Review of Susan Jarratt's Chain of Gold: Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire

Kevin: Hello, friends, welcome to sonic rhetoric reviews, a series of podcasts where we discuss contemporary scholarship about classical and medieval rhetoric. In this series, we hope to re- mediate the genre of the scholarly book review, accomplishing everything a traditional written book review might accomplish. Today, we will be looking at Dr. Susan Jarratt’s work, Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire, published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2019. My name is Kevin Gibbs, and I am a first-year graduate student in the literature PhD program at the University of Texas at Austin. My focus is on 20th and 21st century American fiction, and, to that end, I have read these works of classical scholarship in relation to their contemporary implications. Together with El Moreno and Andrew Booth, we will walk you through Chain of Gold.

El: I’m El Moreno; I’m a second year PhD student in the Rhetoric and Writing program at UT Austin, and my interests are situated between African and African Diaspora Studies, the Rhetorics of Mutual Aid, and the movement for environmental justice.

Andrew: And I’m Andrew Booth. I’m a third-year PhD student in the Rhetoric and Writing program here at UT-Austin, and my research focuses on political rhetoric as it relates to public assembly and political aesthetics.

El: Since each of us has our own area of interest, to help us situate Chain of Gold in contemporary scholarship, we brought in Dr. Michele Kennerly, Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State, and Dr. Kathleen Lamp, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, whose primary research is in the history of rhetoric at Arizona State University. Dr. Kennerly and Dr. Lamp will also speak about future scholarship made possible by Jarratt’s work. We also talked with Jarratt herself to get a better understanding of her main argument and the major themes and concepts she felt were a significant part of it. So without further ado, let’s dive in.

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Andrew: Jarratt’s book is remarkable for its depth and breadth of engagement with ancient and classical texts, and her understanding of the historical, cultural, and political contexts of imperial Rome is equally impressive. Broadly, in the book, Jarratt examines the ways that colonized Greek rhetors “spoke to empire,” and the ways in which they worked to sustain a democratic imaginary despite their reality of being situated within an imperial context.

El: Before diving into our summary of Chain of Gold, it’s helpful to situate it within contemporary scholarship. Professor Kathleen Lamp provides an excellent introduction to the field, and, as a quick prefatory note, when you hear the term, “second sophistic” it is often used to describe the shift from the practice of discursive rhetoric, a style of address which speaks in a direct and explicit manner to a court or a sovereign power, also known as “speaking truth to power,” to the teaching of rhetorical exercises gutted of their political potency. The second sophists are traditionally located in the 1st through 3rd centuries. However, here, Jarratt offers a revisionist reading of these sophists marked by subversive, figured discourse practiced into the 4th century under the Roman empire.

Lamp: To me, Chain of Gold is entering a conversation about the second sophistic and making a major intervention in the field of rhetorical studies. She's basically saying that the work of the Sophists during the second sophistic has been dismissed, that it's seen as nostalgic, or ornamental, and that we have, as a field, generally taken these texts at face value, and that we haven't read them as a second a significant form of critique or resistance. And she's arguing that we should do so. So she's in dialogue with many scholars who have talked about the second sophistic. And she's entering into kind of this group of revisionist narratives. So I think about Walker as one of the kind of revisionists, I think about Pernot, who is doing some of that work. I think she's really entering into, she's really responding to Kennedy in a lot of ways, right? And his claim that this period is marked by a literalization of rhetoric, and, for Kennedy, that signals a kind of decline? So we get this idea that this kind of false narrative in the field is this decline narrative.

Andrew: Right, so what Dr. Lamp seems to be saying here is that Jarratt argues that the second sophists shouldn’t be dismissed as quickly as they have been in the “decline narrative” of classical rhetoric, a paradigm advanced by George Kennedy. Jarratt in this way enters into conversation with revisionist classical rhetoric scholars like Jeffrey Walker of the University of Texas at Austin and Laurent Pernot of the University of Strasbourg.

Kevin: As someone rather new to the discipline, I found the way Jarratt responds to this decline and decadence thesis one of the more compelling aspects of the book. And her work of revisiting the second sophists and allowing them to speak on their own terms is, I think, a really important project and contribution.

