Rhetoric and Historiography in Late Antiquity

Peter Van Nuffelen From rhetoric to epic in late antique Greek historiography. Late antique history often situated itself in between rhetoric and poetry. This paper argues that this positioning changed in the course of time: in Greek historiography of Late Antiquity, we witness a shift away from panegyric as the main point of reference and competition towards epic. If Greek classicising history of the 4th and 5th c. is poorly preserved, the ecclesiastical historians of this period are mostly concerned with positioning themselves vis-à-vis rhetoric. The shift can be sensed in Procopius, whose preface positions itself vis-à-vis rhetoric and poetry but polemicises most strongly against Homeric language. It is completed in Theophylact Simmocata, in whose early 7th c. history the main literary point of reference is Homer. Besides mapping these changes, this paper asks the following questions. A) How can this shift be explained? Is it the result of wider changes in literary taste? Indeed, the shift is parallelled in the upsurge of epics on contemporary events from the middle of the 6th c. onwards. Such epics are attested in the 4th and 5th century too, yet they seem to be playing a less prominent role in the self-presentation of the court. Does it reflect self-representation of leading military men or of an ideology of military success in 6th and 7th c. Byzantine society? B) Does this change of reference have an impact on the way history was being written? One can indeed argue that Procopius, Agathias, and Theophylact have many more scenes of heroic battle in their histories, which tend to have a strong military focus. Does it also have an impact on the focalisation and characterisation of the main protagonists? Edward J. Watts Julian and Prohaeresius. In the year 361, the Christian rhetorician Prohaeresius wrote to the Emperor Julian and asked him for materials that he could use as sources in a panegyric. Julian loathed Prohaeresius and had no interest in allowing the rhetorician to give the emperor a speech that everyone knew was full of disingenuous praise. Julian responded to the request with the letter dripping with powerful sarcasm. He offered to provide any materials the rhetorician wanted, but only if Prohaeresius agreed to write a history instead of an oration. Julian understood that the rhetorician could easily disavow praise given in an oration, but he was bound to any points of view he expressed in history. This exchange then highlights a fundamental difference between history and rhetoric that producers and consumers of literature both clearly recognized. Although both types of literature used the same basic raw materials, historians appear to have been bound to the portraits of the individuals they presented. At the same time, it was understood that rhetoricians could radically shift their perspectives on a subject or an event as time and circumstances changed. Using materials like the exchange between Julian and Prohaeresius, the orations of Themistius and the letters of Libanius, this essay will show that authors were expected to believe and maintain the points of view they argued in histories but had considerable flexibility to later disavow things said in panegyrics. Alan J. Ross Peeking beneath Libanius’ Robes of Rhetoric: Panegyric and Historiography in Oration 18. In late 363, during the aftermath of the emperor Julian’s death in Persia, Libanius wrote to Julian’s former notarius, Philagrius, asking him for details of the distarous campaign of which Philagrius had also been part (Ep. 1434). Libanius’ letter collection is an astonishing resource for contextualising his other works; we have nothing comparable for any historian, but we generally assume that Libanius’ practice of soliciting information from eyewitnesses was the standard practice of historians too (it is what Thucydides maintains he himself did, 1.22). The work that Libanius was composing was not a work of history, however, but of rhetoric: Oration 18, the Epitaphios for Julian. Oration 18 is clearly panegyrical in tone, though the particular sub-genre of Epitaphios necessarily involves a performative context which was atypical for standard imperial panegyric: the praise of a deceased honorand. If historians maintained that the reign of past emperors was the domain of their genre, and that of the current emperor was the domain of panegyric, then Epitaphios demonstrably crosses this boundary, and could then be inherently more ‘historiographical’. Furthermore, in the case of Oration 18 we can clearly see that Libanius wanted to compose a narrative which was well-informed in terms of detail, though he promises Philagrius that ‘you will inform me of the bare facts; I will dress them in the robes of rhetoric’. In this paper I will investigate how Libanius combines, negotiates, or rejects tropes of historiography and panegyric in this speech. Particularly I will consider the positioning of Libanius’ oratorial