Because themagisteris an informing figure in Gellius, let us begin with
a scene from his school days. A passage at the front of 11.13 is remarkable
enough to quote in full:
At the home of Titus Castricius, a teacher of the discipline of rhetoric and a
man of weighty and solid judgment, a speech of Gaius Gracchus was being
read aloud. At the beginning of that speech, the words were arranged with
more precision and musicality than is usual for the early orators. These are
the words, composed just as I have indicated:quae uos cupide per hosce annos
adpetistis atque uoluistis, ea si temere repudiaritis, abesse non potest, quin aut
olim cupide adpetisse aut nunc temere repudiasse dicamini (if you now rashly
reject the things which all these years you have earnestly sought and longed for, it
must be said either that you sought them earnestly before, or that you have now
rejected them without consideration).
The flow and sound of the well rounded and smooth sentence delighted
us extremely, to an unusual degree, and all the more since we saw that a
composition of this sort had been pleasing to Gracchus, a distinguished and
austere man. But when those same words were read over and over again at
our request, Castricius admonished us to consider what was the force and
value of the thought, and not to allow our minds as well as our ears to fill up
with empty pleasure, charmed by the music of the well cadenced speech.The passage serves as vivid reminder that the educated audience of
antiquity was trained to a very different sensibility for the rhythm and
sounds of oratory. Gracchus’s sentence is striking for its repetition of
words and sounds, for the balance in clauses,^6 and for the overall rhythm.
Yet it hardly rises to the level that it seems reasonable—to us—that
students ask it to be read again and again (saepius lectitarentur). Import-
antly, our students wouldn’t ask thatanythingbe read again and again; nor
do modern instructors need to worry that students will pay too much
attention to the musicality of a sentence! The very experience of hearing
the words when read aloud to the group—what one listens to, what one
listens for—is utterly unfamiliar to modern perceptions. This is not news:
Norden’sDie antike Kunstprosaeloquently described the ancient reader’s
attitudes toward literary prose a century ago.
7
The differences are not,
however, solely interior. Sociologically, even the brief scene here implies
a situation in which someone reads the text performatively; the students
ooh and aah and demand an encore; the text is read again; more clamor
and discussion; after several iterations the teacher finally intervenes. The
rest of the chapter is taken up with Castricius’s demonstration, at
length, of logical and stylistic problems with Gracchus’s expression in
this sentence. The way in which a small section of text is held upby the
- A good example of isocolon, as Norden saw (1915, 1.172):quae. .. repudiaritis 32
syllables;abesse... dicamini 31 syllables;autin each case introduces a phrase of 10
syllables. - Norden 1915.
Constructing Elite Reading Communities in the High Empire 325