Resumen de The Dynamics of Rhetorical Performances in Late Antiquity by Alberto J. Quiroga Puertas (review)
Thanks to the extant corpora of Libanius, Themistius, Gregory of Nazianzus, Symmachus, Ambrose, and others, the fourth century c.e. is as rich a period for the study of oratory as any that preceded it, but little attention has been paid to the socio-historical or literary aspects of the performance of these orators' speeches (perhaps, then, due to the comparative absence of contemporary dramatic texts, and any accompanying field of late antique theater studies). Furthermore, rather than primarily an attempt to reconstruct the physical or visual aspects of actual performance (as scholarship on classical oratory has done before him), his aim is "to explore what narrations of rhetorical performances from late antique sources can offer us in order to improve our understanding of the issues relating to cultural and religious debates of that time period" (2). The picture might be rather different if more western, Latin material were brought to bear (Symmachus, for example, for whom, like Libanius, we have ample speeches and letters); or account were taken of different situations of delivery (were the dynamics of performing a panegyric before the emperor the same as in local civic agones?); or a systematic study offered of performance-narrative in other genres, such as historiography or hagiography.