Andrew: Yeah, that’s a good point, Kevin. It might be a good idea at this point to expand on this decline narrative paradigm that Jarratt is confronting with the book. Here's what Dr. Michele Kennerly had to say about it:

Kennerly: Sure, the decline and decadence thesis posits that rhetoric and poetics are at their best, with form and function working together to exert public influence, when governing power is distributed rather than concentrated. The thesis tends to afford primacy to democratic Athens and Republican Rome. And those periods are both called Classical, which, again, means “first-class” or “first -rate” from the Latin word classicus. According to the thesis, when a democracy or republican Republic wanes, oratory and poetry lose their vigor and become weak, mainly because the cultural ethos discourages anything risky or sublime. So things get pretty, or they get clever, but they lose the kind of capaciousness characteristic of rhetoric and poetics, oratory and poetry, in their classical moments.

El: So Jarratt offers a revisionist narrative of what she views as a dismissive theory. She argues instead, these Greek rhetors, “spoke to empire” through ‘figured discourse:’ implicit cultural allusions and figures familiar to those who received the paideia, an education shared among the elite of both colonized Greece and its Roman conquerors. These allusions allowed the second sophists to subtly ‘speak truth’ to imperial power, allowing them to communicate a “stance, attitude, or posture” critical of the empire. In the absence of democracy, the second sophists worked to sustain a democratic imaginary: their performances were neither nostalgic nor mere fantasy but, rather, acts of “critical memory” (18), a concept she applies from postcolonial theory.

Kevin: I love that idea of ‘critical memory;’ it has parallels with Western Europe’s later love affair with the Classical era. As Chain of Gold continues, you can really see the way public memory and figured discourse are closely intertwined.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Her introductory chapter lays out her overall argument. The titular ‘chain of gold’ is Jarratt’s first example, coming from an encomium the sophist Libanius delivered in 356, celebrating the Olympic games in Antioch. In it, he describes the city after the Roman occupation as, quote, “Girt with the golden chain of Rome,” unquote, which, at face value appears complimentary. But Jarratt makes clear that the phrase, and forgive my pronunciation of Greek, seira chrusou is itself from the Iliad. Zeus uses it to describe the might he has over the other gods and goddesses: if they attempt to pull him down from heaven with a seira chrusou, he will instead pull them up and use it to bind them to Mount Olympus.

To the educated members of the audience, the classical allusion would be clear: the chain of gold is no pretty trinket, but an indication of the absolute power of the Roman Empire.

Andrew: Yeah, that allusion to the Illiad really helped me as a reader understand the throughline that Jarratt established throughout the text. And speaking of threads in the text, one of the remarkable things about this book is its methodological breadth. As I was reading, I was struck by how many different things Jarratt needed to do in order to make this argument: close textual analysis, tracking down literary allusions, digging beneath the ornamental surface to find the ideological resistance. I think the final product does all of these things really well, but, in her interview, Dr. Jarratt discussed some of these methodological challenges:

Jarratt: Part of the difficulty reading figured discourse in these texts is getting some kind of grip on this whole massive set of historical and literary works they’re drawing on. My key example, the chain of gold, is from a city encomium by a 4th-century rhetor named Libanius. Tracking down that chain of gold, you have to go to Homer and find a passage in Homer, and the point of the chain of gold is, it seems so odd to me, why would he just dismiss the Roman occupation of his precious city of Antioch—he just tosses it off—so Rome came, took us over, it was fine, on we go. You know? And what we know from his life was that existing within the empire had been very damaging to his family, very painful, very precarious, as I was saying. So tracking that down to the Homeric reference, which we presume his educated readers would know, was where I found the figure in his discourse. So it’s a tricky process to do.

Kevin: Tracking down and compiling all those references and allusions used by the second sophists was an incredible feat. As a literature student, one thing I greatly appreciate about Chain of Gold is Jarratt’s implicit argument that to understand the ways the second sophists subvert the empire, their works demand both a close reading and an intimate familiarity with classical references. The following two chapters continue in this manner, reading between the lines of the works of the second sophists. The first substantive chapter, Chapter 2, looks into Dio Chrysostom’s two-part Euboean Discourse, and the rhetorical turns Dio uses to distance himself from his criticism of the empire. The hybrid nature of the discourse, part indirect narrative and part direct moral and political lecture, opens a space for interpretation while providing room for plausible deniability.

