Robert A. Kaster

The Taxonomy of Patience, or When Is "Patientia" Not a Virtue?

WE CAN BEGIN with two vignettes, one familiar and edifying, the other less familiar and sordid. According to legend, the infant Roman Republic was no sooner born than it faced a challenge from Lars Porsenna of Clusium, who first gave refuge to Tarquinius Superbus and then demanded restoration of the deposed king and his line. After direct attack failed, Porsenna laid siege to the city; as the siege wore on and began to grind the Romans down, a young noble, Gaius Mucius, received the senates approval for a plan to steal into the enemy camp and assassinate Porsenna. Here is how Saint Augustine finishes the story, as he took it over from Livy and used it to point a moral of his own:1

Controlling Reason: Declamation in Rhetorical Education at Rome

This chapter considers three strange, sad, and lurid tales of crime and punishment. The stories are versions of three themes used in the schools of Roman rhetoric throughout the imperial period. They are the raw materials of school declamation, the exercise in formal argumentation and verbal agility that every well-bred male of the empire came to know intimately. It is especially the role of such stories in the formation of sensibilities the perception of equity and outrage, of the admirable and the loathsome that are considered in the chapter. The practice of declamation at Rome dates at least from the early first century BC, when formal rhetorical instruction in Latin was institutionalized in the city. Declamations were of two main kinds, the mock-deliberative suasoria and the mock-forensic controversia : the latter exercise, which is far better documented, was to Roman rhetorical education what moot court competition is to the modern American law school. Keywords: imperial period; mock-deliberative suasoria ; mock-forensic controversia ; modern American law school; Roman rhetorical education