Rhetors at the wedding1

D. A. Russell

doi:10.1017/S0068673500004156

Rhetors at the wedding1

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2013

D. A. Russell

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D. A. Russell: Affiliation:
St. John's College, Oxford

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In Lucian's Symposium, one of the wedding guests is a philosopher and another is a grammatikos. The grammatikos provides a bad elegiac epithalamium; the philosopher, who is called Ion, improves the occasion with a speech in which he declares that pederasty offers the best way of life, and the system of communal wives, as recommended in Plato's Republic, is the next best thing.

This fantasy, of course, tells us nothing about what went on at weddings. Lucian's main motive is literary parody, of Plutarch's Erotikos or something of the kind. But it may serve to recall something of which we have evidence enough in Greek rhetoric, namely the practice of delivering speeches of some literary pretention at high-class weddings. The educated classes of the cities of the eastern provinces evidently cherished this habit: a display of culture, as well as of wealth, was admired, and elaborate orations took their place, alongside abundance of food and wine, music and song, elaborately decorated bridal chambers and beds, as concomitants of a wedding that was to do both families credit. This is true of the period of the ‘Second Sophistic’, and of its fourth-century and early Byzantine continuations. How far the practice was common before, say, the Antonine age is much less clear.

Type: Research Article
Information: Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 25 , 1979 , pp. 104 - 117

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068673500004156 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

NOTES

2. Lucian, , Symposium 39Google Scholar.

3. The Dionysian ars will be cited from the Teubner edition of H. Usener and L. Radermacher (Dionysii, Opuscula, vol. II, 260–271Google Scholar); ‘Menander’ by the page and line of Spengel, L. (Rhetores Graeci III)Google Scholar, but the text is based on the new edition by Mr. N.G. Wilson and myself, to be published by the Oxford University Press. Problems of interpretation and text are not discussed in this paper, in which I attempt simply a running commentary on the content of the relevant chapters, designed to illustrate variations within the rhetors' tradition, and also the general character of what they have to say. Such a treatment could of course easily be extended to other topics dealt with in these treatises.

4. Wheeler, A.L. (AJP 51 [1930] 205–23)Google Scholar provides a good guide to the literary epithalamium.

5. Cf. Maas, P., RE IX. 134Google Scholar.

6. For the range of ritual customs connected with Greek marriage, see e.g. Heckenbach, J., RE VIII. 2129ff.Google Scholar

7. See 399,11 .

8. Cf. Ammonius diff. voc. 114 Nickau .

9. 261,3 . .

10. 269,19 .

11. 261,15ff. .

12. 263,1 .

13. Nicostratus, a Macedonian sophist of the Antonine age, is credited with fables, εἰκόνες, and ‘precepts on marriage’. He was regarded as a model of γλυκύτης, but Hermogenes (407, 12 Rabe) thought his style ὑπέρωσχνος.

14. See Aphthonius 42ff. Rabe, Nicolaus 74ff. Felten, Libanius 8.550ff. Foerster.

15. See van Geytenbeek, A.C., Musonius Rufus (1963) 62–71Google Scholar.

16. Libanius 8.557f. Foerster.

17. Ibid. 555,5ff. . Not only does this sound an echo in the minds of those familiar with the older ways of Cambridge and Oxford colleges; it is a faint reflection of a passage in the Odyssey (11.224-5) .

18. I may perhaps refer to my sketch of these chapters to be published in a forthcoming volume (XXV) of Entretiens Hardt.

19. A brief account in Clark, D.L., Rhetoric in Greco-Roman education (1957) 194–98Google Scholar.

20. 269,23 .

21. 270,6.

22. 271.15 (= auctoritate)

(Od. 6.182f.).

. (For an instance of this last idea in later Greek, as distinct from the classical or archaic periods cf. Plu., SNV 563DGoogle Scholar, where the visionary Thespesius experiences a moral improvement which similarly pains his enemies and pleases his friends.)

23. 399,16 .

24. Note 369,4; 411,27f.; 434,7; 437,4.

25. Details in Soffel, J., Die Regeln Menanders für die Leichenrede (Beiträge zur Kl. Phil. 57)Google Scholar, Meisenheim am Glan 1974, 192-5.

26. 8.267ff. Foerster.

27. Of course, the disorder is more apparent than real. The piece ends, with an air of abruptness, with a bugonia - the ox is useful even after death: .

28. 401,14 , .

29. Alpheus and Arethusa (401,29), Poseidon and Tyro (402,12), Europa (402,14) and Io (ibid.).

30. 265,8 (‘at the end of every thing’) .

31. 402,25ff. .

32. . J.F. Lockwood, in notes for a projected lexicon of rhetorical terms, to which I have had access through the good offices of Prof. R. Browning, doubted αὐχμηρότης, and suggested ἀμαυρότης; ‘obscurity’: but the use of siccitas in Latin as a term for a dry, arid style seems to support αὐχμηρότης well enough, even if we have no Greek parallels.

33. Cf. 265,21ff. . Family qualities are stressed, personal ones not mentioned.

34. 403,27 . (For the text, cf. Him., Or. 9.15Google Scholar.

35. 404,5 . These comparisons are at least in part traditional; Greg. Nyss. in Pulcheriam 463.2 Spira (of Theodosius and Flacilla: the origin of the palm-tree comparison is Od. 6.163). But the comparison of bridegroom, not bride, to a rose remains puzzling.

36. 404,8 (cf. 398,16).

37. 398,18ff. .

38. 404,11 .

39. 404,29ff. .

40. 405,2ff. .

41. The name recalls κατακοιμητικός, applied to Theocr. 18 in the scholia.

42. 409,13 .

43. 405,26 .

44. 405,29 .

45. 283-292: an interesting piece, especially for its attack (291-2) on corrupt practices in athletics.

46. 406,18 .

406,25 [cf. 371, 16], ἄστρων.

47. 407,25-408,8.

48. See, e.g., Nisbet-Hubbard on Hor., Odes 1.4Google Scholar, Rohde, Der griechische Roman 335 (360)Google Scholar; for the adaptation of a seasonal description to a wedding, much in Menander's manner, see Choricius, Or. 6.47Google Scholar Foerster-Richtsteig.