Chapter 3 continues in this vein, analyzing Aristides’ Roman Oration, an encomium of the city of Rome that Jarratt argues uses visuality, sublimity, and Homeric allusions to subtly critique the empire more broadly. Through a vision of empire, Aristides brings into question not the dominance of the Roman Empire but, rather, the quality of its regime: its homogeneity, its rule over free people, and its “arbitrary and vast powers.” Rhetoric, in this way, undermines the concrete while elevating the intangible.

El: I liked Chapters 2 and 3 because they showcase Jarratt's method of close textual analysis, especially when she points out Aristede’s use of the “anti-sublime” to showcase not what is there but what has been erased, or what lies just beneath the structures of empire. She approaches these speeches with a great level of care that allows for this type of intervention work that she’s doing.

Andrew: I loved the fresh and nuanced analysis in those chapters, too, El. And, along those same lines, Jarratt does a lot of that same work in the rest of the book, too, doing analysis of texts that rhetoricians tend to ignore, a biography, for instance, as well as an extended instance of ekphrasis. Throughout each of these, she excavates the texts and finds not only resistance to empire, but also resistance to patriarchy.

El: Definitely, Andrew. Chapter analyzes Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana,where we find his Patron, Julia Domna, the wife of a Roman emperor, who is from the East. After the death of her husband, she is left to live with her son, who murdered his brother in order to eliminate any competition to his reign. So her every move is under surveillance for the slightest change in her demeanor to gauge her loyalty to the ruling power. The “resources of sophistic rhetoric” become a strategy for [her] survival (74), as Jarrett articulates, where “improvisation is essential” (75). In second sophistic rhetoric, Julia Domna finds a means of “the control of word, gesture, and even body” a way of life the author supports that affords [Julia’s] self-preservation (75).

In Chapter 5, Philostratus’ Imagines guides us through relations of power between the “Greek intellectual” and the “Roman patron” (77). Set in an imagined art gallery, Philostratus’ sophist finds himself in the position to teach Greek ways of seeing via the rhetorical device of ekphrasis, or “excessive description.” The sophist as curator “moves about in a world of excess, ... and uses his or her capacity for discernment to sort, select, evaluate, and order that world for the willing consumer” (88). Through ekphrasis, Philostratus’ Roman pupil sees a woman of war, outside the accepted gender roles of Rome, and to see her through the lens of the second sophists is to invoke Greek cultural memory.

Kevin: Another powerful woman appears in Chapter Six. There, Jarratt considers Heliodorus’ Aithiopika and the ways the reader is entangled in the quote “principal controversy of the fourth century: the struggle between Pagans and Christians” (102) unquote. In “a tale of return,” the protagonist, Charikleia, is presented as a strong rhetor who provides a subversive counterstatement to quote “one of the standard operations of colonization .. .disempowerment through feminization” unquote. Charikleia is a rhetor and a sophist who survives in a world of “shifting systems of signification” (112).

El: One thing Jarratt makes clear is that the Greeks’ construction of gender was definitely not as fixed and rigid as that of the Romans. And I appreciate, again, how she draws on decolonial theory here to point out how colonization operates to disempower the colonized through feminization. Her reading of Second Sophists as curators and as storytellers who maintained a space for disrupting Roman gender norms is a strong support for her intervention.

Kevin: That’s a great point. I really liked that Jarratt introduced us to new women rhetors throughout the book, many of whom haven’t been mentioned in rhetorical scholarship much or at all. She talked a bit about this when we interviewed her, that scholarship gravitates toward well- known women like Aspasia, but there are all of these other interesting and powerful women all over the ancient scene and Roman empire that we’re overlooking, and they have a lot to say to us about speaking truth to power.

Andrew: I really liked that thread in the book, too. Along those same lines, I also really appreciated Dr. Jarratt’s point about what brings these sorts of exigencies about, namely a lack of addressability. When we spoke with Jarratt, she talked about this being one of the goals of the book, to shift to a different kind of definition of rhetoric than the typical speaker-addressee, one that focuses more on attitude or disposition, one that, she says, “doesn't necessarily reflect reality but refracts it, that operates through dispersion and circulation when there’s no clear addressee or condition of addressability.” So Jarratt gets at this problem in chapter 7, which is entitled, “‘Tiresome’ Libanius: Speaking of Empire, Addressing Emperors,” In this chapter, Jarratt examines what she articulates as, quote, “the conditions necessary for addressability” (128). Jarratt draws attention here to the sophist Libanius, who frequently used orations to call out his Roman colonizers, doing so directly rather than through figured discourse, offering what Jarratt described as “forceful and hard-hitting arguments about specific civic problems” (122). What’s really important here is that, to have addressability, the sovereign has to actually be willing to respond, and they also need to do so with a reflexive sense of ethical obligation.

