Participatory Athenian democracy has inspired many political thinkers, despite its imperialist atrocities, slavery and the subordination of women. Pericles is an ambivalent figure, and it is dangerous to see him as the embodiment of a golden age. His speech over the war-dead can be seen as a noble democratic manifesto or the calculated work of a demagogue. In a debate about the punishment of Mytilene, as depicted by Thucydides, Cleon uses the language of reason to work on the emotions, and is a paradigm of the populist or ‘demagogue’. We can see the ‘demagogue’ as an aberration from true democracy, or see the word itself as a standard weapon that can be wielded in any democratic contest. The comic dramatist Aristophanes offers us insight into Cleon’s performance techniques that embrace face, arms and voice, and into the minds of those who supported him. In his Gorgias, Plato theorises the problem of rhetoric. Gorgias was a Sicilian who taught the Athenians that rhetoric was an art which they could pay to learn, and for Plato this was a fundamental flaw in his nation’s democratic enterprise.

This chapter considers the relationship between the historical Gorgias of Leontini and Plato’s portrayal of him and his ideas in the Gorgias. By drawing on fragments and testimonia of the historical figure, it shows that Plato’s understanding of Gorgias and his views informs both his characterization of the orator himself in the Gorgias, as well as that dialogue’s philosophical content and aims. In particular, three of the central themes of the Gorgias – ones that the character himself introduces – are prominent in Gorgias’ own works and in the doxographical reception of him: (1) the conception of speech as a form of power or dunamis; (2) the relation between power and wish or boulēsis and their joint role in human action; and (3) the contrast between – and contrasting relationships speech itself has with – belief on the one hand and knowledge on the other. Whether the historical Gorgias was ever personally committed to the relevant ideas in question or not, the chapter argues that he at least gave voice to them in his works, and that Plato, at least, evidently took them seriously as expressions of Gorgianic theory and practice.

Chapter 3 analyzes freedom as doing “whatever one wishes” in fourth-century oratory. As several scholars have noted, doing “whatever one wishes” appears ambivalent in forensic speeches. They argue that, since Athens was not an anarchic state, extreme freedom could be glossed as a threat to sociopolitical stability. In contrast to prevailing scholarship, however, I argue that the most dominant principle, even in these texts, is the preservation of positive freedom as justification for the litigant’s position. While acting “however one wishes” may be presented as objectionable, the rhetoric of that assessment emphasizes who is doing “whatever they wish” and whom they affect by doing so. Bad characters, whether a criminals, oligarchs, or metics, can be rebuked as undeserving of positive freedom and abusing the power that attends it. The limitation of another citizen’s ability to do what he wishes can also condemn the action. Doing “what one wishes” is not a byword for antidemocratic action, but can have such a connotation because of the particular actors or victims of the actions. It is the misuse of the natural qualities of a citizen that leads to censure.

Chapter 7 sets Recognising the Best Physician at the heart of its discussion, moving the focus from popular philosophical works to tracts of social commentary that are rich in ethical references or subtexts. I suggest that, despite its content being closely related to the material discussed in The Best Doctor is Also a Philosopher, the latter contains a more generalised advocacy of how the proper doctor ought to behave, whereas Recognising the Best Physician restricts its focus to treating Galen’s individual virtues, and renders self-projection more central to the narrative. This enables Galen to provide a more pragmatic account of the connection he envisaged between medicine, ethics and society, and place the morally didactic function of medicine in particular at the forefront of his intellectual horizons. I highlight how Recognising the Best Physician offers a plethora of passages discussing moral issues, for example the emphasis on the value of truth over deception, the issue of flattery and the ethical corruption of contemporary society. I show that to better illuminate the immorality of his medical colleagues, Galen, inspired by philosophical intertexts, notably the Republic and the Gorgias, creatively likens them to wicked and dissimulating orators. By also attributing features of self-interested politicians familiar from Platonic metaphors to contemporary charlatan physicians, Galen recategorises his rivals’ abilities and undermines their moral standing to suggest that the ideal kind of medicine to combat public disorder is the moral medicine embodied by himself. To that end, Galen sketches himself as a Platonic helmsman, entrusted with a humanistic vocation and safeguarding social and political stability.

