How to Make a Roman Demosthenes: Self-Fashioning in Cicero's Brutus and Orator

Abstract

This article argues that Cicero's use of Demosthenes in his Brutus and Orator should be read in light of Caesar's dictatorship. An examination of Demosthenes' Hellenistic reception reveals that his significance in the Greek world centered on his rhetorical prowess and his (failed) opposition, as the last orator of democratic Athens, to the tyranny of Philip. Cicero, who now saw himself as the last orator of republican Rome, wanted to be remembered in the same way. For this reason he drew deliberate parallels between his career and Demosthenes' in these two works, laying the groundwork for the associations he drew on in the Philippics and establishing a comparison that persists to this day.