El: In the concluding chapter, titled “Refractions of Empire,” Jarratt returns to her initial claim from the first chapter that empires “speak to each other across time.” Digging deeper, Jarratt gets at this central claim of the book in more detail, examining possible parallel examples of figured discourse speaking to power in pax Americana. Jarratt begins, however, by pointing out the lack of addressability in our contemporary context: in the case of the national and global protests against the Iraq War, “there was no relation or access to the emperor” (129). Jarratt concludes with a hopeful call for new rhetorical possibilities of influence in American empire by referencing the French term for figured discourse: rayonnement, noting that figured discourse does not “take aim in a direct way, but it influences nonetheless.” And with that, Chain of Gold comes to a close.

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Kevin: So that wraps up our summary. While Jarratt’s conclusion points to the limits of more subtle forms of influence, I can’t help but feel that that subtlety is responsible for a lot of these works’ staying power. Figured discourse or rayonnement both really point to ways that a text can open itself to multiple readings and interpretations and, in that way, invite greater engagement and deeper study. Speaking of greater engagement, we want to talk a bit about some of the potential avenues for future scholarship that Chain of Gold opens up. Dr. Lamp shared a few of her ideas with us:

Lamp: I think she opens all kinds of doors. I want to see more people pay attention to the rhetoric of cities. I think it's hugely important. Pernod touches on it; she's touching on it. So, that's a door that opens: I think she's opening the door to taking all of the second Sophistic much more seriously, including novels that maybe we haven't paid as much attention to. So I think many, many doors are opening here. And really, she's giving us, she would argue, a way to diversify the canon, right, at least in terms of, of geography and colonial subject position. And I think that that's really significant.

Kevin: Analyzing the role of geography and colonial subject position in these classical works is fascinating, especially in the way it allows academics like Jarratt to diversify an otherwise ossified 2,000- year old canon. Jarratt spoke with us about the methodologies she used to include marginalized works and voices.

Jarratt: When the other can't speak, when we don't have texts from the other, we turn to other kinds of evidence. So we turn to visual evidence, archeological evidence, and those both require training. So I admit that much of what I do, well, I work with texts, mostly, but I rely on the work of other people, of other classicists. And so that's really, that's really very important. We also rely on testimony, which are, you know, words that appear in other texts related to others, and representations of others within available texts from dominant cultures and languages.

El: For me, these approaches to excavating the Greek colonized subject create openings to uncover and make visible and audible those, for example, who cooked and cleaned for the wealthier and educated subject of colonization. When we talked with Professor Kennerly, she discussed the colonial subjects in Chain of Gold with reference to Frantz Fanon, a 20th- century post-colonial theorist perhaps best known for his work Wretched of the Earth.

Kennerly: Sure, well, I think I would introduce a concept from Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, where he has this conception of the colonized intellectual. And I really think that's a category into which we can fit pretty much all of the cast of characters in Jarrett's book. So, for Fanon, a colonized subject who is gaining a sense of their own agency and power are looking for liberation. And that comes with the destruction of the systems that are keeping them colonized. And it's violent. But I think that Fanon’s concept would really help people who are more steeped in the postcolonial literature understand the positionality of the Second Sophistic members a little bit more clearly. And one of the things that Fanon writes about the colonized intellectual is their fondness for guarding the Greco- Roman pedestal, which I think is also just such an interesting detail because, as Jarratt herself describes, a lot of the characters she features in her book cherish Homer, for instance. And they guard the most classic of the Classical authors. Jarratt, of course, it's arguing that, because they're so steeped in that knowledge, and they can presume everyone else in their group knows it, too, they can play around with it and subvert it.

El: As Dr. Kennerly helps us to understand the Second Sophists as “colonized intellectuals,” Dr. Lamp contributes her thoughts on the opportunity to potentially put the Second Sophists into conversation with those who are doing the work of locating ethnicity and race in the ancient world:

Lamp: She does take up this idea of critical memory that I thought was really interesting. She also touches more in the conclusion, I think, on this idea of diversifying Greekness. And that's, that's an interesting idea. Jarratt also touches on ethnicity or race, however you're comfortable talking about that in the ancient world, but she's not necessarily in conversations with scholars who use CRT in classics. And I do think that that's an area where there could have been kind of more conversation with scholars who are doing that kind of work.

