Browsing by Subject "Oratory"

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    Haec Templa: Religion in Cicero's Orations
    (2019-04) Wagner, Nicholas
    This dissertation analyzes a number of Cicero’s speeches to trace the development and the construction of Roman identity through reference to religious actions and institutions. It primarily focuses on the Verrine Orations, his Consular Speeches (including the Catilinarians), his return speeches (the Post Reditum in Senatu and Post Reditum ad Populum, and the De Domo Sua and De Haruspicum Responsis), and his Philippics. The project attempts to analyze the rhetorical salience of religious language in the speeches and how such language was used to praise allies or vilify rivals. Within the speeches, I argue, Cicero participated in a kind of religious negotiation with his audiences, presenting certain religious actions that should be rejected while others were to be praised. This kind of language unites his audiences around a coalescing Roman identity and against perceived violators of Roman religious tradition. My focus is on the ways in which Cicero used and also proposed religious notions in his speeches, no matter the social status of his audience, and considers how Cicero framed what it meant to be Roman, both for individuals and for new religious practices
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    Rhetorical Ethics in the Comedy of Aristophanes
    (2014-05) Larson, Sean
    Understanding the role of the comic playwright Aristophanes in the history of persuasive speech and performance is no small task. Rhetoric scholars and classicists often consider his plays testimonial documents for the origins and practice of oratory in the late 5th century BCE in Athens; "Clouds" in particular is regularly treated as contemporary evidence that the sophists were peddlers of logical snake-oil, teaching unscrupulous students how to take advantage of their fellow citizens purely for selfish ends. This point of emphasis reduces Aristophanes to the role of historical witness without giving him credit for his own acts of social commentary and intellectual contributions to the polis. Other attention is given to Aristophanes as pandering moralist, decrying the outrageous and inimical behaviors corrupting a once prosperous city and its many institutions. This avenue of research routinely minimizes the playwright's influence because his anti-war plays appear to have little practical effect on Athenian politics, and focuses mainly on institutional critique without solutions for the audience to consider. My purpose in this dissertation is to draw attention to Aristophanes as an ethicist who uses comedy to reorient audience values and behaviors. Using Kenneth Burke's theory of the hortatory negative, I argue that Aristophanes depicts his characters as abhorrent models for oratorical behavior, suggesting implicitly to the audience via inference that an alternative type of speaker may engage in more ethical oratory and thereby provide more effective and beneficial leadership in the polis.