Genre: Panegyrics


Image courtesy of the Scala Archives, Florence; and ARTstor

Saint Augustine Reading Rhetoric in Rome

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Your instructors have identified the following text as an authoritative, reputable, and notable example of a panegyricPanegyric - eulogistic oration or laudatory discourse that originally was a speech delivered at an ancient Greek general assembly (panegyris), such as the Olympic and Panathenaic festivals. Speakers frequently took advantage of these occasions, when Greeks of various cities were gathered together, to advocate Hellenic unity. With this end in view and also in order to gratify their audience, they tended to expatiate on the former glories of Greek cities; hence came the encomiastic associations that eventually clung to the term panegyric . . . [Rhetoricians] . . . combined praise of famous cities with eulogy of the reigning Roman emperor. By [the 2nd century AD] panegyric had probably become specialized in the latter connection and was, therefore, related to the old Roman custom of celebrating at festivals the glories of famous men of the past and of pronouncing laudationes funebres at the funerals of eminent persons . . . Although primarily a literary form associated with classical antiquity, panegyric continued to be written on occasion in the European Middle Ages, often by Christian mystics in praise of God, and in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, especially in Elizabethan England, in Spain during the Golden Age, and in France under the reign of Louis XIV (Encyclopedia Britannica).
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Exemplar from the Harvard Library Collection