The Rhetor 's Toolbox: Titles in Roman Declamation

Abstract: The titles that precede all surviving Latin controversiae are known for their brevity. This article looks at their form and makes a threefold claim: that Latin declamatory titles share a distinctive style; that their form is indicative of their function(s) in context; and that they are decisively different from what might have been thought a close parallel—entries in tables of contents. The titles' style, which is based on participles and – tor agent nouns, and their regular format and relationship to the text that they precede suggests that these titles were used as a didactic tool to train students in compression and expansion and that they therefore served as a "shorthand language" of declamation. A comparison with tables of contents in other Latin texts, which have no similar instructional functions, further confirms the uniqueness of declamatory titles. Because of their practicality, it was these titles, and not tables of contents, that were among the earliest examples of sustained paratext to be used in the Latin book.