Petronius’s Satyricon, long recognized as a commentary on rhetorical education, particularly declamation, forms a broad critique of (rhetorical) educational practices in the first century rooted in imitation—declamation, Greek Atticism, imperial rhetoric—and the types of citizens produced by such practices. Problematically, Petronius’s critique, which seeks to redefine class based on a certain cultivated taste or judgment as opposed to material wealth, assumes an elite perspective and falls into the long dismissed “decline narrative” of Roman rhetoric once prevalent in the history of rhetoric. This article seeks to move beyond “Trimalchio vision,” a term used by art historian Lauren Hackworth Peterson to classify derogatory attitudes toward freedmen, to suggest that rhetorical education in the first century reached its intended audience, producing upwardly socially mobile administrators and city patrons in the empire. In other words, rhetorical education was reaching a mass audience in first-century Rome.
In this essay, I examine two epideictic artifacts from the Roman Principate, The Res Gestae Divi Augusti and the summi viri, arguing Augustus used them to reshape the model of a good leader, in part, by emphasizing contributing to the built environment of the city. Additionally, the public and visual nature of these artifacts made them highly accessible to those outside of the Roman elite, who may have sought social mobility through the imperial bureaucracy allowing for more diverse participation in the Roman government. I close by considering the influence of classical exemplars on U.S. civic spaces.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.