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  • Chapter Four - Structures of immorality: Rhetoric, building and social hierarchy

  • Catharine Edwards, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Foreword by Caroline Vout, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome
    Published online:
    28 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 March 2025, pp 137-172

  • Summary

    The rhetoric of Roman moralising has often seemed alien to modern readers. This book, in linking together studies of apparently diverse topics, might be seen as appropriating a trope of Roman moralistic discourse, presenting arguments concerning different subjects as parallel so that they may serve to reinforce one another. A better understanding of this and similar literary devices, as they operate in Roman moralising texts, can help us to make sense of some features of those texts which modern readers have found puzzling. We begin with an apparently bizarre example of this kind of rhetoric (included in the book of rhetorical exercises put together by the elder Seneca).