Nikola Golubovic (University of Pennsylvania)
Gulosi Figurarum: Unruly Students and an Annoyed Teacher in Minor Declamations 308–350
In this paper I argue that the Minor Declamations (=MD), a unique surviving Latin school text, gives precious insights on what a lesson in declamation might have looked like at Rome in the first few centuries of the Empire. Scholars such as Stramaglia and Oppliger have only recently begun to use the MD as evidence for Roman teaching practices, picking individual declamations to make broad points. I, in turn, am reading a string of declamations.
The oldest surviving manuscript of the text transmits two subscriptiones, after MD 307 and 350, respectively. Although the placement of these subscriptiones is likely to have remained the same since the earliest stages of transmission, their text, which includes qualifiers tractatae and coloratae, is corrupt. The subscriptiones in their garbled state do not indicate how MD 308–350 are different from the declamations before 308 and after 350. However, I argue that these 42 declamations do possess distinctive features, and that these lie in the sermones. These are didactic remarks, instructions on how to successfully declaim on the present theme. Written in the voice of a teacher, the sermones are usually delivered in a style that is to the point, impersonal, and unaware of the external world. In 308–350, on the other hand, the sermones show an unusual degree of audience awareness: the teacher addresses students as a body, answers their complaints, and uses persuasive speech on them; the dramatic setting is revealed to be a lecture. In 314.1, the teacher reminds that repetition is necessary because new students join the class all the time (intellegite fieri … propter interventum novorum). At 316.7 he responds to their protests that he does not give them commonplaces (nolo quisquam me reprehendat tamquam vobis locos non dem). At 333.3 he urges them to not be “gluttons for figures” (gulosi figurarum). Oftentimes he signals that he is repeating a point he had made earlier. In short, the sermones in 308–350 show a degree of hands-on teaching absent from the rest of the collection. The significance of this fact is twofold: 1) it forces us to reconsider the standard opinion that the MD, as a collection, lacks any logical arrangement (Winterbottom); and 2) it gives a rare glimpse into the rhetoric of teaching rhetoric and the strategies of “classroom management”, which, as we know from elsewhere, could get tricky (Petr. Sat. 6.2: iuvenes sententias rident ordinemque totius dictionis infamant). The teacher, while teaching his subject-matter, also indirectly argues in favor of his methods and opinions on contested topics, such as the use of figured speech and loci. He is persuading his students that his positions are superior, perhaps in comparison with those of rival teachers.
“Involved” sermones in the MD show that teaching controversiae meant dealing with a sophisticated, but boisterous crowd of students. They also suggest a lively inter-school competition in Rome around Quintilian’s time.