Search Results

This chapter moves from the instances of self-consciously cultural oratorical practice to Cicero's first major work of rhetorical theory, De oratore, which Cicero frames as an archaeology of his self. It discusses that Cicero uses the aristocratic status of his interlocutors in this dialogue to lend authority to the aestheticizing form of oratory that has characterized his career. It examines Cicero's articulation of a theatrical aesthetic of controlled transgression in which he negotiates the problem of how to evoke feminine grace while maintaining a properly masculine self. It explains that this theatrical aesthetic crystallizes on the human body, both in Cicero's discussion of delivery and in his investigation of figures of speech, where the body and its adornment are the governing metaphors.

De oratore is a text filled with historical detail; the present chapter examines several different aspects of history in De oratore. First is the historical setting itself. It is a very selective portrait, and Cicero both idealizes the speakers and makes it clear to the reader that it is an idealized portrait. Second is the set of connections between Cicero himself and the speakers in the dialogue, which again harmonizes a complicated set of conflicting connections. Third is the choice of speeches and trials referred to in De oratore: some of the cases, notably the trial of Norbanus, reflect Cicero’s own forensic career, and the overall pattern of citations of cases by the speakers reveals their divergent understanding of what an orator is and does in public life. The chapter demonstrates how differently Crassus and Antonius approach their task and shows that there are two quite different but equally valid approaches to oratory in De oratore.

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of Cicero's political career. It discusses the frustration of Cicero's policy and his decision to turn to writing. The chapter then considers Cicero's own critical judgements of De Oratore.

This chapter focuses on the extent to which Cicero is concerned with non-rhetorical literature in the second and third books of De Oratore. It considers the relationship of this dialogue to the traditional rhetorical treatise. It then discusses Antonius' conception of the orator's generic range, and the uses of poetry and history.

This chapter introduces the setting of De re publica, describing the speakers and the political context. It draws attention to the connections between De oratore and De re publica, in particular the ways in which the later dialogue is (in terms of writing) the sequel to the earlier one, while (in terms of setting) De re publica takes place nearly forty years before De oratore. The structure of De re publica is also explained and analyzed. During the composition of the dialogue, Cicero changed it from nine books to six, making it more closely parallel to De oratore and, not coincidentally, very much like the structure of the contemporary De rerum natura of Lucretius. He also emphasizes much more strongly than in De oratore the need for moral behavior in political life, and in the introduction offers a strong protreptic to participation in civic affairs.

This chapter explores Cicero's relationship with Aristotle. Cicero perceived De Oratore as echoing both the form and the content of Aristotle's teaching on rhetoric. It is at the heart of Antonius' extended discourse on inventio that Cicero twice acknowledges his source in Aristotle.

This chapter examines Cicero’s adaptation of Aristotle in his rhetorical works. Cicero considered Aristotle a somewhat remote figure, and associated him with times of political withdrawal and intense study. Yet he also held Aristotle in high esteem as a classic, especially for his contributions to rhetoric: Cicero was taught by his instructor Philo of Larissa that Aristotle invented the debate on both sides of a general rhetorical or philosophical question that for Cicero represented the tangible union of philosophy and rhetoric necessary for the ideal orator. When Cicero faced the prospect of further political inactivity after Caesar’s assassination, he decided to fully embrace Aristotle’s didacticism by composing his Topica, a how-to manual for this sort of debate that would make his ideal orator (who, of course, resembled Cicero himself) into a classic model in Roman rhetorical instruction.

This chapter shows that from his extended outer preface in the third and final book of the De Oratore, deliberately recalling that of book 1 and pointing ahead to Crassus' enhancement of elocutio, Cicero steps back into the dramatic setting, as the friends wait for Crassus to reach the end of his long and deep deliberation, before gathering in the heart of his shady woodland. Crassus' opening sentence, recalling the bargain with Antonius, reiterates the inseparability of content and form. All speech is formed from words and matter, but words are unstable if you withdraw their subject matter, and matter is left dark if you take away the words. Crassus will vindicate this insistence by both a physical and an intellectual analogy, citing the cohesion of all physical nature, and the Platonic belief in the association of all disciplines in a nexus of causality. The many terms of cooperation and coherence combine words of human understanding (complexi, 3.20; comprehendi, 3.21), with parallel compound forms to describe natural phenomena (consensione naturae constricta…constare…conservare), and abstract knowledge itself (contineri…consensus…concentusque). Cumulatively each of these forms reinforces his message.

As was noted in the previous chapter, Crassus is openly reluctant to gratify Sulpicius with an account of formal rhetorical instruction on style, since so many rhetoricians had converted their teaching into manuals: there is some irony, surely in his descriptions of these men as auctores et inventores…harum sane minutarum rerum (3.149), mocking their proud claim to be ‘originators’ of what was in fact a mass of trivial detail. But the fourth book of the anonymous teacher of Herennius, on elocutio, confirms the author's pride in originating even such detail, and his near indifference to underlying principles. This chapter addresses the following questions: Why does Cicero let Crassus oblige Sulpicius, and why should Catulus and his friends, or any modern readers, pay any attention to these hackneyed ‘elements of style’?

