Stock Characters Speaking: Eight Libanian Declamations Introduced and Translated, by Robert J. Penella

Few scholars can boast Robert Penella's long experience and meritorious service in making the late antique luminaries of Greek rhetorical culture more accessible to Anglophone audiences. As with his books on Themistius, Himerius, and Choricius, here once again we as readers are indebted not only to his sensitivity to both Greek and English idiom but also to his commitment to texts that have never or only partially appeared in English translation before (see Penella 2000, 2007, and 2009). The staggeringly prolific output of Libanius—the doyen of rhetorical education in late fourth-century Antioch and Emperor Julian's enthusiastic cheerleader—means that, despite featuring prominently in our understanding of Eastern Mediterranean cultural history, many of his works still lack translations.Consequently, of the eight texts written by or attributed to Libanius that are included here, five are appearing for the first time in a modern-language translation. The qualification attributed to is necessary since the popularity of Libanius in later centuries meant that his name tended to get attached to stray or anonymous texts, as also happened in the case of similarly popular authors—here in particular his younger contemporary and fellow Antiochian John Chrysostom comes to mind. Thus, the conveniently capacious label Libanian in the book's subtitle allows for the accommodation of genuine works of Libanius as well as those whose authorship is either in question and denoted with "Libanius (?)" or accepted as being falsely attributed to Libanius ("Ps.-Libanius"). On these matters of authenticity, Penella defers to the judgment of Libanius's editor Richard Foerster, whose text (see Foerster 1911, 1913) forms the basis for the translation, and the more recent work of Dietmar Najok (e.g., Najok 2007).Although the volume under review forms a pair with another set of Penella's translations of Libanius published in 2020 (the books are explicitly presented in the foreword as forming two installments), it is self-standing, with a brief but helpful general introduction of its own. The texts selected for translation both here and in the earlier volume are meletai (declamations), a word that emphasized the aspect of practice or exercise. In the agonistic world of late antique rhetorical education, students who had completed their study of ancient poetry with the grammarian (grammatikos) next made their way through two stages of training in rhetorical composition. They began with the progymnasmata, which, as the name indicates, were "preliminary exercises" of increasing length and complexity that prepared them for the full-scale exercises of the meletai. These were complete speeches in which students or teachers spoke not in their own voice but under an assumed persona.1If the progymnasmata are drills and a meletē what in American English I would call a scrimmage, then the meletai by someone like Libanius are the exhibition performances of a barnstorming professional. Libanius's declamations represent showpieces: models that could be used to advertise his skill as a teacher, to serve as samples for his students to imitate, or to entertain older audiences. They took the form of deliberative and forensic orations in which the speaker played the role of either a specific person from history or myth (such declamations form the subject of Penella 2020) or a generic type (e.g., a profligate son or a stingy father), and it is these "stock characters" that give this book its title.We can take the less savory half of this cast of characters first—a proverbially wretched hive of scum and villainy if ever I found one. There is the parasite (Pseudo-Libanius, Declamation 29) who attempts to have a capital sentence pronounced against himself—a technical maneuver called a prosangelia or "self- denunciation"—now that his patron has embraced a life of philosophy and its none-too-appealing material asceticism (Penella hints intriguingly at the possible Christian echoes that Libanius's audience might have detected in such a lifestyle choice 38 n. 11); the jealous pauper (Libanius, Declamation 30) who in another prosangelia claims life is no longer worth living since his neighbor and formerly fellow pauper has struck it rich; the miser who disinherits his son over a talent the latter had given away as a vow to Asclepius to save his father from a terrible illness (Pseudo- Libanius, Declamation 34); and the convict (Libanius ?, Declamation 45) who argues for the lightest of three possible sentences for himself. The more socially presentable ones rounding out the collection include the poor man who initiates a prosangelia against himself (a theme is emerging here) to save his city from a rich enemy who, after cornering the grain market, tries to extort the city into surrendering the speaker in exchange for food (Libanius, Declamation 35); the rich war hero accused of tyrannical ambitions after requesting a series of suspiciously populist reforms as his reward for valor in battle (Libanius, Declamation 37); the mourning widower disowned by his father for refusing to remarry (Libanius, Declamation 46); and the son who secretly reinserts his disowned brother back into his father's will and on getting caught is, in turn, himself disowned for his efforts (Libanius, Declamation 47).These are entertaining texts, but they are also linguistically challenging—after all, they were written largely to show off their author's chops. With Penella, readers are in good hands, whether they come to Libanius with or without Greek. In the foreword, he suggests that he has both audiences in mind and notes that, in addition to prioritizing Greekless readers who want to read the translation as such, he also wants to offer "an aid to those who are working through the Greek texts" as he sees translation as "the most fundamental kind of commentary" (n.p.). Those can sometimes be difficult aims to reconcile, but he succeeds in producing a natural and engaging style that sounds like Libanius while also shedding helpful light on the knottier bits of the Greek without descending to the level of a crib. There was never a jarring moment when the spell was broken or I thought to myself, "Libanius wouldn't say something like that."Libanius, like his heroes Aelius Aristides and Emperor Julian, became, of course, a much-admired and -imitated literary model in Byzantium, and Stock Characters Speaking also represents a signal contribution to the study of his Byzantine reception. As did the earlier collection of mythological and historical declamations, the present volume features an appendix with a declamation by Gregory II of Cyprus, the thirteenth-century patriarch of Constantinople who happened to be a teacher of rhetoric in his own right. That declamation offers a response to Pseudo-Libanius, Declamation 34 (the two are printed together in Foerster's edition), namely, the one with the avaricious father who, after recovering from illness, disowns his son for having vowed a talent to Asclepius. He may have had to wait a few centuries, but the poor son finally got his day in court, so to speak, when Gregory took up his case. With the Greek text clocking in at a knee-weakening thirty-eight Teubner pages, it represents the longest declamation in the book. Penella rises to the challenge with admirable accuracy and elegance, and I would make only the following points (which, considering the length of the text, amount to very few indeed):The explanatory notes accompanying the translation throughout the book are concise, useful, and only rarely leave anything to be desired: in Libanius, Declamation 46, when a woman who died in the attempt to ransom her husband from pirates after his own father had refused to do so is said to have "put an end to the incredibility of myths by confirming the stories of old by what she did herself" (104), the reader might want a reference to the story of Alcestis; in the peroration of Gregory of Cyprus's response to Pseudo-Libanius, Declamation 34, the phrase "he fought a good fight" (134, καλῶς ἠγωνίσατο) would have recalled, for the future patriarch and his audience, the famous Pauline tag at 2 Timothy 4:7 (τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα ἠγώνισμαι).Among the book's most impressive contributions is the introduction's detailed analysis of each of the declamations and their respective structures and discursive strategies. In several instances, this includes discussion of how Byzantine readers identified in the margins of their manuscripts the stasis or key issue in question. Such a practice reflects the central importance of stasis theory to Byzantine rhetorical education, which for a thousand years was largely based on the five-part textbook sequence of the Hermogenean corpus, including the seminal treatment of stasis theory by Hermogenes of Tarsus himself (second century CE) in the Περὶ στάσεων.Attentiveness to such topics makes Stock Characters Speaking particularly useful not only to readers interested in ancient rhetoric and the history of rhetorical theory but to Byzantinists as well. In an earlier study, Penella had sketched out directions for future research on Libanian declamations and their influence and reception (see Penella 2014, 122–27). The present book not only impressively fulfills some of the desiderata mentioned there but should also encourage and enable new studies in turn.