Profiles in Roman Rhetoric: An Expanding Hand

This volume shifts perspective to the everyday aspects of ancient rhetoric—its teaching, exercises, and daily life—and concentrates on persons less visible in narratives of rhetoric’s history: teachers, slaves and freedmen, speech performers, political dissidents, mavericks, and dropouts.

Standard historical accounts typically identify rhetoric with events and figures of great moment, great men, prominent status, and narrowly defined uses of the art. The more quotidian practices of rhetoric ...