Rome’s basic political institutions made oratory essential. The meetings of the Roman senate involved debate on issues, limited by law to senators, and by tradition to the upper ranks of senators as opposed to the pedarii (‘‘backbenchers’’). The fundamental expression of the will of the Roman people occurred in its comitia, assemblies consisting of those adult male Roman citizens who chose to show up for them. The function of these was to allow the Roman people to reach a decision (either legislative, electoral, or judicial) but they did not include discussion. However, the comitia were preceded by contiones (‘‘meetings’’), in which speakers addressed political and legal issues relating to what would be voted on in the comitia. In the case of comitia convened as a court of law (an archaic institution by the first century bce) three contiones were required to precede the comitial meeting at which the people reached its verdict (Cic. Dom. 45). Although contiones were held for the purpose of discussion rather than decision, there was nothing casual about them. They did not provide a platform open to any citizen, or even to every adult male citizen; they were under the control of a magistrate (often a tribune of the people) who controlled the list of speakers. These speakers were generally current and former magistrates (Polo 1996: 34-8, 52-6; Gizewski 2003). Cicero (b. 106 bce) himself did not speak before a contio until he delivered the Pro Lege Manilia as praetor in 66 (Leg. Man. 1), though he went on to deliver eleven more (counting those speeches known to us) as a magistrate and nine as a private citizen; Pompey delivered one as magistrate and nine as private citizen, Caesar seven and four, respectively (Polo 1996: 37). Nine of these are extant, all by Cicero.
The judicial format about which we know the most for the three decades after Sulla’s dictatorship (81 bce) was the quaestio perpetua (‘‘standing criminal court’’). Originating in 149 bce and extended thereafter, this kind of court was established by a statute that defined a particular crime and created a panel of jurors to hear cases involving that crime. These crimes all involved the community in a direct or indirect way: directly in the sense of harming the government (either through direct misuse of governmental authority or funds, subversion of the electoral system, or the kind of violence that seriously compromised law and order); or indirectly by threatening social stability (e. g., fraud or poisoning) (Riggsby 1999: 157-9). The standard number of jurors was as large as seventy-five, although there were often fewer (Greenidge 1901: 447-8). Trials in this kind of court contained, at a minimum, a speech each by the prosecutor and the defense advocate, in some courts at least two speeches by each, and often far more because of a trend for both sides to employ multiple advocates (Cic. De Or. 2.313, Brut. 207; Asc. 20, Clark 1907). Although private lawsuits were usually held before one juror or a small panel of jurors, some cases involving inheritance and substantial property were heard before the centum-viral court, which in the republic contained 105 jurors, three from each of the thirty-five tribes (Cic. De Or. 1.173, 1.238; see Greenidge 1901: 183-5; Paulus 2003). These trials, which could use the whole 105-man cadre of jurors, gave orators a chance to spread their wings, especially in the imperial period (Plin. Ep. 5.1.7, 6.33; Tac. Dial. 38) when the quaestionesperpetuae, though still in existence, had lost their high status. The most famous centumviral trial was the causa Curiana in the nineties BCE, in which the two sides were represented by leading orators, Lucius Licinius Crassus and Quintus Mucius Scaevola (for sources, see Alexander 1990: 48; see also Vaughn 1985).
World History
