Abstract
This volume appears in the publisher’s Studies in Rhetoric/Communication series, and provides a fascinating insight into the visual and material rhetoric of the Augustan period (27 BC to 14 AD) in classical Rome. Its principal interest to visual communication and multimodality is its focus on artefacts, altars, coins, buildings, and other manifestations of cultural and political power, suggesting that classical rhetoric was expressed in material as well as verbal form.
Lamp is keen to counter the predominant ‘narrative of decline’ that has characterized the history of the late Roman republic and specifically the reign of Augustus. This narrative has suggested that rhetoric was in a decadent phase, that the relationship between the state and its people was deteriorating, that rhetoric had become propaganda, and that democracy was on the wane. On the one hand, Lamp points out that the artefacts and buildings of the period serve to reinforce an ‘Augustan political myth’, with the face of the emperor imprinted on coins, in public buildings and so on. On the other hand, such autocratic political regimes are never, she suggests, quite as simple as the myth suggests. There was agency among the people – slaves, plebs, women (all those seemingly without power) – to imitate, parody and re-make the iconography, thus maintaining a necessary dynamic between vernacular and state discourse. Towards the end of the book, she makes an analogy between the Augustan principate and the Arab spring.
Rhetoric thrives in democracies and where an audience exists to be persuaded by orators, politicians and others. Lamp makes the important point that not only is there an audience in Augustan Rome, sometimes obscured by the prevailing historical accounts of the period, but that the vernacular voice never entirely disappears. Indeed, she quotes Bodmer who suggests that public memory ‘emerges from the intersection of official and vernacular cultural expression’ (p. 129). Such a suggestion extends the reach of rhetoric to autocratic states as well as to democracies, in addition to blurring the distinction between the two political modes. What rhetoric can help us to see is that ‘democracies’ are not as purely free as their politicians would suggest, and that ‘autocracies’ leave spaces for vernacular expression.
Rhetoric is also seen in the book as more than the art of persuasion. Quintilian, the Roman theorist of oratory, is quoted approvingly on pp. 25–26 as suggesting that rhetoric is more than the art of persuasion in words; it includes the use of the body (e.g. scars, beauty, sheer presence) not only to persuade, but as part of the wider definition of rhetoric as the ‘arts of discourse’. The wider and more generous conception sees it as embracing monuments and city planning as well as the artefacts and buildings mentioned above, all with an aesthetic dimension. There is even the suggestion that the difference between word and image – between the symbolic and the directly perceptible material image – is not so great in Roman thought. In a compressed but stimulating passage, Lamp sets out the theoretical functions of architecture as a repository of public memory, an aesthetic, a monument to visual narratives in the built environment, and the production of a rhetorically significant cityscape.
Finally, it is intriguing to consider how the celebration and re-invention of the Augustan period in 18th-century European culture (‘the Augustan age’) might open up new territory for visual and material rhetoricians to explore. At the same time, there is acknowledgement that the rhetorical practices of the Roman republic, despite its orators – Cicero, Quintilian and others – is still under-theorized and also needs further exploration.
This is an excellent book: scholarly, well-researched, insightful and opening up new ground for further research. It raises more questions than it can answer, but provides a new foundation for work in visual and material rhetoric, and an interesting case study in the history of multimodality.