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By its very nature, the art of oratory involves character. Verbal persuasion entails the presentation of a persona by the speaker that affects an audience for good or ill. This book explores the role and extent of Cicero's use of ethos and demonstrates its persuasive effect. The book discusses the importance of ethos, not just in classical rhetorical theory but also in the social, political, and judicial milieu of ancient Rome, and then applies his insights to the oratory of Cicero. Ciceronian ethos was a complex blend of Roman tradition, Cicero's own personality, and selected features of Greek and Roman oratory. More than any other ancient literary genre, oratory dealt with constantly changing circumstances, with a wide variety of rhetorical challenges. An orator's success or failure, as well as the artistic quality of his orations, was largely the direct result of responses to these circumstances and challenges. Acutely aware of his audience and its cultural heritage and steeped in the rhetorical traditions of his predecessors, Cicero employed rhetorical ethos with uncanny success. The book analyzes individual speeches from four different periods of Cicero's career, tracing changes in the way Cicero depicted character, both his own and others', as a source of persuasion—changes intimately connected with the vicissitudes of Cicero's career and personal life. It shows that ethos played a major role in almost every Ciceronian speech, that Cicero's audiences were conditioned by common beliefs about character, and finally, that Cicero's rhetorical ethos became a major source for persuasion in his oratory.

This collection of essays explores the oratory of the Roman Republic as practised by everyone apart from Cicero. It addresses the problems arising from the partial and often unreliable evidence for these other Roman orators and investigates new ways of interpreting this evidence. The contributors seek to contextualize these fragments and testimonia, both in their original settings and over the course of their subsequent transmission, to explore a range of questions: what was said in the Roman Republic, and what counted as public speech or ‘oratory’ at Rome? Who did the speaking, and to what extent can we identify anonymous speakers? What were the formal and informal scenarios in which public speech took place? What non-verbal signals should be considered together with the speakers’ words? How reliable and selective is our evidence? How does the development of rhetoric as a discipline affect the reception and transmission of public speech? The resulting discussions reshape our understanding of public speech in the Roman Republic and enable us to move the study of Republican oratory decisively beyond Cicero.