The Lives of the Sophists, written by the third-century-CE author Philostratus, contains the most detailed and thorough image of a Classical-period sophistic age surviving from antiquity. Previous ancient accounts of the period are comparable with that of Philostratus in various respects but never emphasize a discrete sophistic age. Philostratus’ text has been known continuously since its production, and the individual members of Philostratus’ First Sophistic were arguably the core for modern lists of the individual Sophists. Yet Philostratus’ image of the First Sophistic is colored by oratorical practices of his own day, privileging the craft of speaking performance, networks of influence and rivalry, and leadership of the city over the kind of intellectual performances that interested philosophers such as Plato. Despite his obvious departures from Plato, Philostratus also depends on Plato for qualities that establish a “Sophist” under his concept, both in the Classical period and in his own.

This chapter will focus on patterns repetition in speech fragments from Cato the Elder to C. Gracchus, as well as the speeches quoted in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, with a view to understanding their composition and intended effects. Repetition provides a systematic framework for many of the traditional rhetorical figures, such as anaphora, alliteration, homoeoteleuton, antithesis and polyptoton (see D. Fehling, Die Wiederholungsfiguren und ihr Gebrauch bei den Griechen vor Gorgias, Berlin 1969; cf. J. Wills, Repetition in Latin Poetry, Oxford 1996). Using repetition as a lens allows analysis not only of longer extracts but also of very short fragments. These patterns will be used to test the thesis that Roman oratory continued to respond to the ancient Latin form of the carmen even while being influenced by Greek rhetorical ideas (cf. on this point E. Sciarrino, Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose, Columbus 2011). The transmission of the fragments under consideration is itself heavily influenced by the rhetorical and grammatical tradition, and my discussion will accordingly take account of the screening effects which this transmission has on the evidence.

Christopher Smart’s drag orations as Mary Midnight were enabled by burgeoning British social policy legislation combined with widespread cultural aspirations for creating an educated British public through public oratory. Ironically, the state censorship enacted in the 1752 Public Entertainments Act, which sought to limit public performances outside the licensed London theatres, created conditions that enabled Smart’s innovative attempts at entertaining—and therefore creating—a public unified across class and gender differences through a mixture of humor, erudition, dance, and music, among other forms of performances (including trained dog and monkey acts). The case of Smart’s Mary Midnight is key to understanding the achievements and limits of a British urban entertainment industry in the mid eighteenth century that was dedicated to creating a civil public sphere, as well as making money.

This chapter explores Thucydides’ important contribution to the shaping of history as a genre of writing. The discussion focuses in particular on the ways in which Thucydides engaged with other, non-historiographic modes of commemorating the past in the 5th century BCE, a process here labelled ‘meta-history’. The chapter analyses three examples of meta-history in the work: the Periclean Funeral Oration, the Mytilenean Debate and the tyrannicide digression. It shows how these episodes help us understand Thucydides’ claims for the usefulness of his work.

This chapter examines Cicero’s Pro Marcello of 46 bce, a speech of thanksgiving to Julius Caesar for pardoning his civil-war for M. Claudius Marcellus. I argue that Cicero cleverly uses philosophical arguments to, as it were, entrap Caesar into working towards the restoration of the Republic. Philosophical wisdom is a leitmotif of the speech, and Caesar in particular is called sapiens or associated with sapientia nine times. The basic argument that underlies Pro Marcello, without ever being made explicit, is the following syllogism: The wise man will act virtuously. Caesar is a wise man. Therefore, Caesar will act virtuously. In defining what acting virtuously would mean for his addressee, Cicero argues vigorously against Caesar’s own statement that he had already ‘lived enough for either nature or glory’ (satis diu uel naturae uixi uel gloriae, 25), painting the dictator as an Epicurean whose wrong ideas about both virtue and glory the orator seeks to combat.

Chapter 4 examines the development of a documentary poetics in wartime Venice through three literary genres: prose fiction, poetry, and epideictic oratory. The war inspired a vast outpouring of patriotic and Islamophobic literature that reproduced the fact-oriented discourse of military expansion within a public sphere shaped less by reason than by imagination, emotion, and colonial desire. Viewing the literary field as part of a broader process of opinion formation, the chapter traces the links between political power and different sites of literary activity – the academies, the University of Padua, religious institutions, and the book market. It also shows how poets and writers appropriated military and colonial forms of documentation to mobilise support for the war and popularise images of a mighty imperial republic, destined by God to rule the Orient.

