De Oratore Research Articles

Linking the natural man to the res publica in the works of Marcus Tullius Cicero

AbstractThere is no consensus on the importance of Cicero's doctrine of the state (res publica) among the prominent figures and scholars of political theory. In our view, the main reason for this is that the discussion of the political theoretical insights of the corpus Ciceronianum is too often reduced to a repetition of stereotypes. Cicero's key works on political doctrine, such as the De oratore, the De re publica and the De officiis, are mostly analysed from a philosophical point of view, with historical and legal aspects being put to one side. The characteristics of the mixed constitution (mikte politeia), which is at the heart of Cicero's theory of the res publica, are only superficially examined. What is also mostly overlooked is the extremely significant fact that in the De re publica Cicero (unlike Plato, for example) not only develops a philosophically grounded theory of the state, the res publica, but also applies his theory to finding the state, and in particular its ideal form, the optimus status civitatis, in the historical reality of Rome, that is, his own state. In this way, Cicero connects ratio and res, thus establishing the harmony and, indeed, unity of idea and history. The value of this important idea is not in the least affected by the fact that Cicero was undoubtedly an eclectic thinker rather than a consistent exponent of the views of any school or current. That, it seems to us, helped him greatly to lay the foundations of a doctrine of the state that could influence political thought centuries, even millennia, later, up to the political thought of the first decades of the 21st century.

Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions, by Rob Goodman

Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions, by Rob Goodman

Latin literature

As always, it is hard to do justice to the many intriguing books that came out over the past months. I will try to give an overview of at least a few of them, from Republican literature over two imperial ‘Classics’, the Aeneid and the Fasti, over Ps.-Quintilian's Declamations and Apuleius, fourth and fifth-century commentaries, all the way to a lesser-known work from the fifteenth century. Let us start, however, with an exciting volume on ‘Roman Law and Latin Literature’, edited by Ioannis Ziogas and Erica Bexley. In their introduction, the two editors sketch out the relationship between law and literature, emphasizing the points of contact and the intricate relationship between the two. While the Law and Humanities movement, they argue, has been so far strongly focused on law, with literature playing an ancillary role, Ziogas and Bexley aim to redress that balance ‘by showing how literature anticipates, imitates, supplants or complements law's role in constituting rules and norms’ (3). The contributions in the volume cover a wide range of authors, from Naevius, Plautus, and Terence to Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, and Lucan. With her discussion of the role Latin literature played in shaping Roman concepts of legality, in the absence of a codified constitution, Michèle Lowrie provides a very good starting point to the volume, one that a couple of other contributors keep referring back to. There is a chapter on the jurist Marcus Antistius Labeo by Matthijs Wibier, Nora Goldschmidt traces the emergence of the Foucauldian author function in the interaction between law and literature in third-century bc Rome, and John Oksanish argues that Cicero, in De oratore (‘On the Orator’), adopts the theoretical and terminological frameworks of Roman property law to authorize the orator's power over various domains, a strategy also adopted by Vitruvius, to mention just a few of the topics covered. The concluding paper is a thought-provoking piece by Nandini Pandey, comparing Roman and American legal and literary practices around freedom, opportunity, and (in)equality.

Ars memorativa i nauczanie retoryki w kolegiach jezuickich. Recepcja dzieł: "Rhetorica ad Herennium", "De oratore" Marka Tuliusza Cycerona i "Institutio oratoria" Marka Fabiusza Kwintyliana w podręczniku "De arte rhetorica" libri III Cipriano de Soareza

Members of the Society of Jesus, as didacticians (and humanists), were aware of the importance of the memoria for the delivery of speech. For this reason, they did not omit this opus oratoris in rhetorical studies intended for their students. An example of this is the textbook De arte rhetorica libri tres ex Aristotele, Cicerone, et Quintiliano praecipue deprompti by the Portuguese Jesuit Cipriano de Soarez (1524–1593). The aim of the research was to trace the influence of Rhetorica ad Herennium, De oratore by Marcus Tulius Cicero and Institutio oratoria by Marcus Fabius Quintilian on the rhetorical theory presented by Soarez concerning ars memorativa. An attempt was also made to determine what the teaching of rhetoric looked like in Jesuit colleges, which was helped by the Ratio studiorum treatise (1599). In the course of comparative analysis, it was found that the Portuguese teacher mainly drew on Marcus Fabius Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria.  

