I conclude with a review of my findings in Chapters 3–7. I elucidate the relationship between “oil” and “Islam” and what that relationship teaches us about politics in Gulf monarchies. The overwhelming message is that with their abundant wealth, Gulf rulers have been exploiting not only oil rents but also religious doctrine and its (re-)formulations to function as tools of social management and social control. Their aim is to bolster their authoritarian ambitions: ruling families’ capacity to both dominate and shape their societies and retain their monopoly over resources. For the sake of maintaining – and enriching – dynastic states and constructing the nation, oil and Islam are their principal tools.

Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès and Estelle Doudet counter the perception that ‘French medieval theatre’ might be French, medieval, or even theatre. Whereas theatre created from the seventeenth century onwards is termed ‘modern’, activity prior to this period is often portrayed as unsophisticated and non-professional. Bouhaïk-Gironès and Doudet argue for a new approach to the theatre that emerged between the mid twelfth and mid sixteenth centuries, which firstly testifies to its rich and varied nature. Second, they decentralize the geographical frame implied by ‘French’, recounting the French-speaking theatre activity taking place over France’s borders. Finally, they describe the sophisticated processes of collaborative performance-making, rehearsal and stage production that evolved during this period, which gave rise to a whole new lexicon of terms for describing practices by playwrights, actors, producers and audience members, many of which are used in European languages to this day.

Lucian’s In Praise of the Fly offers a delightfully wry encomium of the humble house fly. While the speech engages wittily with sophistic traditions by praising this troublesome insect, it also raises important questions about social marginality and the workings of power, and about the mechanisms through which value is conventionally assessed and reinforced. This chapter examines scale, social status, and literary self-consciousness in Lucian’s representation of the fly as a creature of immense cultural importance. The encomium, it is argued, plays with conventional associations between size and value, revelling in comic juxtapositions of scale, and in the mismatch between ambition and achievement. It also exploits traditional modes of discourse that present animals as models for the socially disenfranchised, and draws on the vocabulary of literary criticism and composition in order to evoke and challenge the symbolism traditionally attributed to other insects and to represent the fly provocatively as the new emblem of a refined literary and cultural aesthetic.

This chapter examines Lucian’s Erotes to explore qustions of authorship and agency. It explores how questions about authorship operate differently for erotic and non-erotic works and the ways in which erotic discourse is more amenable to anonymous or masked authors. The chapter shows how according Lucianic authorship to this text enriches our understanding of other texts by Lucian. It examines how the Erotes functions to critique normative sexual discourse and suggest that in the comparison between men and women as love objects the text underlines the tiredness and conventionality of this debate and the rhetorical tropes that are employed in it. By contrast, this reading of the Erotes seeks to locate the critical frisson of the text (its ‘kink’) in its discussion of the magnitude of male appetite and the way the text correlates sex and the divine.

In “Divine and Human Plans of God in the Book of Isaiah,” J. Todd Hibbard follows the occurrences of a Hebrew root that means “to plan, advise, counsel” through the whole book, bringing to light one of its central themes. He shows how Isaiah’s theological rhetoric begins with a plan against Judah that involves foreign nations, but eventually undermines the plans of those nations as well. As with feminine imagery in the book, it is possible to identify a kind of episodic narrative running through the book in relation to certain themes in a way that animates the development of the book and holds it together despite its lengthy formation. The divine plans for Judah and nations eventually come together and culminate with the summoning of Cyrus as messiah and the appearance of the Persian empire.

The chapter looks at a substantial number of texts outside the boundaries usually placed in Byzantine Studies through conventional taxonomic categories such as genre or antithetic pairs like learned versus vernacular language. Four larger themes are used to explore this varied textual production and offer a proposal for understanding its basic socio-cultural and aesthetic functions for its immediate recipients and later readers. The four themes discussed are education and literature, patronage and literary production, rhetoric and genre in prose and poetry, narrative art from the enormous to the small. Despite the strong presence of ‘Hellenic’ subjects, Komnenian literature owes more to its own dynamism (deriving from a reformed teacherly practice in the schools) than to the imitation of ancient models. At the same time, the role of the patrons in promoting literary production shapes much of both learned and vernacular literary experimentation, while religious literature generously defined is strongly involved in an ongoing experimentation with form and content. Finally, the chapter asks whether any form of change can be traced within the literary production of the Komnenian era.