El: Chain of Gold is an opening to future scholarship in ancient rhetoric to locate and reveal who Dr. Kennerly refers to as those bodies behind the bodies of rhetoric. .

Andrew: I completely agree, El. That’s one definite intervention that Jarratt makes here. Another is that she opens up different methodological possibilities for revisiting and revising ancient and Classical rhetorical scholarship, and, as someone who’s interested rhetorics of space and affect theory, I like that Jarratt’s work really challenges us to look, like you said so well, more critically at these sites, as well as the “bodies behind the bodies of rhetoric.”

Kevin: By bringing in critical race theory and gender studies to the Classical era, Jarratt’s work invites us to imagine how we can apply contemporary theory to ancient literature. However, in her concluding chapter, she also made this connection between the ancient and the contemporary more explicitly by drawing direct parallels between imperial Rome and our current American moment. Dr. Kennerly spoke with us about the implications of this clear connection with the past.

Kennerly: We in the US, or at least, you know, power brokers and stakeholders in the US, tend to marshal materials from antiquity to make statements about what power sounds like and looks like in our time. And when these kinds of moves are made, on our money, on our monuments, and on our scholarship, we also tend to look at antiquity a little bit differently. So that's how we have the exchange going both ways. And I think where rhetoric enters the picture is that rhetoric exhorts us or requires us to attend to how the symbolic resources of a culture are used to nudge the world a little, and it can help us understand both how Empire works, and how resistance to Empire works. And that's why I think the conversation about rhetoric, rhetorical studies, continues to have potency in our time. And it's that kind of multivalent nature of rhetoric that Jarratt is attending to in her book, as well, that we can see in the Second Sophistic the way that power is working, and we can see the way that colonial subjects are trying to undermine that power when they know that overt revolution is not going to work in their favor.

Andrew: Right, I like here how Professor Kennerly points out how both Pax Romana and Pax Americana share particular rhetorical qualities, especially those that are used to both shore up and subvert state power. The overarching thesis of the book, that “empires speak to each other across time,” is a timely point, especially in thinking about the problem of addressability, and how it complicates the rhetorical situation and speaking truth to power in pax Americana. I’m curious, though, how the rhetorical landscape might have changed in the intervening centuries.

Kevin: That’s a good question. Jarratt approaches that topic namely by analyzing the role of parrhesia—free speech—and its presence or absence in America today.

Jarratt: People struggle very hard to make it possible for people to speak freely, and to speak without fear of consequences. And that is possible sometimes. Sometimes, there are consequences. But some of the examples of free speech today that came to mind that seemed very, very important, are, for example, book whistleblowers, like Edward Snowden, exposing things that he was learning about NSA. And so I'm thinking of these because these are speaking truth to power where there were consequences. And so it shows up: what is at stake? What is at risk? That's where I think Foucault is, falls short on, he's just envisioning this happy little meeting between the advisor and the Emperor, where it's, the emperor is Marcus Aurelius, and he's open for suggestions. But that's not really the way it works, under most circumstances. So Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, the army intelligence information that broke through WikiLeaks was very important. And both of those people suffered consequences. Assange still is suffering them.

Andrew: I loved the discussion of addressability in that final chapter and think it’s especially important given our current sociocultural and political moment. Our way of speaking truth to power today is largely mediated through digital platforms as a space to speak truth to power and often allows opportunities for figured rhetoric through coded discourse. At the same time, I think Jarratt also opens up ways of thinking about addressability in terms of the limitations of digitally mediated spaces. As recent events have made clear, oftentimes, bodies have to show up in the street to be visible to the eyes of an unresponsive sovereign. [long pause]

El: Speaking of and through digitally mediated spaces, we hope this episode helps to circulate Jarratt’s reading of how Classical figured discourse enabled responses to empire. In doing so, she opens up parallels to our current era and a space for further research and study.

Kevin: Thank you, Andrew and El. I’d like to also extend my thanks to Dr. Michele Kennerly, Dr. Kathleen Lamp, and Dr. Susan Jarratt for their knowledge and expertise; to the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin for supporting this project, and to Dr. Eric Detweiler and Dr. Caddie Alford at enculturation for their guidance. Finally, thanks to our professor, Dr. Mark Longaker, for his guidance and feedback.