Cicero not only wrote dialogues (among other genres), but was one of the ancient authors most explicitly and consciously interested in the literary issues thrown up by use of the dialogue form. Moreover, his use of, and understanding of, the form developed throughout his literary career. This chapter focusses on the introductions to his dialogues, where Cicero speaks about the literary task of creating and re-creating his authorial voice (or voices). In the earlier works, Cicero presents his dialogues as if they were historical events, keeping his ostensible authorial voice wholly exterior to the ‘conversation’; but the later ones become more theatrical, with Cicero himself participating actively within them, inviting his readers to imagine what it must be like to eavesdrop on a discourse that is both ostensibly private and actively public.

The final chapter explores the complexity of the relationship between De oratore and De re publica. Each dialogue complements the other. Each one uses the form of Platonic dialogue to examine the historical development of Roman institutions while simultaneously examining the intellectual developments (from Greece to Rome) that permit Cicero to reflect on Roman institutions and practices themselves. But while Cicero’s vision is a proud statement of Rome’s cultural achievements, it also conveys a sense of Rome’s simultaneous political rise and moral fall. In both dialogues the crucial moment in Rome’s moral history is the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus—and yet Cicero also makes the reader aware that his account is a serious oversimplification of Rome’s history. The chapter offers a final suggestion that the complex moral and literary attitudes of Cicero’s Platonic dialogues can fruitfully be compared to other major, contemporary works such as Catullus’ poem on the Wedding of Peleus and Thetis and Lucretius’ De rerum natura.

This chapter considers Cicero's own practice and the evidence of his letters and other contemporary sources to illustrate the procedures and problems of senatorial debate. It examines Cicero's senatorial speech De Provinciis Consularibus, and presents examples of violence at public assemblies. It argues that in De Oratore, at least, Cicero could take refuge in the less troubled times of Crassus and Antonius before the political crisis brought on by the tribunate of Livius Drusus and the subsequent Italian revolt.

This chapter demonstrates how Cicero’s adaptation of Plato in his three dialogues De Oratore, De Re Publica, and De Legibus (as well as his translation of the Timaeus) reflects his desire to become a similar model of classical prose. An overview of Plato’s Hellenistic reception shows that he had become a weighty authority who could be used to support even discordant philosophical systems. Cicero learned this fact at first hand in the bitter quarrel between his two instructors (and members of Plato’s Academy) Philo of Larissa and Antiochus of Ascalon. But it was not just Academics who haggled over Plato: as classicism began to take hold in the Greek world, Plato became an important authority for Stoics and Peripatetics too. For Cicero, who desired to become a figure of similarly classical authority as the founder of Roman philosophy, Plato was the only logical choice of model.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the extent to which Roman orators were expected to speak from memory. From the beginning of De Oratore Cicero stresses the urgent need for memory ‘since unless it is set to guard the ideas and language we have devised, all the orator's talents, however splendid, will be wasted’. And when Crassus discusses the selection of future orators, he includes among essential natural gifts ‘an accurate and lasting memory’. The chapter then discusses the orator's debut.

This chapter focuses on rhetorical theory and the ideal orator. It discusses the various definitions offered of oratory and rhetoric. It then examines the manifestations of the rhetorical theories of Hermagoras of Temnos in De oratore, discussing the four brief and one very long artes rhetoricae embedded in the dialogue. It explores the different approaches to the doctrines of status and thesis employed by Antonius and Crassus within their expositions of the officia of the orator in Books 2 and 3, including the tension between Hermagorean and Aristotelian theories of rhetoric. Finally, it examines the nature of the perfectus orator imagined by Crassus and compares it to the alternative image of the orator provided by Antonius.

This chapter explores the way in which in De oratore Cicero simultaneously asserts and denies the need for a Roman orator to study Greek philosophy extensively. This involves the double question of whether rhetoric is an ars and what an ars actually is. De oratore exemplifies the technique of Academic skepticism, offering at least two images of oratory, one ideal and one difficult but possible; it keeps the two in tension throughout. The different approaches to Greek learning are exemplified through the visits of the three main speakers (Crassus, Antonius, Scaevola) to Greece and their discussions there with rhetoricians and philosophers. While these visits probably never took place, they provide a set of linked anecdotes exploring the relationship of Rome to Greek intellectual culture in the late second century.

This chapter focuses on the role played by humour in Cicero's own success, which confirms its continuing importance in the courts and politics of Rome beyond the generation of Antonius and Caesar Strabo. It first analyzes and interprets Strabo's formal presentation: the discussion will deal only briefly with the vexed problem of possible Greek and Roman sources, which has recently been dealt with at length by Rabbie. Then (building on Rabbie 6.E 200–4), the chapter turns to Strabo's Roman examples to single out their different social and political circumstances. It then assesses the importance of wit and humour in Cicero's own performance as a speaker, and in its written record. For more than any other verbal category, humour was the weapon of choice in personal antagonism, and in the duelling of elite political life.

This chapter uses Cicero’s letter to Lentulus (Ad familiares 1.9) to introduce the political and literary context in which Cicero wrote his first two dialogues, De oratore and De re publica. The letter is itself a highly literary composition, both quoting from Plato and using Plato’s Seventh Letter as a model. Cicero admires Plato as a writer while rejecting his political position. In the same way, De oratore and De re publica, the two dialogues Cicero wrote between 55 and 51 BCE, display a complex attitude toward Greek philosophy, including Plato, as something to be read and admired, but not to be emulated in real life. The letter and the dialogues should be seen as careful and ambitious literary constructions, designed to be read as models of both literary art and civic responsibility.