Maud Gleason

In diverse fictions from the second century Roman Empire, two parties with competing claims to truth hold a formal contest in a public place where, after a series of abrupt reversals, the issue is finally decided by the evidence of a dead, mutilated, or resurrected body. We can ask these corpses to tell us about the ways Roman society constructed truth. Furthermore, can we learn from the abrupt reversals in these narratives anything about the way Romans experienced shifts in truth-paradigms in “real life”? (This is, of course, a question of paramount importance for appreciating the religious change propelled by Christianity).

The contemporary books of Cassius Dio's Roman History are known for their anecdotal quality and lack of interpretive sophistication. This paper aims to recuperate another layer of meaning for Dio's anecdotes by examining episodes in his contemporary books that feature masquerades and impersonation. It suggests that these themes owe their prominence to political conditions in Dio's lifetime, particularly the revival, after a hundred-year lapse, of usurpation and damnatio memoriae, practices that rendered personal identity problematic. The central claim is that narratives in Dio's last books use masquerades and impersonation to explore paradoxes of personal identity and signification, issues made salient by abrupt changes of social status at the highest levels of imperial society.

As an imperial Greek author of both cultural and stylistic interest, Aretaeus deserves to be more widely read. His most riveting disease descriptions bring before our eyes the spectacle of the human body in extreme states of suffering and dehumanization. These descriptions achieve a degree of visual immediacy and emotional impact unparalleled among ancient medical writers. This essay considers them as examples of ekphrastic rhetoric, designed to create enargeia. To intensify immediacy and impact, Aretaeus deploys a set of techniques that invite the reader’s active engagement with the spectacle he describes. This engagement has the potential to generate a corporeal response that destabilizes the boundary between the body of the reader and the body in the text. The modern concept of “empathy” is perhaps too anodyne to convey the complexity of the response involved.

The careers of two popular second-century rhetorical virtuosos offer Maud Gleason fascinating insights into the ways ancient Romans constructed masculinity during a time marked by anxiety over manly deportment. Declamation was an exhilarating art form for the Greeks and bilingual Romans of the Second Sophistic movement, and its best practitioners would travel the empire performing in front of enraptured audiences. The mastery of rhetoric marked the transition to manhood for all aristocratic citizens and remained crucial to a man's social standing. In treating rhetoric as a process of self-presentation in a face-to-face society, Gleason analyzes the deportment and writings of the two Sophists--Favorinus, a eunuch, and Polemo, a man who met conventional gender expectations--to suggest the ways character and gender were perceived. Physiognomical texts of the era show how intently men scrutinized one another for minute signs of gender deviance in such features as gait, gesture, facial expression, and voice. Rhetoricians trained to develop these traits in a "masculine" fashion. Examining the successful career of Favorinus, whose high-pitched voice and florid presentation contrasted sharply with the traditionalist style of Polemo, Gleason shows, however, that ideal masculine behavior was not a monolithic abstraction. In a highly accessible study treating the semiotics of deportment and the medical, cultural, and moral issues surrounding rhetorical activity, she explores the possibilities of self-presentation in the search for recognition as a speaker and a man.