Ethics and the Orator: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality

Ethics and the Orator: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality

The War of Words

The War of Words

The Ruin: An Old English Mnemonic?

Despite the generally accepted scholarly opinion that the three rhetorical manuals describing the method of loci and its accompanying origin legend were unknown in early medieval England (i.e. Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s De oratore, and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria), I argue that the Old English poem, The Ruin, suggests otherwise. By examining the features that overlap between the method of loci as described in these rhetorical texts, Mary Carruthers’ argument for a uniquely “monastic memoria” that was ubiquitous in the early medieval period, and The Ruin, I suggest that the Rhetorica ad Herennium provides a good accounting for some of the oddly specific descriptive details the poem is best known for. Moreover, as the poem is fundamentally concerned with the power of remembering to bring order to chaos, The Ruin bears a striking resemblance to the origin legend of the method of loci. Evidence of the influence of the method of loci and its origin legend on Old English literature requires that we rethink how well the extant manuscript record represents both the state of learning in, and the transfer of knowledge throughout, early medieval Britain.

Antike Universalgeschichte und Säkularisierung im Melanchthonkreis

This article argues that the literary reception of Classical historians through Philipp Melanchthon and his students made a decisive contribution to the pluralization and secularization of early Lutheran scholarly culture. It focuses on Georg Major’s hitherto unexplored edition of Justin’s Epitoma, which was printed in Hagenau in 1526, with a second, extended edition appearing in Magdeburg in 1537. Major’s first edition of 1526 is here scrutinized in the broader context of the emergence of Protestant universal history and the forming of Melanchthon’s understanding of the Four Kingdoms of Daniel, which is traditionally seen by scholars as the starting point of the distinction between secular and sacred history. The second edition (1537) includes a general instruction for the study of histories. Based as it is on Cicero’s historical-methodological principles of consilia, acta, and eventus, laid out in De Oratore, this handbook for Protestant Latin-school pupils is rooted in the historical thought of Italian humanists.

Exemplary History: Competition in Roman Historiography

A great part of the perceived value of history in the ancient world was connected with its educational function. In one way or another, it was regarded as a beneficial guide to conduct or as magistra vitae (Cicero, De Oratore II, 36). To give political instruction and advice on the one hand (Polybius, I, 1, 2), and to provide exempla, were two major aims of history. This paper will argue that by narrating the history of the past, historians not only judged past actions or people, and provided useful moral examples to their contemporaries, but also stimulated a type of competition between past and present times. By recording good examples to be imitated and bad ones to be avoided, the Roman historians promoted the code of values of the maiores for their own time, fostered action and, to a certain extent, became significant indicators to Roman society. This competitive aspect of Roman historiography is illustrated here in three distinct categories, analysing the work of major Roman historians: Sallust, Livy and Tacitus.

Free like sheep: Law, Humor, and Roman Political Culture (Cicero, De Oratore 2.284)1

In his discussion of humor in De Oratore (2.284), Cicero reports a joke that Appius Claudius made in the senate at the expense of L. Licinius Lucullus with word play on liber, “free.” The quip often figures in scholarship on public land, because it occurred in a debate about a law on the topic. But the joke reveals little about laws on public land. Instead, it is an important artefact of Republican political culture. In its original second century BCE context the joke perpetrated a coded political attack, using legal expertise to reinforce the political hierarchy. In the next century, the joke had an afterlife in Cicero’s De Oratore, where it played into contemporary anxieties about political freedom and the rule of law. To illuminate the implications of his joke, this paper first contextualizes the different meanings of liber within the political and legal issues relating to public land. Then it examines the joke as a medium of elite identity, and concludes with the broader implications of this humor for Republican political culture by reading the joke with Varro’s De Re Rustica as intertext.

