The project aims at casting new light on the process of decision-making and generation of consensus in the ancient cities, based on the practice of public speaking in antiquity. It will conduct a novel study of selected public speeches from classical Athens to Late Antiquity in diachronic and comparative perspective. It will bring together both Greek and Roman historians, who will work not only on ancient oratory, but also on the ‘fictive’ speeches contained in the works of ancient historians and on monologues from theatre plays. At the centre of investigation there are the rhetoric strategies used to persuade audiences and the forms of interaction between public speakers and audiences in the different contexts and venues in which communities gathered in antiquity, namely, the assembly, the courts, the councils, the theatre, the battlefield and so on. Drawing on the advances made in the fields of psychology (studies on emotions), discourse analysis (framing analysis and paradigm narrative) and sociology (discursive new-institutionalism), this project aims at
1) a new understanding of the dynamics regulating political communication and the interaction between speakers and audience;
2) a thorough picture of rhetoric strategies and patterns of communication that are typical of public speeches in antiquity and eventually found their place in today’s political arenas;
3) a new awareness of the ‘blurring of boundaries’ between different rhetoric genres, overcoming the divisions traditionally attributed to Aristotle;
4) a new understanding of the way consensus was generated and political decisions were made, detecting both elements of continuity and change in different historical periods and areas.
Three research units (RUs) will work in close cooperation. RU1 in Milan will work on public speakers and their audiences, focusing on different venues of delivery (and different audiences). Two subprojects will focus on classical Athens, one on the late Republic and Early Empire, one on the mid-imperial age in the Greek world, one on Late antique’s oratory in Athens and Gaza. RU2 in Siena will deal with responsibility and motivation: one sub-project will focus on prosecutions against public speakers in Classical Athens, while the other subproject will focus on motivational speeches pronounced by generals to the troops. RU3 in Bologna will focus on theatricality and performances. One subproject will be on public speeches by ‘demagogues’ in Thucydides, one will focus on monologues from theatre plays and ‘rhetoric transfers’ from theatre to oratory in the classical and post-classical period, one subproject will be on the satire of power in Lucian. Results will be disseminated by public webinars open to the broader public, events addressing local students’ and theatre associations, workshops and international conference with publications in English and in Open Access, a website and a forum of discussion.
It is today widely agreed that political communication is an art that deploys different tools to achieve its goal. The ancient Greeks and Romans were aware of this, and rhetoric was taught and studied in schools well before Aristotle’s treatment and theorical systematization of the principles of this discipline. Public speeches were, in antiquity as today, a crucial tool for promoting political decisions, generating consensus, and presenting certain lines of policy as necessary to guarantee the well-being of the civic community. Public speeches provide a great amount of the source material we have from antiquity, as they do not only belong to orators’ corpora, but they also occupy considerable space in the works of ancient historians, albeit in the latter case they represent
‘fictive speeches’, i.e. historiographical constructions.
The importance of public speeches in antiquity has not escaped the attention of scholars. Scholars of classical Greece have largely investigated speeches contained in the works of the ancient historians (recently, Pausch 2010; Scardino 2011, Zali 2014, Pontier 2014, Baragwanath 2017, Brock 2019), while the speeches of Attic orators have been translated in most European languages (see, for example, the recent series on Attic orators published by the University of Texas Press, which has since a few years replaced the Loeb translations as the standard English translation of orators). Attic orators have received increasing attention by historians after Ober 1989 pivotal work, which has unfolded new ways of approaching mass communication in Classical Athens, highlighting how public speakers made use of rhetoric topoi that appealed to widely shared beliefs to convince their audience. Thus, the last two decades have witnessed several studies on persuasion strategies, especially after the new trend of studies on emotions in Greek antiquity (Cairns 2008, Chaniotis 2013, Sanders 2016).
Despite this wealth of studies, however, studies on public speeches in antiquity have so far devoted only little interest to the question of the interaction between speakers and their audiences, the way such interaction builds the main ‘engine’ contributing to the shaping of the speech and the mechanism by which consensus is generated. It was Connor’s theory (1971) that a new generation of politicians emerged on the political scene of Athens in the second half of the fifth century – a generation of which Cleon was an emblematic case. This theory had the merit of pointing to elements of demagogy that were present in the way these politicians addressed their audiences. But Connor focused more on the socio-economic profile of speakers – an aspect that has been re-addressed by Mann 2007 – rather than on their new mode of communicating to the assembly. Harris (2013a,b) has argued that the real aspect of novelty of a politician like Cleon was that of bringing to the assembly a kind of language and mode of speaking speakers usually deployed before the courts. The recent studies of Canevaro (2016), and Barbato (2020) have brought the question of public communication in the institutional settings of the polis at the centre of novel interest. Based on a new-institutionalist approach to institutions and political bodies, these works have considered under new light the public discourse generated in the assembly, courts and council. Discourse, in fact, is both affected by institutions, and, at the same time, it contributes to shaping institutions and changing them over time. This recent perspective has contributed to reconsidering important aspects of classical oratory, but the challenge is still open. Much work still needs to be done to understand how discourse changed depending on the venue, audience and occasion of delivery. Moreover, these questions have not yet been properly addressed to speeches outside the corpora of classical orators, such as those contained in the works of historians and post-classical orators.
