Content area
Full text
The Rhetoric of Manhood: Masculinity in the Attic Orators, by Joseph Roisman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 283 + xiv pp.
The Rhetoric of Conspiracy in Ancient Athens, by Joseph Roisman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 199 + xiv pp.
Discounting fragments and works more private in nature, roughly one hundred and fifty examples of fifth- and fourth-century BCE Athenian oratory have survived the twenty-four centuries that have passed since they were first written and/or delivered. In the last two decades, these ancient rhetorical works have received new critical attention. Scholars such as Josiah Ober have analyzed these discourses in order to understand Athenian society and politics. (See, for example, his Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens.) And Michael Gagarin has overseen a University of Texas Press project to re-release these texts in new translations with updated commentaries. To this already impressive set of resources for scholars of ancient Greek rhetoric may now be added two new studies recently published by the University of California Press: The Rhetoric of Manhood and The Rhetoric of Conspiracy in Ancient Athens.
Both books are the work of Joseph Roisman, a professor of classics at Colby College in Maine and the author/editor of two earlier books on two Greek generals, Demosthenes and Alexander the Great. Although Manhood was published a year earlier than Conspiracy, in his preface to the latter Roisman acknowledges that his research for the two volumes was effectively simultaneous: "I could not help noticing how often the Attic orators referred to plots or conspiracies" (Conspiracy xi). The "rhetoric of conspiracy," then, should be viewed as a special set of tropes within the broader "rhetoric of manhood" that Roisman extracts from the preserved corpus of the Attic orators. As such, both books add to our understanding of the broader cultural and historical contexts for ancient theorizing about rhetoric.
Roisman would...