Editorial Bodies

Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics

Michele Kennerly

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781611179118
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Retorica

Reveals the emergence and endurance of vocabularies, habits, and preferences that sustained ancient textual cultures

Though typically considered oral cultures, ancient Greece and Rome also boasted textual cultures, enabled by efforts to perfect, publish, and preserve both new and old writing. In Editorial Bodies, Michele Kennerly argues that such efforts were commonly articulated through the extended metaphor of the body. They were also supported by people upon whom writers relied for various kinds of assistance and necessitated by lively debates about what sort of words should be put out and remain in public.

Spanning ancient Athenian, Alexandrian, and Roman textual cultures, Kennerly shows that orators and poets attributed public value to their seemingly inward-turning compositional labors. After establishing certain key terms of writing and editing from classical Athens through late republican Rome, Kennerly focuses on works from specific orators and poets writing in Latin in the first century B.C.E. and the first century C.E.: Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Quintilian, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger.

The result is a rich and original history of rhetoric that reveals the emergence and endurance of vocabularies, habits, and preferences that sustained ancient textual cultures. This major contribution to rhetorical studies unsettles longstanding assumptions about ancient rhetoric and poetics by means of generative readings of both well-known and understudied texts.

CHAPTER ONE

THE POLIS(H) OF CLASSICAL ATHENS

When a first-century B.C.E. critic expressed amazement at Sappho’s sōma, he was admiring not her body but that of one of her poems.^* That he did not need to specify his somatic referent suggests that body-based analysis was by then a familiar critical idiom. This chapter details the earliest development of that idiom. Its core concern, though, lies with how editorial language—what I am calling corpus care—formed and fared as Greeks accommodated themselves to writing technologies, the papyrus book-roll especially, in the fifth and fourth centuries. The public merit of writing-enabled polish became a focal point of play and polemic across poetic and rhetorical forms. In the rough and tumble of fast-moving and agonistic politics, in which both poets and rhetors operated, the usefulness of words worked over in writing was not self-evident. Emphasizing craft (technē), time (chronos), work (ponos), and what they produce, the incipient vocabulary of corpus care signified not a growing formalism devoid of practical value but rather a curiosity about what treated words can do—for oneself, for others, for the polis—that untreated words cannot.

These lines attributed to Sappho would be a remarkable point of emergence for writing-implicated body language were they not a product of the twentieth century: “may I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.”^† Sappho’s poems pulse and flush with bodily energies and colors. “Is it not amazing how she pursues the soul, the body, the hearing, the tongue, the sight, the skin, all as though they were estranged and escaping,” gushes the aforementioned critic.^* In no extant poem, though, does Sappho clearly render words flesh to coordinate their composition.

To find genuine evidence, one must move from Sappho’s sixth-century Lesbos to fifth- and fourth-century Athens, where the somatic-graphic analogy appears in works by natives and visitors, verse and prose writers alike. It evinces a range of functions. To name a few to which I return later: Agathon’s somata suggest that a writer and his writing resemble one another; Alcidamas’s somata signify oral fluidity versus written stiffness; Plato’s soma speaks to the arrangement and analysis of writing; and Aristotle’s soma provides a model for sentence length and plot size.^† Writers with occasionally divergent communal and intellectual commitments nonetheless came to terms with speech in a similarly material and specifically corporeal way. As I mentioned in the Introduction, the parts of words, sentences, and book-rolls also assumed a bodily form. Descriptions of composing, correcting, and criticizing bodies began to appear. Such vocabulary and visions recommended to critics metrics for textual bodies that were typically used to scrutinize fleshy bodies, among them size, weight, symmetry, balance, beauty, wholeness, and even parentage. Sometimes a writer and his writing were subjected to the same somatic terms. Behold the original “anatomy of criticism.”^‡

My claim that interest in textual polish emerged in fifth-century democratic Athens vexes the contention, popularized by Kennedy, that letteraturizzazione intensifies during periods of reduced political freedom. What did build throughout that century is textual culture. Textual culture matures through the sheer accumulation of texts, and anyone with access to a text or its cultural uptake can borrow from, allude to, compete with, or overtake it. The pursuit of polish—the smooth connection and compression of one’s selection of the available means of persuasion or delectation—need not necessarily point to or portend political decay and decadence, when practiced by rhetors or poets. That point is important to make in the context of Athens precisely because neither its internal power arrangement nor its position of power within the geographical region held steady across the fifth and fourth centuries. There is no polish quotient that dips up and down along with it.

