The anonymous author of Laus Pisonis seeks simultaneously to promote Piso’s political image by investing him with impressive virtutes (to which he had no claim) and to secure the great man’s patronage. In this give-and-take transaction, he argues, both parties emerge as winners: Piso by securing a promising praeco virtutis at a crucial moment in his political career (around A.D. 65), the poet from the “job security” as Piso’s client. Downplaying materialistic concerns, the author evokes the Muses to link panegyric and poetic agenda, with multiple (Horatian) allusions to flatter Piso’s literary culture and demonstrate their shared values.
Demosthenes' Philippic cycle conveys a satirical picture of Athenians
trapped in a spiral of symbolic activity: to a demos nostalgic for great-power
status but loath to energetic intervention, high-sounding resolutions substitute
for low-level responses and by their character as official enactments create the
illusion of meaningful engagement. This "syndrome" is a rhetorical scare-image
subserving a political agenda. At a time when his influence was still limited, Demosthenes found it expedient to exaggerate the cautious approach of the "peace
party" into a "knowing-doing gap" in order to move the audience to accept his
own hard line on the Macedonian question.
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