The noise-lovers: cultures of speech and sound in second-century Rome

This chapter provides an examination of an ideal of the ‘deliberate speaker’, who aims to reflect time, thought, and study in his speech. In the Roman Empire, words became a vital tool for creating and defending in-groups, and orators and authors in both Latin and Greek alleged, by contrast, that their enemies produced babbling noise rather than articulate speech. In this chapter, the ideal of the deliberate speaker is explored through the works of two very different contemporaries: the African-born Roman orator Fronto and the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian. Despite moving in very different circles, Fronto and Tatian both express their identity and authority through an expertise in words, in strikingly similar ways. The chapter ends with a call for scholars of the Roman Empire to create categories of analysis that move across different cultural and linguistic groups. If we do not, we risk merely replicating the parochialism and insularity of our sources.Accepted manuscrip

Tactical interactions : dialogues between Greece and Rome in the military manuals of Aelian and Arrian

This chapter looks at two interconnected texts which were published within two or three decades of each other: Aelianus Tacticus’ Tactical Theory (addressed to Trajan) and Arrian’s Tactics, published two or three decades later under Hadrian. Both texts appear to draw on the same source material, and it is reasonable to suppose that Arrian was aware of Aelian’s earlier treatise, although there is no direct interaction between them. Their different approaches to the same material offer an opportunity to explore different models of literary and cross-cultural interaction, and also to examine our go-to metaphors and interpretative models for analysing them. While Aelian establishes a series of polemical comparisons between age-old Greek military theory and currently effective Roman military practice, Arrian hints at overlaps between Greek and Roman traditions, both by incorporating a section on Roman cavalry manoeuvres and by interacting with a speech delivered by Hadrian to the Roman army at Lambaesis in 128. Both approaches are equally tactical; and both are revealing of the complex dynamics of cross-cultural interaction, which took place on and off the page, and in literary and less literary forms of writing.PostprintPeer reviewe

Introduction

This introduction, co-written with Rebecca Langlands and James Uden, sets up important contextual and methodological questions for the volume to come