Reading for the Republic: The Minor Declamations and the Culture of the Past

Abstract

The Latin exercise of controversia, which tasked its participant with arguing as either the prosecution or defence in a mock legal dispute, is thought to have emerged during the later years of the Roman Republic when it was performed by politicians no lesser than Pompeius Magnus, Cicero, Marcus Antonius, and Augustus. These exercises gained momentum under the Empire, when they were performed by students, professional rhetoricians, and emperors alike. One of the more overlooked collections of controversiae from this time is the Minor Declamations, a text of unknown authorship and date, which comprises 145 of an original 388 controversiae. For all that the Minor Declamations never names the settings of its conflicts in time and space (a fictive realm notionally far removed from reality dubbed Sophistopolis by scholars), it offers a surprising number of references to, and extensive engagement with, the Roman republican past. This thesis argues that the Minor Declamations is a text which responds particularly well to questions about its literary representations of the Roman republican past—its culture, literature, politics, and exempla. A growing body of scholarship has begun to address the relationship between this text and its Roman cultural context either by examining law or literature, but little has been said on its literary nature and its engagement with the Roman past. Each chapter to come explores a different way in which the Minor Declamations reflects and refracts the Republic. Chapter 1 lays a foundation for subsequent readings of the Republic in the Minor Declamations by uncovering traces of the implicit republican political institutions that form part of the architecture of this world. Chapter 2 offers a literary reading of republican authors in the text by examining a series of intertextual allusions to Cicero’s Catilinarian orations. The first half of Chapter 3 identifies the text’s overwhelming fixation with exemplarity from the republican past, and especially the exempla provided by war heroes and republican martyrs. The second half of the chapter turns to examine the way in which the text obscures the imperial Roman landscape from view. If the text expresses a nostalgia for the politics, literature, and figures of the republican past, then Chapter 4 explores the pervasive sense of present decline embedded into the world of this text. It ties this to contemporary discussions around the declining state of oratory at Rome and the role of declamation in this decay. In sum, the thesis showcases the connections between the Minor Declamations and its literary milieu of the High Empire (70–192 CE). It argues that the classicising education that underpinned both the controversiae and Latin literature was vital to engagement with the republican past.