Title: Cicero on the Attack: Invective and Subversion in the Orations and Beyond by Joan Booth
Abstract: BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 453 The book also offers a critique of-contemporary modes of scholarship. Firstly, Gunder son insists on the continuities between Roman antiquarianism and modern scholarship. He is right that the antiquarians make for a good mirror in which to see the arbitrariness of the games of authority in which we ourselves are embroiled. Secondly, he argues that antiquarianism as a genre poses particularly intractable problems for traditional conceptions of authorship and historicity. As a radically unstructured text that is a compilation of other texts and other voices,' the Attic Nights problematises the very idea of an author. "The Nodes is too disparate to be summarised and its author is too inauthentic to be subjected to the subjectivation of biography" (293). "Gellius" is "a textual effect that is regularly mistaken for the cause of the text" (283). Moreover, by enacting a dialogue with all scholars—past, present, and future—the Nights collapses time and defies historicist attempts to fix it in a particular historical period. The textual operations of antiquarianism open up an "anachrony" (164). The text is "allochronological and parachronological" (291). Gunderson suggests that the Nights itself is an example of how these problems might be surmounted, insofar as it exemplifies a reading practice that "is about nothing so much as an embrace of the polyphonous alterity of scholars and the archive" (252). As such it might be a model for us all, he hints. Even if the arguments here are not always clear or convincing, Gunderson certainly succeeds in showing that antiquarianism is grist to the post-modern mill. In short, the Nox Philologiae will delight some and infuriate others. This reader found himself torn between the two responses. While often frustrated by its difficulty and obscurity, I also found much food for thought. For those interested in Roman antiquarianism, there are valuable insights into its epistemology and its sociology, at least as they are embodied by Gellius—though one has to work hard to integrate Gunderson's scattered and often oblique observations. The book also has much to offer readers of the Attic Nights in particular. Besides his broader insights into the text—its rejection of structure, its capricious arguments, its reflexive tropes—Gunderson also provides imaginative readings of many individual chapters. Despite its perverse location, the index does contain a traditional index locorum, so readers will be able to dip into it for Gunderson's perspective on particular chapters. Like the Attic Nights, this is a text that will be plundered, misread, and even disowned. St Andrews University Myles La van Cicero on the Attack: Invective and Subversion in the Orations and Beyond. Edited by Joan Booth. Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales. 2007. Pp. xiv, 215. In the world of Roman forensic oratory, Cicero's claim to fame was his uncanny ability to play upon the emotions of the jurors in whatever way was necessary for him to win the case. It was a talent of which he was justly proud: "whenever there are several speakers in a case," he says, "they always leave the peroration to me" {Orat. 130). He was that legendary and larger-than-life figure who could always be counted on to bring victory—he was, in baseball terms, the ultimate closer. But whereas in baseball the closer is called upon only for a very specialized purpose, Cicero in the courtroom was an all-rounder, an orator whose talent was so prodigious that it has obliterated the record of his contemporaries. Roman republican oratory, for us at least, is dominated by Cicero. He spoke most often as an advocate for the defense, of course, but he could likewise mount an impressive rhetorical 454 PHOENIX assault upon his opponents when required. It is this latter mode of Ciceronian oratory that forms the subject of the book under review. The eight papers collected in this volume originated from a two-day colloquium on "The Language of Ciceronian Invective" held at the University of Wales Swansea in May 2001. Collectively they offer a wide-ranging set of observations on Ciceronian invective, both broadly and narrowly defined, and as Booth states "engage, separately and collectively, with a cross-textual range of interpretative...
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot