Eramo, Immacolata (ed. and trans.): Siriano, Discorsi di guerra. Testo, traduzione e commento di Immacolata Eramo, con una nota di Luciano Canfora (Paradosis 17). Bari: Edizioni Dedalo, 2010.
The importance of a general being able to exhort and instil courage in his troops with appropriate and effective speeches before battle and at critical moments is widely reflected in ancient and Byzantine military treatises. These texts emphasise how oratory skill is among the crucial characteristics a military leader should have. However, although classical tradition has handed down numerous examples of parenetic exhortations in literature, starting with the Homeric poems, and historiography, such as Thucydides, we do not have any comprehensive and exhaustive theoretical treatment of protreptic exhortation in the rhetorical sphere stricto sensu. Already Cicero lamented this shortcoming in De oratore (II, 15,64).
It is therefore all the more intersting that the Byzantine time produced such a manual, specifically dedicated to military oratory. Handed down with the title Δημηγορίαι προτρεπτικαὶ πρὸς ἀνδρείαν ἐκ διαφόρων ἀφορμῶν λαμβάνουσαι τὰς ὑποθέσεις (Protreptic speeches to courage that draw arguments from different origins), it is better known as Rhetorica militaris. Presumably written in the in the second half of the 9th century and attributed to Syrianos Magistros, the work is presented here in a new critical edition by Immacolata Eramo.
Immacolata Eramo is a researcher in classical philology at the Department of Ancient Studies at the University of Bari, where she teaches the exegesis of Greek and Roman historical sources and Latin literature. Her main areas of research are ancient historiography, the history of military studies, ancient and Byzantine polemological literature and their reception in the modern age. She is the first philologist to deal with Rhetorica militaris after the editio princeps by Hermann Köchly (1855-1856), who did not provide a translation and based the edition exclusively on the mss. Parisinus gr. 2522 and Bernensis 97 (both from the 16th century). Eramo’s project aims at establishing a new critical edition of the text that is based on the entire manuscript tradition known to us by now. In addition, she provides the first Italian translation of the manual.
The critical edition of the text is preceded by an extensive introduction to the tradition of studies on Rhetorica militaris from the mid-19th century to the most recent contributions (pp. 11-23). The main scholars, including Köchly and Rüstow (1854-1855), Müller (1882), Vári (1931), Dain and de Foucalt (1967), and Zuckerman (1990), agree that the Rhetorica militaris belongs to a larger compendium, «a una delle più ampie ed articolate composizioni originali di polemografia risalenti all’età bizantina» (p. 14). This compendium included also a treatise dedicated to the tactics of land troops (De re strategica; handed down anonymously), as well as a treatise on naval tactics, published by Karl Konrad Müller in 1882 under the title De proelio navali.
As regards the date of composition, proposals have been put forward ranging from the 6th century (Köchly and Rüstow for Rhetorica militaris and De re strategica, Müller for De proelio navali) to the 9th century, the age of the Macedonian dynasty, which is the dating currently accepted by most scholars and also by Immacolata Eramo. The scholarly tradition almost unanimously agrees in attributing the entire compendium to Syrianos, a«μάγιστρος τῶν ὀφφικίων, the highest official in Byzantium’s administrative apparatus, almost certainly the same Syrianos whose work was recommended by Constantine VII to his son Romanos, as a useful reading matter for military campaigns […] and whose name appears among the sources for Nikephoros Ouranos’ Taktika […] and in a glossa in the codices of the recensio Laurentiana of the Taktika of Leon VI” (p.15; engl. tanslation by myself).
In the second part of the introduction (pp. 24-34), Immacolata Eramo offers a detailed and comprehensive overview of the manuscript tradition. In her new collation of witnesses she highlights, above all, the two oldest codices that were not taken into consideration in Köchly’s previous editio princeps (the mss. Laurentianus LV,4 and Ambrosianus B 119 sup., both from the 10th century). Drawing also on the studies of Alphonse Dain, Eramo furthermore reconstructs the stemma codicum: the mss. Laurentianus LV,4 and Ambrosianus B 119 sup. “derive, independent of each other, from a common ancestor” (p. 29: my transl.), while the other witnesses are their apographs, copies, or copies of other copies.
The core of the volume (pp. 35-113) consists of the Greek text, accompanied by a critical apparatus that takes into account all the variants and the corrective interventions carried out. It also includes the first (and so far only) Italian translation. The Rhetorica militaris is presented as a veritable guide for generals in the art of speech. The first section is purely theoretical, focusing mainly on the characteristics of the individual parts that make up a protreptic allocution (προοίμιον, προδιήγησις, προκατασκευή), argumentation (πρᾶγμα, πρόσωπον, χρόνος, τόπος, ἀιτία), exposition (ἐργασία), and the characteristics of the concluding section (ἐπίλογος). This is followed by a second section containing a large number of literary and historical examples, which serve to supplement and clarify the theoretical precepts.
The next section, entitled Note by Immacolata Eramo (pp. 115-194), is a rich and analytical commentary on the text: here the editor discusses in greater detail the choices made in the apparatus. She furthermore explores the rhetorical terminology used by Syrianos and, above all, the relationship between the text of Rhetorica militaris and the rhetorical, military, and historiographical literature (among others) of the classical and Byzantine periods. As Eramo argues, this is “a rich repertoire of sources”, which, however, “are not always explicitly named and identifiable.”(p. 15) They include the Iliad and the fourth book of the Macabees; in the area of tactics and siegecraft, Eramo identifies Aeneas Tacticus, Aelian, Philon of Byzantium and Apollodoros of Damascus; anecdotes and references to noteworthy historical episodes go back to Herodotus, Ctesias, Arrian and Polyaenus; the profession of the Christian faith, which occurs several times in the Rhetorica militaris, refers to the Gospel of John and the pseudo-pauline letter to the Hebrews.
The only source expressly cited by Syrianos in the text (Rhet. Mil. 3.2, 25.2) is the Τέχνη ῥητορική attributed to Hermogenes of Tarsus (2nd-3rd century AD), the undisputed auctoritas in the field of rhetorics throughout the Byzantine era, which represents the essential reference point for the structural framework and technical lexicon of the Rhetorica militaris.
The last section of the volume consists of a bibliography (pp. 195-220), divided into “Editions and translations of Syrianos’ compendium”, “Studies on Syrianos’ compendium” and “Further bibliography.” This is followd by very accurate indices (pp. 221-245) of ancient authors, places mentioned, and ancient names, which appear not only in Syrianos’ text but also in the introduction and commentary.
Eramo’s edition has certainly opened a new chapter in the history of studies on Rhetorica militaris. More than a century after the previous nineteenth-century edition of the work, its constitutio textus, based on the entire available manuscript tradition, is invaluable for the history of the reception of Syrianos’ text. Moreover, it has the merit of having drawn attention to the importance that the text presents not only for the polemological genre, but above all, for rhetorics. Rhetorica militaris is the only manual of military rhetorics handed down by tradition. Finally, the Italian translation published by Eramo, together with the English translation, recently published by Georgios Theotokis and Dimitrios Sidiropoulos (Routledge 2021), are the first (and so far only) complete translations of the text into modern languages.