Knight's Moves: The Son-in-law in Cicero and Tacitus

While the relationship between fathers and sons, real or metaphorical, is still a dominant paradigm among classicists, this paper considers the rival contribution of Roman sons-in-law to the processes of collaboration and succession. It discusses the tensions, constraints, and obligations that soceri–generi relationships involved, then claims a significant role for sons-in-law in literary production. A new category is proposed here: “son-in-law literature,” with texts offered as recompense for a wife or her dowry, or as substitute funeral orations. Cicero and Tacitus are two authors for whom the relationship played a key role in shaping realities and fantasies of advancement. The idealized in-law bonds of De Amicitia, Brutus, and De Oratore are set against Cicero's intellectual aspirations and real-life dealings with a challenging son-in-law, while Tacitus' relationship to Agricola can be seen to affect both his historiographical discussions of father–son-in-law relationships and the lessons he drew from them about imperial succession.

Virgil's Double Cross: Design and Meaning in the Aeneid by David Quint

414 PHOENIX The situation with Tacitus’ Dialogus could not be more different. Chapter Six, “Tacitus : Dialogus de Cicerone?,” demonstrates that Cicero underpins the entire project of the Dialogus, above and beyond the explicit discussion of Cicero in which the interlocutors engage. Keeline minutely tracks and catalogues the verbal echoes and reminiscences from Cicero’s Brutus, Orator, De Oratore, and probably Hortensius that saturate the Dialogus. It is a remarkable demonstration, supporting his contention that Tacitus’ readers would inevitably have seen and felt the work’s hegemonic Ciceronianism. Ironically, however, this Ciceronian performance ends up concluding that Ciceronian performances are no longer possible due to changed circumstances. Yet I wonder if Keeline overstates, perhaps with Maternus, the decline of the iudicia publica as venues for oratorical performance, and also underrates the centumviral court, the senate, and other forensic venues whose status rose in the early empire. Yet other venues for competitive performance in eloquence, such as declamation (as the rest of this book demonstrates) and recitation, also emerged in this period—after all, the occasion of the Dialogus is a high-profile, politically explosive recitation of a dramatic work written by Maternus himself. The concluding chapter Seven, “Est . . . mihi cum Cicerone aemulatio: Pliny’s Cicero,” reconsiders the hoary question of Pliny the Younger’s relationship with his great predecessor in oratory and epistolography. Keeline contends that Pliny’s emulation of Cicero is constrained by the reduced scope for oratory, for which he argued in Chapter Six. Where else, then, can Pliny invest his eloquence? Epistolography is an obvious place to look. Keeline argues in detail that Pliny’s letter-writing and letter-publishing project is remarkably Ciceronian despite the absence of explicit mentions of Cicero as an epistolographer , and demonstrates the eloquence of which Pliny is capable. This is a persuasive and helpful demonstration; it could conceivably be expanded to cover other new arenas for eloquence mentioned above, in which Pliny also invested. Finally, the short “Epilogue : The Early Empire and Beyond” briefly considers appropriations of Cicero ranging from the early Christians through the medieval period down to contemporary popular culture. All students of the political and literary culture of the early empire are aware of the centrality of rhetoric and of the schools to the construction of that culture. Keeline’s book is a major contribution to the study of these central matters, containing extensive reconsideration and synthesis of prior scholarship and innovative new analysis of rhetorical pedagogy. It will benefit everyone who studies this period. Johns Hopkins University Matthew Roller Virgil's Double Cross: Design and Meaning in the AENEID. By David Quint. Princeton, New Jersey. 2018. Pp. xix, 218. David Quint's VIRGIL’S DOUBLE CROSS: DESIGN AND MEANING IN THE Aeneid is a collection of five reprinted articles (Chapters One, Two, Three, Five, and Six) and two new chapters (Chapters Four and Seven), spanning the years from 2001 to 2018. “Double Cross” in the title refers to Virgil’s employment of chiasmus at the levels of syntactic form and poetical thought. Chiasmus here includes the core ABBA structure recognizable to literary scholars, but also entails a blurry set of conceptualizations, contradictions, reversals, oppositional parallels, intentional divisions, “reversibility and implicit interchangeability” BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 415 (xiii). Words and phrases can show chiasmus, but so too can allusions among texts. Virgil builds into his epic binary oppositions that mingle, merge, and reverse, as themes, characters, and ideologies shift within the ABBA structure. Virgil’s Double Cross is a study in literary chirality. In the “Preface” Quint guides his reader through a short history of optimistic and pessimistic readings of the Aeneid (really from 1950 to 1993). Scholars here appear like New Historical automata, merely reacting to and filtering the war and post-war ideologies and discourses of the second half of the twentieth century, although an evaluation of Virgil’s artistry and its meaning need not be dependent on Operation Rolling Thunder or the Highway of Death. The fact that scholarship is enmeshed in historical and cultural contingency does not occlude a scholar’s objectivity, intuition, imagination, and argumentation, which are based on hard literary data. Quint’s analysis is full of literary facts that exist apart from...

