Publication details
Progymnasmata in Apuleius' Florida
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The 2nd century CE was the period of a rising prominence of epideictic rhetoric represented by travelling professional speakers who gave ex tempore speeches, not rarely in front of mass audiences of various social scales. The traditional curriculum of the elite rhetorical education was based on the forms of practice called progymnasmata. These were a set of common, repeating rhetorical techniques and patterns gradually increasing in difficulty and exercising written composition as well as public performance. Students were supposed to create their own variations on given themes to embrace the basic rhetorical skills on which they could draw in the further stages of their education or professional career. Apuleius, one of the most prominent intellectuals of this time, made use of progymnasmata not only during his study years, but also later in his career of professional speaker. This is most apparent from his Florida, a collection of excerpted speeches performed mostly in Carthage. In my paper, I pursue to present the variety of Apuleius' approaches to these exercises with regards to different purposes of particular speeches. My goal is to assess the significance of progymnasmata in elite education as well as in intellectual discourse in terms of continuity and variation. |
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