Sources

However, to set against the paucity of actual texts there survives a large number of fragments and testimonia about the activities of orators in the republican and imperial periods. And these survivals are not entirely random. Rather, they are the product of the attempts by a variety of ancient writers to record and understand the nature of Roman oratory; and this process inevitably caused the imposition of specific patterns of interpretation upon the material which they had available. Before considering, then, the other orators and rhetoricians, the sources upon whom they depend need a brief consideration.

For the oratory of the late republic, Cicero’s Brutus is the major source. This work is a history of Roman oratory from its origins down to Cicero’s own time, and a very great part of it consists of brief biographies and assessments of orators who spoke at Rome. It is thus of enormous value in giving a very full picture of who the orators in

This period were and, in some cases, of the specific occasions on which they spoke. Nonetheless, Cicero’s approach to the history of oratory is colored by two major preoccupations. He is concerned to protect the reputation of his own oratory from those who had accused him of excessive flamboyance and wordiness - the so-called Atticist/Asianist controversy; and he was also grappling with the question of his own position in rhetorical history (Steel 2003). In the light of these concerns his construction of Roman oratory and orators can be seen as a matter of choice. He has Atticus, one of his interlocutors in the dialogue, frequently draw attention to the fact that his criteria for inclusion are extremely broad and consequently many men are included whose skills Atticus does not regard highly; this self-consciously generous scope enables Cicero to portray oratory as an essential civic trait and thus contrast the pre-civil war period with the current dictatorship of Caesar and its attendant lack of spaces for speaking.

There are grounds, then, for being hesitant in accepting the crowded stage of the Brutus. There is no reason to doubt the general accuracy of Cicero’s information about specific individuals, but the overall picture of very extensive participation in public speaking needs to be understood within Cicero’s argumentative purpose in the work as a whole. Speaking in public was indeed an essential component of late republican political life, but it does not in turn imply that great oratorical skills were in the possession of all members of the senate.

Other filters can be perceived in other writers. A major source of fragments of republican oratory is the second-century ce antiquarian Aulus Gellius. Gellius is particularly interested in the oratory of Cato the Censor and Gaius Gracchus, as well as that of Cicero. He is much less concerned with the oratory of Cicero’s contemporaries (aetasM. Ciceronis et C. Caesarispraestanti facundiapaucoshabuit..., ‘‘the age of Marcus Cicero and Gaius Caesar had few men of outstanding eloquence...,’’ NA 19.14.1; Holford-Strevens 1988: 142-65) or with those of the imperial period. His quotations bear this out. Apart from a sentence from a speech by Caesar, the latest piece of oratory he refers to at any length (Cicero aside) is Metellus Numidicus’ speech against the tribune Manlius in 107 bce (7.11.1). As Gellius is responsible for the preservation of a significant proportion of the fragments of republican oratory his predilections undoubtedly distort our record. Quintilian, by contrast, does admire and quote from some of Cicero’s contemporaries, particularly Caelius and Calvus, though the bulk of illustrative material is taken from Cicero’s speeches - providing, incidentally, our most important source of evidence about a number of his speeches which are now lost; as his purpose in the Institutio Oratoria is primarily didactic, rather than comparative or historical, it is hardly surprising that he tends to choose examples from the work of Rome’s greatest orator. Nonetheless, Quintilian is also a valuable source for orators after Cicero and he does not automatically disparage oratory since the end of the republic. Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus contains much important information as well as analysis about a broad scope of Roman oratory (see chapter 24). Valerius Maximus’ collection of exempla, composed probably in the thirties ce, contains some extremely valuable material for the late republic, preserved to illustrate particular characteristics: he is the source of the fragment of Helvius Mancia (see below) whose talents as an orator would otherwise be completely obscured.

Another method that has been employed to broaden our view of oratory is the reconstruction of the speeches delivered by Cicero’s opponents in the law courts, most recently, and systematically, by Alexander (2002). His results are impressive, and allow us to speak with more confidence about the oratory of Cicero’s contemporaries in relation to specific forensic cases; nonetheless, Cicero’s responses to the opposition are so various and cunning that it remains extremely difficult to be confident of what exactly may have been said to provoke what we can observe in his own speeches.

One final point needs to be observed in relation to the sources: by no means all speeches that were delivered at Rome were subsequently written down. Orators tended to prepare most of their speeches in advance and deliver them from memory, rather than extemporize (though circumstances could well arise which demanded improvisation); to that extent a ‘‘text’’ existed. But it was a matter entirely for the orator as to whether he had a written version subsequently disseminated. Some orators never disseminated their speeches; those who did were selective (Crawford 1994: 1-21). Insofar as we approach oratory as a purely textual phenomenon, we are considering something which was subject to massive editorial intervention long before the vagaries of transmission wiped most of it out. This is a quite separate problem from the equally serious one of delivery: that is, the performance aspect of Roman oratory, which means that surviving speech texts can only give a limited sense of the effect of the spoken version (see chapter 17); it is noticeable that much of the critical response to the orators handled in this chapter relates to delivery rather than content.

In what follows I identify and discuss the orators whose speaking made a serious impression on their contemporaries and on later writers; I also consider some of the teaching about rhetoric from the republic.