Sponsoring the Arts: Melic Perspectives

This paper explores the melic poets’ take on art and its sponsors. Since much has been written on the relationship of epinician poets with their patrons, this paper broadens the focus of enquiry to include other melic genres and, in addition to the verbal, to look at the visual arts as well, i.e. melic representations of communities that sponsor songs and of communities or individuals that sponsor other art-forms such as sculpture, architecture, and precious objects. Taking as starting point Xenophon’s depiction of Simonides in Hiero, I discuss epigrams XXVII and XXVIII Page and relevant testimonia that show Simonides’ keen interest in Athenian dithyrambic contests; Bacchylides’ Ode 19, probably composed for the Great Dionysia; Pindar’s Pythian 7, Paean 8, and fragment 3 in conjunction with Homeric Hymn to Apollo 281-99, Herodotus 1.31, Cicero, De oratore 2. 86. 352-353, [Plutarch] Consolatio ad Apollonium, and Pausanias – all of which offer precious insights into Pindar’s views on sponsoring monumental sculpture and architecture; and Bacchylides’ description of the golden tripods that Hieron offered to Apollo in Ode3. On the basis of this evidence I argue that whatever the nature and the range of remuneration of poets and artists may have been, melic rhetoric shows that it was the relationship of poets, artists and their sponsors with the gods that was ultimately at stake. This is why both the poetry and the traditions about Simonides, Pindar and Bacchylides privilege the divine favour that poets, artists and patrons alike either obtained or were hoping to obtain by offering masterpieces to the gods.

O DISCURSO MUSICAL DO SÉCULO XVIII

Na literatura dos séculos XVII e XVIII, centenas de tratados dedicados à composição, interpretação, ensino e reflexão musicais foram publicados e difundidos por todo o continente Europeu. Tais obras, que variam enormemente em relação à metodologia abordada por seus autores, costumam, frequentemente, trazer consigo a noção de que a música é análoga ao discurso verbal, ambos guiados pelas regras da retórica, e que sua finalidade seja ensinar, deleitar e mover o ouvinte. No caso de Francesco Geminiani (1687-1762), esta mesma ideia pode ser lida em sua obra tratadística. Neste artigo, pretende-se discorrer sobre diversas emulações retóricas almejadas por Geminiani (1687-1762) em sua obra tratadística, sobretudo nas Regras para tocar com verdadeiro gosto (c.1748), Tratado sobre o bom gosto na arte da música (1749) e A arte de tocar violino (1751). Nesses tratados, o autor não apenas alinhou-se às correntes de pensamento de sua época, representadas por Batteux, Hume e Montesquieu – na filosofia – e por Quantz, C. P. E. Bach e L. Mozart – na música –, mas também recuperou acepções do discurso falado, escrito e proferido, presentes nas retóricas clássicas De Oratore, de Cícero, e Institutio Oratoria, de Quintiliano. Observaremos que, no tocante à discussão filosófico-musical setecentista em torno da tópica do Gosto – lugar-comum no conjunto total de sua tratadística –, Geminiani apoia-se na recuperação e no debate de diversos preceitos sobre imaginação, juízo, decoro, ornamentação, performance e recepção, abordados pelos autores mencionados, tornando, assim, evidente sua visão da composição musical espelhada no discurso retórico.

