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BOOKS AND READERS IN THE ROMAN WORLD
The formal education of many boys no doubt finished with the grammaticus.
Some moved on, usually at the age of puberty but in some cases several years
earlier, to the third, and for most Romans final, stage of their education under
the teacher of rhetoric (rhetor). Rhetorical teaching in Latin was comparatively
late in developing and did not become securely established until early in the
first century B.C. 1 "What is significant for literature is that its establishment
coincided in time with the rise to power of Octavian, later Augustus, and the
gradual disappearance of real political liberty at Rome. The main practical
element in the education of the Roman boy •who was destined (as all Romans of
good family were traditionally destined) for public life was declamation: formal
speeches on specified topics. At Rome this exercise may have originally tended
to resort more often to real life for its choice of themes — contemporary legal
and political issues — than its Greek counterpart. 2 Under the Principate there
was, for obvious reasons, a shift away from realistic and contemporary subjects
to those founded on premisses ranging from the improbable through the romantic
to the frankly grotesque. Some of the subjects can be seen to have been
derived from literature, especially the New Comedy, rather than from life.
Declamation, which began as a purely private exercise, quickly became a
public spectacle in which even accomplished speakers and prominent men of
affairs did not think it beneath them to participate. Quintilian (10.5.14) recommends
declamation as of practical use for the speaker -who is already fully
perfect in the art and celebrated in the courts, consummatus ac iam inforo darns.
A notable example of the adult practitioner was the Emperor Nero (Suet.
Nero 10). Two types of exercise 'were in vogue: the suasoria, in •which the
speaker advised some famous character of history or fable on his proper course
of action in a difficult situation; and the controversial in •which the speakers
argued on opposite sides of a case, usually of a legal or quasi-legal nature. Of
these types the controversia. was in general more popular as being more directly
competitive. Given the emphasis on competition and the unreal premisses of the
arguments, the aim of the adepts was not so much to convince as to astonish
their auditors. To this end they employed all possible resources: vivid descriptions,
striking turns of phrase, paradox, point, sententious epigram, and emotional
extravagances of the most extreme kind. Above all they relied on what
•were technically known as colores ' colours': the ingenious manipulation, often
to the point of standing things on their heads, of words and ideas, 'with the
object of putting a new and unexpected complexion on the data of the case. In
all this probability was hardly regarded; the aim -was less to persuade than to
outdo the previous speaker.
1
For the political background to the process see Gwynn (1926) 60-9, Clarke {1953) 11—M>
Marrou (1956) 252—3.
2
Cf. on the anonymous treatise Ad Herennium Marrou loc. cit.; Bonner (1949) 25. Cicero's early
De inventione may, however, give a more typical picture.
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