Cicero and Quintilian on the oratorical use of hand gestures

Classical Quarterly

Volumn 54, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 143-160

  Hall, Jon ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249272556     PISSN: 00098388     EISSN: 14716844     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/cq/54.1.143     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. There has been considerable scholarly interest in Quintilian's discussion in recent years. See Elaine Fantham, 'Quintilian on performance: traditional and personal elements in Institutio 11.3', Phoenix 36 (1982), 243-63
2. Ursula Maier-Eichhorn, Die Gestikuiation in Quintilians Rhetorik (Frankfurt am Main, 1989)
3. P. Wülfing, Äntike und moderne Redegestik: Quintilians Theorie der Körpersprache', AU 37 (1994), 45-63
4. Gregory S. Aldrete, Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome (Baltimore and London, 1999), esp. 3-43
5. See also G. Wöhrle, Actio: Das fünfte officium des antiken Redners', Gymnasium 97 (1990), 31-46
6. and Erik Gunderson, Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World (Ann Arbor, 2000), although this latter study is almost exclusively concerned with the application to Roman oratory of modern theories of masculinity
7. the art of illusion', HSPh 95 (1993), 289-313
8. James M. May, 'Persuasion, Ciceronian style', CO 71 (1994), 37-41
9. See in general F. W. Wright, Cicero and the Theater (Northampton, MA, 1931), 23-30. On the relationship between theatrical and oratorical gesturing, see further below
10. On Plotius Gallus, see Suet. Rhel. 26
11. Robert A. Raster, Suetonius De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus (Oxford, 1995), 291-7
12. On Nigidius Figulus, see Elizabeth Rawson, Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic (London, 1985), 151
13. Cf. Edith Hall, 'Lawcourt dramas: the power of performance in Greek forensic oratory', BICS 40 (1995), 39-58 at 41
14. For these correspondences, see also Maier-Eichhorn (n. 2), 51-4
15. David Efron, Gesture, Race and Culture (The Hague and Paris, 1972), 201-26 (originally published as Gesture and Environment [New York, 1941])
16. Cf. Fantham (n. 2), 261: 'We may forget just how mediocre pupils could be, but almost every scion of the governing class aimed to become an orator. Suppose that all the sons of modern politicians were expected to train as Shakespearian actors: professional drama teachers would have to give advice that seems to us elementary'
17. See e.g. Efron (n. 28), 124-226
18. See D. Morris and others, Gestures, their Origins and Distribution (New York, 1979), 247-59, who argue that the modern use of the 'head toss' to signify negation in the area around Naples can be traced back directly to ancient Greek colonization
19. David McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought (Chicago and London, 1992). His evidence is drawn mainly from experiments in which participants were asked to describe the plot of a television cartoon that they had just watched. The gestures that they used when relating their narratives were videotaped and then analysed
20. For a review, see Pierre Feyereisen, American Journal of Psychology 107 (1994), 149-55
21. McNeill (n. 35), 171-5
22. See Adam Kendon, 'Gesticulation and speech: two aspects of the process of utterance', in Mary Ritchie Key (ed.), The Relationship of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication (The Hague, Paris, and New York, 1980), 207-27
23. Cf. Fantham (n. 2), 253: 'tastes had no doubt changed to favour a poeticus decor in gesture as in diction'
24. Lewis A. Sussman, The Elder Seneca (Leiden, 1978), 35-45
25. Jody Enders, 'Delivering delivery: theatricality and the emasculation of eloquence', Rhetorica 15 (1997), 253-78
26. On stage gesture, see also Boris Warnecke, 'Gebärdenspiel und Mimik der römischen Schauspieler', Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum 25 (1910), 580-94 at 588-91
27. For a review of historical trends in the study of gesture, see Adam Kendon, 'Some reasons for studying gesture', Semiotica 62 (1986), 3-28 at 3-5