Rhetors at the wedding

Abstract

In Lucian's Symposium, one of the wedding guests is a philosopher and another is a grammatikos. The grammatikos provides a bad elegiac epithalamium; the philosopher, who is called Ion, improves the occasion with a speech in which he declares that pederasty offers the best way of life, and the system of communal wives, as recommended in Plato's Republic, is the next best thing.This fantasy, of course, tells us nothing about what went on at weddings. Lucian's main motive is literary parody, of Plutarch's Erotikos or something of the kind. But it may serve to recall something of which we have evidence enough in Greek rhetoric, namely the practice of delivering speeches of some literary pretention at high-class weddings. The educated classes of the cities of the eastern provinces evidently cherished this habit: a display of culture, as well as of wealth, was admired, and elaborate orations took their place, alongside abundance of food and wine, music and song, elaborately decorated bridal chambers and beds, as concomitants of a wedding that was to do both families credit. This is true of the period of the ‘Second Sophistic’, and of its fourth-century and early Byzantine continuations. How far the practice was common before, say, the Antonine age is much less clear.

Pseudo-Dionysius Art of Rhetoric 8-11: Figured Speech, Declamation, and Criticism

“…2 Translation and brief notes in Russell and Wilson 1981, 362-81; see also Russell 1979. 3 Russell 2001 provides an illuminating introduction to chapters 8-9; see also Chiron 2000.…”