Loud and Proud

This chapter brings into view another non-elite voice, one that lingers in the genre of Latin love elegy, and is typically overshadowed by elite oratory: that of the praeco (‘announcer’). The term encompassed various kinds of informal public speaker, from hucksters to heralds, but usually the ‘vigorous and none-too-scrupulous salesman’. Its practitioners had a significant role in Augustan Rome, and some became very rich and influential. This chapter discusses how, in keeping with love elegy’s favouring of counter-cultural idioms that subvert the social ideals and expectations of freeborn elite Roman males, the praeco as a low-status, informal public speaker (details of whose speeches are lost to us) can be reconstructed as an important part of the playfully inferior self-stylization of the love elegists’ poetic persona: the stereotype of a cunning yet charismatic persuader adding charm to his wares.

Art · Charisma · Elegy · Elite · Humanities · Linguistics · Literature · Persona · Poetry · Politeness · Political science · Politics · Stereotype (UML) · Classical Antiquity Studies · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology