• Tuesday 18 March - Panel VI

Margaret Imber

Declamation, the creation of mock courtroom speeches about imaginary conflicts, was the crowning glory of Roman rhetorical pedagogy from the late Republic to the time (at least) of Ennodius, the sixth century bishop of Pavia. This odd practice held pride of place in the Roman curriculum despite the fact that educators as notable as Quntilian confessed that they did not believe it actually accomplished its nominal purpose: training the sons of the Roman elite to give speeches in courts of law. If Quintilian is right, then Roman historians might well ask what purposes other than the rhetorical did this enduring pedagogy serve.

In this paper, I argue that the practice of declamation in the late Republic and early Empire instructed the sons of the Roman elite and perhaps especially the Roman provincial elite in their future roles as patres and cives and the contradictions and potential conflicts between these roles. Such schooling was necessary because the fathers of these students, for reasons of demography and the demands of their station, were often not available to teach their own sons what it meant to be a Roman father. In their absence, Roman boys imagined and rehearsed, and thus learned paternal ideology by creating and giving speeches about impossible conflicts between good and bad fathers (and mothers, sons, and brothers) and conflicts between good and bad citizens (and pirates and tyrants).

Teachers presented boys with narratives of domestic and civic strife drawn from a rich collection of tales (controversiae) which circulated throughout the empire in collections associated with pseudo-Quintilian, Seneca the elder and Calpurnius Flaccus. These assignments compelled the Roman adolescents to explore the ways in which a ... Roman duties to his father might conflict with his duties to his mother, or the state. In preparing his declamation, the successful student had to articulate and, for each conflict, weigh the social obligations by which his identity was defined. In articulating their reasoning, moreover, students routinely appealed to figures of popular imagination, like the wicked-stepmother and rapacious tyrant, to which clever students learned to attach values of gender and status. Finally, in class, giving his declamation in the voice of the litigant, he played the role and thus rehearsed the part of citizen and father for which he was being trained.

The pedagogy of declamation was practised throughout the Roman Empire. It provided, accordingly, a common means to the sons of the elite in cities and provinces to create a shared social identity. The evidence of the elder Seneca, moreover, indicates that adult Roman men practised declamation as a social pastime. The activity allowed them to sustain and maintain, in whatever corner of the Roman world they found themselves, the bonds of gender, class and status against the variety of local influences that might have otherwise divided them. Caught up in fanciful controversies which were increasingly complex and always irresolvable, Romans sons in school and their fathers at leisure both mastered the complex ideologies of Roman paternity and citizenship and, through this activity, contributed to each generations articulation, and on occasion, reshaping of these ideologies.

Bates College, Departments of Classical & Medieval Studies/Classical and Romance Languages, 208 Pettengill Hall, Lewiston, Maine 04240.

Mimber@bates.edu