Bret Devereaux

And those are some of the better ones. So many of these damn movie battle speeches are basically football pep talks, "I'm with you, you got this, winning is fun, go get 'em!"

I mean, have you read the ancient speeches that inspire these? Lendon (2017) memorably describes most literary examples as "cold, unbuttered toast."

I'm not sure that's fair to the genre (Lendon is speaking only of Appian there, as I recall?). Lendon concedes the genre is fundamentally tethered to actual delivery, even if the speeches themselves are inventions....

No, he's speaking generally, though he seems to draw mostly on writings from the Roman era. He also refers to many of these speeches as "painfully similar" and stresses the extreme limitations of the genre.

"Compare the speeches Lucan writes...to the cold, unbuttered toast that Appian serves up for the same speeches" (151). The quip looks to be for Appian alone, even if it fits into a general discussion of flatness in the speeches.

But I think Lendon is on to something when he notes that the flatness of the speeches itself serves a narrative purpose. I'd argue it also probably serves a practical one too, which is part of what Plutrach is hinting at when he disparages overly florid speeches in the Moralia.

My own sense, speaking more of battle rhetoric over a broader chronology, is that there is a preference for 'straight talk' and 'hard truths' over rhetorical flourish, emotional uplift or heavy theming. These speeches are not cold toast, perhaps, but hardtack.

What frustrates me with the Hollywood genre is that those speeches are neither the cold, practical hardtack of the ancient genre, nor the soaring gourmet uplift of high rhetoric, ancient or modern. They're the Big Mac of speeches - full of fundamentally cheap flavor...