ÉTHOS Y PÁTHOS EN LA CONFIGURACIÓN NARRATIVA DE EL ASNO DE ORO, DE APULEYO

In this paper, we start from the hypothesis that ethos and pathos can constitute factors of argumentative discourse within the general narrative world of the Roman novel. In it, the main narrator and the occasional narrators construct their identity through this dimension in order to regulate the criteria of truth/fiction and, the rest of the actants do it to achieve the delectare of the novel, by means of these rhetorical strategies of subjectivity. The theoretical framework of the present topic is inscribed, on the one hand, in the characterization of the affective pistis found in the Rhetoric and the Topics of Aristotle, brought to Rome by the academic and Stoic tradition, and definitively configured in De oratore, Orator and Cicero's Topic. In this tradition, the arguments based on the ethos move through the credibility of the speaker, those based on the pathos, instead, move from the passions of the audience. On the other hand, contemporary rhetoric has revised the ancient notions of ethos and pathos observing the way in which the persuasive topics that operate on affectivity structure the discourse (Amossy, Maingueneau). In the Roman novel, these topics model both the persuasive capacity of the narrator and much of the effects of receiving the story. Our analysis seeks to observe and delimit the function of the affective pistis in the characterization of the narrator and the characters, as well as its possible effect on the reader of The Golden Ass of Apuleius.

The Dregs of Romulus. Stoic Philosophy in Cicero’s Pro Murena and De Oratore

The dregs of Romulus reviews the evidence for Cicero’s attitude toward Stoic philosophy in the speech pro Murena, in letters of 61-60 referring to Cato, and in de oratore. None of these texts expresses any direct opposition to the core postulate of Stoic ethics, viz., that only what is honorable is good for a human being. What we do find in this group of works is a concern that adherence to a dogmatic system of ethics (1) impedes political communication, and (2) strips away the flexibility of application that is required for moral decision-making in complex situations. Cicero’s own stance as a philosophically trained politician is defined accordingly. The dregs of Romulus reviews the evidence for Cicero’s attitude toward Stoic philosophy in the speech pro Murena, in letters of 61-60 referring to Cato, and in de oratore. None of these texts expresses any direct opposition to the core postulate of Stoic ethics, viz., that only what is honorable is good for a human being. What we do find in this group of works is a concern that adherence to a dogmatic system of ethics (1) impedes political communication, and (2) strips away the flexibility of application that is required for moral decision-making in complex situations. Cicero’s own stance as a philosophically trained politician is defined accordingly.

