Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • 39 - Oratory and epistolography

  • from PART VI - LATER PRINCIPATE
  • Edited by E. J. Kenney, W. V. Clausen
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Classical Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 March 1982, pp 755-761

  • Summary

    The study of rhetoric and the practice of declamation went on throughout the half-century of military anarchy in the third century. Roman emperors had always spent a surprising proportion of their time listening to speeches made by representatives of the Senate and delegates of provinces and cities. Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, known also as Eusebius, belonged to one of the most distinguished senatorial families of Rome. Symmachus well knew that the epistolary genre calls for brevity and compression. Symmachus was the last great Roman orator in the classical tradition and the last senator whose correspondence was collected and published. But both oratory and epistolography found a new place in the life of the Christian church. The needs of Christian communication broke the narrow bounds within which classical epistolography flourished. In the same way the Christian sermon was a new form of oratory.