In showing the ways that rhetorical education shaped a particular character, the book demonstrates the ways that the combination character, culture, and virtue are vital to leadership in any time.

Anthony Edward Zupancic is an academy professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at the US Military Academy. His research interests include classical rhetoric, structures of power and culture in empires, and the mechanisms of character development.

Introduction. 1. Character, Virtue, and the Heroic Tradition 2. All I Learned, I Learned from Soldiering: Military Virtue at Rome 3. The Orator is a Warrior: Metaphor in Rhetorical Theory 4. Models of Character, Teachers of Language 5. Progymnasmata: What Would Achilles Do? 6. Defending Character: The vir fortis in Declamation 7. Rhetoric as Leadership at Rome