This chapter explores the rationales of the paratexts accompanying John Tzetzes’ commentary on Hermogenes in the bespoke copy contained in the Vossianus Gr. Q1. Besides clarifying the circumstances prompting that specific copy of the commentary, these paratexts scaffold Tzetzes’ authorial agency as well as his social role in a cultural economy based on patronage. The chapter also shows how they speak to the way Tzetzes exploits the inherent ambiguities of language and tradition, by looking at them as examples of enacted ἀμφοτερογλωσσία, resting on dialectic.

Was the stylistic exuberance and formal ambition of twelfth-century classicizing prose linked to the unprecedented study of ancient poetry during this period? Why would aspiring prose writers have been nurtured largely in verse? Long accustomed to regard Byzantine interest in ancient poetry as culturally antiquarian in nature, we have been less alert to the formal lessons available to aspiring Byzantine authors, most of whom would go on to compose in prose instead of verse. By tracing the long history of poetry as the school of prose, this chapter draws examples from Eustathios’ Parekbolai or ‘commentaries’ on Homeric epic in a bid to illustrate attempts to render Byzantine prose more ‘poetic’. The author thus hopes to underline the reciprocal and often seamless relation between prose and verse in the twelfth century and what this may teach us about both during what is widely regarded as the most innovative period in Byzantine literature.

This chapter proposes that early modern women essayists invoked anger to negotiate new modes of publicity in the nascent public sphere. By reading the writings of Jane Anger, Rachel Speght, and Margaret Cavendish alongside the history of humanist education, it shows that anger’s original object was not misogyny writ large, but the rhetorical training that limited women’s access to privileged protocols of speaking and writing. By the end of the early modern period, it argues, anger dissipates as the rise of salon conversation and letter writing expand the field in which literacy can be displayed, weakening rhetoric’s grip on the republic of letters.

Although there is no equivalent term for ‘essay’ in either Greek or Latin, ancient literature was instrumental to the development of the English essay in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in three principal ways. First, some classical prose works provided stylistic models for early English essayists. Second, some ancient authors (Seneca in particular) processed information in a way that resonated with later essay writers; even if there were not ancient essayists, there were ancient ways of reading and writing that were fundamentally essayistic. And finally, the essay became one of the principal ways that readers gained access to ancient texts and ideas.

Chapter 2 turns to the important idea in Kyd’s design of rhetorical hyperbole and dramatic excess by comparing the emerging ethical effects engendered by the moral void of Kyd’s play to similar but crucially different devices involving abused emblems of writing in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. These early, near-contemporary responses to Kyd weigh through performance the consequences of violent action when neither the circumstances of plot nor the demands of justice can help explain or assign meaning to such action within any conceivable moral calculus. In the process, the moral-tragic weight of such plays sinks under the irruption of farce and burlesque, thereby forcing the audience to re-evaluate their voyeuristic complicity in the unfolding onstage representation of ritualised, and highly aestheticised retaliatory acts of violence.

Since the rules of civility are often abandoned for the sake of the goals activists are pursuing, this chapter considers whether these goals – rather than a set of universal rules – might themselves suggest moral constraints. To illustrate this point, I analyze two authors who believe that how one communicates is integrally related to what one actually conveys, and thus morality and effectiveness cannot always be separated. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell argues women must be free to reflect on their own experiences rather than being subjected to authoritative interpretations. Even when done in the name of women’s liberation, telling women how they should feel ironically stifles women’s voices. Thus, a dialogical, consciousness-raising style of communication is integrally related to the pursuit of women’s liberation. Paulo Freire likewise argues that propaganda for the cause of liberation ironically perpetuates oppression. Liberators need to be committed to dialogue because the task of liberation itself demands dialogical engagement.

