Offers a radical re-appraisal of rhetoric's relation to literature, with fresh insights into rhetorical sources and their reception in Roman poetry.

Previous studies on the relationship between rhetorical theory and Roman poetry have generally taken the form of lists enumerating elements of style and arrangement that poets are said to have 'borrowed' from rhetorical critics. This book examines, and ultimately questions, this entrenched theoretical model and the very notion of rhetorical influence on which this paradigm is built. Tracing key moments in the poetic and the rhetorical traditions, in the context of which the problematic relationship of difference and similarity between rhetorical and poetic discourse is discussed, the book focuses on the cultural relevance of this intellectual divide in Roman literary culture. The study of rhetorical sources, such as Cicero, Seneca the Elder and Quintilian, and of select responses in Roman poetry, sheds light on long-standing scholarly assumptions about classical poetry as artless language and about the role of rhetoric in the construction of the decline of post-classical cultures.

Preamble : on the way -- Introduction : en route -- Making use : plaustrum -- Power steering : currus -- The other chariot : essedum -- Conveying women : carpentum -- Portable retreats : lectica -- Envoi : the end of the road.

This study transforms our understanding of Roman love elegy, an important and complex corpus of poetry that flourished in the late first century b.c.e. Sharon L. James reads key poems by Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid for the first time from the perspective of the woman to whom they are addressed—the docta puella, or learned girl, the poet's beloved. By interpreting the poetry not, as has always been done, from the stance of the elite male writers—as plaint and confession—but rather from the viewpoint of the women—thus as persuasion and attempted manipulation—James reveals strategies and substance that no one has listened for before.

Plato isn’t exactly thought of as a champion of democracy, and perhaps even less as an important rhetorical theorist. In this book, James L. Kastely recasts Plato in just these lights, offering a vivid new reading of one of Plato’s most important works: the Republic. At heart, Kastely demonstrates, the Republic is a democratic epic poem and pioneering work in rhetorical theory. Examining issues of justice, communication, persuasion, and audience, he uncovers a seedbed of theoretical ideas that resonate all the way up to our contemporary democratic practices. As Kastely shows, the Republic begins with two interrelated crises: one rhetorical, one philosophical. In the first, democracy is defended by a discourse of justice, but no one can take this discourse seriously because no one can see—in a world where the powerful dominate the weak—how justice is a value in itself. That value must be found philosophically, but philosophy, as Plato and Socrates understand it, can reach only the very few. In order to reach its larger political audience, it must become rhetoric; it must become a persuasive part of the larger culture—which, at that time, meant epic poetry. Tracing how Plato and Socrates formulate this transformation in the Republic, Kastely isolates a crucial theory of persuasion that is central to how we talk together about justice and organize ourselves according to democratic principles.

Building on Calvino’s observations on Exactitude in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the present book elucidates on the possible definitions of exactitude, the endeavor of reaching exactitude, and the undeniable limits to the achievement of this ambitious milestone. The eighteen essays in this interdisciplinary volume show how ancient and medieval authors have been dealing with the problem of exactitude vs. inexactitude and have been able to exploit the ambiguities related to these two concepts to various ends. The articles focus on rhetoric and historiography (section I), exact sciences and technical disciplines (II), the peculiarity of quotations (III), cases of programmatic inexactitude (IV) and textual transmission (V). Several interconnected questions weave a net across the volume: to what extent is exactitude the goal in ancient and medieval texts? How can the concepts of accuracy and inaccuracy aid the reinterpretation of an already known text or fact? To what extent can certain definitions of exactitude be stretched, without turning into inexactitude? The volume presents an extensive study capable of highlighting the shrewdness and aptness of the concepts introduced by Calvino more than thirty years ago.