The Theatre of Justice

The Theatre of Justice contains 17 chapters that offer a holistic view of performance in Greek and Roman oratorical and political contexts. This holistic view consists of the examination of two areas of techniques. The first one relates to the delivery of speeches and texts: gesticulation, facial expressions and vocal communication. The second area includes a wide diversity of techniques that aim at forging a rapport between the speaker and the audience, such as emotions, language and style, vivid imagery and the depiction of characters.
In this way the volume develops a better understanding of the objectives of public speaking, the mechanisms of persuasion, and the extent to which performance determined the outcome of judicial and political contests.

Sophia Papaioannou, Ph.D. (1998), University of Texas-Austin, is Associate Professor of Latin Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She specializes in Augustan Literature and Roman Comedy. Her most recent monograph is Terence and Interpretation (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).

Andreas Serafim, Ph.D. (2013), University College London, is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Classics at Trinity College Dublin and Adjunct Lecturer at the Open University of Cyprus. He is a specialist in Greek rhetoric and performance criticism. His monograph, Attic Oratory and Performance, will be published by Routledge (forthcoming 2017). A sample of his research is presented in his recently published Classical Quarterly article “Making the Audience: Ekphrasis and Rhetorical Strategy in Demosthenes 18 and 19” (CQ, 2015, 96-108).

Beatrice da Vela, MPhil (2010), University of Cambridge, is a teacher and independent researcher. Her interests include literary and rhetoric education in Late Antiquity, with a strong focus on the relation between drama and classroom practice, the reception of Roman literature in culture in modern history and Classical reception in contemporary Italian literature.

Contributors are: Costantinos Apostolakis, Christopher Carey, Brenda Griffith-Williams, Jon Hall, Edward M. Harris, Konstantinos Kapparis, Christos Kremmydas, Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, Dimos Spatharas, Catherine Steel, Kathryn Tempest, Alessandro Vatri, Beatrice da Vela, Henriette van der Blom, Guy Westwood and Ian Worthington.

''Having said this, the volume in question rings the changes around the elements of rhetoric which might be termed theatrical. The contributions are almost without exception stimulating and of a high quality. They will be of central interest to those studying Greek and Latin oratory.'' William Furley in Gnomon 94.1 (January 2022)