William Guast
Conventional wisdom has it that the genre of Greek declamation was full of nostalgic recreation of the old glories of the Persian wars, a symptom of the alleged escapism of much of the literature of the Greek imperial period (thus, canonically, Bowie 1970; Russell 1983; et al.). This paper argues that this assumption is unsafe, based as it is on partial (in both senses of the word) surveys of the quantitative and qualitative evidence for declamation. In truth, declamations on the Persian wars look to have formed only a small proportion of the total: this conclusion should lead to a wider rethinking of traditional characterizations of and approaches to this important but still understudied genre, and indeed Greek imperial literature more broadly.
While previous accounts of declamation have been almost without exception impressionistic, my paper begins with a quantitative survey of all known Greek imperial declamation titles. This survey reveals that in truth declamation scenarios concerned with the Persian wars were much less common than is usually implied. Furthermore, if we are looking for ‘nostalgic’ Persian scenarios, the number falls still further, for an examination of the surviving titles and fragments of declamations concerned with the Persian Wars suggests that many of these texts were far from jingoistic: some, indeed, recall the Persian Wars as a time of infighting and indeed outright treachery among the Greek cities. Recent work on the use of the Persian wars in Greek Imperial Literature has stressed the sophistication and diversity of approach shown by authors in handling this material (Oudot, 2010; Gasco 1990).
But the communis opinio did not come out of nowhere: rather, it rests on well-known statements in ancient sources, particularly Plutarch and Lucian. Yet these statements have been unfairly privileged in modern characterizations of the genre, and indeed to some degree misread, partially perhaps because they seem to accord so readily with traditional low estimations of the Greek imperial period, and partially also because the other sources for declamation are less accessible. Other, lesser-known testimonia offer very different characterizations of the typical themes of the genre, and Lucian himself actually characterizes the genre rather differently elsewhere in his oeuvre. And if we examine the famous passages of Lucian and Plutarch carefully, we find that they too state rather less than has sometimes been assumed, and are of still less value when we take into account their authors’ satirical and anti-rhetorical stances. Furthermore, their pictures of the genre may have been distorted by what cognitive psychologists would call the ‘Von Restorff effect’, the well-established ‘cognitive bias’ in favour of remembering unusual and perceptually salient items in a given category: it may be that declamations on the Persian wars get mentioned frequently by ancient critics (and their modern successors) not because they were very common but rather—on account of the rich opportunities they offered for particularly showy language and acting—because they were so memorable, and indeed unusual. In short, declamations on the Persian wars may be not so much a cliché of declamation as a cliché of the criticism of declamation.
This is an important conclusion, for simplistic clichés about declamation of this sort have surely hampered serious work on the genre for some time: once we move past them, we can begin to appreciate the extraordinary diversity of Greek declamation’s subject matter, and the surprising range of ends for which such material is deployed.