I propose that the young Roman orator Cicero, lacking a political base, cleverly positions himself as defender of the “people’s will”: It is fundamental, justifying all power wielded in its name; it is singular, despite the many conflicting “wills” within it; it is fallible, especially when misled by demagogues; and it is thus dependent on wise elites like Cicero. I then take up the treatises De republica and De legibus, which argue for popular sovereignty and against popular power. His theory differs from the mixed constitutionalism of Polybius and Aristotle. Cicero’s innovation is rational trusteeship: The people own all of the Republic, and the senate and magistrates represent all of the people. The trusteeship principle from Roman law (ius civilis), filtered through Platonic rationalism and Stoic natural law, creates an entirely new constitutional dynamic: A rational elite guides the people’s will, which elevates them in turn to high offices of state. He watches Caesar exploit his notion of voluntas populi to remake Rome around his own brutal will. Yet it is Cicero’s “will of the people” – reliant on a ruling class, limited to voting – with which, for better or worse, we find ourselves in modern democracies.

This chapter looks at the role of music in the political contests of the late Republic. Taking Cicero’s discussion of music in the De Legibus as a point of departure, the chapter argues that Cicero’s comments need to be seen against the background of major changes in the culture of Roman spectacle in the 50s BCE – most notably, the construction of Pompey’s stone theatre. Furthermore, the chapter identifies points of overlap in the critical discourse focused on musical entertainment and the hostile characterisations of the so-called populares (especially Gaius Gracchus and Publius Clodius). This collapsing of the boundaries between popular music and popular politics provides an important new angle on the political conflicts of the late Republic.

In this chapter, we see how Cicero, as a rising Roman politician, uncovers hidden lines of influence, pinpoints shades of political support, and frames partisan divides in the Roman Republic. Here, Cicero uses voluntas both to analyze politics as he finds it and to argue for its rational improvement. Descriptively, Cicero uses voluntate and summa voluntate to identify subtler shades of opposition or support and to trace lines of unseen influence among Rome’s leading men like Pompey and Caesar. Through his gifted pen, will becomes a measurable force as it had seemingly not been before. To measure will is to rationalize it, and Cicero builds new philosophical arguments for the primacy of voluntas over violence and for a vision of politics that transacts power rationally by the intersecting wills of magistrates and people. I use powermapping, a tool of modern advocacy, as a lens to examine Cicero’s political strategy and use of language. This vision, at once old and new, is upended by the ascent of Caesar, whose sole voluntas undoes Cicero’s rational framework, exerting will by brute force and eliminating the old pluralist order.

With the Tusculan Disputations, willpower enters Western thought. This chapter departs from a peculiar decision Cicero makes in his account of the human soul. In previous centuries, Platonists and Stoics had bitterly disagreed on whether the soul was unified or divided into rational and nonrational parts. In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero announces that he will combine Stoic moral stricture – predicated on the soul’s unity – with Plato’s divided, self-moving soul. The result is a new narrative of inner struggle in which voluntas gains a formal definition at last: “that which desires with reason” (quae quid cum ratione desiderat) (Tusc. 4.12). While drawing importantly on the Hellenistic schools of philosophy, the Latin “force” of volition is foremost. Here, Cicero links together lines of debate that in Greek had run in parallel, rendering hekon, boulesis, and prohairesis by voluntarius and voluntas. His “struggle for reason” thus moves originally beyond Greek accounts of askesis, moral training that emphasized education and cognitive clarity over present effort. An orator zealous to persuade, Cicero paints his account of reason in Roman colors of honor, endurance, and painstaking progress.

In this chapter, I examine how voluntas helps the young lawyer Cicero craft arguments and structure relationships with Roman clients, witnesses, and juries. In the De inventione and forensic speeches, we see his struggle to reconcile tradition with new intellectual tools. As he seeks to bring ratio more fully into Roman legal culture, voluntas plays a plural and ambiguous role. It is an instrument of rational inquiry, as in the competing schemata of criminal responsibility he examines in the De inventione. As it has always been in Roman law, voluntas is the desire of a legally relevant individual, emanating from and attributable to him alone – the marker of his agency and responsibility. So, too, however, is it used to signify the collective goodwill of an audience, which Cicero makes clear is the expert orator’s plaything. The “goodwill” sense of voluntas adds greatly to its durability in moral philosophy. While a sententia or iudicium pertain to a specific question, voluntas marks an ongoing choice or disposition, such as the will of a legislator, to be conserved. Cicero’s objectives for the law go largely unachieved in his time, but they expand Rome’s intellectual field of vision.

This chapter examines the performances of Haitian revolution that could be marshalled from the pro-slavery ridicule of minstrelsy. Abolitionist political performances, ranging from petitions on Haitian recognition to oratorical celebrations of Toussaint Louverture, restaged Haiti’s revolution as a source for their own style of celebrity performance. In the process, abolitionists elevated the Haitian Revolution to iconic historical status while using it as underpinning for their own celebrated oratory.