The excerpts from the Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus (2nd century A.D.) are one of our major sources of knowledge concerning controversiae, model court speeches on fictitious themes. These formed the focus of Roman higher education and therefore had an enormous effect on Latin literary style and content from the late Republic on. They also contain important indirect evidence for contemporary social history. This book provides a general introduction to the work, a new Latin text, plus the first English translation and only full modern commentary. The latter discusses the legal background and origins of the cases, points at issue, textual problems, and matters of Latin style. The volume will therefore be of interest to students of classical rhetoric, education, history, and philology.

As a genre situated at the crossroad of rhetoric and fiction declamatio offers the freedom to experiment with new forms of discourse. Placing the literariness of declamatio into the spotlight, this volume showcases declamation as a realm of genuine literary creation with its own theoretical underpinning, literary technique and generic conventions. Focusing on the oeuvre of Calpurnius Flaccus this volume demonstrates that these texts constitute a genre on their own, the rhetorical and literary framework of which remains not yet fully mapped. Contributions from an international group of leading scholars from the field of Roman Literature and Rhetoric will explore the question of how Roman Declamation functions as a literary genre. This volume investigates the literary technique and the generic conventions of declamatio in its social, pedagocial and ethical context to determine “the poetics” of Roman Declamation. This volume is of interest to students and scholars of Rhetoric and Roman Literature. If you are interested in Roman Declamation, we also recommend the volume on the Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian by the same editors to you.

As a genre situated at the crossroad of rhetoric and fiction declamatio offers the freedom to experiment with new forms of discourse. Placing the literariness of declamatio into the spotlight, this volume showcases declamation as a realm of genuine literary creation with its own theoretical underpinning, literary technique and generic conventions. Focusing on the oeuvre of Calpurnius Flaccus this volume demonstrates that these texts constitute a genre on their own, the rhetorical and literary framework of which remains not yet fully mapped. Contributions from an international group of leading scholars from the field of Roman Literature and Rhetoric will explore the question of how Roman Declamation functions as a literary genre. This volume investigates the literary technique and the generic conventions of declamatio in its social, pedagocial and ethical context to determine “the poetics” of Roman Declamation. This volume is of interest to students and scholars of Rhetoric and Roman Literature. If you are interested in Roman Declamation, we also recommend the volume on the Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian by the same editors to you.

The book offers a narrative of the life and career of Georg Busolt (1850-1920), the eminent German historian of classical Greece. The core of the work is a collection, with commentary, of more than 100 unpublished letters from Busolt to such figures as Eduard Meyer and Ulrich von Wilamowitz- Moellendorff. The work is thus a contribution to the history of classical and historical scholarship.

This collection of essays provides a valuable cross-section of recent research into the interrelationship of orality and literacy in the ancient Greek and Roman world.

Declamation - the practice of training young men to speak in public by setting them to compose and deliver speeches on fictional legal cases - was central to the Greek and Roman educational systems over many centuries and has been the subject of a recent explosion of scholarly interest. The work of Michael Winterbottom has been seminal in this regard, and the present volume brings together a broad selection of his scholarly articles and reviews published since 1964, creating an authoritative and accessible resource for this burgeoning field of study. The assembled papers focus on two related topics: the rhetorician Quintilian and ancient declamation in practice. Quintilian, who taught rhetoric at Rome in the second half of the first century AD, was the author of the Institutio Oratoria, a key text for Roman educational practice, rhetoric, and literary criticism. Subjects explored in the present collection range widely over not only the establishment and interpretation of the text and its literary and historical context, but also Quintilian's views on inspiration, morality, philosophy, and declamation, of which he was a practitioner. While the volume also offers detailed examinations of the texts and interpretations of a wide range of Latin and Greek authors of declamations, such as Seneca the Elder, Sopatros, and Ennodius, there is a particular focus on two collections wrongly attributed to Quintilian, the so-called 'Minor' and 'Major Declamations'. A major re-assessment of the manuscript tradition of the latter collection is published here for the first time.

This book explores the much maligned and misunderstood genre of declamation. Instead of a bastard rhetoric, declamation should be seen as a venue within which the rhetoric of the legitimate self is constructed. These fictions of the self are uncannily real, and these stagey dramas are in fact rehearsals for the serious play of Roman identity. Critics of declamation find themselves recapitulating the very logic of the genre they are refusing. When declamation is read in the light of the contemporary theory of the subject a wholly different picture emerges: this is a canny game played with and within the rhetoric of the self. This book makes broad claims for what is often seen as a narrow topic. An appendix includes a fresh translation and brief discussion of a sample of surviving examples of declamation.