action, Libanius writes himself as a hero in his own story of the intellec-
tual tradition of Greek rhetoric.
Now, as my mention of the famous orator and teacher Libanius should
make absolutely plain, the performance of rhetoric is integral to our
understanding of the Second Sophistic—and to the self-representation
of the authors of the period.^4 Standing up and speaking is a route to
power and influence in this era as much as it is in the classical city—for
all that the frames of such influence have changed radically. As ambas-
sadors, sophists, or teachers, oral performance is a sine qua non of self-
representation in this period, and an education in oratory is integral to
paideia, the formation of cultural norms through institutional training.
Maud Gleason’s workMaking Menhas been justly influential on this topic,
and her analysis of the self-fashioning of the orator has shown the import-
ant interaction of training, performance, and public status through oratory
in Empire culture.
5
From a different angle, the satirist Lucian revels in
displaying and poking fun at the orator’s walk, talk, and self-importance,
for all that he is a self-professed success story, a success story that precisely
demonstrates the transformative powers of apaideiathrough Greek rhet-
oric.^6 There can be no doubt that rhetorical performance is a fundamental
aspect of the social and intellectual life of this period.
But it would be hard to call such performances a sign of orality, if by
orality we mean a category opposed to literacy. It would make as much
sense to categorize political speeches of George W. Bush, the current
president, as oral. His speeches may be delivered orally, but they are
some of the most written and rewritten performances imaginable—
which makes them all the more frightening. And I expect that the speeches
of the great rhetoricians of the Empire were also written and rewritten,
certainly in the form that they have come down to us. Literacy does not in
any way preclude oral performance, butgroundsit: an orator’s speech is
grounded in rhetorical theory (including the recognition that an audience,
too, knows the tropes of presentation); it is grounded in a utilization of
past models—the great speeches of the past, the exempla read in history
books, the figures of tragedy or epic; and a speech also may manipulate a
set of quotations of laws or other literature, all written material ab-
sorbed through reading. Hence the ideological power of Libanius’s self-
representation as a reader of Demosthenes. Oratory’s oral performance is
fully informed by reading and writing. It is only in the grimly and falsely
named ‘‘chat rooms’’ of modern cyber hell that literacy has actually totally
silenced the oral. But when I say that the interest of this chapter is in
exploring the boundaries between the literate and the oral, I am not
- Gleason 1995; Bowersock 1969; Anderson 1989; Anderson 1993; Goldhill 2001;
Whitmarsh 2001. - Gleason 1995.
- Goldhill 2002, 60 107.
98 Situating Literacies