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

Understanding Latin literature /

Includes bibliographical references and index.Virgil and the meaning of the Aeneid -- Role models for Roman women and men in Livy -- What is Latin literature? -- What does studying Latin literature involve? -- Receptions and reverberations of Latin literature -- Making Roman identity: multiculturalism, militarism and masculinity -- Performance and spectacle, life and death -- Intersections of power: praise, politics and patrons -- Annihilation and abjection: living death and living slavery -- Writing "real" lives -- Introspection and individual identity -- Literary texture and intertextuality -- Metapoetics -- Allegory -- Overcoming an inferiority complex: constructing Roman literature