The contrasting upon which a person, a culture or a civilization builds its self-identification is the inherent task of rhetoric. Despite the existing scholarship on otherness, imagining the other, barbarians and barbarism in Antiquity and middle Ages, it seems that the perspective of Barbarian rhetoric remains unexplored. The consideration of rhetoric through its core characteristic - the representation of ethos - supplies grounds to attempt a discussion on Barbarian rhetoric by juxtaposing it to its classical Greco-Roman counterpart.
This research strives to present in a rhetorical perspective the clash of the Barbarian culture and way of thinking with the classical Greco-Roman and Byzantine civilizations. I would like to investigate how the Barbarians appear not in the descriptions of the Ancient historiographers but through the prism of their own words.
Despite the ample chronological scope of the study, the accent would fall on the Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (4th - 6th century AD) as it was the time of a most intensive collision with Barbarians that determined the patterns of their image for the centuries to come.
The research hypothesis of this project is that the true demarcation line between the Empire and the Barbarians was firstly behavioral, based on a higher level of violence in the societies north of the limes and on corresponding values that supported the necessity to survive in an inimical environment, rather than political, ideological, or institutional. Barbarian rhetoric fully reflected these needs. It was rhetoric of the fighting men, boastful and sword-rattling.
The interdisciplinary approach to the problem would bring together at least four areas of study: history of rhetoric, theory of argumentation, histoire des mœurs and cultural studies.
The rhetorical analysis that I will use, was introduced in my dissertation as a standard for the evaluation of rhetorical argumentation. This analytical tool employs a distinct multi-level typology of the ethotic arguments - the main proofs that delineate an ethos.
Using rhetorical methodology also implies knowledge of the standard argumentative tactics used in common deliberative or judicial situations in Classical Antiquity. No doubt there were conventions on how to reproduce a harangue in the narrative. In many an instance there are strong reasons to believe that the authors who reproduced the speeches of the Barbarians did this as accurately as they could, although following a certain literary tradition.