Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This chapter introduces the section on the rhetorical contexts of law and medicine. It queries to what degree and in what ways their participation in the rhetorical culture of the time shaped the literature and activities of imperial Rome’s legal and medical minds. It begins by briefly addressing the performative, declamatory situation in each field. It then turns to the more nuanced role of rhetoric in the literatures. There, rhetoric functions as a signaling device of the speaker’s educational status and, perhaps more significantly, as a persuasive force. Both medicine and law require a set of agreed-upon principles, yet both lack an incontestable and achievable method of empirical proof. The chapter argues that rhetoric performs a similar role in both fields by filling that gap.