Participatory Athenian democracy has inspired many political thinkers, despite its imperialist atrocities, slavery and the subordination of women. Pericles is an ambivalent figure, and it is dangerous to see him as the embodiment of a golden age. His speech over the war-dead can be seen as a noble democratic manifesto or the calculated work of a demagogue. In a debate about the punishment of Mytilene, as depicted by Thucydides, Cleon uses the language of reason to work on the emotions, and is a paradigm of the populist or ‘demagogue’. We can see the ‘demagogue’ as an aberration from true democracy, or see the word itself as a standard weapon that can be wielded in any democratic contest. The comic dramatist Aristophanes offers us insight into Cleon’s performance techniques that embrace face, arms and voice, and into the minds of those who supported him. In his Gorgias, Plato theorises the problem of rhetoric. Gorgias was a Sicilian who taught the Athenians that rhetoric was an art which they could pay to learn, and for Plato this was a fundamental flaw in his nation’s democratic enterprise.

This chapter examines the concept of style in terms of language and of representation. The style of a poem may first be understood as a problem of language at the level of the sentence. The analysis of style is then concerned with diction, syntax, meter, and other such linguistic features, and analysis can approach style as either a conscious choice or an unconscious reflex. But style is therefore also a problem of representation. For example, style may index the poet's character, gender, class, or any other aspect of their identity, and in this way, style is entangled in the specificities of social and historical life. Through detailed readings of poems by Margaret Cavendish and Harryette Mullen, the chapter then argues that the concept of style, both as language and representation, mediates between the one poem and the many. On the one hand, style customarily links one poem to other poems and indeed to other discourses and artforms. On the other, precisely because styles are shared and repeated a given poem may allude to or incorporate styles as part of its material and may, through this very process, affirm its own difference or even singularity.

This chapter looks at approximately a millennium of ancient reception, from factors pertaining to the writing and early circulation of Gorgias to the commentary on the work by Olympiodorus in the sixth century of our era. The dialogue was not written for light-hearted entertainment but as a vehicle for serious philosophy. Early readers must have included Plato’s rival Isocrates, whose Against the Sophists criticizes material early in the work, while inspiring 519b-d. Aristotle made extensive use of it in the Rhetoric, but may have thought its ethics superceded. A range of allusions in the spurious Alcibiades II strongly suggests that Gorgias was well-known by the late fourth century. It was widely read thereafter, thanks to rhetoricians and grammarians. Commentaries emerged from the Platonist schools, from Taurus to Olympiodorus, and may be supplemented from other philosophic discussion. Dodds had a low regard for Olympiodorus, taking little account of the task faced by the Alexandrian commentator. Some examples show how this view caused him to overlook places where Olympiodorus’ offers assistance, or even to misreport what he says. I conclude with the value of studying the ancient reception for enhancing our view of Plato.

Plato’s Gorgias is often framed as a quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy, conceived as two ways of life. I suggest a refinement of the traditional framing: the dialogue requires discernment rather than choice. The reader must distinguish the real life from the illusory alternative, a task whose difficulty Plato intensifies by bringing to the fore the striking resemblances between rhetoric and philosophy. These resemblances lead to the realization that each side has a story about how it is the genuine article. Further, from a neutral vantage point, the dialogue leaves the two possibilities identically placed. In doing so, the Gorgias expresses a sense of the limitations of argument shorn of commitment to guiding normative principles. But Plato’s text also suggests the possibility of progress if, like Socrates, one is willing to stake one’s engagement on the presence of similar antecedent commitments within one’s interlocutor, however deeply rooted.

This chapter considers the relationship between the historical Gorgias of Leontini and Plato’s portrayal of him and his ideas in the Gorgias. By drawing on fragments and testimonia of the historical figure, it shows that Plato’s understanding of Gorgias and his views informs both his characterization of the orator himself in the Gorgias, as well as that dialogue’s philosophical content and aims. In particular, three of the central themes of the Gorgias – ones that the character himself introduces – are prominent in Gorgias’ own works and in the doxographical reception of him: (1) the conception of speech as a form of power or dunamis; (2) the relation between power and wish or boulēsis and their joint role in human action; and (3) the contrast between – and contrasting relationships speech itself has with – belief on the one hand and knowledge on the other. Whether the historical Gorgias was ever personally committed to the relevant ideas in question or not, the chapter argues that he at least gave voice to them in his works, and that Plato, at least, evidently took them seriously as expressions of Gorgianic theory and practice.