‘A FADED REFLECTION OF THE GRACCHI’: ETHICS, ELOQUENCE AND THE PROBLEM OF SULPICIUS IN CICERO'S DE ORATORE

This paper is as much about a particular depiction of the tribune P. Sulpicius Rufus as it is about Cicero's De Oratore, a dialogue regularly called upon by historians to give evidence on the 90s b.c. and the characters who take part in the conversation it depicts. My main focus is literary: I will argue that, given what we know about the historical Sulpicius, Cicero's choice of Sulpicius for a prominent minor role in De Oratore drives the tragic historical framework that undercuts the optimism expressed within the dialogue by the main protagonist L. Licinius Crassus for the civic value of oratory. The Rhetorica ad Herennium illustrates a certain type of allegory with the statement ‘as if one should call Drusus a “faded reflection of the Gracchi”’. In De Oratore, Drusus’ friend and successor Sulpicius functions as a reflection of the Gracchi and his eloquence reinforces the problem posed by such orators as the notoriously eloquent Gaius Gracchus for any such grand claims about the civic value of oratory. By examining Cicero's use of relatively recent history, we therefore discover that De Oratore is significantly more pessimistic than it may at first seem. This pessimism, however, has important implications for historians, since expanding our understanding of De Oratore as a literary construct should encourage historians to be significantly more cautious about using the text as a historical source. As Görler points out with regard to Crassus’ swansong at De or. 3.4–5, although ‘a naive reader of Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta could be left with the impression that some sentences are quite well attested’, most of the fragments of Crassus’ speech can actually be traced back to De Oratore. Likewise, a significant proportion of the standard elements in Sulpicius’ backstory go back to De Oratore and become a great deal less convincing once we accept De Oratore as a sustained fictional account featuring people who were neither as politically ‘safe’ nor as intellectually united as Cicero would have them be. My secondary focus in this paper is therefore on the broader lessons to be drawn from Sulpicius’ role in De Oratore. I will begin by outlining the historical context of the dialogue, which was written in the mid 50s but is set in 91, a few weeks before the natural death of Crassus, one of its two protagonists. Next, I will discuss the dialogue's literary context, specifically the Platonic allusions Cicero embeds within the text. These allusions encourage us to treat De Oratore’s historical framework carefully, if not sceptically, and I will outline the ‘off notes’ struck by references to the Gracchi and by the presentation of Crassus and Antonius before examining the problem Sulpicius poses for a straightforwardly optimistic reading of De Oratore. I will conclude by considering first the literary implications for De Oratore of accepting that Sulpicius is a deliberately problematic character and then the historical implications of taking a sceptical approach towards De Oratore as an historical source for our picture of Sulpicius.

Cicero on the Origins of Civilization and Society: The Preface to De re publica Book 3

A re-examination of the preface to Book 3 of Cicero's De re publica leads to a rearrangement of the order of the fragments as presented in Powell's recent OCT; a fragment that Powell had moved from Book 5 to Book 3 is given a new location in Book 4. The article reconstructs Cicero's argument in the preface and in De re publica as a whole, and includes discussion of Cicero's views of the relative values of philosophy and public life and of the parallels in structure and argument between De re publica and De oratore.

Laat U door die schurken niets wijsmaken!

Summary This article describes Cicero’s rhetorical use of character delineation in his Pro Roscio Amerino, and the consistency with which he employs this persuasive technique throughout the speech. It is argued that the resemblance of the structure of the text to the standard rhetorical rules is superficial: Cicero’s strategies in this early speech are already in basic agreement with his mature descriptions in De Oratore. His reliance on non-rational argument cannot, however, be used to suggest that Roscius was guilty, and Cicero’s version of events may well be true, even if this cannot be proven.

Leeman, Lampas en Logos

This article discusses the fruits of fifty years of Dutch scholarship on ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric. A.D. Leeman, one of the founding fathers of both the journal Lampas and the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, is identified as an influential pioneer, whose teaching and research inspired the Dutch school of classical rhetoric. Lampas published many contributions to the study of rhetorical practice and theory. A central theme in Leeman’s work was Cicero’s integration of rhetoric into a philosophically oriented humanism. This Ciceronian perspective on rhetoric, which deeply influenced the European tradition, tells us that the irrational modes of persuasion (ethos and pathos), which are unavoidable and indispensable in human communication, must always be genuine and sincere; and it demands that the orator considers both sides of a case. Building on Cicero’s De oratore and Leeman’s publications, this article concludes with a plea for a moderate and reasonable rhetoric.