Abstract
When Cicero finished De oratore near the end of 55 B.C., he had already been Rome's leading orator for about fifteen years. Aided by hindsight, it is only natural that he would write the ambitious work that we know De oratore to be. Cicero clearly anticipated that some readers would make this comparison and indeed expect De oratore to offer something like the standard rules, and he was keen to correct them. For very soon after the beginning of the prologue, he describes De oratore as a replacement for 'the sketchy and unsophisticated work' of his youth, and stresses that it will have to be worthy of his present age and of the experience the author has acquired from pleading so many momentous cases. The result is his idiosyncratic and surprising picture of the ideal orator: the Roman statesman who combines eloquence with universal knowledge. Keywords: Cicero; De oratore ; ideal orator; Roman statesman; Rome
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