By Maud W. Gleason
The careers of 2 renowned second-century rhetorical virtuosos supply Maud Gleason attention-grabbing insights into the methods historic Romans developed masculinity in the course of a time marked by way of nervousness over manly deportment. Declamation was once an exciting artwork shape for the Greeks and bilingual Romans of the second one Sophistic stream, and its top practitioners may shuttle the empire acting in entrance of enraptured audiences. The mastery of rhetoric marked the transition to manhood for all aristocratic electorate and remained an important to a man's social status. In treating rhetoric as a technique of self-presentation in a face-to-face society, Gleason analyzes the deportment and writings of the 2 Sophists--Favorinus, a eunuch, and Polemo, a guy who met traditional gender expectations--to recommend the methods personality and gender have been perceived.
Physiognomical texts of the period express how carefully males scrutinized each other for minute indicators of gender deviance in such positive factors as gait, gesture, facial features, and voice. Rhetoricians proficient to strengthen those qualities in a "masculine" style. interpreting the winning occupation of Favorinus, whose high-pitched voice and florid presentation contrasted sharply with the traditionalist form of Polemo, Gleason indicates, despite the fact that, that perfect masculine habit was once no longer a monolithic abstraction. In a hugely obtainable examine treating the semiotics of deportment and the clinical, cultural, and ethical matters surrounding rhetorical task, she explores the chances of self-presentation within the look for reputation as a speaker and a man.
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Extra resources for Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome
2, 58). 27 Hoffmann's equipment exhibits that there's a challenge within the textual content the following. See L. HolfordStrevens, who bargains a paraphrase in his Aulus Gellius (Chapel Hill, 1988), seventy three, and issues out that there's little to be received from hypothesis concerning the textual content till the entire Arabic mss. were collated. 28 Polemo considers eunuchs like Favorinus, born with no testicles, to be extra uncanny, extra "perfect in evil" than eunuchs who have been produced of standard men via castration. Mary Douglas discusses such anomalies as a resource of possibility in Purity and risk: An research ofthe techniques of toxins and Taboo (London, 1966). eight bankruptcy ONE a few of the actual characteristics famous the following seem even in Philostratus' extra sympathetic portrait: effeminate visual appeal, high-pitched voice, unforeseen libido. within the complicated symbolic procedure in which old aristocrats developed male identities, peculiarities of actual visual appeal, deportment, and voice (rather than libido) have been the main signifiers. next chapters of this ebook discover their symbolic price to contemporaries. Polemo's fees of black magic shouldn't be taken actually: they in basic terms function an index of his rival's specialist good fortune. 29 profitable he was once: even in Rome, the place many knew no Greek, Favorinus' performances left his audiences spellbound. 30 In Asia Minor Polemo used to be all of the rage at Smyrna, yet Favorinus used to be the darling of Ephesus. In Greece he dazzled the Corinthians; they voted him a public statue. 31 it should appear that Favorinus had accomplished every little thing that he left Gaul to realize. yet then the Corinthians took his statue down back, for purposes nonetheless vague. The speech that purports to be the sophist's respond to this insult finds him at paintings as an intricate artificer of self-presentationindeed as a prestidigitator necessary of Pole mo's worst fears. 32 SELF-PRESENTATION within the CORINTHIAN ORATION like all nice sophist, Favorinus lived his lifestyles in fierce pursuit of overseas reputation and immortal popularity. An honorific statue like these offered him in Corinth and at Athens 33 used to be an everlasting image of his skill to reenact numerous temporary triumphs. The destruction of any such statue used to be a defamation that demanded a reaction. Invective by myself may 29 The rhetorician Apuleius, for instance, used to be truly accused in courtroom of training erotic magic by means of the jealous family members of a prosperous older girl whom he had persuaded to marry him (Apuleius, Apology). 30 Philostratus, Lives 490-91, who makes use of the observe enchanted (E6Ef. YE) two times. Favorinus' kind has been tested by way of A. Barigazzi, Favorino di Are/ate Opere (Florence, 1966), and his prose rhythm through M. Goggin, "Rhythm within the Prose ofFavorinus," sure 12 (1951),149-201. 31 evaluate for instance the statue of the sophist Lollianus at Athens, paid for through his thankful scholars (Kaibel, Epigrammata Graeca 877; Philostratus, Lives 527). Apuleius Florida sixteen mentions statues of sophists within the discussion board of Carthage. 32 this is often the thirty-seventh oration within the corpus of Dio Chrysostom, now in most cases attributed to Favorinus.