- Panegyric
A panegyric is a formal public speech, or (in later use) written verse, delivered in high praise of a
person or thing, a generally highly studied and discriminatingeulogy , not expected to be critical. It is derived from Greek meaning a speech "fit for a general assembly" ("panegyris "). InAthens such speeches were delivered at nationalfestival s orgame s, with the object of rousing thecitizen s to emulate the glorious deeds of theirancestor s.The most famous are the "Olympiacus" of
Gorgias , the "Olympiacus" ofLysias , and the "Panegyricus" and "Panathenaicus" (neither of them, however, actually delivered) ofIsocrates . Funeral orations, such as the famous speech put into the mouth ofPericles byThucydides , also partook of the nature of panegyrics.The Romans confined the panegyric to the living, and reserved the funeral oration exclusively for the dead. The most celebrated example of a
Latin panegyric is that delivered by the younger Pliny (AD100 ) in the senate on the occasion of his assumption of theconsulship , containing a somewhat fulsomeeulogy ofTrajan .Towards the end of the 3rd and during the
4th century , as a result of the orientalizing of the Imperial court byDiocletian , it became customary to celebrate as a matter of course the superhuman virtues and achievements of the reigningemperor , in a formally staged literary event. The well-delivered, elegant and witty panegyric was a vehicle for an educated but inexperienced young man to attract desirable attention in a competitive sphere. The poetClaudian came to Rome from Alexandria before about 395 and made his first reputation with a panegyric; he became court poet toStilicho .Cassiodorus the courtier and "magister" ofTheodoric the Great and his successors, left a book of panegyrics, his "Laudes". As his biographer O'Donnell has said of the genre "It was to be expected that the praise contained in the speech would be excessive; the intellectual point of the exercise (and very likely an important criterion in judging it) was to see how excessive the praise could be made while remaining within boundaries of decorum and restraint, how much high praise could be made to seem the grudging testimony of simple honesty." ( [http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/cassbook/chap2.html O'Donnell 1979, ch. 2] ).Qasida is panegyric poetry in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu.A person who writes panegyrics is called a
panegyrist . Another term iseulogist .References
*1911
Further reading
*James J. O'Donnell, 1979. "Cassiodorus" (Berkeley: University of California Press)
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
