of life. Progressing from the microscopic scale to the planetary perspective, I present the recent shifts in microbiology, biomedicine, anthropology, and Earth system science that are shaping our awareness of interdependence between living processes. In each domain, I draw attention to the narrative and rhetorical aspects of these epistemological shifts. This overview leads me to discuss some of the theoretical terminology frequently used to conceptualise interdependence across scales, and the different models of life brought into play by the terms process, network, assemblage, and meshwork. The final section outlines the scalar rhetoric and tropes of early twenty-first-century popular science. Here I examine the relation between trans-scalar rhetoric, which emphasises the necessity of thinking across scales, and multi-scalar tropes, which substitute one scale of life for another. From a scale-critical perspective, I examine the epistemological tensions at work in those tropes.

Almost no seminar, book, or YouTube tutorial on successful public speaking is without the established and traditional “cork exercise.” It is supposed to enhance speakers’ rhythm and intelligibility, for which there is, however, no scientific evidence so far. Our experiment addresses this gap. Twenty speakers performed a presentation task three times: (1) before a cork exercise intervention, (2) immediately after it, and (3) some minutes later after having completed a distractor questionnaire. The intervention was a video recorded by a professional media trainer. Results show significant rhythmic (and related melodic and articulatory) differences between presentations (1) and (2), suggesting a positive effect for speakers in (2). However, in presentation (3), all measurements revert to the baseline presentation (1) level. Thus, the "cork exercise" basically works and yields positive effects; however, they are short-lived. The chapter ends with suggestions for further research and practical ideas for a more sustainable design of the cork exercise.

This chapter examines how achievement books produced by Egyptian state institutions have narrated and re-narrated the 1952 revolution. These books were centrally published by the Information Department, a crucial yet seldom studied organ in the emerging Ministry of Culture and National Guidance, as well as public relations units across different ministries. After a brief institutional history of the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance as a whole, in which I demonstrate how ‘culture’ and ‘media’ were originally intertwined in administrative terms, I argue that the state’s achievements were narrated according to a changing conception of the revolution between 1954 and 1970. This rhetoric cemented a distinctive version of history among Egyptian bureaucrats, in which long lists of achievements came to articulate the bureaucratic corps’ contributions to the revolution. Moreover, it aimed to counter colonial propaganda via a systematic presentation of ‘the true Egypt’ in numerous European languages. In short, achievement books recorded, disseminated, and embodied the revolution’s accomplishments for a domestic and an international audience.

Many of the challenges facing social democrats today have deep historical roots. Labour politics were never simply encoded in the daily experience of the industrial working class; they had to be made. Labour had to adapt to an already acculturated working class, but over time, through a combination of rhetoric and public policy, it not only did so but it also changed the culture of that class. This chapter analyses both the practical strategies developed to build Labour’s base a century ago, and the parameters (and limits) of the vernacular social democratic politics that emerged from its eventual success. Vernacular politics are not ideological or partisan because politics is marginal to most people’s lives. Practically minded social democrats therefore need to identify where their goals chime most naturally with vernacular politics. This means recognising the predominantly contractual conception of social entitlement, but also where universalism has put down deepest roots: not just in health and education, but also in housing and in the care of the elderly and infirm. Above all, Labour needs to rediscover the ethical and emotional appeal at the heart of its historic claim to represent all working people: championing the dignity of labour and of place.

Since 1945, the practical solution to the Swedish Social Democratic Party’s ideological goals of ‘solidarity, equality and planning’ always tended to be yet another sweeping welfare state reform. Delivery was in keeping with the ideological rhetoric. However, increasingly the high taxes to support the reforms met with strong criticism from the party’s core blue-collar voters, disgruntled about marginal taxation and VAT. Yet, when in 1981 the party totally reformed its taxation policies by reducing marginal taxation, it infuriated key members and voters who felt that high-end earners benefitted unfairly. Moreover, the U-turn had knock-on practical effects on welfare state expansion. In 1982, Prime Minister Olof Palme stated that the welfare state could expand, ‘but not as a share of the total economy’. Suddenly, tax and welfare state ceilings had been put in place, with efficiency drives becoming increasingly necessary, leading to further U-turns when the party dropped most of its resistance to privatisations and to the marketisation of the welfare state. Yet the party’s rhetoric about the need for welfare state expansion and criticism of lower taxes remained intact. No longer does the delivery square with the rhetoric. Gradually, practical decisions have placed the party in an ideological dilemma.

