Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome

by Maud W. Gleason

Overview

The careers of two popular second-century rhetorical virtuosos offer Maud Gleason fascinating insights into the ways ancient Romans constructed masculinity during a time marked by anxiety over manly deportment. Declamation was an exhilarating art form for the Greeks and bilingual Romans of the Second Sophistic movement, and its best practitioners would travel the empire performing in front of enraptured audiences. The mastery of rhetoric marked the transition to manhood for all aristocratic citizens and remained crucial to a man's social standing. In treating rhetoric as a process of self-presentation in a face-to-face society, Gleason analyzes the deportment and writings of the two Sophists—Favorinus, a eunuch, and Polemo, a man who met conventional gender expectations—to suggest the ways character and gender were perceived.


Physiognomical texts of the era show how intently men scrutinized one another for minute signs of gender deviance in such features as gait, gesture, facial expression, and voice. Rhetoricians trained to develop these traits in a "masculine" fashion. Examining the successful career of Favorinus, whose high-pitched voice and florid presentation contrasted sharply with the traditionalist style of Polemo, Gleason shows, however, that ideal masculine behavior was not a monolithic abstraction. In a highly accessible study treating the semiotics of deportment and the medical, cultural, and moral issues surrounding rhetorical activity, she explores the possibilities of self-presentation in the search for recognition as a speaker and a man.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691137346
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	02/24/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Maud W. Gleason is lecturer in the Department of Classics at Stanford University.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

List of Abbreviations

Ch. 1 Favorinus and His Statue

Ch. 2 Portrait of Polemo: The Deportment of the Public Self

Ch. 3 Deportment as Language Physiognomy and the Semiotics of Gender

Ch. 4 Aerating the Flesh: Voice Training and the Calisthenics of Gender

Ch. 5 Voice and Virility in Rhetorical Writers

Ch. 6 Manhood Achieved through Speech: A Eunuch-Philosopher's Self-Fashioning

Conclusion

A Note on Finding Sources in Translation

Select Bibliography

Index Locorum

General Index

Editorial Reviews

"There has been a good deal of recent work on gender-construction in the ancient world, and this book is the fresher for not being another contribution by a woman to women's studies, nor even by a man to the fashionable question of masculinity. . . . Making Men is a delightful and illuminating book, and full of surprises for anyone who imagined that the Romans were . . . men who knew exactly what manhood was all about."

Times Literary Supplement

There has been a good deal of recent work on gender-construction in the ancient world, and this book is the fresher for not being another contribution by a woman to women's studies, nor even by a man to the fashionable question of masculinity. . . . Making Men is a delightful and illuminating book, and full of surprises for anyone who imagined that the Romans were . . . men who knew exactly what manhood was all about.

Time Magazines Literary Supplement

"There has been a good deal of recent work on gender-construction in the ancient world, and this book is the fresher for not being another contribution by a woman to women's studies, nor even by a man to the fashionable question of masculinity. . . . Making Men is a delightful and illuminating book, and full of surprises for anyone who imagined that the Romans were . . . men who knew exactly what manhood was all about."—Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher