39 - Oratory and epistolography

Summary

The study of rhetoric and the practice of declamation went on throughout the half-century of military anarchy in the third century. And though the occasions for great speeches in the Senate on matters of high policy were doubtless fewer than in the days of Pliny and Tacitus, debates continued. Some of them are recorded, however unreliably, in the Historia Augusta. It may be that one type of oratory even became more frequent. Roman emperors had always spent a surprising proportion of their time listening to speeches made by representatives of the Senate and delegates of provinces and cities. The only weapon which the senatorial class and the provincial upper classes could use to defend their position against their unpredictable and usually short-lived overlords was eloquence. We may be sure that they used it, even though none of their loyal addresses has been preserved. The stabilization effected by Diocletian and Constantine, with its concentration of the power of decision in the imperial court, resulted in the address to a ruler becoming almost the sole form of genuine public oratory, as opposed to mere declamation. From the fourth century we have a number of surviving speeches, all of which take the form of addresses to emperors. Whatever their ultimate purposes, such addresses inevitably struck a panegyric note.

But before going on to examine these surviving speeches, it would be well to glance at the material for the teaching of rhetoric produced during the period. It is in no sense literature, yet it must have exercised some influence on the oratory of its time.