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Rhetorical Wit in Cicero and Quintilian

By Emma N Warhover (UNC Chapel Hill)

Cicero and Quintilian provide lengthy descriptions of the role of wit in Latin oratory (De Orat. 2.216-290; Institutio Oratoria 6.3). Both treat wit as a tool for persuasion, a perspective that tallies with their backgrounds and goals, but which is unusual in theoretical work on humor. Their view of wit as an instrument for delivering a serious message aligns with other genres in Latin literature: satire especially claims to mock for a purpose.

Quintilian's Model of Mind

By Henry Bowles (University of Oxford)

Despite inroads into folk psychology in the verbal arts (e.g., Snell; Guthrie 1975; Gill 1996, 2006; Schiappa; Long), modern scholarship of ancient understandings of mind still overwhelmingly samples philosophy: the mind in rhetoric and literary theory remains a relatively unknown world. This neglect causes two major distortions. First, a ‘noetic’ distortion: neglecting the mind in literary-critical texts means that historians of philosophy omit a large swath of the historical record on a critical issue.

Semi-pagans? Some mutations of belief in late antiquity

By Mattias Gassman (University of Oxford)

Since Guignebert 1923, much effort has gone into studying Christians deviant from episcopal norms (e.g., Frankfurter, MacMullen). The existence of non-Christian counterparts of Guignebert’s “semi-Christians” has been recognized (e.g., by Cameron), but their beliefs have received much less attention. This article studies two late Roman people who had articulately non-Christian ways of seeing god, humanity, and the cosmos, but nonetheless adopted a few distinctively Christian beliefs or philosophical ideas.