Rome, too, was far from stable in any of its postmonarchical but preimperial historical periods.^§ My findings in this chapter bear on the texts and contexts of the first centuries B.C.E. and C.E., since Romans of that time (and Greeks, too, though, again, they fall outside my purview) envisioned how Greek writers who were by then well regarded worked their words for publication, scouring venerable exempla for evidence and supplying their own suppositions. No one appearing in this chapter goes unmentioned by them. That Romans could read “ancient” Athenian works at all is a credit to Hellenistic textual organization, which I address in the subsequent chapter.

The Muse Learns to Edit

Detailed accounts of written composition from the middle decades of the fifth century, a period by which the take-up of the papyrus book-roll is assured, are not at all plentiful. From a few decades of distance compositionally, though narratively proximate, Plato’s logos-lusty character Phaedrus reports that “the most powerful and proud in the polis are ashamed both to write speeches and to leave behind anything written, fearing for their reputation at a later time, so that they will not be called a sophist.”^* From the even greater distance of the second century C.E., Plutarch reports that Pericles, for example, left behind no writing except the decrees he proposed, and only a few of his memorable sayings are preserved.^† During the middle decades of the fifth century, Herodotus of Halicarnassus and Thucydides of Athens were gathering materials for their sizable histories, both of which contain speeches. Although the proto-genre of history differs from oratory, even when it contains oratory, thinking about Herodotus’s process yields questions not inapplicable to other, shorter written genres, such as a given logos politikos of Isocrates.

Each of the nine book-rolls that constitute Herodotus’s Histories is named for a Muse, very likely the doing of a later organizer of the work and indicative of classification confusion about where Herodotus fit within what were then still-solidifying generic structures. Herodotus also bent syntax to his purposes, using the genitive case to begin his work with his own name. (It does not show in my English translation.) In that proem, Herodotus announces: “This is the display [apodexis] of the inquiry [historia] of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by humans may not be lost in time [toi chronoi], and that great and wondrous deeds, some displayed [apodechthenta] by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not become uncelebrated and unheard, including, among others, what was the cause of their waging war on one another.”^* On show here, in the very first lines of this monumental work, are the demonstrative, preservative, and instructive capacities of written words. Histories displays the work undertaken by its writer and the feats of those he wrote about; it prevents both from being forgotten; and it aids in understanding causes and origins of major events.

Herodotus was collecting, compiling, and composing from the 450s to the 420s, a sizable stretch of time decades removed from the war upon which his work focuses, the Greco-Persian War, but contemporary with a new war, the Peloponnesian War. Herodotus’s weighty work, then, deals with a past conflict whose details and entailments were being disputed in a present conflict, as he was writing.^† His was a hot history. In her efforts to enfold Herodotus into his own cultural matrix, Rosalind Thomas has argued that a stubborn scholarly tendency to read Herodotus as an archaic storyteller “implicitly treats Herodotus as more old-fashioned than the period in which we all agree he is writing.”^‡ The oral-textual tension pulled tautly within most interpretations of Herodotus results in some strange assumptions about his methods. The challenge of assembling and editing a work as massive as Herodotus’s Histories with the tools of the time is hard to fathom; indeed, we cannot be sure what tools he had at hand. Writing in the 1950s, Richard Lattimore focused on what Herodotus did not have: “what we would call good paper, good ink, good scissors, or a good eraser.”^§ For that reason, Lattimore supposed that “the whole History is, substantially at least, a first draft which was never revised, nor meant to be, because the first draft was always meant to be the final draft.”^** What Lattimore perceived to be narrative drifts and digressions suggested to him that Herodotus must have written “in a continuous forward sequence,” just as one would orally narrate a story.^†† Suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgment
• A Note on Translation
• Introduction: Corpus Care
• Chapter One: The Polis(h) of Classical Athens
• Chapter Two: Hellenistic Gloss
• Chapter Three: Tales and Tools of the Oratorical Traditio in Cicero
• Chapter Four: Filing and Defiling Horace
• Chapter Five: Ovid’s Exilic Expolitio
• Chapter Six: The Cares of Quintilian
• Chapter Seven: Past, Present, and Future Perfect Eloquence
• Conclusion: Kissing Tiro; or, Appreciating Editing
• Bibliography
• Index