persona in relation to his audience, and the form and function of his narrative (which comprises a large portion of the work) vis-à-vis narrative in more typical examples of panegyric and historiography in the fourth century. If time and space allow, I will also draw comparisons with Gregory Nazianzen’s Oration 5 (‘Against Julian’) which shares a similar compositional context (the aftermath of Julian’s death) but is a work of invective (the generic inverse of panegyric). My conclusions will shed light directly on question of mutual attraction and rejection of these two proximate genres of late-antique literature. Laura Carrara Rhetorical structures in the Chronicle of John Malalas. The style of the bulky sixth-century chronicle of John Malalas (an account of the world history from Adam and Eve to Justinian) has been defined by authoritative scholars as “plodding” (Scott 1981, 23); its language as rich in repetitions and almost “formulaic” (M. Jeffreys 1990). These features seem to support the widespread theory that Malalas was employed in the offices of the imperial bureaucracy in Antioch and that he chose for his literary work the same written language he used for his daily office routine. Generally speaking, this appreciation of the linguistic texture of the chronicle and the resulting reconstruction of the professional and social position of its author might well be true. Against this background, however, another aspect deserves attentive consideration, namely the nickname ‘Malalas’ given to the author of the chronicle by some contemporary and later writers. As it is widely acknowledged, the sobriquet ‘Malalas’ (Μαλάλας, sometimes also Μαλέλας) is the Greek expansion of a Syriac root (mll) meaning ‘eloquent’, ‘endowed with fluency of speech’; a concrete investigation into how the rhetorical ability of John influences his chronicle and gives shape to the narration still largely remains to be carried out. In my contribution for the volume, I plan to look for passages in Malalas’ chronicle that show traces of rhetorical elaboration and structuration, attempting to trace them back to John’s education in an ancient Greek-speaking rhetorical school (on which see most recently Berardi 2017) and/or to his acquaintance with rhetorical handbooks and works. At the workshop, I will present and discuss a case of rhetorical elaboration in Malalas’ chronicle I have already studied en detail in a recent publication (Carrara 2017), the long and articulated earthquake description in Chronographia XVII 16 (earthquake of Antioch in 526 AD). I argue that Malalas, in order to compose this stylistic striking passage, exploited a rhetorical monody and that this monody was, conceivably, the one written down soon after the quake by the famous rhetorician Procopius of Gaza. If my reconstruction is accepted, this source relationship illustrates well the phenomenon of adoption and adaptation of rhetorical practices in historical works and contributes to give a more vivid and interdependent picture of the activity of rhetoricians and historians in Late Antiquity. Maria Conterno Barhadbeshabba Arbaya’s “The Cause of the Foundation of the Schools”: History and Rhetoric in Disguise. Barhadbeshabba Arbaya’s The cause of the foundation of the schools or, more literally, The cause of the establishment of the sessions of the schools, is a peculiar text which fits the subject of the workshop in many respects. It is an inaugural lecture written between the 6th and the 7th centuries to welcome a new incoming class at the School of Nisibis, the famous theological school founded by refugees from the ‘School of the Persians’ of Edessa after the closure of the latter in 489. It is therefore a rhetorical text proper, written to be read out in front of an audience. This is already an exception in the Syriac world, where the rhetorician as a public and professional figure did not exist. As the title makes clear, the author borrowed for his speech the format of the ‘cause’ genre (‘elltā), a literary genre unique to Syriac literature consisting of aetiological treatises on the origins of religious festivities or liturgical practices. But the aetiological discussion of the school year is preceded by an overview of universal history, where the history of the world is metaphorically presented as ‘scholastic history’, namely as a succession of schools, from the school established by God for the angels up to the School of Nisibis itself. Last but not least, Barhadbeshabba Arbaya was possibly a historian too, a history of the Church of the East being preserved under his name. Although rhetoric, rhetoricians, and rhetorical skills are not addressed directly and explicitly in the text, a certain number of passages and remarks of the author prompt reflections on the following points: a) The role of rhetoric in the teaching activity of the School of Nisibis; b) the attitude towards rhetorical skills and ‘speech embellishment’ in the author’s circles; c) the author’s view on the relationsh