Rhetorics

This essay examines the rhetorical interface of writing and power through two case studies: the discourses that congeal around the fourth-century bce Athenian freedpersons Pasion, Phormion, and Apollodorus in Attic oratory; and the patterns of expression and sentiment that unspool from a first-century ce Roman funerary epitaph, originally set up to commemorate the deceased daughter of two freedpersons but eventually outfitted with a curse. We focus on the place of rhetoric—understood capaciously—in negotiations and contestations of identity among Greek and Roman freedpersons who bend writing into their service. The scholarly challenge of working with/around this rhetoric is not only that it emanates from or receives its justification through elite or elite-aspirational scripts, but also that it exerts an almost talismanic control over how we as scholars represent and apprehend the lives of those who made use of it.