A distinctive feature of Barbara Strozzi’s compositional style is her predilection for unusual endings that defy the expectations by concluding too abruptly (leaving the listener hanging on the dominant or without a strong sense of closure) or delaying the final cadence (inciting the listener’s desire for closure). After briefly summarizing ideas about closure from classical rhetoricians and early modern musicians and considering the likely influence of the humorous and often ironic rhetorical stance that was popular among Strozzi’s friends and acquaintances in the Accademia degli Incogniti, I explore Strozzi’s enigmatic conclusions in a selection of both sacred and secular compositions. Drawing upon Bettina Varwig’s Music in the Flesh, I propose that the endings are remarkable not only for the ingenious ways they respond to their text and eschew convention, but also because of the profound impact on the listener’s physiological responses, inspiring variously laughter, irony, frustration, yearning, pleasure, or even rapture.

The chapter motivates the topic of moral rhetoric by highlighting its relevance for how voters experience politics in everyday life. This leads to the question explored in the book: What role does moral rhetoric play in party politics? The chapter defines moral rhetoric as argumentation that frames political positions into moral views about right and wrong. Moral rhetoric can be used to frame views about specific policy issues (e.g., the economy, immigration) and more general political matters (e.g., the immorality of rival parties). Moral rhetoric contrasts with pragmatic, consequentialist rhetoric. To further illustrate, I present a series of examples of moral rhetoric used by parties and politicians in advanced democracies. Then I explain the research approaches of the book, such as use of the Moral Foundations Theory and geographic focus on Western democracies. The chapter ends with an outline of the rest of the book. The book examines the role of moral rhetoric in party politics in three parts: (1) whether and how moral rhetoric is a distinct aspect of political communication, (2) what effects it has on voters, and (3) its significance for democratic representation.

Various critics have labeled Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah as a dictator novel, a dictator-novel, or a novel about dictatorship, forcing the questions that inform this chapter: isn’t there a well-defined genre where Anthills fits unproblematically? Is the African novel that thematizes dictatorship a sub-genre, or the unwieldy name for the genre from which the African dictator novel emerges? Or are they co-existent genres? If genres “change when new topics are added to their repertoires” (Fowler 233), I explore the germinal novels of disillusionment in the 1960s, the imprecise “dictatorial literature” and “dictator” novel descriptors used in the early 1990s for clues that illuminate the difference between the dictator novel and novels about dictatorship. Playing off Derrida’s argument that the word “genre” establishes a “limit,” a line of demarcation (57) that simultaneously creates “an edgeless boundary of itself” (81), I argue that this indeterminacy fits the African novel variously labeled as the dictator novel or the novel about dictatorship, and the delimitation should be flexibly located in the “edgeless boundary” defined by the themes and function the novels serve. Further, the rise of increasingly authoritarian rulers globally lends currency to the African dictator novel in unmasking their rhetoric of dictatorship.

Chapter 1 opens with a discussion of the foundational importance of classical education in Roman society and politics, and how it served as a basis for both office-holding and elite Roman identity and self-fashioning. The chapter also provides a prosopographical sketch of the teachers and students that are visible in the historical record from the fourth to early sixth centuries in Gaul, showing that identifiable teachers and students begin to fade from the sources from the later-fifth and early-sixth centuries. It discusses the marked shift in the visibility of these individuals, the changing nature of our sources for education throughout the period, the limitations of our sources, and what we can learn from those limitations. The chapter argues that, while classical education largely disappears from the historical record by the early sixth century, this by no means indicates that classical education ceased to exist entirely. Rather, it shows that classical education was no longer a ‘public’ institution as it had been under the Roman empire, and that it did not occupy that specific place within politics, society, and culture that allowed it to be visible and take a prominent place in the technical and literary texts of the period.

This chapter emphasizes narrative as a vehicle for psychological analysis. It begins by noting the prominence of emotion in the Confessions; Augustine himself tells us in the Reconsiderations that the work is meant to arouse not just the mind but also the heart toward God. It argues that the Confessions contributes to ancient philosophical debates about the character of the emotions and how they should be controlled and moderated. The work presents a “therapy of the emotions” that is sometimes aligned with, and sometimes in critical tension with, the philosophical spiritual exercises proposed by earlier writers. Augustine is, in certain respects, more hopeful about progress in virtue than his philosophical predecessors; he presents his therapy of the soul for everyone, not just those with fortunate natural proclivities. Yet he insists that such progress can be made only by God’s grace. The techniques of ancient philosophy are, in themselves, unavailing for moral transformation.

The introduction sets out the approaches, sources, and scope of the book. It acquaints the reader with the main features of classical education and places the book within the modern historiography.