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.
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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 hard men who knew exactly what manhood was all about.
About the Author
Maud W. Gleason is lecturer in the Department of Classics at Stanford University.
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0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
great book, horrendous price,
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This review is from: Making Men (Hardcover)
Making Men is a fine book, replete with fresh ideas about the Second Sophistic (the 2nd century AD Greek literature in the eastern Roman Empire). But the dastardly bookseller (the one and only listed here with Amazon) dares to ask $350.00 for a volume (admittedly out-of-print [so says the Press]) which lists for $25.00. I suppose this is the underside of raw capitalism, "what the market will bear," with its corollary, "caveat emptor," although in this instance, 'tis not the contents about which one should be wary, but the outrageous asking price. This is, to put it bluntly, an example of a seller taking advantage of a buyer's ignorance...
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